Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 03 (29 page)

           
The canopy ripped off in the
slipstream before the crewmen’s heads crashed through it, and both he and Pilas
were rocketed free and clear of the stricken plane.

           
Tamalko’s body was flying forward at
almost seven hundred feet per second.

           
The wall of compressed, superheated
air rushing toward him from the explosion of the single RK-55 nuclear warhead
of the Fei Lung-9 missile was traveling at two thousand feet per second. When
the two met, Tamalko, Pilas, and the crippled F-4E Phantom II fighter were
mercilessly crushed into powder, then vaporized by the five-thousand-degree
heat of the fringes of the fireball that had already destroyed the Philippine
corvette
Quezon
and its three
antiship helicopters.

First Air Wing Command and
Control
Operations
Center

Cheyenne
Mountain
AFB
,
Colorado

Same time

           
A young Air Force staff sergeant,
Amy Hector, was on the FOREST GREEN console at the U.S. Air Force Space
Command’s Command and
Control
Operations
Center
, deep within the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD
complex, when her detection board went crazy.

           
“Red Collar, Red Collar,” Staff
Sergeant Hector called on the center-wide intercom, pressing the “Call” button
on her console so that her warning message would override all the other
transmissions in the
Operations
Center
. The words “Red Collar” would also ensure
immediate attention by all—the effect those simple code-words had was akin to
her screaming at the top of her lungs:

           
“FOREST GREEN with an
event-detection warning, all stations stand by ...” Hector waited a few more
heartbeats, then quickly began reading her detection figures aloud, knowing
that the senior controller and the various section chiefs were scrambling to
their seats and checking their own readouts. “FOREST GREEN shows three units
with amplitude pulse threshold readings. System reports confirmation of
readouts, repeat, system reports readout confirmation, event confidence is
high.” Technicians at
Cheyenne
Mountain
seldom used words like “nuclear detonation”
or “explosion”—these were collectively called “events” and “readouts.” There
was an odd emotional detachment prevalent inside the Mountain, as if they could
somehow block the horrors they saw by naming them something harmless.

           
It was a relatively low-tech device
that issued a warning on that Wednesday afternoon, a device that had gone all
but unused for years. In an effort to increase the number of nuclear detection
devices in orbit without increasing the actual number of satellites, in the
late 1970s and early 1980s a secret program code-named FOREST GREEN was
implemented. NAVSTAR Global Positioning System navigation satellites were
fitted with electromagnetic pulse sensors and devices called (quite
appropriately for nuclear detonation detection) Bhangmeters, which were
sensitive optical flash detectors that could determine the explosive yield of a
nuclear explosion by the brightness of the flash. Unlike AMWS, which were used
only on specific (albeit very wide) areas of the Earth, FOREST GREEN had global
coverage because the eighteen-satellite NAVSTAR constellation had at least
three satellites looking at every piece of the Earth at every moment.

           
A nuclear explosion has a definite
pattern of two pulses— the first less intense than the second—caused first by
the detonation of the triggering device, followed exactly one- third of a
second later by the main explosion; this was the reason Bhangmeters were
mounted in pairs, with one more sensitive than the other. The EMP detectors on
the three FOREST GREEN satellites also registered the disruption of the
ionosphere before communication between the satellites and their receivers on
Earth were abruptly cut off.

           
The senior controller in the
Operations
Center
, an Air Force colonel named
Randolph
, immediately put the staff sergeant’s
console display up on the “big board,” a rectangle of six 2-by-3-foot screens
in the front of the
Operations
Center
. The display was relatively uninformative
at this point—three lines out of eighteen on the display were flashing, with a
string of numbers showing the system readings and the threshold levels pre-programmed
into the system.

           
“All stations, this is
Randolph
. I confirm a FOREST GREEN event detection
and classification, I need a status check and report in thirty seconds, all
stations stand by.”

           
The problem with the FOREST GREEN
sensors was that they were not highly directional—the sensors could accurately
record a nuclear detonation but not precisely pinpoint the explosion’s
location; when the Bhangmeters were installed on older Vela nuclear-detection
satellites, the device’s telescopic eye could pinpoint the location of the
detonation, but on NAVSTAR satellites the sensors were relegated to area
reports only. In a few moments Amy Hector had replaced the cryptic lines of
data with a graphic pictorial of the information: a chart of the Earth that was
within line-of- sight reach of the three NAVSTAR satellites that had suddenly
gone off the air. Somewhere within the three overlapping shaded spheres, the
first above-ground nuclear device in thirty years had detonated.

           
Unfortunately, the display showed the
explosion could have occurred anywhere from
Hawaii
to
Thailand
and from

           
Japan
to
Australia
. “I need better information than that,”
Colonel Randolph said. “Find out why no DSP systems issued an alert.”

           
DSP was a constellation of
satellites so sensitive that they could detect brush fires, structure fires, or
even high-performance aircraft using afterburners—all from twenty-two thousand
miles in space.

           
“Sir, this is Staff Sergeant Hector
on FOREST GREEN,” Hector interjected. “I think I can come up with a rough
triangulation.”

           
“Let’s have it, Sergeant.”

           
“I’ve got the exact time when aft
three of the NAVSTAR satellites shut down,” Hector explained, “and I’ve got the
time down to one-one-hundredth of a second. I can—”

           
Randolph
looked at her. “I get the picture, Sergeant
Hector. Speed of gamma particle versus time. Are the off-air times that
different?”

           
“Stand by, sir.” There was a slight
pause, then Hector replied: “Two times are the same; the other is different. I
can poll the sensor threshold-release circuits and get a more exact time; I can
also try a laser orbital velocity measurement to see if the event changed the
orbits—”

           
“Just do it, Amy.” This was the
first time he had ever recalled calling Hector by her first name, but it seemed
oddly appropriate now. “But first, I need an acknowledgment of a suspected
FOREST GREEN event from CINCSPACE- COM right away—also get SAC and JCS on the
line.”

           
“Yes, sir.”

           
“NORAD hasn’t issued an alert yet,”
Randolph
muttered half-aloud. “Why the hell haven’t
they said anything? Something big enough to knock out three satellites is not
good news. . . .”

Aboard Sky Masters’ DC-10,
over
California

Same time

           
Jon Masters had his feet up on the
bulkhead, was on his third plastic squeeze bottle of Pepsi and halfway through
a bologna and cheese sandwich when the toneless, emotionless voice of the Air
Force mission control tracking officer on the radio said, “Masters One,
College, contact lost with Jackson One.”

           
Masters sat upright, put down the
Pepsi, and quickly checked his readouts. “College, this is Masters One, I—” He
did a double-take. Seconds ago he’d been getting a stream of position and
velocity readouts from the NIRTSat in its orbit.

           
Now the readouts were zero.

           
Masters sighed. “Confirmed on this
end. Stand by. I’ll try to re-establish communications.” On the interphone to
his crew, he said, “Give me a turn westbound and a climb to best altitude.
We’ve got a problem with the satellite.”

           
Helen Kaddiri entered the flight
deck. “What is it, Jon?”

           
“We lost contact with the
satellite.”

           
She looked at him as if to say, I’m
not surprised. Instead, she said, “Same problem we had before?”

           
“That was a loose plug, Helen,
this”—he scratched his head in an uncharacteristic moment of confusion—“has got
to be something else. But what, I don’t know.”

Aboard Whisper One-Seven, over
Powder River
MOA,
Montana

Same time

           
McLanahan began programming the
final launch instructions on his Super Multi Function Display so they could
take out the last few sortie targets in General Jarrel’s setup and then head
home.

           
The display shimmered and abruptly
changed.

           
“What the—” McLanahan muttered.

           
Instead of the gently rolling hills
and dry gullies of southeastern
Montana
, the SMFD showed a confusing pattern of
light spots in a blank, featureless background. It did have one very prominent
terrain feature—a mountain nearly twenty thousand feet high and sixty miles
wide. It was as if
Mount
Everest
had just
been transplanted into the middle of the
Great Plains
.

           
“I don’t believe this ...” McLanahan
said, staring at the SMFD.

           
“What is it?” Ormack asked. “That
doesn’t look like the target area.”

           
“The computer must be decoding the
signal wrong,” McLanahan guessed.

           
Amazingly, the computer began
plotting a recommended course on the erroneous computer display, with sharp
changes in heading away from the larger moving spots but fairly close to the
smaller, non-moving ones. The computer even made weapon selections, although
with only two weapons on board the choice was relatively simple—the longer-
range SLAM missile for the large moving spots that were to be circumnavigated,
and the STRIKER glide-bomb for the smaller, stationary ones.

           
The strike computer began the arming
and countdown procedures to attack these “targets,” and that’s when McLanahan
got tired of this. “There’s some glitch in the system and it’s not clearing.
I’ll reset the system and go manually until I get a usable display back.” But
he did not simply reset the computers—he used the on-board computer memory to
save the last few seconds of images first before clearing the bogus display.

           
“What do you think is the problem?”
Ormack asked.

           
“I don’t know,” McLanahan replied.
“I’ll check switches—the system will report on any switches out of position in
the post-mission computer dump. Maybe there was a glitch in the satellite. Who
knows?” He bent toward the screen and began identifying radar aimpoints,
getting ready for the “bomb” releases. “Probably something minor . . .”

           
But that new satellite image did not
look like something minor, McLanahan thought uneasily. It was more than a
glitch. The computer was processing the data it received from NIRTSat as if it
were real, uncorrupted data, and he knew enough about the NIRTSat system to
know that the computer would reject false data.