Final Storm (44 page)

Porogarkov’s spirits suddenly were soaring. If the American bomber wanted to surrender, then perhaps Red Star would survive this incident after all!

He instantly began doing calculations in his head. He was very familiar with the little-used airstrip right next to the radar station—he had landed in his own airplane there many times. Its runway was extra long, due to the needs of the huge An-22 and IL-76 cargo jets that had flown in the majority of the materials used to upgrade the Krasnoyarsk station.

He knew the B-1 didn’t need a very long runway to land. Could it be possible that not only would the valuable station be spared but this his forces would also
capture
an American bomber?

Manipulating the bank of switches near the station entrance, he was able to lift one of the protective shutters that covered the huge, six-inch-thick plate glass windows of the station’s main building.

Now he had a perfect view of the airstrip.

A quick shudder ran through him as he heard the base’s SAM group leader order his crews to lock on to the approaching American airplane.

“
No!
” he screamed involuntarily, quickly yanking the microphone from the radio set. The last thing he wanted now was for his missile crews to shoot down the surrendering bomber. The airplane would be much more valuable to Red Star intact—both technologically and propaganda-wise.

A quick call to the base defense commander and the SAM crews were quickly put on stand-by.

Another minute passed. Now Porogarkov could just barely make out the outline of the approaching American bomber, its smoking dark silhouette casting a ghostly image in the twilight sky, the two MiG-21s, their exhausts flaming, riding on either side.

He reached for the phone again. In a matter of seconds he was talking with one of the trainee pilots.

“Is he still intending to surrender?” he asked the young man.

“Yes, sir,” came the nervous reply. “He has no choice, sir. His airplane has sustained damage to both wings, its tail and its midsection. His engines are smoking heavily and we can see he is having trouble just controlling his level.”

Of course Porogarkov knew that there was a chance the American would simply dive into the radar station. In fact the airstrip defense commander was quickly on line expressing the same concern.

“Not to worry, Comrade,” the air marshal said, knowing the Americans’ long-standing policy against “one-way” bombing runs. In fact, he knew that a great amount of their bomber technology ever since World War II—durable engines, high fuel capacity, inflight refueling exercises—had been geared around bringing the crews
back
from long-range bombing missions.

“These Americans never go on suicide missions,” he said confidently. “They feel that life is much too valuable.”

In a strange way, Porogarkov felt a little envious of the American behind the controls of the slowly approaching airplane. He knew that if the positions were reversed, Porogarkov would have been expected by his superiors to give up his life to destroy the target.

“He is starting a turn for landing …” one of the MiG pilots called out.

“Stay with him!” Porogarkov immediately called back. “Stay right beside him and make sure he lands.”

The air marshal could clearly see the American bomber now. It was a B-1, probably one of the last ones left, he thought. He was looking forward to finally getting to see the insides of one.

The airstrip landing lights began to blink on, giving the American a clear view of the strip. Briefly, Porogarkov’s mind flashed back to the six ICBMs he knew were at that moment streaking through the upper atmosphere, heading for their targets. All the better, he thought.

With this last gasp, the Americans would finally be finished.

T
HE B-1’S WHEELS HIT
the Soviet airstrip hard, violently bouncing the airplane once, then a second time. Tortured screeches of metal and rubber filled the air. Finally, after the third contact, the battered, smoking American bomber was down for good.

Porogarkov was running now. Out of the radar station’s main entrance and toward the end of the runway about two hundred feet away. Already a dozen jeeps and troop trucks were tearing out onto the landing strip, racing madly in an effort to keep up with the fast rolling bomber.

The two escorting MiGs, their pilots now certain that the bomber was down, pulled up and streaked over the base, one of them brazenly performing a celebratory barrel roll.

The B-1’s engines quickly reversed and a shredded parachute was released from his rear end—both acts in effort to slow the big plane’s roll. Porogarkov reached the end of the runway at this point, out of breath but jubilant. The B-1 was slowing down and soon enough it ground to a halt right in front of him, not 150 feet from the main entrance to the radar station.

He cautiously approached the airplane, opting to wait for the security troop trucks to arrive. He was amazed at how much damage the bomber had sustained—both its wings were in tatters, its portside tailplane was hanging by only a few bolts and wires, and its mid-section looked as if some gigantic fist had battered it several times.

Each of the bomber’s four engines were smoking heavily and small fires had broken out on two of the afterburning nozzles. Still Porogarkov knew the chance of an explosion caused by ignited fuel was remote. Even as he was running toward the airstrip he had seen two long plumes of vented fuel burst out from the back of the airplane, its pilot obviously not wanting the battered aircraft to explode on landing.

In fact, he had seen more than a dozen pieces of the airplane fall off during its approach, leading all the more to his amazement that the airplane had actually landed in relatively one piece.

The security forces were now on the scene and the bomber was quickly surrounded.

Once Porogarkov was certain the area was secure, he motioned for a dozen of the soldiers to follow him.

Reaching the bomber’s rear compartment entrance, the air marshal sent in two soldiers ahead before climbing into the aircraft himself.

If anything the interior of the airplane looked worse than its outside. The compartment was filled with acrid smoke, many small fires were blazing away and it seemed like every electrical wire was sparking brilliantly.

He and the soldiers slowly made their way up to the airplane’s forward compartment, the air marshal taking his own pistol out just in case the Americans gave a struggle.

The two soldiers were the first to reach the cockpit. Instantly they turned back toward him, two identical expressions of mixed confusion and horror written across their faces.

Porogarkov brusquely stormed into the cockpit, his head filled with wild ideas of how the Red Star would honor him for this moment.

But an instant later, he understood the look of haunted disconcertion in his soldiers’ eyes.

The cockpit was empty.

“
Search the airplane!
”

Porogarkov heard the words, but it was as if someone else had yelled the order.

That’s when everything started to happen at once. His eyes had fallen into a LED display which was ticking off in seconds. When it finally reached 001, he was startled to hear the bomber’s engines suddenly come to life again.

At the same instant, another more pungent odor filled the cabin. The astounded soldiers, not knowing the origin of the smell, instinctively held their noses.

But as an old weapons officer, Porogarkov knew the aroma well—it was the result of two fusing agents being ignited.

In other words, bombs on board the airplane were, at that second, being armed.

A moment later, the B-1 suddenly lurched forward in a bizarre, bumpy taxiing motion. A multitude of lights came to life on the bomber’s control panel. Bells, buzzers, and shrill warning signals all started blaring at once. Shocked and unable to move, the air marshal and his dozen soldiers were thrown against the cabin wall as the B-1 crawled forward, its engines screaming in low-acceleration pain.

Then, in his last living moment, Porogarkov heard the distinct loud sizzling of two weapons just micro-seconds before detonation.

Three seconds later, the B-1, its speed up to 25 mph, slammed right through the main entrance of the radar station, the pair of high-explosive glide bombs in its mid-section detonating at the same instant.

There was a quick flash of flame, followed by a tremendous explosion—so powerful it knocked down the remaining airstrip security troops who had watched in horror as the B-1 suddenly pitched forward into the building.

A series of devastating secondary explosions followed, their combined violence producing an enormous mushroom cloud that rivaled the detonation of a small nuclear device.

When those Soviet security troops lucky to survive the blast came to, they saw that absolutely nothing was left of the bomber or the Krasnoyarsk radar station….

N
O MORE THAN A
hundred people saw the six streaks of light flash across the sky high above the American northeastern seaboard.

The small number of witnesses was due to the fact that most of the New England coastal areas had been evacuated shortly after the Big War, when the murderous Mid-Aks briefly held the area.

However one person, a Down Mainer fisherman named Frank Dow, got a fairly close look at two of the Soviet ICBMs. He was twenty miles off the coast of southern Maine when the objects crashed side-by-side into the ocean no more than one thousand yards from his fishing boat, their violent re-entry creating such a tidal disturbance his craft was very nearly swamped.

Neither exploded.

Dow had no idea what the missiles were or where they had come from. In fact, when he first saw the streaks approaching him as he was beginning to haul in his daily catch, he thought he was about to be abducted by UFOs.

Once he was certain that his boat was out of danger of sinking, he quickly marked the approximate location of the crash on his sea chart and then hastily left the area, leaving his catch and his nets behind.

A South African criminal named Rook also witnessed one of the ICBMs re-entry up close and first hand. Hiding out on a small island off the coast of the old city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Rook had been awakened from a deep sleep by a monstrous crashing noise. Rousing himself from his log cabin hide-out, he ran to the beach and was amazed to see the smoky remains of the huge SS-19 missile sticking straight up in the sand just at the high tide level.

Rook, a former Circle Army mercenary who was also an airborne explosives specialist at one time, knew the object was a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile and figured quite rightly that it contained a nuclear device inside.

Yet he also knew that whoever had fired the missile had done so incorrectly. The object sticking out of the sand was very nearly the entire missile—launch stages, warhead, everything. The missile had not separated in the upper reaches of the earth’s atmosphere as it was supposed to. It had landed, virtually intact, on the beach.

It was just a guess, but he theorized that if the missile’s fuel mixture had somehow been tainted—or not blended together properly in the first place—it would have prevented the ICBM from reaching its all-important “critical escape altitude,” the point at which the timing mechanisms for the breakaway stages and the warhead arming systems were activated via altimeter controls.

But Rook also knew that just because the missile had landed intact that didn’t necessarily mean it still wasn’t about to explode.

Quickly packing his things, he set out in his small unpowered boat and rowed toward shore, upset that he would have to find yet another place to hide.

No one saw the other three SS-19s crash to earth.

One landed in a lake in western Nova Scotia. Another did a belly landing on an abandoned seaside vacation area in northern Massachusetts called Plum Island.

The sixth and final ICBM had plowed itself into the side of a New Hampshire mountain used in pre-war days as a ski slope.

Inside these three SS-19s, as in the others, the warheads had survived their less-than-auspicious re-entry. And battered though they were, with the right amount of technology, all six of the 1.5-kiloton nuclear devices could one day be repaired.

H
UNTER KNEW AT LEAST
three of his ribs were broken.

He tried to turn over on his side, but couldn’t—the pain was too intense. He reached up to his right shoulder and found that this too was hurt—most likely it was separated.

Carefully, he tried to wiggle his toes and was relieved to find them responding, though remotely so. He held first his right hand, then his left in front of his face. Both were badly scraped and cut, but apparently free of broken bones.

He felt his face next, checking to make sure his nose, ears and jaw were still attached. They were. A quick reach between his legs also brought a spark of relief—he was sore there, but still intact.

He reached below him and felt the remains of the rubber life raft that he had used to break his fall. It was in tatters, instantly deflated when it—and he—hit the cold, sharp rocky tundra going no less than 60 mph shortly before the B-1 set down on the Soviet airstrip.

Jumping from the moving airplane had actually turned out to be the easy part. The complications happened minutes before when he had to quickly program the B-1’s on-board computer to land the bomber, taxi it to a stop at a precise spot down the end of the runway, and shut down, only to have its engines fire up again exactly one minute later—the time it would take to arm and fuse the two glide bombs in its forward weapons bay—and smash into the radar station.

But he knew the plan had worked. Even through groggy and blood-misted eyes he had seen the Soviet complex explode in a mini-mushroom cloud.

“We got ’em, guys,” he had coughed in a brief moment of congratulations.

But he knew he was in real trouble.

He couldn’t move—not right away anyway. And if he had been able to, where would he go? If there were any Soviets left breathing at the base, he was sure they would kill him. And there was certainly no friendly face for at least a thousand miles around.