Battle Born (51 page)

“That’s it? No other forces near Korea?”

“Sir, that’s
one-third
of our carrier fleet,” Freeman acknowledged somberly. “And they all must operate with minimal forward-basing capability. Seventh Fleet was forced to move from Yokosuka to Pearl Harbor because of the
Independence
disaster, and all attack-capable military units were removed from Japan following the nuclear attack on the
Independence.
We have a few assets at Yokota and Misawa, all air defense and transport units. It took two years of hard negotiating to keep our bases on Okinawa. The units on Okinawa are there to maintain air base operations and provide fleet support only—we are prohibited from basing or staging any attack forces from there. Anderson Air Base on Guam is still uninhabitable; Agana Naval Base on Guam is just coming back up after being heavily damaged in the Chinese attack. The nearest American military base is Elmendorf Air Force Base.” When the President looked up at Freeman with a quizzical expression, he added, “In Anchorage, Alaska.”

“Anchorage
!” the President exclaimed. “The closest military base we have to Korea is in
Alaska?
”

“The former Adak Naval Air Station in the Aleutian Island chain is thirteen hundred miles closer, but it is completely uninhabited except by caretakers—the Navy left in 1998,” Freeman said. “First-class airfield, first-class dock facilities, first-class communications facilities, enough housing and infrastructure for almost ten thousand folks—just uninhabited for two years. It’s a three-hour plane ride from Anchorage, if the weather is good.” He gave the President a wry smile. “The Navy got along well with the neighbors—the nearest civilian community of any size is over one hundred miles away.”

“My God,” the President muttered. “No nearby military facilities. What’re the next closest bases?”

“About equidistant between Anchorage and Honolulu,” Freeman said. “Over four thousand miles away—eight hours by jet.”

“God,” the President muttered again. “Philip, I need a contingency plan to deal with this, right away. If China attacks United Korea, what are we going to do about it? What will our response be? We also need to have sufficient forces in place to protect Japan, even if they don’t want us based on their soil. My thoughts are this: we place enough deterrent forces in the region to show China that we are ready to respond. At least three carrier battle groups, plus a bomber force on alert in Alaska, loaded with enough firepower to blunt a Chinese ground invasion. Philip, I need you to draw up something like that as soon as possible.”

Philip Freeman walked over to his briefcase and withdrew three copies of a thick manuscript. “Fast enough for you, sir?” he quipped, handing a copy to Vice President Whiting as well. The manuscript was entitled “United Republic of Korea Show of Force Ops Plan.”

“You’ve been busy these past few days, Philip,” the President said approvingly. “Very good. Give it to me in a nutshell.”

“You’ve given it to me already, sir,” Freeman responded. “Priority number one: increase our presence in northeast Asia without the use of foreign forward-operating bases. Priority number two: deter aggression by China or Russia against the UROK or Japan. Priority number three: be able to stop or blunt a land invasion by either China or Russia into the UROK with rapid, sustained, massive firepower.

“This document was written by Brigadier General Patrick McLanahan of the High Technology Aerospace
Weapons Center. It’s biased, of course—McLanahan and his team develop air weapons, mostly Air Force—but he has a workable plan that I’d like to present to you for consideration. He relies on some naval assets and some assets of other services, but mostly he relies on experimental assets being developed by him and his team at Elliott Air Force Base.”

“Why am I not surprised?” the President asked sarcastically. He inwardly winced when he heard the name “Elliott,” as in “Brad Elliott”—as he feared, that three-star bastard was still haunting him, tormenting the White House from beyond the grave.

“Response number one: increase surface combat tasking in the region,” Freeman went on. “The first choice would be carriers, and we’ll have to start with the ones we have in the region, but McLanahan outlines a different proposal in his plan. Response number two: increase commitment of long-range air combat forces to the Asia theater. Response number three . . .” He hesitated, then said, “Commitment to use special weapons in the NEA theater.”

“Special weapons? You mean,
nuclear weapons?
” Ellen Whiting exclaimed.

“It’s the only viable alternative, ma’am,” Freeman said. “We have less than one hundred active long-range bombers and less than three hundred medium bombers in the Air Force, and with three carrier battle groups we add only another eighty Navy medium bombers and perhaps a thousand cruise missiles. Even if we could surge these aircraft to two sorties a day and limit attrition to one percent, we won’t have nearly enough assets to even put a dent in a massive Chinese ground and armored invasion. And we have to consider the real possibility that China will switch to weapons of mass destruction itself when American forces respond. Therefore, I believe we need to make the commitment right
up front to deploy and use tactical nuclear, subatomic-yield, or plasma-yield weapons.”

The President and the Vice President were too stunned to react, so Freeman went on: “There are other concerns as well. This will put a tremendous strain on our other world commitments, since every few months at least one additional carrier needs to be rotated in—that’s more than one-third of our carrier fleet committed to northeast Asia. This will leave important parts of the world, such as the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, without a carrier battle group for long periods of time. If a crisis erupts in the Balkans, the Aegean, the Baltic, or the eastern Med, we couldn’t respond rapidly. We would have to commit large portions of our air forces to the Pacific theater—bombers, tankers, and support aircraft—and since we’re talking about the northern Pacific, that means deploying those forces north, to Alaska . . .”

“Aha—the mention of Adak and Elmendorf wasn’t a fluke, eh, Philip?” the Vice President said as she flipped through the report.

“No, ma’am,” Freeman replied. “As soon as we lost the use of our bases in Japan, the Pentagon started looking for other alternatives—and that meant Alaska. Now, with the loss of Korean bases as well, Adak’s importance has skyrocketed. We have proposals awaiting authorization to dump a billion dollars into Adak in the next five years and base as many as thirty support aircraft there year-round.”

“Looks to me like you’d better get that proposal into the congressional paper mill right away,” the President said. “I’ll bet you have an emergency spending plan drafted up as well?”

“One hundred million dollars over the next two years,” Freeman answered. “We can have the Pentagon tack it onto some other spending authorization bill and
have it back on your desk for signature in a few days. It won’t exactly be a plum base of assignment, but we operated aircraft out of there for decades before.”

“Do it,” the President said. “Good work. But I’m still bothered about those carriers, Philip. China will start howling at us if we put three carriers around the Korean peninsula. Besides, the carriers are too attack-heavy. How about just a few ships—a little less intrusive, a little more defense-oriented?”

“Section Three,” Freeman said. The President and Vice President smiled and flipped the pages in their documents. “I had another little talk with General McLanahan just a few days ago, and he sent me a draft of a proposal that has been circulating around for years which we appended to his plan. He says we can effectively increase our forward presence around Korea by a factor of between two and five, using assets we already have. He says with a budget, he can set up a missile defense screen
over the entire Korean peninsula
without one ground-based system at all.”

“What?” the President exclaimed. “How in the hell is that possible?”

“I can get him in here in a matter of minutes and he can explain it all to you,” General Freeman said. “He just happens to be on his way to Washington.”

“Just happens to be?” the President said. “Good. Let’s get him in here and do it.” He skimmed through the document, shaking his head in amazement. “Unbelievable. Simply unbelievable. How come we didn’t implement this plan before?”

“General McLanahan won’t say so, but we both suspect it was because of General Elliott. You remember how fond he was of the Navy.” Sarcasm dripped from every word.

The President shook his head, reminded that inter-service rivalry and mistrust had set fine military plans
like these back so many years. “Christ, if he was still alive, with George Balboa still at the Pentagon, we’d be lucky to stop the fighting in our own
hallways
, let alone in Asia.”

“You mentioned a couple of things I’m not too familiar with, General—subatomic-yield and plasma-yield weapons,” Vice President Whiting said. “What are those?”

“Section Five, ma’am,” Freeman said. “That was drawn up by General Elliott’s successor, General Terrill Samson, the commander of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center, along with General McLanahan. He recently made this presentation before a Senate subcommittee. They have devised a way of using the next generation of powerful weapons for use in both attack and air defense applications.

“Subatomic-yield weapons are weapons such as neutron bombs that kill with high doses of radiation but cause little blast effect. They are unpopular, politically and otherwise, for obvious reasons; they can kill humans—sometimes with excruciating pain over many months—but leave buildings and weapons largely undamaged.”

“Never heard of a weapon that
was
popular,” the President said. “What about that other thing, the plasma-yield weapons?”

“Plasma-yield weapons are just making it out of the testing facilities and into field testing,” Freeman went on. “They kill and destroy with much greater effectiveness than any other kind of weapon ever devised. They use a small nuclear explosion to generate tremendous amounts of plasma energy—heat so intense that it instantly vaporizes anything it touches. The effect is devastating—targets don’t just blow up, they
vanish.
”

“What do you mean, vanish? Like a space ray or something? Like a
Star Trek
phaser beam?”

“Exactly,” Freeman said. “Matter is turned into plasma energy, which cannot be sensed by humans—the target vanishes.”

“Talk about politically unpopular!”

“The weapon has many advantages and many disadvantages,” Freeman went on. “It works poorly in the atmosphere. It is horrendously expensive. But a plasma-yield detonation causes no blast effects—no overpressure, no heat, not even much noise, and the size of the blast can be electronically limited and controlled to a great extent. Both weapons are in short supply, but they represent a way to respond to greater threats without resorting to full-yield nuclear weapons.”

The Vice President shook her head. “I’m not sure I like where this discussion is going, Mr. President,” she said. “We’re planning on deploying nuclear weapons again? And these Buck Rogers weapons sound like political suicide—the spies and saboteurs will be fighting with the protesters for access to the labs and bases where we keep these things. Isn’t there any other alternative?”

“Yes, there is. It’s called peace,” the President said. “As long as everyone involved agrees to stay calm and not overreact to a situation, we might be able to get through this without having to resort to special weapons. I hope—we all hope—for this best resolution. But we need to plan for the worst.” He looked at Freeman and nodded. “Let’s get Defense and the boys from Dreamland in here, Philip. We need to get something set up right away, before somebody goes and does something stupid.”

MASTER CONTROL AND REPORTING CENTER,
OSAN, UNITED REPUBLIC OF KOREA
(FORMERLY SOUTH KOREA)
THAT SAME TIME

T
he very first indication of danger was a tiny yellow flashing light that could have been missed in the huge array of other lights and indicators on the panel. But the controllers on duty—all Korean now, with no Americans at all—were attentive, and one of them noticed the indicator immediately, as if expecting it.

One press of a button, and the computer display at the controller’s station changed to a pictorial depiction of the detection, plus radar data on the new track. It took only seconds for the controller to study the data and determine what it was. He hit a yellow ATTENTION button, which flashed a warning at all controllers’ stations and connected his mike to them. “All stations, all stations, sector seven reports many inbound radar tracks, southbound courses, altitude and speed increasing. Verification protocols in progress, all stations stand by.”

The next step took only seconds as well; a second radar array was tasked to cross-check the first radar’s information. Once the two systems verified each other’s information, identification was positive. The controller hit a red WARNING button, which illuminated red flashing lights throughout the entire complex and put the controller’s microphone on Hot Call, which overrode all other communications in the MCRC. “All stations, all stations, missile warning, missile warning in sector seven. Multiple inbound tracks verified and confirmed. All stations, go to threat condition red.” At the same moment, his track data was displayed up on one of the electronic screens in the front of the command center so
the other controllers and on-duty commanders could study it.

“Projected targets?” asked the commander, UROK Air Force Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Park Yom. He had been on duty at the Osan MCRC ever since the visit by the American Vice President, when the attacks on North Korea and the transition to reunification began. He had not seen the light of day since that fateful morning. But he didn’t care. The citizens were celebrating above, but Korea was still in danger.

“One . . . no, two tracks on Seoul,” the controller said. “Possibly one of those targeting Inchon. One track on Kunsan, one on Pusan. One track . . . sir, one track heading out over the Sea of Japan, target Japan.”