Fogelman raced around his bomber pulling chocks and checking to see if any maintenance access panels had been opened, then climbed up into the cockpit and kicked the boarding ladder away clear of the wheels. “Ladder’s clear!” he shouted to Furness as she climbed inside the cockpit and retrieved her helmet. “Chocks pulled, panels closed, I’m ready to taxi.”
“Okay,” Furness shouted. But they didn’t need to hurry. The power cart was going to another plane first, it was the only one in sight, and there were no tow vehicles or tow bars moving toward them at all. “Nice going, Mark, but we’re not going anywhere right now.”
A few moments later their crew chief, Staff Sergeant Ken Brodie, came by and put their ladders back up on the bombers. “Just one power cart out here,” he explained. “Colonel Lafferty wants us in the air raid shelter until they’re ready to start or tow us.” It was one of the most painful things they had ever done to leave their Vampire behind, armed and ready to fly, and retreat to the safety of the air raid shelter under base operations. Before they reached the front doors, they heard a tremendous double booom! that rattled windows and seemed to shake the ground. Furness jumped. Fogelman, Brodie, and the assistant crew chief, Bordus, ran on ahead.
But Furness saw some movement out of the corner of her eye and saw Daren Mace dragging a long chain from the fire station beside the base operations building out to the bombers, and immediately she ran over to him. “What are you doing, Daren? They said report to the shelters.”
“I talked the firemen into towing planes off the ramp with the fire trucks,” Mace said. “I want to get these planes at least out of the open. You better get inside.”
But she grabbed the chain and began pulling it toward the planes as well. “At least let’s do my plane first,” she said.
“Deal.”
As they dragged the heavy chain out to Furness’ plane and began wrapping it around the nosewheel, she said to him, “Did you start that fight over me, Daren?”
“Heck no,” he lied with a smile. “I was trying to stop your wizzo from pounding the shit out of that Turkish officer. Man, he was great.”
They finished tying the chain around the nosewheel, then extended it out away from the nose and laid it out on the ramp, ready for the fire truck to hook up. Furness said, “You’re a lousy liar, Daren. Thank you. It’s nice to have you here.”
“Right now, I wish we were back at that bed-and-breakfast,” Mace said. “The last thing I want is—holy shit, look out!”
Furness turned toward the runway to where Daren was pointing. Careening out of the clear morning sky on the end of a small stabilizer parachute was a string of two large silver bombs, aligned perfectly with the runway centerline. Except for videotapes of training exercises or file footage from Vietnam, neither of them had actually ever seen a parachute-retarded bomb hitting a target before. They saw the weapon at about two thousand feet in the air, and it fell very quickly.
Its shape, its silver color, its thin profile, its large stabilizer ‘chute — it looked like an American B61 thermonuclear gravity bomb.
For a brief instant, Furness considered running for the air raid shelter, or at least dropping to the ground and covering her eyes. But that was ridiculous and she knew it. A B61 had the explosive power of twenty Hiroshima bombs and would destroy this base, the nearby city of Kayseri, and everything around it for a distance of thirty miles. She didn’t know what a Russian neutron bomb looked like, but at this distance even a fractional-yield nuclear device would kill.
“That boom must’ve been a sonic boom,” Mace said in a low voice. He flashed the middle finger of his right hand at where he guessed the retreating aircraft was in the sky. “A supersonic bomber at high altitude. Long time-of-fall — the plane must’ve been really up there, maybe fifty or sixty thousand feet. He’s gonna get a pretty good bomb score. Lucky son of a bitch.”
All Rebecca could think about doing was reaching for Daren Mace’s hand as she watched the bombs speed toward the center of the runway. She was pleased to find that he was reaching for her hand as well.
PART FIVE
The essence of war is violence.
Moderation in war is imbecility.
THIRTY-THREE
“For the alert force, for the alert force, klaxon, klaxon, klaxon.”
Those words blared out of the loudspeakers at the RF-111G Vampire strategic alert facility at Plattsburgh Air Force Base, and at other alert facilities around the country: a B-1B Lancer supersonic heavy bomber wing in Rapid City, South Dakota, carrying cruise missiles and short-range nuclear attack missiles; an F-111F medium bomber wing, also loaded with nuclear SRAMs, in Clovis, New Mexico; a B-52H Stratofortress heavy bomber wing in Spokane, Washington, all carrying cruise missiles; and a B-2 Black Knight stealth bomber wing in Whiteman, Missouri, the aircraft most capable of penetrating stiff Russian air defenses and therefore the only group still carrying nuclear gravity bombs. The TAAN (Tactical Aircrew Alert Network) radios clipped to aircrews’ elastic flight suit waistbands crackled to life with those fateful words, heard by anyone for the first time in over four years, and heard for the first time by one-fourth of the nation’s crewmembers — the ones who had never pulled strategic alert before.
The phrase “klaxon klaxon klaxon” was not just a term for a loud raucous horn repeated three times — it was an order, with all the force of federal and military law behind it. Upon hearing those words, or a klaxon sound for longer than three seconds, or by seeing a rotating yellow light on street corners on base or flashing lights marked “Alert” in theaters or hospitals, aircrews on strategic nuclear alert were directed to report to the aircraft, start engines, copy and decode the subsequent coded message that would be read on the network, and comply with the message’s instructions. The crews could act like cops on a high-speed chase or fire trucks responding to a fire — they could (cautiously) speed through intersections, drive on aircraft taxiways and runways, even commandeer cars. At Plattsburgh all that was unnecessary: because of bad weather and the base’s close proximity to Russian ballistic missile submarines in the Atlantic, the crews were restricted to the alert facility.
Air Force Reserve major Laura Alena, a thirty-seven-year-old computer-aided design engineer in civilian life, had just kicked off her boots and was about to unzip her flight suit and get some sleep when the klaxon sounded. After being in the Air Force Reserves only four years, she had never heard a klaxon before, but there was no mistaking what it was. The sound was inescapably loud, tearing at your auditory nerves, and Alena found herself leaping to her feet.
Her roommate, Captain Heather Cromwell, the Sortie Four weapons officer, was sound asleep when the klaxon went off. She kicked off the old rough green military horse blankets which were tangled around her feet and somehow got up without killing herself. “Shit!” Cromwell yelped, almost rolling off the wrong side of the bed and smacking into the whitewashed concrete wall.
Alena reached for the light switch and flipped it on, instantly blinding them both. “Get dressed, Heather!” Alena shouted. “Don’t forget your thermals.”
Cromwell fumbled for her thermal underwear and flight suit — she had made the mistake of hanging all her clothes up neatly in the wardrobes, and for a brief moment she couldn’t find anything. “Do you think this is an exercise, Laura?”