by James Philip
There were moments when Walter Brenckmann was a little afraid that he and Joanne were going to be blown off the stage. He could not hear himself think.
Eventually, the furore quietened by a few degrees.
“This may be the last stop on my campaign to be your President but I will be back. I’m a lawyer by profession,” he quirked a rueful smile, “I’m sorry about that, I can’t do anything about it now; but I’m also a Navy man. I reckon the Marines have it right: Never leave a man behind. That ought to be written into the oath every President takes on Inauguration Day. I tell you now, that this will be my guiding principle. This country has left far too many people behind the last few years. You hear people talking trash about history, that we are the prisoners of past generations’ mistakes. We are not! We are freeborn Americans together, and we all have a right to our dreams. Sure, not everybody’s dreams come true; life is like that. But no child born in our country should ever be stopped from dreaming!”
There was another tumultuous interregnum.
“I don’t plan to be everything to every man, woman and child in our country; but I do plan to be your President. If your President doesn’t stand up for you: Who will?”
Walter Brenckmann was a little breathless, glad of the cheering.
He sucked in the cold Michigan air.
“We all know now that Richard Nixon fooled us all four years ago…”
That was it, it was hopeless after that.
WE WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN!
LOCK HIM UP!
WE WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN!
LOCK HIM UP!
WE WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN!
Walter Brenckmann stepped away from the microphones so he was fully visible to those close enough to see him. Joanne joined him. They clasped hands, raised them high not daring to exchange looks, knowing this was all more than just a little terrifying, completely out of their control.
It was as if they were in the Kingdom of Oz and all they could do was carry on stumbling down the Yellow Brick Road, not daring to contemplate what awaited them at the Wonderful Wizard of Oz’s castle…
LOCK HIM UP!
WE AREN’T GOIN’ TO GET FOOLED AGAIN!
Chapter 75
Wednesday 6th November, 1968
Amerikanskaya Mechta, 315 kilometres NNE of Midway Atoll
Operation Autumn Breeze had been put on hold, first for twelve hours – presumably, somebody back in the Urals had temporarily got cold feet – and then for another day before the executive command Nebo Padeniya – Sky Falls – had clattered up on the Operations Room teleprinters.
Take-off had been…interesting.
The great bomber had lumbered down the runway forever, hardly seeming to gain momentum. Dmitry Akimov had held the overweight beast down practically until the nose wheel was running on the grass where the tarmac ran out, before easing her into the air.
The extra fuel pumped into to fill the tanks of the bomber and the Raduga Kh-20 slung beneath the Tu-95K’s belly had almost killed them all, adding over a metric ton to its burden.
Far to the east of the Kamchatka Peninsula, Vitaly Koslov had reported, one, then a second and a third surface radar system ‘painting’ the Amerikanskaya Mechta’s stately progress – still heavy, she was cruising at only a little over five hundred kilometres per hour at around eight thousand metres – before they crossed the invisible International Dateline.
That had been eleven hours into the mission, as far as their orders required them to trespass into the ‘American Sea’ that was the North Pacific south of the Aleutians.
Dmitry Akimov had come over the intercom.
The aircraft commander was grim: “In case anybody was still in any doubt we aren’t going back to Seryshevo. General Zakharov may be finished but he’ll take us all down with him if he can; 37th Air Army just don’t know it yet. So, that leaves two choices. One, we can go with the original Zakharov plan and deploy the Raduga against the Yankees. Or, two, we can attempt to surrender ourselves to the Yankees or the British.”
Andrei Kirov had been dozing in his seat – Karl Osipov’s former post in the compartment he shared with Olga and Tatyana, while they monitored the status of the flying bomb beneath their feet and the health of the separate command circuit to the Kh-20’s three-megaton warhead.
None of them had dared to think this far ahead.
“We’ll vote on this,” the First Pilot announced sardonically. “I vote for option two. We try to surrender. However, before you decide I must tell you that we do not know if the Raduga’s warhead is pre-armed, or booby-trapped in any way. My guess is that it was Osipov’s job to do that. However, we have no way to know if the bloody thing has a time fuse on it, or the conditions under which fissile initiation might be triggered. Olga Yurievna only possesses one set of fail-safe codes; Operation Autumn Breeze is an exercise, remember…”
Olga broke in.
“My apologies, Dmitry,” she uttered tersely. “It is worse than that. The warhead is an 8-K-3 with a stripped down control circuit that has, as far as I can tell, only two modes: impact and air burst between one thousand and four thousand metres. The failsafe codes I was supplied with do no communicate with the bomb’s initiation system.” She hesitated but only for a moment. “If this aircraft crashed that would almost certainly not be sufficient to detonate part or all of the warhead in normal circumstances. However, if a time clock was set before Karl Osipov died, it might already be running, set to initiate the warhead when its internal altimeter detected a certain ‘in range’ height above sea level. If we decided to abort the mission, Dmitry’s option one; we must, at some stage, preferably at a safe distance from land – probably at least thirty or forty kilometres, ideally fifty or sixty – descend almost to sea level to ensure that it is safe to attempt a landing…”
“Permission to speak, First Pilot?” Maxim Godolets broke in. The Navigator’s voice was sombre. “Why don’t we just dump the bloody Kh-20, or shoot it towards the horizon?”
Olga jumped back in.
“The Kh-20 has been loaded for several weeks. We have no idea if it will fire up, or just drop like a stone. Dmitry and I have discussed this: if it turns out that warhead activation is pre-set to be altitude sensitive, we won’t necessarily have time to get away from the blast zone. If we succeed in launching the Raduga we’d probably be all right, but what about any poor sods underneath it when it goes off? Anything out this far from land is bound to be American, or British, or maybe, Japanese. The bomb will sink anything within ten to fifteen miles, and damage anything within thirty.”
She left the rest unsaid and surrendered the intercom to Dmitry Akimov.
“Like I said,” the First Pilot reiterated doggedly. “I vote for option two. We’ve got enough fuel to get to the East Coast of North America but I am going to recommend we attempt to make contact with the American authorities on Hawaii. What is your vote, Olga?”
“Two. Hawaii sounds okay,” she confirmed.
Akimov went around the crew stations.
All the previous votes had been for surrender when he spoke to Pavel Onishken. The gunner thought about it; and pointed out the obvious flaw in the plan.
“You know the Yankees will shoot us down, right?”
Dmitry Akimov let the static crackle over the intercom.
“I vote for nothing,” the man in the tail turret barbette decided. “But I won’t do anything to stop you.”
“What about you, Comrade Commissar?” The aircraft commander asked.
“Two,” the KGB man said blankly.
It was settled.
Forty minutes later Tatyana Zhukov reported an airborne contact on her weapons tracking radar. It was known that the Americans had based early warning aircraft at Midway Atoll for many years, and now, one of them had found the Amerikanskaya Mechta.
The bomber flew on to the east, its American shadow hanging back fifty miles off her right quarter for another fifteen minutes. There was very little intercom chatte
r.
Maxim Godolets called the course change to the south.
And that was that, the die was cast.
The nose of the Amerikanskaya Mechta came around to a bearing which would, within one-and-a-half hours cut across the US-declared two-hundred-mile air defence radius of the Hawaiian Islands.
Still, there was no real plan.
Simply a hope that the Americans would want to talk before they shot down the intruder.
Dmitry Akimov was calmly business-like.
There would be no further intrusion by democracy.
“Comrade Major,” he called, waiting for Andrei to acknowledge. “You and me only on the circuit from now on. My English is only what I needed to fly transports around Europe in the fifties. You’ll have to do the talking. Well, if the bastards don’t just shoot us down!”
“Understood, Comrade First Pilot,” the big man acknowledged.
Vitaly Koslov had patched snatches of shortwave broadcasts to him earlier in the flight. That had been mostly indecipherable babble, shot through with vicious interference.
Broad spectrum jamming probably.
Andrei had translated what he could. Now he contemplated suggesting that they attempt to make contact with the aircraft dogging their every move.
No, I am an amateur.
If he did not trust Olga, Dmitry and the others he was dead anyway.
Chapter 76
Wednesday 6th November, 1968
Hickham Air Force Base, Oahu, Hawaii
Nobody had seriously imagined that the commanding officer of VF-74 took the first QRA – Quick reaction Alert - duty by accident. But then there was always a frissance of anticipation when a squadron first assumed the primary air defence responsibility for the protection of a major base. Kitted up in G-suits, the eight duty aviators – four pilots and four back-seaters - killed time in the ready room, a two-minute fast ride from the four fuelled and armed F-4 Phantom IIs and their bored, idling start-up ground crews killing time at their hardstands.
The Japanese had mounted a submarine attack on Pearl Harbour in the middle of the Second War; but the Chinese – the present-day enemy – was not about to send warships or aircraft to attack the headquarters of the Seventh Fleet, or any of the sprawling military bases, or martial infrastructure located mainly on Oahu but also scattered around several of the other islands.
However, the men in the ready room could not afford to think about that; the alarm bells rang thirteen minutes before the relief crews formally began their eight-hour watch.
“SCRAMBLE! SCRAMBLE!”
And then, as the first two pilots and their back seat men were already half-way out of the door.
“THIS IS NOT AN EXERCISE!”
All four men very nearly missed a step.
“THIS IS NOT AN EXERCISE…”
Did we really hear that?
The four men were pulling on their bone domes, patting down their suits, creatures of long-ingrained habit as their truck charged across the tarmac before they paused, made eye contacts.
Of course, this was an exercise…
Wasn’t it?
Commander John McCain grinned.
He had pulled this duty to emphasise how important he thought the standby mission was; and basically, to get it out of the way for a few days; he had a lot of squadron business to sort out on the ground.
His wingman was a twenty-three year-old hotshot straight out of the Tactical Weapons School at Miramar Naval Air Station – who had been sent to Hawaii to learn how to be a real fighter pilot. There was a lot of talk back home about upgrading Miramar, or merging it with the other schools, even of creating what sounded an awful lot like an elite ‘fighter jock instructor’ cadre.
Neither the Navy or the Air Force had covered themselves in undiluted glory in the ‘Chinese War’: that was not to say the aviators deployed had not acquitted themselves well, and shown uncommon bravery on occasions too numerous to catalogue, but combat air patrols had got mobbed under or distracted too often, Phantoms, Crusaders and Skyhawks had frequently been less dominant in dogfights they ought, by rights, to have never got involved in, mainly because their air-to-air missiles – various incarnations of the Sidewinder – had either not performed, or been mis-handled too many times.
There was nothing intrinsically wrong or in any significant way, generally deficient with the airmanship of American pilots, or their equipment, most of which was a generation-and-a-half ahead of the enemy’s numerous MiG-17s and 19s, and easily a match for the Communists’ handful of MiG-21s. Nonetheless, ‘shoot-down ratios’ had been ‘disappointing’: for example, the Sidewinder’s manufacturer predicted a fifty to sixty percent overall success rate in combat, whereas, the actual single missile shoot-down rate was nearer thirty percent in most engagements. This had contributed to US losses in aircraft and crews of three to four times higher than anybody, in their worst dreams, had projected once Rolling Thunder had kicked off.
Partly, this was due to the initial obsession with low-level strikes, possibly a gung-ho over-reaction to the US Navy’s post-October War travails. Worryingly, losses on the high altitude strategic bombing operations deep over the mainland, had become prohibitive, rather than – over time, as the enemy’s air defensive system was progressively degraded - declining to negligible levels. The blame for this had been laid at the Navy’s door; the hard-pressed and as the campaign progressed, under-strength carrier strike wings had failed to ‘clear the roads’ into the interior, in no small measure because losses had been heaviest among the most experienced aviators – the men leading from the front where the action was hottest – and the ‘newbies’, men like John McCain’s number two today, who were only starting to learn their profession.
McCain reckoned something had to be done about the situation; he did not know what exactly but forming a veteran cadre of instructors was probably a good start!
A few weeks, or months in the hands of the Navy’s top guns would certainly have saved him from himself more than once in the last few years. As it was, most of what he had learned had been learned the hard way, the important lessons very painfully hammered home and frankly, in this day and age, it ought to be easier than that. So, today his wingman, for all that he was a ‘hotshot’ on every evaluation in his service jacket; was a greenhorn rookie of the most dangerous – to himself – variety when it came to combat, and his CO was not about to forget it any time soon.
This is not an exercise…
What the fuck was all that about?
Before he knew it, John McCain was clambering into the cockpit of his F-4. The Lucky Lucy was already alive, the ground crew having fired up her twin General Electric J79 turbojets.
He had no awareness of being strapped in.
Simply of returning the cockpit crewman’s salute.
And focussing on the batman’s pads.
Of getting the all clear to roll.
It was only a seventy-yard roll to the end of the runway.
All other take-off and landing operations were waved off when there was a SCRAMBLE.
“Devil One-oh-Two, this is Devil One-oh-One. Do you copy me?”
“I copy you, Devil One-oh-One!”
The kid sounded calm, the merest snatch of tension clipping his acknowledgement.
The Control Tower was in McCain’s ear.
“Devil Leader, you are cleared to roll onto Twenty-two Left. You are cleared to climb level three-zero on vector zero-four-zero. All other traffic has been waved off, sir!”
John McCain confirmed this tersely.
“Devil One-oh-Two is in your number two spot, boss,” his back-seater informed his pilot.
McCain lined up the nose of the Phantom straight down the two-mile asphalt runway. His seat punched him in the back and pressed him deep into his straps as he engaged full re-heat. Twenty-five tons of airframe, engines, avgas, filled gun boxes – her underwing hardpoints accommodating Sidewinder missiles and two drop tanks - leapt into the air three-quarters of a mi
le down the runway and rocketed, very nearly vertically away from the ground.
Like and angel in a hurry to get home…
The USS Enterprise, her hull looking a little weathered and many of the members of her air group, a little jaded, had returned from the Philippines, had entered port yesterday morning, mooring where the Saratoga had berthed a fortnight ago, her stern close to the wreck of the USS Utah, the old battleship – converted into a target ship in the 1920s, ironically – sunk by the Japanese on 7th December, 1941.
Before she went into dry dock, the Sara Maru had put to sea to fly off her fixed-wing air group, just a short hop from thirty miles out at sea back to Hickham Field, where VF-74 was temporarily attached to the 15th Naval Air Wing (Base Group).
Once the Saratoga was out of dockyard hands, probably in about eight or nine days, Rear Admiral Zumwalt was due to transfer his flag to her, the air group would re-embark, strengthened by six, or eight – nobody had decided which – of the Big E’s airframes, before the nuclear-powered carrier headed back to Long Beach for her own abbreviated refit. That would leave the USS Coral Sea (CV-43) and the Independence (CV-62), the former operating from the Japanese Home Islands, and the latter from the Philippines, to ‘keep up the pressure on the Chinese.’
The grapevine predicted that the USS Constellation (CV-64) – newly repaired after her flight deck ‘incident’ and fire - originally ear-marked to deploy to Pearl Harbour after the Saratoga, ahead of a likely re-assignment to the Far East was probably going to be partially mothballed at San Francisco. If that was true, it signified that somebody in the Pentagon had finally accepted that the Navy did not have, and was not going to have for at least another two or three years, enough qualified men to man all the surviving big carriers.