Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 03 (30 page)

           
No, whatever that
twenty-thousand-foot-high “mountain” was, McLanahan thought, it was real.
Something very serious had just happened somewhere in the world.

High
Technology
Aerospace
Weapons
Center

           
“What the
hell
happened?” Colonel Wyatt exclaimed. They were looking in stunned
amazement at the high-definition TV monitor, and at the monstrosity that the
computer was showing them: a mountain thousands and thousands of feet high and
dozens of miles wide, engulfing ships in its path with devastating power.

           
“Must be a sensor glitch ... a solar
flare or a power spike,” Major Kelvin Carter tried. He spoke with the
technicians, but none of those present could understand the display. “Whatever
it is, it killed the satellite,” Carter said. “This is the last image received;
the satellite is off the air.” “Too bad,” Wyatt said. “McLanahan’s run was
looking real good, too.”

           
Captain Ken James’ attention was
riveted on the display frozen on the screen. “It’s a weird picture, but the
computer is displaying valid data on it,” he said. “Look: height, width, speed,
density, course—the thing is moving and growing all at once.”

           
“But it’s showing it as terrain,
Ken,” Carter said. “That can’t be right. We were looking at the
Philippines
first, then at
Montana
. There’s no mountain in either place.”

           
Wyatt shrugged, then began packing
up his notebook. “It was still a spectacular display, gents,” he said, “but I—”

           
“Sir, phone call for you,” one of
the technicians said. “Urgent from NMCC.”

           
As Wyatt trotted to the phone, James
turned to Carter and asked, “Nimic? What’s that?”

           
“
National
Military
Command
Center
,” Carter replied. “The War Room at the
Pentagon.”

           
James nodded, making a mental note.

Strategic Air Command Headquarters
Offutt Air Force Base,

near
Omaha
,
Nebraska

Wednesday, 21 September 1994,
1425 hours local

           
General Larry T. Tyler, commander in
chief of the Strategic Air Command, was getting ready to make his first serve
of the tennis match between members of the headquarters staff when the beeper
on his portable radio went off. But, like a baseball pitcher halfway into his
windup, he completed the serve and managed to hit his Reserve Forces Advisor,
Colonel Hartmann, in the left leg. Hartmann was distracted and didn’t expect
his boss to finish his serve.

           
“Cheap shot, General,” Hartmann
shouted.

           
Tyler raised his racket to offer an
apology to Hartmann, who politely waved it off, then trotted over to the bench,
where his radio was sitting. Tyler’s driver, a young buck sergeant named Meers,
heard the beeper and immediately started up the General’s staff car, which was
waiting just a few dozen yards away. In Tyler’s footsteps was his doubles
partner, the former commander of Pacific Air Force’s Philip- pine-based
Thirteenth Air Force, Major General Richard “Rat Killer” Stone, who was to
become Tyler’s Deputy Chief of Staff of Pacific Operations in a few weeks.

           
It had been said that CINCSAC—the
Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command—was a prisoner of his job, and
to a certain extent it was true—the radio, the car, and the driver were his
constant companions. But the fifty-six-year-old ex-Notre Dame football
quarterback was determiiled not to let the awesome responsibility of his
position disrupt his life—and that responsibility was truly awesome.

           
Tyler was in charge of the United
States’ smaller but still potent nuclear combat force of ninety B-1B Excalibur
bombers, two hundred B-52G and H-model Stratofortress bombers, ten B-2A Black
Knight stealth bombers, six hundred Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles,
one hundred rail-garrison Peacekeeper ICMBs, fifty MGM- 134A Mustang
road-mobile ICBMs, eight hundred AGM- 129A advanced cruise missiles, and one
thousand AGM-131A Short-Range Attack Missiles.

           
In addition he commanded several
hundred aerial refueling tankers, strategic reconnaissance aircraft, airborne
command posts, and communications aircraft, and a total of about eighty
thousand men and women, civilians as well as military, all around the globe—and
his job was to stay within moments-notice contact with each and every one of
his sixty active and reserve units at all times.

           
Although he was at the very pinnacle
of his Air Force career, he was determined not to get jabbed in the ass by its
sharp point.

           
As Tyler made his way to the bench
where his radio sat, he noticed the amber rotating lights at the street
intersection nearby—the SAC command post was recalling the alert crews, and the
amber warning lights told other drivers to be aware of alert crews heading
toward the flight line. Offutt Air Force Base had an alert force of four KC-135
aerial refueling tankers that would prepare for takeoff to support airborne
command post aircraft at Offutt, as well as other strike and communications
aircraft.

           
The alert crews were tested
regularly to make sure their response time was always within limits. But Tyler
knew the schedule of all alert crew exercises, especially for the E-4 and
EC-135 aircraft—if enemy warheads were inbound, Tyler himself would transfer
his flag of command and take an EC-135 airborne—and this wasn’t a scheduled
exercise. His pace quickened as he grabbed for the radio; his tennis partners
sensed his sudden anxiety, saw the rotating lights, and immediately made their
way to their staff cars as well.

           
With Stone standing a discreet
distance away—he had a Top Secret security clearance but was not yet
recertified for the SIOP, or Strategic Integrated Operations Plan, after losing
his command in the Philippines—Tyler keyed the mike to turn off the beeper and
spoke: “Alpha, go ahead.”

           
“Colonel Dunigan, Command Center,
sir,” came the voice of his command center’s duty senior controller, Colonel
Audrey Dunigan. Dunigan was the first woman senior controller, rising through
the ranks from KC-135 tanker pilot all the way to a Headquarters senior-controller
slot. Dunigan was now the senior controller of the busiest shift in the Command
Center, in direct communication with the Pentagon and all the SAC’s military
forces around the globe, and she seemed to take charge of the place like no one
else before her. “Zero-Tango in ten minutes. Command Center out.”

           
“Alpha copies. Out,” Tyler replied.
Turning to Stone, he said, “Let’s go, Rat Killer. In my car. We’ll have a
little impromptu on-the-job training.” He dropped his racket on the bench and
loped toward his waiting sedan, not even bothering to make apologies to his
staff—whom he knew would be right behind him anyway. Stone piled into the front
seat beside Tyler’s driver and they roared off.

           
“We got a Zero-Tango notification,”
Tyler told Stone. “You should be familiar with that: notification by NCA or
Space Command directly, teleconference of the NCA, JCS, specified and unified
commanders, all that stuff.”

           
“I’ve only been in one,” Stone
replied, “and I was the one who called it. Just before the Philippine elections
last year, Manila was a war zone. I thought Clark was going to be overrun. I
had to kick General Collier at PACAF in the butt to do something. I raised a
ruckus that obviously went right to CINCPAC, but he finally made the call and
we got the support we needed.”

           
“I remember that,” Tyler said. “From
what I read in the messages, Rat, Clark could have looked like the American
embassy in Tehran in ’79. Landing that Marine Expeditionary Unit on Luzon may
have seemed like overkill to most of the Pentagon and the press, but it defused
the situation perfectly.”

           
“Sure it did,” Stone added dryly.
“And I got shit-canned for even suggesting it.”

           
“Best thing that could have happened
to you was getting bumped out of Pacific Air Forces and coming to work at SAC,
Rat,” Tyler said. “You know as well as I do that everyone will remember the
last commander of Clark Air Force Base. Wherever you went in PACAF, that stigma
would have followed you. It would have hurt your chances for promotion—I know
it sounds shitty, but shit happens. Here at SAC, I get a topnotch expert in the
Pacific Theater and maritime warfare, and you get a fair shot at your third
star.”

           
A coded message was being read over
the radio, and Tyler squelched it out. Stone said, “You’re not going to monitor
the alert network?”

           
“The messages are for the crews, not
for me,” Tyler replied. “When I try to second-guess those messages, I give
myself ulcers. Now I try to relax, think about what I need to do, and think
about what I should be hearing when I get to the Battle Staff area.”

           
“And the whole staff gets notified
and called in?”

           
“Yep,” Tyler replied, hanging on to
the seat back as Meers negotiated a tight turn, switching on the siren to clear
some traffic out of an intersection. “At this time of day it’s no problem. When
we get one at two in the morning, it can get real hairy.”

           
“How often do you get these
notifications?”

           
“Not very often lately,” Tyler
admitted. “A lot of the notifications can be expected—the riots in Lithuania
just before their independence, the SCUD missile attacks during DESERT STORM,
the assassination in Iraq, shit like that. You can read the evening paper and
pretty much anticipate that a Zero-Tango was going to be called. But things
just aren’t all that critical in the real world these days.”

           
They were approaching SAC
Headquarters, a low, generally unimpressive building in the center of the base.
The building was unimpressive because only three stories were above
ground—there were five more stories underneath. Stone could see the Minuteman I
missile out in front of the building, a lone dedication to the thousands of SAC
crew members who spent as much as a third of their careers on twenty-four-hour
alert, sitting near their planes, in underground missile-launch complexes, or
in windowless command posts, ready to respond in case deterrence failed—in case
they were called on to fight World War III.

           
He also saw the weeping willow on
the lawn in front of the headquarters building, and the sight struck Richard
Stone as oddly ironic. Fifty feet under that lone weeping willow, men and women
were ready, at the direction of the President of the United States, the
Secretary of Defense, and the man in the car with him, to unleash thousands of
megatons of explosive power all across the planet with uncanny precision. The
location of the willow, Stone realized, was even a little absurd—several
nations probably had their thermonuclear weapons aimed at that precise spot,
ready to knock out the two-thirds of America’s nuclear forces controlled from
this one location.

           
No wonder Tyler turned off his
radio, Stone thought Even in these days of relative stability and peace, the
thought of being flattened and vaporized by the first incoming warheads was
enough to drive a guy crazy.

           
“In ten, Sergeant Meers,” Tyler told
his driver.

           
“Got it, sir.”

           
“Keep your badge in sight and follow
me in, Rat,” Tyler told Stone. “We might have to put you in the ‘press box,’
but you’re certainly cleared inside the Command Post. It should be fun,
whatever we got going here.”

           
Stone blinked at the four-star
general. “General, you mean you don’t know what’s happening?”

           
A grim-faced expression from Tyler
gave Stone his answer.

           
At the outer gate to the parking
lot/security perimeter around SAC Headquarters, a security guard had his M-16
rifle in one hand, and with the other hand he held up four fingers. Meers
flashed the guard five fingers, then one finger, and the guard let him through.
If Meers had added wrong and flashed the wrong number—he had to add the right
amount of fingers to the guard’s fingers to equal ten, the security number that
Dunigan had relayed to Tyler in the notification message and the one that she
would have relayed to the gate guards—they would probably have had their tires
shot out by two or three well-trained guards, and their noses would be pinned
to the pavement a few seconds later. They had to pass through a second gate
before reaching the building, and this time the guard was kind enough to flash
eight fingers so Meers had to raise only two fingers in response.

           
Meers stopped the car just outside
an enclosed doorway, guarded by a single security policeman. Tyler and Stone
ran past him, not bothering to return his salute, and Tyler punched in the code
to the Cypher-Lock beside the steel door. The door buzzed, and Tyler yanked the
heavy steel door open, ran inside, flashed his security access badge to a guard
in a bulletproof booth, and trotted to the private elevator that would take him
four floors down, directly to the underground Command Center. The guards, Tyler
noticed, all wore subdued smiles as he dashed by—it must be fun for them, he
thought, to see a two- and four-star general in warmup suits running around the
place. One more guard in a bulletproof booth checking ID badges, through a
metal- detector device, another guard, two blast doors, past the Command Center
weather station, and they were in the SAC Command Center itself.

           
The Command Center consisted of
three areas, separated by thick soundproof glass and remote-controlled privacy
shutters—the Battle Staff area on the main auditorium floor area, the Essential
Elements area behind the main auditorium, and the Support Staff area in a
balcony over the auditorium. All three areas could see the “big board,” the
eight 5-by-6-foot computer screens in the front of the Command Center, but
depending on the security classification of the activity and the occupants, the
senior controller could seal off either area to prevent eavesdropping—an
unclassified briefing could be going on in the Support Staff area while a Top
Secret briefing could be given in the Battle Staff area, with complete
security.

           
Tyler glanced up at the Command Post
status board just inside the entrance and found red lights flashing near the
signs that read “Battle Staff” and “Essential Elements”—the rooms were both
classified Top Secret. Tyler pointed to a doorway to their right. “Take those
stairs up to the Support Staff room, Rat,” he said. “They’ll direct you from
there.” Stone did not argue or hesitate, but went through the door, which locked
behind him. A set of stairs took him up to the glassed-in observation area
overlooking the Battle Staff area, where a technician had him put on a pair of
headphones as he sat down to watch. The shutters remained open, which meant he
could watch the big board but not hear any of the conversation going on below.