Power Games: Operation Enduring Unity I (29 page)

Sophie didn’t look worried, just curious. “Do you think they’d really do that, sir? How many hundreds of bombs are sitting around here? Wouldn’t an air strike cause the biggest nuclear explosion ever?”

“Nah, detonating a nuke accidentally is impossible. I was talking with one of the NBC specialists over there earlier. Fire, shock, explosions, etc…that just destroys the delicate arming mechanisms. The rougher you are on a nuclear device, the less likely it is to go off. They’ve had bombs on planes that had mid-air collisions without a problem. Even had one in a bomber back in the Cold War days that crashed into the side of a mountain without a detonation. No, it’s not the nukes I’m worried about. It’s
our
fragile little asses that aren’t so hardy.”

He looked up as if he expected to see B-52’s at any moment. The sight of four friendly F-16’s circling high above should have been reassuring. The protective air cover only reminded him why they needed it. Well, it was an officer’s job to worry like an old woman and a sergeant’s to get things done.

“So, we’ll be escorting the packages? There never was much time for convoy training, but we’ll do the best we can, sir.” Sophie didn’t wonder about planes and strategy, just about who would make the best driver.

The LT shrugged. “Even easier than that. They’re moving out in three convoys. Heading north, south and west. We got lucky. Our platoon goes with the westbound team, the quickest way home.”

He waved his hand at a busy bunch of vehicles parked in front of bunkers five hundred yards away.

“The Guard will carry the weapons in their 5-ton trucks. They’ll provide the real security with those light armored cars of theirs. Our job is simply traffic control. We’ll move in two sections. One ahead and one behind the convoy. We’re responsible for blocking intersections and clearing lanes through traffic jams; that type of stuff.”

He tossed her a short-ranged, encrypted military issue squad radio. The militia’s privately bought models were better, but she pretended to be appropriately impressed. “Here’s a gift from our Guard partners. I’ll take the first section and you’ll be leading the second. If there’s anything wrong you can talk straight to the regular troops. I know it’s a major responsibility, but you’re the best I’ve got for this mission.” He searched her young face for any hint of uncertainty or self-doubt. How frightening that he found none.

“Ok, Sophie, but we need to be on the same page. Nothing can slow this party down. Our orders are to make sure we don’t stop for any reason until we’re at, well, wherever we’re going. They won’t even tell me the final destination.” He waved at all the armed people around them. “Sometimes I think there’s no more trust left in the world!”

Thirty miles away and almost ten high, a Global Hawk launched from Texas loitered in lazy circles. Even at that distance, the $120 million drone’s classified sensors could still read the nametags of the specks crawling around the desert base below. Positively identifying the slick, 12-foot long silver bullets they were cramming into the back of trucks was child’s play.

US Northern Command Headquarters

15 March: 1430

“Without a doubt, sir. We just moved from Broken Arrow to Empty Quiver status. The terrorists are preparing to move ‘em.”

You could have heard a mouse fart in the joint headquarters. There were contingency plans, sure, but no one knew them by heart. The theft of nuclear weapons had simply never occurred before.

The White House liaison staffer spoke first. Shaking his head, he stole some random colonel’s seat. “You have to call off the airstrike, General. If the nukes are outside the bunkers, God knows how much radiation would be released. We’ll have to try something else.”

The Air Force general still struggled to fathom just how far discipline had broken down at Nellis. An entire wing going over to the enemy…nothing like it had ever happened in Air Force history.

“Negative. The bombers will stick to the plan and sanitize the area. Even if it only slows the terrorists down, that’s enough. I have a Delta Force and Green Beret task force en route to secure the nukes. They’re already airborne. We also have a battalion of Army Rangers right here gearing up to retake the rest of the base. We just need to hold these sneaky bastards in place until our troops get to Nellis.”

This suit was the same one the president sent to keep an eye on the doomed Florida airborne operation back in January. He was here now because of his “extensive experience” coordinating with the military. The general hated him almost as much as he did the rebels. This kid who couldn’t tell the difference between a Bradley and an Abrams was the president’s eyes, ears and mouth to the Armed Forces. What a world.

“General Lyon, did you not hear me? I understand these things can’t detonate; you people have been talking about that for hours. Still, it’s about the public relations damage of playing with such fire. The president cannot run the risk of even trace amounts of radioactive material being spread about the base.”

“Listen up, son. We know what we’re doing. The big HE bombs will hit specific command and control facilities far from the nukes. The cluster bombs will blanket the ammo area, true, but they are small explosive devices. Dangerous to people working around there, but most unlikely to damage one of those warheads. We’ll carry on as planned.” He turned his back on the civilian and focused on receiving updates from subordinates.

The bureaucrat couldn’t wrap his mind around this insubordination. In his world, political connections equaled rank. “General, you are out of line. I gave you a direct order. This is an extremely important operation. If you aren’t going to cooperate, then I will relieve you and find someone else that will. Damnit, man. Don’t you have any honor?”

The suit was the type that thought having his chauffeur hit the brakes too hard a violent altercation. A wet stain spread down the front of his pants when the general grabbed him by his $500 tie and dragged him out of his chair. The general waved his free hand at the security detail.

“Airman! Get this fucking little shit off of my base, right now! Honor? What the hell do you know about that? I was dodging flak over Baghdad while you were having your diapers changed by the maid. I will obey a direct order from the president personally, but no longer from any of the vampires he surrounds himself with. No wonder these rebels prefer to fight than serve you people.”

15 March: 1445

Jamming a GPS signal is disturbingly easy. The satellites might have been high tech, but they communicate via old-fashioned radio waves. Since, even at their closest, the sats orbit 22,000 miles away from the receiver, that signal is not terribly strong. Even a weak transmitter broadcasting on the same frequency only a few miles from the target can effortlessly drown them out. Car thieves have been using cheap handheld jammers, bought anonymously over the internet, to outwit expensive GPS-based antitheft devices for years. It was scandalous how long it took the military to copy them.

Except for the circling friendly fighters, nothing showed on the radar screens up in the Nellis control tower. Nothing at all. Not a single civilian plane, big or small, was airborne within a 50-mile radius. A quick call to their counterpart civilian air controllers at the international airport scared the rebels the most. The FAA had grounded all flights in or out of the city and set up a no fly zone around the base. Without any explanation given. Just a firm order with no expiration time. No one from the government bothered calling the base to inform them. Not a good sign.

The base commander fidgeted. He was always the decisive type, for a senior officer. There wasn’t any point in scrambling more fighters. The only four pilots he could positively count on were already airborne. The tolerance of his people was, to put it mildly, nearing its limits. Sending up the rest of the squadron might just be giving the enemy reinforcements. He paused at the E-word thought. So strange, but it felt right.

He still had one card up his sleeve though. Some of his staff had an interesting plan to jam all GPS signals in a 20-mile radius. Normally, he never would have considered the idea, since it was such a huge threat to all the civilian aircraft around. Thanks to the Feds, they now had an opportunity…and the desperate need to try it.

He had a space operations team at the base; primarily staffed by contractors. As long as their paychecks kept coming, their loyalty wasn’t such an open question. They were pretty motivated about the idea of reprogramming some of the airfield’s powerful radio transmitters to override all military and civilian GPS bands in the vicinity. The job was theoretically straightforward, since they had all the hardware, software and codes necessary, but it had never been tried before.

The chance to do something truly new, to turn a radio antennae and computer into a weapon, guaranteed the loyalty of the civilian technicians more than the promised bonuses. Forcing them to stay on duty at the base during the eventual airstrikes helped guarantee high quality work as well.

The jamming could be overcome, of course. The military sinks a lot of money into R&D every year. Not all of it is siphoned off by unscrupulous, overbilling contractors. Every now and again, all that money spent yields useful products. For example, each of the $2 billion B-2 bombers closing in on Nellis was equipped with state-of-the-art anti-jamming equipment. All the electronic firepower aimed at the aircraft had little effect on their instruments. That’s why they didn’t have the slightest idea what the enemy was trying to do.

While the bulk of the Air Force’s aircraft were properly shielded, no one ever thought to protect the GPS-guided bombs they dropped. Putting $50k electronic countermeasures onto something you were going to blow up anyway was an expense that even those extremely generous congressmen on the Armed Services Budget Committee thought a tad wasteful.

After the infamous Nevada strike, the Air Force would get all the funding they needed to upgrade their ordinance. That came later, sadly. It wouldn’t do much to save the citizens of North Las Vegas today.

The great thing about GPS guided weapons isn’t how accurately they can be dropped. A 2,000 lb. bomb gives a lot of room for error. What is revolutionary is how far away they could be deployed from. You can stand off miles and, thanks to GPS controlled canards on the rear of the death sausages, still be sure the package will hit within five meters of the target.

Somewhere over the Hoover Dam, four stealth bombers unleashed their payloads from 50,000 feet high and almost 15 miles away. A mix of 24 large HE and cluster bombs arched towards the rebellious base below. With their GPS guidance shut off, the suddenly “iron bombs” made no corrections for atmospheric conditions or ballistic wobbling. In short, with every mile they fell, they missed their programmed targets by hundreds, sometimes thousands, of meters.

Cold War-era air raid sirens screeched all over Nellis Air Force base. The rebels scurried to shelter in the sturdiest structures they could find: the partially buried ordinance bunkers. None appreciated the humor of hiding in a bunker packed with explosives to survive the bombs coming towards them. At first. Once they heard faint blasts safely in the distance did they start joking again. The comedy respite ended abruptly when somebody pointed out they came from the west. In town. For some reason, out here in the middle of a sprawling desert, this military base jutted right up against civilian areas.

One great big bomb slammed into a Wal-Mart less than half a mile from the base’s main gate. The cheap corrugated tin roof of the sprawling shopping Mecca wasn’t sturdy enough to trigger the point fuse. The bomb didn’t detonate until it struck a shelf full of flat screen TV’s. 2,000 pounds of high explosive turned the entire electronics department into a crater and destroyed the building from inside out. Scores of satisfied shoppers and minimum wage earning associates were either vaporized or shredded apart by millions of cheap Chinese made chunks of plastic shrapnel.

A bit to the north, a cluster bomb sprayed hundreds of ball bearing packed death canisters over an elementary school. With class being out and all the kids at home, due to the self-imposed national crisis, that hit should have counted as a lucky break. Would have been too, if the school wasn’t also being used as a polling station for the referendum. In typical monkey fashion, dozens of people rushed out into the parking lot to see what all the booms in town were about…just as hundreds of small booms erupted around them. Even worse, this polling location had a number of reporters doing exit interviews. Some survived with their cameras intact.

Across the country pundits, politicians and other crazy people had their self-righteous rants interrupted with “breaking news” from out West. Washington maintained an impressively firm “no comment” line, hoping to avoid any mention of loose nukes. Their silence was far more incendiary than any rhetoric.

The first network to seize the initiative in this information vacuum got to define the narrative: that of a preemptive airstrike on a potentially rebellious state. Anti-Fed talking heads hopped up and down in their seats at the live footage of unarmed rebels being slaughtered, regardless of which way they were voting. Pro-Fed commentators, already a sinking majority, found themselves even further divided. That dwindling minority still preaching calmness and negotiation pretty much realized it was time to shut up and pick a side.