Red Hammer 1994 (40 page)

“Good hunting, Captain. You know the score.” He hesitated for a moment, searching for the right words. “It’s critical we knock out those mobiles. No sense holding back or playing it too cautious, if you know what I mean.”

Rawlings knew exactly what he meant. Day patrols instead of waiting for darkness, taking on superior forces if necessary, foregoing laser designation for the fighters if they could get a direct kill. It had all been clearly spelled out for them.

“I understand, sir.” That was all he could say. He entered the aluminum cavern and counted heads, making sure his boys were all there. They sat passively, weapons resting on their laps. There were twelve in all, his men, his Team.

The loadmaster signaled all secure to the flight crew and raised the ramp. The ground crew backed away, ear protection in place. One by one, the four turbo-prop engines kicked over and roared to life with a momentary burst of black smoke. The air force pilot promptly taxied toward the runway, the British watching the departure unemotionally, while the air force personnel were already packing their gear for evacuation. Within a minute, the Talon was airborne, climbing rapidly, engines straining, beating the cool evening air into submission. Leveling at five thousand feet for the short flight over the English countryside, the plane turned east and began its long journey to the Russian Motherland.

The tethered loadmaster, a burly air force staff sergeant, lumbered forward and tapped Rawlings on the shoulder. “Five minutes to the jump-off point, sir.” Rawlings shook off his drowsiness and glanced at his watch—0133—then surveyed his crew who sat in varying stages of disrepair. The four-hour-plus flight had been punishing; the terrain-following autopilot had jerked and shaken the men unmercifully as they had skimmed over both land and sea. A few had vomited, unable to handle the constant thrashing.

The flight plan had unfolded like clockwork. No air contacts were detected, the skies eerily vacant. The Germans had kept their promise of free passage. Hitting the beach in Latvia after a stint in the Baltic had been tense, but anticlimactic. The country was jet black and stone cold. Not a sign of life emanated from the ground, even when flying at two hundred feet over towns and factories cloaked in darkness. The flight crew had screamed along main arteries to avoid crossing deadly power lines but even then hadn’t seen anything with wheels. Rawlings had once rode in the cockpit of a MH-53J helo when flying a training mission at night and had come away awestruck by the crew’s competence. It took nerves of steel and a steady grip to avoid instant disaster at the hands of power lines, towers, buildings, or other obstacles.

Crossing into Russian territory had brought little change. Only spurious electronic signals danced on the airwaves, signatures of air-search radars or patrolling interceptors, none of which would be able to distinguish the Talon from ground clutter. Only once had they deviated from their base course to avoid a suspected surface-to-air missile site.

“Let’s go!” Rawlings yelled over the cabin noise. He stood and stretched out his sore back. It took a few moments to catch his balance. Six SF soldiers on each side of the pallets shuffled to the rear, past the helmeted crewmen. They hooked-up to the wire static line, bunched nuts to butts, buffeted by a violent ride. They would bail out in one continuous run into empty space, followed by the heavy pallets coasting down the rollers two seconds apart. The goal would be to have minimum separation between the men and machines once on the ground.

The loadmaster reached for the chest-high ramp lever. The whine of hydraulics triggered a rush of adrenaline to Rawlings’s body. The first crack of pitch black brought a deafening roar, and an unexpected backblast of swirling, frigid air that made them shiver. Nature’s violence, mixed with fear of the unknown, hit Rawlings. He breathed deeply, muscles tense, as the ramp lowered into place.

“Two minutes.” The twin lines, led by Rawlings and Gonzales, edged aft and bunched even closer. The ramp was completely distended and locked, the edge dropping off into nothingness. Rawlings purged his lungs and suddenly felt invigorated. The thick forest below rushed by in a blur; his eyes were unable to focus for more than a second. At only six hundred feet, there was no margin for error. A good chute pop and two swings and they’d be hitting the ground hard.

“Go.” The loadmaster gave a thumbs-up as an adjacent light panel flashed green. Rawlings gritted his teeth and leapt into Russian airspace, his static line jerking open his main parachute. It unfurled in a rush and roughly snapped him upright as he twisted back to glance at the departing Talon. The others were in various stages of deployment, and the first pallet had swung free of the plane, the huge chutes resembling mushrooms in a clump. Rawlings turned to see the ground rushing toward him. He aimed for a small clearing, smacked the dirt, and rolled. He sprang to his feet and reeled in his chute. His first thought was finding concealment. He didn’t want to be caught in the open by Russian troops.

Catching his breath, he moved through the trees in search of the next man in the jump chain. The sooner they linked up, the better. Rawlings remembered the words of an old family friend who had seen action in Southeast Asia in the secretive late fifties, when death in the jungles brought only word of a “training accident” to a distraught family. “It all gets very real very fast when your feet hit the ground,” he had offered, and as Rawlings stared into the dense Russian forest with a lump in his throat—alone—he realized how true those words were.

CHAPTER 33

Thomas and Hargesty were waiting to see the president aboard NEACP, the National Emergency Airborne Command Post. The acronym was somewhat of a misnomer—it implied a single aircraft, but there were originally four in the inventory, identically configured for the complex mission of controlling US strategic forces during nuclear war. Two were still operational on this the fifth day of the war. One had been destroyed on the ground, while the other, with its battle staff, had fallen prey to sabotage while taking off from an air force installation. Flares popping off as the plane lifted from the runway had proved inadequate against two shoulder-fired, IR homing missiles. Both were sucked up by the huge turbo-fan engines, blowing them clean off the wings. The crew didn’t have a chance when the crippled plane splintered into chunks before bursting into flames.

Cruising thirty-four thousand feet over the state of Arkansas, the converted Boeing 747 airliner had been airborne for over two hours. A hasty departure had been arranged from Polk AFB in North Carolina, for some reason not yet attacked. The pattern of bases hit and those spared made no sense. It was if the Russians had thrown darts at an alphabetical installation listing.

At Polk, the president and his entourage had surfaced, risking attack while the giant plane refueled. Thomas and Hargesty had been pulled from other duties, merging from two separate azimuths for the last-minute rendezvous. The president had sent an urgent summons. He wanted both present. They sat impatiently while the cavernous wing tanks were topped off. The unique aircraft stuck out like a sore thumb under the blazing North Carolina sun. No one felt safe until the aircraft had cleared handheld missile range.

Driven by the threat of nuclear or conventional attack, the president and his senior advisors resembled a high-tech band of Gypsies—never in one place for more than a handful of hours, looking over their shoulders. They shuffled between ground mobile command centers, slept in makeshift tent cities, held conferences in deeply buried bunkers, and endured twelve-hour stretches in the air. Rarely did they have more than two key people at any one meeting. It would be like consistently betting against the house in Vegas.

The president wasn’t helpless. In the air, assorted aircraft such as the former Air Force One and theater CINC airborne command posts flew decoy missions around the clock, flooding the airways with bogus communications. Selective war-reserve frequencies had been intentionally compromised, and an occasional uncovered voice message was fed to the scores of Russians agents infecting the countryside. One plane had been shot down by an agentled Spetsnaz team near an airbase in Indiana. The weapon of choice had been a US made Stinger missile stolen from an army stockpile years before. The later-slain agent had been identified as a local, living for years in the surrounding community, employed as a high-school math teacher. The true number of such agents was anybody’s guess.

Once airborne, Thomas prepped with Hargesty for a meeting with the president. Resting in front of the generals was a heavily marked map of Europe, including western Russia to the Urals. An army colonel seated at the table, pen pointer in hand, described American, Allied, and Russian troop deployments. US forces on the European Continent were trapped like rats, while the Allies had dispersed their ground troops to defend in depth against any invasion from the east. But the Russians weren’t inclined toward such a rash maneuver. The once-formidable Red Army was hunkered down in the Ukraine and Western Russia, weathering US attacks. The remaining armored divisions in Germany, leftovers from the Cold War, strong-armed their hosts into obedience. A nervous German Army acted as traffic cop, praying that the two belligerents on their soil wouldn’t turn united Germany into rubble reminiscent of the Second World War.

“That’s good enough, Colonel,” Hargesty said. “Let’s go see the president.” Getting US forces out of Europe and back home to help with reconstruction was high on the president’s agenda. Nervous allies suspected more sinister motives. In other words, doing something stupid that would drag them into the conflict. No one completely trusted the wounded United States, a country with too many nuclear bombs and lacking the necessary resources for recovery. The dollar was literally worthless. How would the United States pay for anything? IOUs? Erstwhile, allies expected some nuclear arm-twisting.

The two generals traversed to the forward part of the aircraft, past the rows of operator consoles aligned neatly two by two. The battle staff worked around the clock. By now, they had fallen into a perfunctory routine of damage assessment and tracking US military units around the globe. The picture was confused and fragmented.

NEACP was literally a flying radio. The plane’s exterior from nose to tail sprouted the full range of wire, blade, and flush-mounted satellite antennas to handle the entire communications band from VLF to EHF. The airship could transmit and receive simultaneously over multiple channels to nuclear or conventional forces worldwide.

An aide herded the duo to a lounge just outside the president’s private cabin. He had spent the better part of the day on the ground, locked in tense negotiations with a delegation of hostile House and Senate members eager to immediately reconvene somewhere, anywhere. They had been among the fortunate survivors and were beating up the president to loosen the reins of martial law and turn over many emergency powers to a rump Congress. The idea was anathema to the military, and even the president had grown apart from members of his own party. He slowly absorbed the reality that only a strong, almost dictatorial, chief executive had any hope of rescuing the crippled nation.

The chief of staff stuck his head through the oval cabin door. “The president will see you now.”

They joined the president around a large circular conference table bolted to the cabin deck. Thomas and Hargesty were in fatigues, caps in hand, while the president and the civilians were in an assortment of casual clothes. Secret Service agents stood guard around the periphery. The president dispensed with any greetings. He looked exhausted. He got right down to business.

“General Hargesty, what’s the status of the Russian redeployments?”

Hargesty folded his hands in front of him. “Our satellites have detected definite changes in Russian military activities. It’s too early to detect any patterns. General McClain swears they’re staging for a major attack, as soon as they acquire targeting data. But he’s exhausted any means of breaking up the formations short of committing the Tridents.” There was that awful word again.

The president let out a pained sigh and closed his eyes momentarily.

“We need to turn our attention to the people. We’re in a race against time. Winter is just over the horizon,” the president said.

The president was at the end of his rope. The tit-for-tat exchange since the initial waves of nuclear bombs was down to a tolerable level—only two detonations reported the last twenty-four hours. But both sides were under unbelievable pressure to finish off the other before they collapsed. Communications were degrading; intelligence from satellites had dropped off, and conventional military forces were melting like heated butter. A breakdown in logistics left both sides floundering around the world. Only the remaining nuclear forces held the promise of a quick fix.

“I don’t care what the Russians are doing,” said the president softly, “I want to disengage our forces. I want to show the Russians we’re serious about negotiations.”

Hargesty let out a huff. “Untangling conventional forces will take quite a while, Mr. President. Maybe months. And I’m not sure if it makes sense.”