Won't Get Fooled Again

by James Philip

  Zumwalt could not allow that Bear to get any closer to the Hawaiian Islands with a possibly pre-armed bomb on board. At this very moment it might just be on the very limit of its stand-off capability, and he could not afford to bet the house – the security of the people on the Hawaiian Islands - on VF-74’s Phantoms ability to shoot down that missile down if it was launched.

  Potentially, the lives of millions of Americans were in his hands, not to mention the survival of the ships at Pearl Harbour and of the other vital strategic bases across the archipelago.

  His duty was clear and he acted without hesitation.

  “Commander McCain, this is Admiral Zumwalt. Instruct the Soviet aircraft to jettison that Raduga Kh-20 missile. If it does not comply with your order within five minutes – repeat five zero minutes – shoot down that Bear. Further to this, if they attempt to launch that missile, shoot it down and then shoot down the Bear. Please confirm your orders. Zumwalt over.”

  There was the normal comms pause of a about a second.

  “I copy that, sir,” John McCain drawled. “Jettison the missile. Splash the Bear if I have to. Devil One-oh-One. Over.”

  “Carry on, Devil One-oh-One. Zumwalt out.”

  Chapter 79

  Wednesday 6th November, 1968

  Amerikanskaya Mechta, 411 kilometres NW of Oahu

  The bomber had lurched upwards as the clamps holding the twelve metric ton deadweight of the Raduga Kh-20 released the missile into the slipstream.

  Upon receiving the order to jettison the weapon, Dmitry Akimov had ordered Olga to launch the missile in sixty seconds and pushed the throttles of the four giant Kuznetsov power plants hard up against their stops.

  If the bomb went off it was probably hopeless; but the pilot had no intention of simply hanging around waiting for the end. The US Navy F-4 Phantom IIs had engaged re-heat as the Kh-20 dropped away into space, lingering just long enough to confirm that the weapon was in free fall, unpowered, spiralling down ever faster towards the ocean over five miles below.

  On board the bomber there was nothing to do but wait.

  Once the Phantoms had intercepted the Amerikanskaya Mechta, the game was over. Those aircraft were capable of chasing down a Kh-20 in flight as if it was an old, Second War German V-1 flying bomb; and the mother ship, despite Pavel Onishken’s beloved tail-mounted autocannons, was at the Americans’ mercy.

  Olga had gazed at those magnificent aircraft through the small observation window above her control panel. Looking at them she wondered what that clown Nikita Khrushchev had been thinking, goading these people into a war the Motherland could never hope to win.

  The giant bomber pitched into a dive.

  Poor Dmitry, he was doing his best but the physics of their situation were remorselessly inescapable. If the bomb really was pre-armed, and altitude-fused there was no conceivable way they could escape the death zone. Had they been at fourteen thousand metres, the Tu-95’s maximum service ceiling, they might have had a chance. At half that altitude they had no chance. The death zone would reach out for them, crush and incinerate them in a moment…

  Olga reached out her hand and Andrei Kirov took it.

  Tatyana Zhukov, her face as white as chalk behind the visor of her oxygen mask lowered her eyes, and tentatively reached out her hand to Olga.

  There was nothing the trio could do other than to hold hands and to hope for a miracle.

  “It will hit the sea in approximately one-hundred-and forty-four seconds,” Olga announced.

  She had done the math: the Kh-20 was going to pass through the upper boundary of its likely fuse-initiation within sixty to sixty-five seconds of its release.

  “The bomb has fallen past four thousand metres,” she said to herself, and then, remembering she ought to be counting down over the intercom, repeated herself.

  If the warhead was altitude-fused it was likely to be activated at below two thousand metres; however, for the next forty to forty-five seconds while the missile fell through another three thousand metres to the likely cut-off altitude of one kilometre above sea level, they were nanoseconds from death.

  If the bomb went off on impact with the surface of the sea, a remote but not wholly implausible scenario, they might live.

  Probably…

  She pulled off her mask.

  “Thirty-seven… Thirty-six…”

  The others mouthed, and then began to murmur the numbers as the seconds ticked by.

  Somebody was praying over the intercom.

  That was Pavel Onishken, alone in his isolated turret.

  One should not be alone at the time of one’s passing.

  Olga kept counting, comforted in ways she did not understand by the presence of her bear-like, clumsy ‘bed partner’ and the woman who was possibly her one real friend at Seryshevo.

  “Twenty-nine… Twenty-eight…”

  The clock seemed to be slowing down.

  “Twenty-seven… Twenty-six…”

  It was strange the way things had turned out.

  All the planning, scheming, the sleepless nights and the sickening knowledge that they had all been played for fools by that bastard Zakharov.

  “Twenty… Nineteen…”

  Any second now…

  Try as she might, Olga could never remember how she had got down from the top of that missile gantry on the night of the Cuban Missiles War. In the distance she recollected the flashes of thermonuclear piledrivers smashing the 33rd Guards Rocket Army’s R-16s, men and women back into their primordial particles, cratering the desert plains like the surface of the Moon.

  It had felt as if the next Yankee ICBM was going to fall on her head.

  She had slapped the inspection panel shut.

  Stepped back and snapped the lever which told the gantry crew that missile 8K64/017 was ready to fly…

  And then what?

  They said she had knocked her head.

  Maybe, that explains why I have been crazy ever since.

  Realistically, she knew that the only way she could possibly have got off the gantry in time to avoid being incinerated was to use one of the two zip-line ropes. She had seen a couple of tough guy Red Air Force troopers grab the straps and hurtle into space, and tear down to earth at breakneck speeds, hitting the ground hard and rolling to a bruised halt fifty or sixty metres away from the base of the tower. Watching them race down that steeply angled escape line she had known that she could never do that; not step out into the void…

  And yet, that was exactly what she must have done; pulled on the harness and in the inky blackness of the night in between the distant strikes on other missile sites, in a blur of sheer, bladder and bowel voiding inchoate terror, trusted herself to the abyss.

  She had managed to shut the outer door of the blast shelter, that much she knew for certain because when she had regained consciousness some hours later, she was lying across the concrete lintel of the inner door to the buried section of the emergency pad bunker.

  She had no idea why all that was flooding back into her head.

  Not now…

  They said R-16 serial 8K64/017 killed a million Yankees at a place called Buffalo; at the time she had not known what the target co-ordinates meant - somewhere in North America was all she needed to know – her problem had been that her supervisor had been so spooked by the bombs going off around Baikonur, about thirty kilometres away, a test site not an active ICBM base, that he had failed to complete the re-calibration of the missile’s guidance system. In fact, the useless prick, had run away and left her standing on the top of the gantry holding a slide rule and a sheaf of very, very flaky calculations. Oddly, she had not been anywhere near as afraid that night as she was now.

  Perhaps, it was because she had been so angry to be left on her own up there that, given the situation, she had had no spare capacity in her brain to process her fear?

  It had been bitterly cold up on that tower.

  She remembered the wind was tugging at the deck beneath her fee
t. The gantry, the rocket, everything had seemed to be in gentle, swaying motion.

  She used to wake up in the middle of the night asking herself why she had not just told the launch crew she had fixed the problem, and run for the shelters like so many other people, no more than kids like she had been at the time, must have done that night.

  “Fourteen… Thirteen…”

  Olga Yurievna Petrovna, mass murderer…

  A Hero of the Soviet Union.

  About to wet herself…

  “Eight… Seven…”

  If the Kh-20’s warhead initiated now the Amerikanskaya Mechta would be ripped to shreds but they might live for a few seconds more.

  Falling, falling…

  “Four… Three…”

  And suddenly, nobody was counting.

  “Two…One…”

  The bomber was pulling out of its dive, Dmitry Akimov was easing back on the throttles before the leviathan’s wings came off and there was absolute, unearthly, shocked silence over the intercom.

  None of them could believe they were still alive.

  Chapter 80

  Epilogue

  Saturday 30th November, 1968

  USS Saratoga (CV-60), Sydney Harbour, New South Wales

  The Sara Maru had edged into the famous anchorage in the shadow of the great bridge as the light was fading last night. Salutes had been exchanged with the flagship of the Royal Australian Navy, HMAS Melbourne, and a huge flotilla of small boats had milled around the great ship as she had settled at her moorings.

  Shore leave had been postponed while preparations were made for the next three ‘open’ days.

  VF-74’s Phantom IIs had been brought up on deck, lined up, noses inward from the bow to the island superstructure, F-8 Crusaders, anti-submarine and command and control variants of the Grumman S-2 Tracker, and four of the carrier’s SH-3 Sea Kings completed the flight deck parade. Nearby, the Sara Maru’s two escorting consorts, the Leahy class guided missile destroyer USS Worden (DLG-18) and the Farragut class destroyer USS Dewey (DDG-45), were decked from stem to stern with flags as they swung around their chains, like two deadly sisters at the ball.

  John McCain took his place in the reception line on the hangar deck as the morning sunshine poured into the ship through the vast portal of the lowered amidships elevator. The gangway was down, and the party was about to begin.

  Apparently, when Vice Admiral Julian Christopher, the long dead hero of the Battle of Malta in April 1964, had brought the British Pacific Fleet to Sydney a couple of months after the October War, he had been greeted as if he was a cross between the prodigal returned and the nation’s guardian angel. The whole city had turned out and the British fleet, its flagship, the Ark Royal in particular, had been awash with visitors for a week!

  “It’s good to know somebody in the world likes us!” Commander Dick Sperry, the Saratoga’s CAG – Combat Air Group commander – observed dryly as he and his senior squadron leader viewed the host of boats surrounding the ship, and the procession of big launches and barges queuing to discharge their passengers at the foot of the gangway.

  The Prime Minister of New South Wales, the city’s Mayor, and the British and US Ambassadors and their wives, would be in the first party to board the flagship of Task Force 141.1.

  The one dissonant note was that, apparently, the Governor General of Australia, had declined an invitation to be at this initial ‘jamboree’, as he had a prior engagement in Canberra.

  John McCain could not imagine Peter or Marija Christopher declining an opportunity to fly the flag, or not wish to fully ‘engage’ in such a massive upwelling of public excitement. But then, they were gone and with them, he suspected, practically all the youthful joy and zest for life which had once filled the corridors of Government House at Yarralumla.

  He knew that bidding farewell to Peter and Marija and the others had been a lot harder for Lucy than she had admitted in her letters. The outgoing Governor General and his spouse had been father, mother, big brother and sister to the youngest surviving daughter of William Philip Sidney, 1st Viscount De L'Isle, the man Peter Christopher had succeeded at Yarralumla. Throughout Peter and Marija’s two-year tenure, Lucy had been a fully paid up member of the Government House family, surrounded by people she liked, loved really, who had gone out of their way to allow her all the room she had needed to blossom into young womanhood.

  It was hard to think the kid was still not sixteen…

  By all accounts, Lucy had continued to thrive in his father and mother’s Embassy, although how long his father would still be Ambassador was a moot point now the Nixon cabal at the Navy Department was soon going to have to deal with President elect Captain Walter Brenckmann, USN (Reserve). The crowd responsible for the disasters in the Far East were going to have a lot of explaining to do between now and 20th January – Inauguration Day – if they wanted to keep their jobs.

  McCain had religiously abstained from the debate but in the Sara Maru’s Wardroom, as he guessed, in many others, there was a mounting groundswell of support for bringing back ‘Mister Sea Power’, the handle his father had acquired before the October War, and embellished, like a prophet in the wilderness with such effect that President Nixon had had him banished to the Australian Capital Territories for his sins two-and-a-half years ago.

  The next President was going to be a real blue water Navy man; that at least, was good news.

  However, all that was way above his pay grade.

  Today, he was just looking forward to seeing his parents again, not to mention Lucy…

  She would be full of questions about the affair of the defecting Red Air Force Tupolev Tu-95 Bear, which, after the complete walkover result of the Presidential Election earlier in the month had been, pretty much, the biggest single global news story – other than in the Soviet Union where, for obvious reasons, it was a crime to talk about it – of the last few weeks.

  The Red Air Force’s less than impressive attempt to mount defiant demonstrations all around its borders in the wake of the US election had backfired dramatically. Other defecting crews had landed in British-occupied Cyprus, in Italy and Japan; and latterly, intelligence had come to light of at least one fleeing Ilyushin bomber having been shot down over the Sea of Okhotsk as it made a break for freedom.

  However, nothing could possibly trump the images of the Amerikanskaya Mechta, her nose undercarriage collapsed where the great machine had come to rest, fifty yards beyond the end of the runway at Midway Atoll, or of the TV footage of the shaken crew being ushered away from the near disastrous crash landing. Later, the six defecting Red Air Force crew men, and two women, had met McCain for the cameras at Hickham Air Force Base.

  That had been Rear Admiral Zumwalt’s idea; as it happened, practically his last one, before he was relieved of his command and summoned back to Washington, possibly the first victim – or was it a sacrificial offering to appease the incoming President? – of the wind of change already blowing through the Navy Department.

  Zumwalt’s successor, forty-nine-year-old Rear Admiral George Morrison was a less flamboyant character, an old-school straight-talker, a member of the Annapolis Class of 1938 who had been on board the minelayer USS Pruitt, a converted old four-stack destroyer, at Pearl Harbour on 7th December, 1941. Later, he had trained as a naval aviator in 1943, flown combat missions in 1944 and 1945, been involved in the Navy’s development of and implementation of nuclear weapons protocols in the late 1940s, earned a Bronze Star for valor during the first Korean War, and commanded the USS Ticonderoga prior to attaining flag rank. He was also a former commanding officer of the Naval Air Station at Alameda.

  Somebody had mentioned to McCain that, like the President elect, George Morrison also had a California-based musician son. Although – he thought he had heard the guy was called James, or Jim – he was nowhere near as famous as Walter Brenckmann’s chart-topping youngest boy, Sam.

  The dignitaries began to pass down the reception line as the carrier’s ban
d played Waltzing Matilda. The Premier of New South Wales knew McCain was ‘the Ambassador’s son’ and lingered briefly in front of him, swapping pleasantries. Then the Mayor of Sydney crushed the aviator’s hand.

  A minute later, a little self-consciously father and son shook hands.

  His mother embraced him, trying not to laugh.

  And then the Honourable Lucy Corinna Agneta De L’Isle was smiling shyly at McCain.

  Neither of them had the remotest idea what to do next.

  He tried sticking out his hand.

  She took it, hesitantly.

  So far, so good…

  However, in a moment Lucy had thrown her arms around his neck, he hugged her and literally, her feet no longer touched the ground. Instantly they realised what they were doing, they broke their brief, innocent clinch.

  Lucy’s feet touched the deck again.

  And belatedly, did the polite shaking of hands ritual that they ought to have done in the first place.

  John McCain saw his mother beaming at Lucy; whereas, his father looked for a moment as if he wanted to put his head in his hands but, because he was the man and the father that he was, he too hastily constructed a proud, paternal grimace across his rugged physiognomy.

  Lucy was wearing a calf-length summer dress that bared her arms but nothing else, and her auburn hair tumbled over her shoulders. She looked a lot older than she was; less girlish and to the aviator’s eyes, suddenly, and very disconcertingly, grown up.

  “I don’t bite,” she whispered playfully.

  And then she was gone, moving on down the line; as if to the manner born, catching up with her unlikely American guardians.

  A huge buffet reception had been laid on in the mid-section of the Saratoga’s cavernous hangar deck, her warplanes watching silently as the throng gathered and the solemnity of the official welcomes turned informal. Up top on the flight deck a similar ‘party’ was under way and that was where, around mid-afternoon Lucy caught up with, and accosted her hero.