Power Curve (46 page)

“Oh, yeah,” Contreraz answered. “The general is treating them like 500-pound gorillas.” They pulled up to Ryan’s car and stopped. “They get whatever they want.”

“Are any of your people helping Dr. Malthus?”

“He’s down there all alone,” Contreraz said.

Ryan’s head snapped up. Suddenly, he had a vision of
himself as the courageous individual who stopped the madness and Martini’s headlong rush to nuclear war. “Thanks for the lift, Sarg.” He jumped into his car and sped toward the Security Police shack. He had to find Daguerre, the Security Police captain.

Washington, D.C.

Shaw reached out and hit the alarm before it went off. The green numbers on the clock flickered to 0400. He lay still, not moving. Jessica’s hands moved over his back, massaging his muscles. “Did you get any sleep?” she asked.

“No,” he answered. He swung his legs out of bed and sat up. “I’ve got to go. Early meeting.” She watched him as he hurriedly shaved and dressed.

“What do you want me to tell the senator?” she asked.

He gave a little snort. “Anything you want, darlin’.”

“Let me help,” she offered.

“There’s nothing you can do.” Again, he snorted. “Old Patrick screwed the pooch big time on this one.” He laughed. “Maddy surprised all of us.”

“What are you going to do now?”

That’s a good question
, he thought.
What am I going to do now?
Suddenly, it came to him. “I’ll be gawd-damned,” he said. “If old Patrick ratted once, he can rerat right back. Darlin’, you can tell Mr. Senator John Leland that I’m not giving Maddy up.” Jessica bounced out of bed and threw her arms around him. He stroked her bare back and felt the tears on her cheeks. “Now what brought all this on?”

“Leland will kill you,” she said.

“In this town, darlin’, you can kill people, but you can’t kill them dead. Besides, Old Patrick has a trick or two left in the old hip pocket.” He hurried to the elevator, feeling more alive than he had in weeks. His limousine was waiting for him in the garage, and he settled into the backseat for the short ride to the White House. He gazed out the window, trying to anticipate what the day would
bring. But he kept thinking about Jessica.
Well, I’ll be damned
, he thought, realizing he had an erection.

Shaw was waiting in the hall when Madeline Turner came out of her bedroom. “Good morning, Patrick,” she said. “You’re looking tired. Didn’t you get any sleep last night?”

“As a matter of fact, Madam President, I didn’t sleep a wink.” They walked quickly down the corridor.

“Patrick, are you all right? You sound different.”

“I’m fine, Madam President. Ab-so-loot-lee fine.”

She arched an eyebrow and looked at him. “What happened to the ‘Mizz’?” she asked.

“Don’t know. I guess it sounded a bit presumptuous.” They walked in silence to the Situation Room. The stairs and hallways were packed with aides and staffers, poised to be of instant service to their masters inside. They pressed back, clearing a passage for the president. A Marine guard pulled the door open, and Shaw entered first. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “the President.”

Turner entered and sat down. “Good morning. I see that you all slept well.”

The DCI waited while a little chuckle worked its way around the room. “Madam President,” he began, “at last count, the Chinese have landed 986 troops on the atoll and reinforced them with antiaircraft artillery batteries and surface-to-air missiles. A reliable source has located General Bender and his crew. They are being held in a cell”—a TV monitor displayed an aerial view of Shahe Air Base—“in this complex.” His laser pointer circled a set of buildings near the center of the base. “Their aircraft has been moved undercover.” The pointer circled what looked like a small hill.

“Barnett, have you made any progress on the diplomatic front?”

“None worth mentioning,” the secretary of state answered. “We’re encountering a singular reluctance on the part of the Chinese to talk. Perhaps they are waiting for new instructions from Beijing.”

“I’m done waiting,” she answered. “General Charles?”

“No word from Okinawa. But they have not declined the emergency action message.”

“What does that mean in English?” she asked.

“They intend to execute the mission no later than 0700 our time, this morning. If something happens, like the runway gets bombed or they haven’t got the aircraft—”

“Or a bomb that works,” Shaw said.

Charles ignored the interruption. “—then the commander can decline the mission.”

“I see,” she said. “If they cannot do it or”—she fixed Charles with her pen—“we experience another dud, I want a submarine-launched Tomahawk on target immediately. If that one also fails to detonate, do it again.” She stood up to leave.

“Madam President,” the DCI said, “the Chinese will probably execute General Bender and the crew in retaliation.”

Madeline Turner paled, but her voice was hard and unflinching. “That would be a very serious mistake on their part. Whether they release General Bender or not, the Chinese will have exactly twenty-four hours after our sel rel to convince me
not
to take further steps. Specifically, I will order the Navy to sink any Chinese warship found in the East China Sea. I hope our Navy is up to it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the chief of Naval Operations answered.

“Are there any questions about my intentions?” she asked. There were none, and she left with Shaw still in tow.

“She seems to like twenty-four-hour deadlines,” Charles said to no one in particular.

“She’s taking it one day at a time,” Hazelton replied.

Okinawa, Japan

C
aptain Terrence Daguerre leaned cross his desk in the Security Police shack. “Is this a formal complaint?” he asked.

Ryan bit his lip, afraid to take the final step and commit to a course of action. “As the head of the Personnel Reliability Program for this wing,” he said, still trying to hedge, “I am bringing to you a valid concern.”

“We’ve talked about this before,” Daguerre replied. “Since your so-called concern involves the wing commander, I’m not about to do squat-all unless you file a formal complaint and produce hard evidence.”

“I’m filing—” Ryan’s voice cracked when he spoke. “I’m filing a formal complaint. General Martini is destroying government property and deliberately violating two-man control procedures required for the handling of nuclear weapons.”

Daguerre shook his head. “Exactly what is he destroying?”

“Nuclear weapons.”

“Son of a bitch!” Daguerre said, jumping to his feet. “You got proof?” Ryan nodded dumbly, relieved the captain was finally acting. Daguerre jammed his blue beret on and headed for the door. “Show me.” He stopped and waited for the doctor. “But you had better be right.”

It was sunset when Malthus climbed out of the pit dragging a steel case the size of a wastebasket. He crawled into the makeshift plastic tent set up over the ladder, and the decontamination team sprang into action. In short order, he was out of his lead-lined apron, heavy gloves, respirator, and clothes. He kicked them into the pit and crawled out of the tent, still dragging the steel case. He dressed while Ev checked his dosimeter. She chanced a sideways glance at the naked physicist, taking a not so professional interest in his body. “Not bad,” she said. “Ah, I mean there’s less than two rems on your dosimeter.” She ran a Geiger counter over the steel case that held the plutonium from the bomb’s core. “It’s a little hot; we better put it in the container.”

While two of the Sandia engineers placed the steel case inside a larger insulated steel container, a team of civil engineers started pumping concrete into the pit. “It’s pretty hot down there,” Malthus said. “But the concrete should do the trick.”

“Did you find anything?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “I cut and tested three samples and everything tested perfect.”

“We’re burying over $200,000 of test equipment in that hole and learned nothing?” she complained. “What are you going to tell Martini?”

“I need to think about it.”

Martini paced the Intel vault like a caged tiger. “So what you’re telling me is that we’re still at square one.”

“Not entirely,” Malthus said. “There’s one other thing: the time delay in the arming sequence Captain Byers mentioned.”

“The arming circuits tested good,” one of the Sandia engineers replied.

“Let’s arm it on the ground,” Malthus said. “If the green light cycles on like it should, go with the mission.”

“I know,” Martini said, “that the bomb still needs to sense delivery parameters to detonate. But you ever heard of Murphy’s Law? It seems to be in effect around here. There is no way that I’m going to let one of my aircraft
take off with an armed nuclear weapon.” He glared at them. “Not on my base.”

“Arming is a two-way street,” Ev said. “The crew dearms the bomb after we check it. If, at any time, the bomb doesn’t arm as programmed, abort the mission.”

“With all the checks we’ve done, we’ve got a higher probability of detonation than any other weapon system in the stockpile,” Malthus added.

Martini’s face turned to stone as he worked the problem. His entire career had been focused on the mission. It was the touchstone of his existence, the reason for everything he did. Now his mission was to drop a single nuclear weapon on an enemy who had threatened his base and killed people he liked and admired. But did they have the weapon to do it? He checked the master clock on the wall. He had run out of time. “Do it. I’ll give the final go-no go decision then.”

The two captains stood in front of Martini. The pilot, Chet Woods, did the talking. “We want a second chance,” he said. “Let us fly the mission.”

“Give me one good reason,” Martini demanded.

The WSO, Ray Byers, answered him. “General, it figures that if we’re going a second time, you’ve checked the bomb and the systems out. The only thing that we know that went wrong the last time was the delay on the arming light. I’m betting that was the problem, and we’re the guys who will know if it’s happening again.”

Martini’s fingers beat their relentless tattoo on the desk. “Good thinking,” he said. “You’ve got it.”

“Over there,” Ryan said, pointing out Master Sergeant Ralph Contreraz. “He saw it all.” Daguerre stopped his staff car by Contreraz’s van and motioned for the sergeant to get out.

“Sergeant Contreraz,” Ryan said, “I want you to tell Captain Daguerre exactly what you saw in that hangar.”

Contreraz gave them the respectful NCO look that he saved for such occasions. He had developed it over the years in dealing with officers he didn’t like or considered incompetent. Ryan met both criteria but he only detested
the security cop. “Yes, sir. But I’ve got to ask first if the captain’s got a need to know?”

“Sergeant,” Daguerre answered, “the major has filed a formal complaint under the Personnel Reliability Program. I am required by regulation to investigate.”

Contreraz decided it wasn’t worth arguing about and recounted what he had seen inside the hangar. “Dr. Malthus was in the pit alone, but the pit was under constant surveillance. So what’s the problem?”

Daguerre rubbed his forehead. “Very unusual. This is a hard one.”

“What’s so hard about it?” Ryan snapped. “We’ve got a commander who is breaking down under stress. He’s aberrating, and we have to do something about it.”

“I’ll have to take this to my boss,” Daguerre said. “If he buys it, he’ll take it to the vice commander who will have to notify PACAF.”

“We haven’t got time!” Ryan shouted.

“This is pure bullshit,” Contreraz grumbled. The two officers stared at him. “You’re wasting my time.” He climbed back into his van.

“Why is it bullshit?” Daguerre asked.

“I don’t pretend to know all that’s going on around here. Hell, I don’t need to know. The old man trusts me to do my job as best I can. I haven’t got the time or the energy to worry about him and the high rollers in the command post doing theirs.”

“You trust Martini?” Ryan asked.

“Damn right. I was his crew chief on the Thunderbirds. Every day, every time he flew, I saw the trust he had in the team. I mean every pilot, every crew chief, everyone. That’s why the Thunderbirds were so damn good.” He slammed the van into gear. “That’s why this base, this wing, is so damn good.”

“I can’t walk away from this,” Ryan said.

“Then try talking to the general, Major. He’ll listen.” Contreraz let out the clutch and drove away.

“The sergeant’s got a point,” Daguerre said. “Go talk to him or drop this.”

“But he’s—”

“Try listening,” Daguerre said, interrupting him. “Ei
ther talk to the general or drop it. Otherwise, I’ll arrest you for inciting a mutiny. Did I use any words you don’t understand?”

Ryan shook his head.

The right engine of the Strike Eagle shrieked to life, filling the fuel cells building with sound. The small crowd gathered around the jet stepped back. Toby Malthus plugged his headset into the ground communications cord and spoke to the crew as they went through the before-taxi checks. Finally, it was time to do it. Byers dialed in the PAL code. “The bomb is unlocked and I’ve got an orange light,” he said. “Nuclear consent switch.”

A slight pause. “On,” Woods replied.

Byers took a deep breath and rotated the arming wafer switch to AIR. The light blinked green. “There was no delay in the bomb arming,” he told Malthus.

“De-arm it and stand by,” Malthus said. He ran to a wall phone to call the Battle Cab on a secure line. “It worked!” he shouted into the mouth piece.

Martini punched the off button and dangled the phone by its cord. He looked at the colonels clustered in the Battle Cab. “Malthus says the weapon is good to go.”

“We can make the time over target,” the Ops Group commander said.

Martini dropped his chin.
What if we fail a second time?
he thought.
It doesn’t matter, we have to try. This is what it always comes down to: We have to try
.

He closed his eyes for a moment. He could hear the men breathing in the cab. His eyes opened. “Go.” The order went out, and Martini stared at the big status boards on the wall. But he wasn’t seeing them. He was with the crew. Then, “Get Dr. Malthus in here, I need to speak to him.”

The Strike Eagle lifted off runway 5 right and headed straight ahead, to the northeast, away from their target. The island of Okinawa flashed by underneath, and in less than two minutes, they had crossed the island and were over the Pacific. But they were still on a heading away
from their target. The pilot flipped off the jet’s anticollision beacon and nav lights before wrenching the big fighter onto a southerly course. He dropped to 100 feet above the water, rounded the southern tip of Okinawa, and headed directly for the atoll. Ahead of them, the dark outlines of the Kerma-Retto island chain loomed out of the sea. They were using the islands for terrain masking.

The TEWS, the F-15’s tactical electronic warfare system, came alive. A hostile search radar was sweeping the skies in front of them. “They haven’t got a paint,” Ray Byers said. “The islands are still masking us.”

“Not for long,” Chet Woods replied from the front seat. He dropped the jet a little lower and flew around the first of the islands. The chirping from the TEWS grew stronger. “Arm it up,” he ordered. They ran through the checklist, arming the B-61.

“The green light came on as advertised,” Byers told him.

“Shit hot!” Woods barked. They rounded the last island in the chain and headed for the atoll, ninety miles away.

The TEWS chirped at them, filling their headsets with a warning that a hostile radar had found them. Byers checked the symbols on the radar warning display. “It’s a search radar,” he said, his words fast and clipped. “Coming from the atoll.” The defensive part of the TEWS came alive. The system made no attempt to jam the radar but sent out false signals to confuse the enemy’s radar as they made the long, high-speed dash across the open water onto the target. “Eight minutes to go.” Woods nudged the throttles up, and the airspeed touched 660 knots. They were going .98 Mach 100 feet above the calm ocean surface. At that speed, every second ate up 1,100 feet of the remaining distance.

The TEWS display flashed, and the symbol for a radaraimed antiaircraft artillery battery appeared. “That ain’t gonna save their butts,” Byers muttered. But the AAA would be a brief threat when they tossed the bomb and made their escape. A new symbol appeared on the TEWS. “Fuck me!” Byers roared. “They got a monopulse radar on the island. I don’t believe this. It’s a Gadfly. Where the hell did they get that?” The Gadfly, or SA-11, was a
deadly Russian-built surface-to-air missile. It had a range of 21 miles and could engage an aircraft down to fifty feet off the deck. Woods squeaked the F-15 down to fifty feet. “Can you get it any lower?” Byers asked. “Five minutes out.”

Byers called up the FLIR, forward-looking infrared, on his far right display scope. The FLIR was a passive system and did not announce their presence by emitting electronic signals like the radar. But at their low altitude, its range was extremely limited. “We’re gonna have to use the radar,” Byers said. “Four minutes out.” Forty-four miles to go.

“Make it quick,” Woods grunted. Sweat was pouring down his face, stinging his eyes. Ahead of them the first line of AAA tracers streaked into the sky. “We ain’t there, assholes,” Woods muttered. The TEWS had worked as designed and had meaconed the hostile radar. When they were inside thirty miles, a curtain of tracers lit the sky. “But they know we’re coming,” the pilot said.

Byers raised his head to look and quickly looked back down at his displays. He wished he hadn’t seen it. He hit the EMIS button and the radar came to life. Byers’s fingers played the buttons on his right hand controller like a piccolo and he drove the radar crosshairs over the atoll. He locked it up and stabbed at the EMIS button, returning the radar to standby. The radar had been active less than seven seconds, but it had sent a wealth of information to the F-15’s computers. The weapons delivery system could do its job now without the radar. The attack display in the pilot’s HUD came on.

Ahead of them, the Gadfly’s guidance and tracking radar keyed on the F-15’s radar signal and four transporter-erector launchers, each with four missiles, slewed to the northeast.

Four bright rocket plumes—Gadflies—lighted the night as the missiles launched and converged on the F-15. Woods lifted the Strike Eagle to 100 feet and turned twenty degrees to the right. When he was certain the Gadflies had turned with him, he slammed the F-15 down to the deck and turned ninety degrees back to the left. The first two missiles tried to turn with him but overshot.
Woods reversed his turn back to the right, pulling over 6
g
’s. The third missile tried to turn but broached sideways, tumbling into the sea. The fourth missile flashed overhead and exploded. The expanding rod core in the missile’s warhead flayed the night with shrapnel, cutting into the top of the F-15.

Byers felt a stinging in the back of his neck. He knew he was hurt but not how bad. “You with me, babes?” he asked the pilot.

A pained “Yeah” answered him. “I lost the HUD.”

“Manual release,” Byers said. “Pull on my count.” He talked the pilot through the attack as they flew into the hell in front of them. “Come left five degrees, five more, steady, steady, steady,
pull
!” Woods pulled smoothly back on the stick into a sixty-degree climb. Byers watched the altimeter increase. “Ready, ready, ready,
pickle
!” Woods hit the pickle button, and the B-61 separated cleanly from the centerline and arced high into the sky. Woods’s left hand jabbed at the weapons jettison button just in case it hadn’t released. “Bomb gone!” Byers yelled. Woods rolled the jet and dove. Byers twisted around in his seat and checked their six o’clock position.