Patrick McLanahan Collection #1 (92 page)

“Warning, fuel emergency,”
Bitching Betty chimed in. In her drive to get as many enemy planes as possible, Kelly had ignored her fuel state. She knew that her wingman was coming, but he was still at least twenty minutes away. She was almost out of ammunition—admittedly having been a little excitable and trigger-happy on her first gun pass, but being more frugal as her supply got lower and lower. She tried the radios again—still jammed. The datalink hadn't activated yet, meaning that the AWACS plane from Elmendorf hadn't arrived yet. There was no indication that her wingman was anywhere in the area, so she couldn't even lead him to the bandits.

With the sky full of enemy planes all around her, she came to the horrifying realization that she was done for the day—she had no fuel and no weapons. The enemy aircraft were heading farther to the southeast, within visual range of the Canadian coastline by now. They were heading away from Eielson, so she couldn't pursue. It was the hardest thing she'd ever done in her life, but she had no choice except to break off and head for home.

And then she saw them: more missiles flying overhead. The Backfires that she couldn't down were launching their missiles! And she was powerless to stop them.

Forman pointed her F-16's nose toward Eielson, entered the emergency beacon code into her transponder, and throttled back to max-range power. On radar she could see even the slow-movers down low passing her easily. Her radar tracked twelve bandits cruising on their way toward North America, and it detected even more missile launches. She kept trying her radios, but it would be no use until every one of the bandits had disappeared from radar.

As she slowed to her best-range power setting, the vibration in her stick and rudder pedals got worse. She couldn't go below three hundred knots without the fighter's shaking so violently that she thought she could lose control at any second. That was not good. It meant that air refueling was probably out of the question.

“Hunter Four, this is Hunter Eight on company, how do you read?”

Thank God the jamming had subsided enough to hear human voices, she told herself. “Two by, Eight,” she responded. “How me?”

“Weak and barely readable,” her wingman said. “We tried to raise you earlier, but no response. I have you tied on, three-zero at one-two bull's-eye, base plus eleven. What's your state?”

“Eight, I engaged seven, repeat, seven bandits,” Forman said breathlessly. “Do you copy?”

“
You engaged seven bandits?
Did you make visual contact?”

“Affirmative. Russian Backfire bombers. Two of them launched what appeared to be very large air-to-surface missiles. I got six of the bandits. There were several groups of bandits, the Backfires up high and slower-movers that descended to low altitude. They were headed southeast. I have been unable to contact Knifepoint. Can you try? Over.” Hunter Eight was farther south, away from the Russian planes that were jamming them—she hoped he'd have better luck.

Now Forman's wingman sounded as breathless as she did. “Stand by,” he said. On the primary radio, she heard, “Knifepoint, Knifepoint, this is Hunter Eight.” It took several tries to reach the NORAD controller. “Hunter Four has engaged large hostile attacking bomber force.” He gave the approximate position and direction of flight.

“We copy all, Hunter flight,” the controller responded. “We encountered heavy MIJIing on all frequencies. We have lost contact with all SEEK IGLOO and SEEK FROST sites. Unable to provide service at
this time.” The controller paused, then said, “We saw the gaggle go by, but we couldn't talk to anyone—and then we lost our radars. There wasn't a damn thing we could do.”

That same time

T
riple-C, this is ADOC, we have a situation,” the intercom announcement began. “Alaska NORAD Region has just submitted a radar outage report. They report losing contact with four long-range radars and seven short-range radars of the North Warning System. They've also submitted a Fighter Status Report and indicate they have lost contact with one of their fighters scrambled out of Eielson. This is not a drill. Both Alaska NORAD and Eielson report communications outages as well.”

“ADOC, Command copies,” responded U.S. Army Colonel Joanna Kearsage, the command director of the Combined Control Center. “All OCs, stand by. Systems, warm up the hot lines. This is not a drill.” Kearsage was a former Patriot air-defense-brigade commander from Fort Hood, Texas, and a twenty-two-year Army veteran. She once thought that nothing compared to deploying her brigade out to the field on short notice and putting her beloved Patriot missile system through its paces—and then she got the assignment to the Mountain. She'd been wrong. For eight hours every day and a half, information from all over the world flowed right to her fingertips, and she made decisions that affected the lives of two great democracies and the peace and freedom of the entire world. There was nothing else like it.

At first the idea of living in a huge underground bunker was not very appealing. The Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center was a series of massive excavations covering four and a half acres deep inside the Mountain. Inside the granite excavations was a rabbit's warren of fifteen steel buildings, most of which were three stories tall, all mounted on springs to absorb the shock of a nuclear blast or earthquake. There was no contact between the buildings and the rock; flexible corridors connected the buildings. The complex had its own emergency power generators and water reservoirs, along with its own dining halls, medical centers, and barracks, and even such creature comforts as two exercise
centers, a barbershop, a chapel, and a sauna. The whole complex was enclosed behind massive steel doors, each weighing over twenty-five tons but so precisely balanced on their hinges that only two men could push them open or closed if necessary.

The command director of the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center was the person in charge of the round-the-clock global monitoring network of three major military commands: the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the U.S. Strategic Command, and the U.S. Northern Command, all responsible for the defense of the United States and Canada. Kearsage's forty-person Charlie crew manned the extensive communications and computer-network terminals that collected information from everywhere in the world and from space and merged it into the displays and readouts presented to the command director and her operations staff. Her battle staff was broken up into operations centers within Cheyenne Mountain: Missile Warning, Air Warning, Space Control, Intelligence, Systems Control, and Weather. Each center's combined data was displayed in the command center on several computer monitors of various types and sizes.

Kearsage was seated in the command center along with her deputy commander, Canadian Forces Colonel Ward Howell, and the noncommissioned officer in charge of command communications. Dominating the command center were four wall-size monitors with graphical compilations of the global threat and continental defense picture. The left-center screen showed the current threats for North America, and the right-center screen showed threats around the world. Flanking the two large center screens were two other screens showing the status of air-defense and strategic-attack forces. Two rows of computer monitors in front of Kearsage and her deputies showed up-to-date information and reports from the individual operations centers themselves.

Her attention was riveted on the North America display, which showed the circles representing the optimal range of the long-range radars, or LRRs, and short-range radars, or SRRs, of the North Warning System in northern Alaska and northern Canada. The circles were blinking red, indicating a malfunction or degradation. The North Warning System was the first line of defense against air-breathing threats to the North American continent—and for some reason a good chunk of it was suddenly shut down.

In addition, there was a blinking red inverted V, indicating the last known position of the F-16 scrambled out of Eielson Air Force Base on
cryptic orders from the Pentagon. She could still see the two other groups of symbols, representing other airborne assets: one F-16C and a KC-135R tanker from Eielson, which were supposed to rendezvous with the lone F-16; and two F-15Cs and an E-3C AWACS radar plane flying northeast from Elmendorf Air Force Base in southern Alaska to temporarily set up a long-range radar and fighter picket northwest of Alaska over the Arctic Ocean. But the other two groups of symbols were steady green—on course, on time, and in contact. What happened to the first F-16?

“ADOC, talk to me,” Kearsage said, using the acronym for the Air Defense Operations Center inside the Mountain, her group responsible for tracking and identifying all air targets over North America. “What do we have? And where is that fighter?”

“Village is trying to ascertain the status of those radars and to make contact with the fighter,” the Air Warning Center's senior controller responded. “Remote transmissions appear to be experiencing heavy interference.” “Village” was the call sign for the Alaska NORAD regional headquarters at Elmendorf Air Force Base.

“SOLAR, would sunspot activity be responsible for the comm interference?” “SOLAR” was the nickname for the Weather Support Center at nearby Peterson Air Force Base, which provided weather support to Cheyenne Mountain.

“Unknown at this time, ma'am, but we're not experiencing any abnormal solar activity.”

“Triple-C, this is MWC,” the controller at the Missile Warning Center at NORAD reported. The Missile Warning Center was responsible for detecting, identifying, and monitoring any possible missile launches anywhere on the planet, using heat-seeking satellites, and predicting if the missiles posed a threat to North America. “We're looking at some events near the long-range and short-range radar sites in northeastern Alaska and northwestern Canada. Not very high threshold readings—definitely not ballistic-missile launches. Stand by.” “Events” were how they referred to whatever hot spots the heat-sensing Defense Support Program satellites could pick up—anything from oil-well fires and forest fires to ballistic-missile launches.

“Village, this is Anchor, what do you think?” “Anchor” was Kearsage's code word for NORAD headquarters.

“Ma'am, we're in contact with the fighter's wingman, who took off from Eielson, and we're in contact with the F-15s and AWACS that
launched out of Elmendorf,” the senior controller at the Alaska NORAD Region headquarters responded. “Some sort of localized interference over the Beaufort Sea.”

“Are you going to submit an ECTAR?”

“Negative. Not at this time,” the senior controller responded.

Kearsage allowed herself to relax a bit. An Electronic Countermeasures Tactical Action Report, or ECTAR, was an important notification, because it was often the first indication of an enemy attack. If there was some kind of jamming, the NORAD Regional Operations Centers were supposed to launch airborne-radar planes and prepare to transfer control to them. So far they had not lost tactical command—that was a good sign. “MWC, what you got for us?”

“Triple-C, we recorded a few brief hot events,” the Missile Warning Center's controller responded. “Not sunlight glints, but very brief flares. Perhaps a fire or explosion.”

Kearsage and Howell turned and looked at each other. “Electronic interference, loss of contact with both the radars and our fighter, and now possible explosions near the LRRs—looks pretty suspicious to me,” Howell said.

“But we don't have any indication of a threat,” Kearsage said. “And we have contact with all other airborne assets….”

“Colonel, that message from Air Intelligence Agency was pretty specific—a possible bomber attack against the United States, similar to the attack on that CIA base in Uzbekistan.”

She looked at him, looked at his eyes to read the seriousness of his words—and what she saw scared her. Howell was the former fighter pilot on this command crew. He'd been involved in strategic air defense for almost his entire career. He was always the stoic, unflappable Canuck—and if he thought this was a real emergency, he meant it. He also rarely called her by her rank, except if VIPs or commanding officers were in the Mountain—if he used her rank now, he was probably scared, too.

That warning from the U.S. Air Force was certainly weird. Normally intelligence data flowed directly from whatever source, usually Air Intelligence Center or sometimes directly from the U.S. Space Command, to NORAD. This time a warning had been issued by the chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force. This indicated some kind of turmoil in the Pentagon. That was usually very, very bad news. Someone had broken the chain of command, which usually resulted in confusion and chaos.

She heard through the grapevine that it was a flap in Air Intelligence Agency, involving its powerful commander and the new commander of one of its information-warfare wings, none other than Patrick McLanahan. That, Kearsage thought, explained a lot. McLanahan had the worst reputation of any general officer since Lieutenant General Brad Elliott. He was, simply, a flakeoid. He couldn't be trusted. He'd obviously said or done something that got everyone at the Pentagon riled up—his specialty. Now they had to expend lots of time, energy, manpower, and resources proving how stupid the guy was.

Kearsage studied the map of North America. The lone F-16 and the tanker from Eielson would soon be in the last known area of the first F-16, and the E-3C AWACS and the two F-15s from Elmendorf would join up a few minutes later. Assuming there was a big outage of several North Warning System radars, their first priority would be to fill in those gaps.

She looked over at the list of available assets in Canada and was pleased to see that two NATO AWACS planes were based at Four Wing, Canadian Forces Cold Lake, Alberta, probably deployed there to support a MAPLE FLAG air-warfare exercise. “Let's get an AWACS and a couple CF-18s airborne from Cold Lake moving north to cover that gap in the North Warning System,” she ordered.