Final Storm (39 page)

At one time, only one in four of the enlisted men assigned to the place had had any radar experience. Alcoholism was rampant. The console crews were little more than repetitive sets of bloodshot eyes staring past the screens into nothingness, and shaking hands nervously fidgeting with the dials on the bench.

But all of that changed with the coming of Red Star.

His own life had changed too—dramatically so. Once he had been little more than an assistant to the deputy air defense minister, a petty functionary who couldn’t even get an extra book of meat ration tickets. Now, since the dawning of Red Star, he
was
the air defense minister—a very important person in a very important position. He now had power and prestige of the kind he had only dreamed of before—a luxury apartment in Moscow not far from the Kremlin, as well as a
dacha
on the Black Sea. His wife could shop at the exclusive stores where there were no lines, no shortages, and plenty of pre-war quality goods. His mistresses could do the same.

He lit another cigarette and reveled in the ever-budding glory of Red Star.
They
had defeated the United States, forced its disarmament, presided over its break-up, enforced the New Order.
They
had kept the mish mash of America’s countries and states on edge for the last few years, all of it part of the plan to buy time. Time for their scientists to reactivate the warhead-targeting satellites. Time for their scientists to refurbish their remaining ICBMs. Time to plan, with an intelligent step-by-step approach, the eventual conquest of the entire globe.

And once that was accomplished, Porogarkov told himself without a hint of false modesty, Red Star would rebuild a space shuttle, reconquer space, and eventually go to the Moon and Mars.

Nothing could stop them now.

Not even the news that the former US Vice-President had been kidnapped and returned to America.

This too was part of a plan. The American turncoat had long ago worn out his usefulness—his role had simply been another device to buy time. And with his capture came an opportunity to send the Americans a message. No more would the Soviets be forced to infiltrate entire armies halfway around the world, or pay out enormous sums of money to every two-bit hooligan terrorist who promised to make things hard for the United Americans’ shaky provisional government.

No, the days of the shotgun approach were gone. The Soviets’
new
message—the firm bold message of Red Star—had arrived in an air burst twenty thousand feet above the city of Syracuse.

Porogarkov had only seen the American traitor once, when the man had visited Krasnoyarsk not six months after his act of betrayal. But even before the Big War, there had been inside, deep rumors of the American’s collusion with the Red Star fringe elements of the Politburo. The logical payoff had come in the form of highly sophisticated satellite software technology the Vice-President had somehow managed to squirrel away in Finland before hostilities broke out.

Now, not fifty meters from where Porogarkov stood, the very last of that same high-tech booty was finally being fully installed.

As air defense minister, he was privy to all aspects of the First Launch, as the bombing of Syracuse had come to be called. In many ways the operation had been a test firing; the liquid fuel mixture had been critical, but so had been the correct interaction between the equipment installed at Krasnoyarsk and the orbiting satellites. All things considered, not only had the First Launch gone off flawlessly, but it had answered many questions. Now, with only a few more adjustments to make, the Red Star technicians had transformed the Krasnoyarsk station into a military command center like no other in history. Not only would it be able to cover ninety percent of the Soviet Union with an early-warning radar screen and look in on any part of the US via the astoundingly advanced American-built spy satellites, but it would also be able to independently target any of the Red Star ICBMs with pinpoint accuracy to any spot on the globe.

It was a simple concept. Manageable. Sublimely so.

In this, Porogarkov saw the beauty of it all. For from this isolated Central Asian outpost, Red Star
could
control the world.

At the far end of the building, Captain Nikita Mursk had just reported for duty.

Refreshed from a good night’s sleep and a hearty meal of delicious food, the young Red Star officer began his duty shift as he always did: making the rounds in the complex’s defensive radar section. Walking around the large, terminal-filled room like a benevolent schoolmaster looking over the shoulders of his students, Mursk saw that most of the radar scopes yielded nothing but the shapeless masses of huge weather systems that reeled across the Asian continent, blotting out huge areas. On others there was an occasional blip from a military flight, with its authorization code duly noted alongside the dot on the screen where it appeared.

All seemed to be normal.

Except for the last screen …

This station’s radar scope, manned by a sergeant named Vasilov, showed more of the same weather patterns and identified flights. But Mursk noticed the young man was staring at a certain point near the northern border’s coastline.

“Anything to report, Vasilov?” Mursk asked, scanning the young man’s console without waiting for an answer.

“Nothing, Comrade,” the well-groomed, muscular enlisted man began, his voice quavering only slightly. “At least it appears to be nothing …”

“Explain, Sergeant,” Mursk said calmly. “Don’t hold back.”

“I saw a large blip appear in the middle of the White Sea, sir,” the man replied. “Only for a brief moment. It was moving very fast. But now, I see no such indication.”

Mursk half-listened to the radarman as he watched the screen. The area Sergeant Vasilov had pointed to was on the edge of the dense Arctic pack ice in the White Sea. For the most part Mursk was certain, beyond question, that no aircraft could just simply appear and penetrate the zone undetected.

“Probably just a case of atmospheric distortion,” Mursk said confidently, dismissing the enlisted man’s concern. “Anything else?”

“Nothing, sir,” Vasilov said, returning to his regular position at the console. “Only some ground clutter farther south.”

Mursk gave the man a comradely pat on the back. “Carry on, Sergeant,” he said.

H
UNTER CHECKED THE MISSION
clock and saw it was already at four and one half minutes.

So far, so good.

Time seemed to be moving extra fast ever since he’d burst forth from the hidden ice cavern base. It was only a second after he had punched in the big bomber’s afterburners that the deafening roar of the engines diminished all at once to a distant rumble. This told him that his power plants were working well.

Wing configuration came next. Upon leaving the cavern, the big bomber’s wings were fanned out to their full extension as it shot skyward on a steep angle. After only seconds in the air, Hunter had grasped the large wing-sweep lever to his right, pulling it up almost halfway. Immediately, giant ball-screw assemblies in the wingroots smoothly cranked the tapered wings in toward the slim fuselage at a twenty-five-degree angle, and the B-1’s rocketlike rise increased another notch.

Ten seconds into the flight, he knew that the heavy bomber was climbing at a rate of more than two thousand feet per minute, slicing through the frozen skies at almost four hundred miles per hour.

“Quarterback to base,” he had called into his microphone. “I’m up and still climbing. At fifteen hundred feet now at mark …”

“Roger, QB,” came Jones’s reply. “Activate on-board sensor and monitoring systems …”

Hunter had reached over and punched a series of switches on a computer-driven TV transmitter that had been installed on his right side where the co-pilot’s seat would normally be.

“Sensor and monitoring systems on,” he reported, as he watched the four, side-by-side TV screens facing him on the front console blink to life.

Almost magically, the color images of Jones, Toomey, and Ben materialized, each on his own TV screen. The fourth screen, designated “mission master” would display all data—fuel load, time to target, potential threats, and so on—deemed important by the mission computer.

“This is very strange,” Hunter admitted as he looked at the three video talking heads, “I actually feel like it’s getting crowded in here.”

“Imagine what it looks like to us back here,” Toomey said, reaching up to tap the lens of the TV camera devoted to his station. “You look like Buck Rogers, or Captain Midnight.”

“We have communication link-up integrity confirmation,” Jones told Hunter, confirming that the video link-up between the B-1 and the sub’s mission control center was being properly scrambled and dispersed, making it practically impossible to be monitored by the Soviets.

“OK, guys,” Hunter said, finally taking his eyes off the images of his friends on the TV screens, “glad to have you aboard. But now it’s time to go to work …”

The big plane’s altimeter display to the right of the center CRT screen had barely clicked over to five thousand feet when Hunter eased up on the B-1’s fighter-like stick control with his right hand and quickly backed the four throttles down from full afterburner with his left.

As the bomber leveled off, several high-speed fuel pumps rapidly began transferring tons of JP-8 among the network of fuel cells in the internal circulatory system of the airplane, maintaining a balance with the ever-shifting delicate center of gravity.

Hunter monitored the fuel exchange on his console, and was heartened to see that everything was in order.

“Let’s get a position fix, Ben,” he said crisply into the microphone in his oxygen mask, “and then let’s get back down on the deck. No sense loitering around up here.”

“Roger, Hawk,” Wa answered from his station. Without delay, he began deftly flicking switches and reading in-flight data to the inertial navigation system, coaxing the complex computer to establish the B-1’s exact position and calibrate the coordinates with the MAPS readout on his display screen. After a few moments of activity, the proper series of characters, beeps and flashes appeared on the flickering screen.

“It’s a go,” Ben reported, his TV image flickering slightly. “Heading one-zero-zero, maximum warp…. Head for the tall grass and let’s meet up with our plotted course about six klicks over landfall. You’ll have to tell us where the hell the land begins and the icepack ends.”

“Roger, Ben,” Hunter replied. “Doing a visual terrain check now.”

Hunter turned away from the TV screens for a moment and looked down at the frozen, barren expanse of jagged ice fields below him, trying to pick out the coastline where the frigid tundra met the jagged icepack of the White Sea. Within seconds, his extraordinarily sharp eyes detected a dark outcropping of black rocks, blasted free of snow by the howling Arctic winds, and he knew that it marked the edge of the Soviet landmass.

“OK, I’ve got the shoreline dead ahead,” he called back to the trio. “Ben, let’s go down to two hundred feet.”

He checked his other console readings, then nudged the big control stick forward to nose the B-1 over in a deep dive toward the ground. Back in the sub, Jones simultaneously pushed a button which activated the airplane’s wing sweep lever all the way up until it locked, bringing the giant wings in toward the fuselage at their full retraction angle of sixty-five degrees.

“I have wing lock confirmation, here,” Jones radioed Hunter.

“Ditto wing lock confirm here,” Hunter answered, seeing the appropriate light come to life on his console.

Gently, the Wingman eased the B-1’s stick up and the bomber gracefully leveled off as it flashed over the coastline just under the speed of sound. Once again coordinating via the TV with Wa, Hunter set the plane’s terrain-following radar guidance system to full automatic, and locked the altitude setting at a scant two hundred feet above the ground. Once the B-1’s flight control computers were thus set, the complex navigation program would automatically raise and lower the big bomber’s flight path to maintain that two-hundred-foot altitude.

“Anything on the scope, J.T.?” Hunter asked Toomey.

“Nothing … yet,” Toomey’s voice was steady as his eyes remained glued to the small CRT screen.

It displayed straight horizontal lines, indicating various radar frequencies that might be used by the Soviets’ ground controllers to probe the skies for intruders. As of that moment, no threat was indicated.

“Intersecting MAPS plotted course in ten seconds,” Jones said crisply, punching buttons on his console to overlay the earlier MAPS coordinates on the B-1’s real-time CRT projection.

Slowly, the white icon that represented the bomber was tracing a path toward the gray bar that showed the plotted course almost due south. In less than three blinks of the screen, the outline image of the plane joined up with the chosen path and remained locked on it.

“MAPS course locked on, altitude two hundred feet, airspeed six hundred knots, fuel load one-hundred-fifty-thousand pounds,” Jones announced. Hunter could see that the general had lit a cigar and was puffing away furiously.

“Roger that, base,” Hunter responded. “Could I have a status check on the rest of the systems?”

“Offensive systems A-OK,” Wa responded immediately. “Terrain avoidance locked on, bomb load unarmed and intact, forward weapons bay secure.”

“Defense systems, check,” Toomey said tersely. “No threat indicated, air-to-airs on standby, after weapons bay secure.”

“OK, gents, this is the real thing,” Hunter began.

Hunter started to reach for the four throttle levers to the left of his seat, but he paused for a moment. Instead, he reached up to his left breast pocket beneath his flight suit and felt for the American flag that he always kept there. It had brought him good luck so many times before—he hoped its charm would continue.

Then his eyes darted to the MAPS display projected on the small CRT in front of him on the B-1’s cockpit console, seeking out the thin red ‘X’ that marked the Soviet radar complex.