“I’ll send them over to the frontier, over Seventh Corps,” Layton said to his task force commander, Army major general Bruce Eyers of U.S. Central Command. Eyers was the former chief of intelligence for U.S. Central Command, assigned to the Pentagon specifically to mastermind Operation Desert Fire. “We’ll have to have Seventh watch out for him and cover their six,” said Layton. The U.S. Army VII Corps in northern Saudi Arabia — they called it a “Corps” but in fact it had only about twenty thousand troops, about division size, scattered across a seven-hundred-mile frontier — were responsible for Coalition ground-based air defense. “Thank God the crew didn’t launch the SRAM. We got to them in time.”
“But they should have launched,” Eyers said angrily. Eyers was an experienced airborne infantry officer and knew little about the world of aviation, but he did know about success and failure — from Vietnam to Grenada, he was familiar with both. Given a set of tools to work with, he expected nothing less than perfection and performance. Operation Desert Fire was his creation; it was he who pitched the idea to Schwarzkopf, Powell, and then SECDEF Cheney himself, and it was he who was given the honor of overall on-scene command of the operation by Schwarzkopf. Eyers was fifty-one years old, five feet ten, 220 pounds, with short dark hair, dark eyes, broad shoulders, and a “fireplug” build. He was a West Point graduate who was very political, with substantial aspirations for higher promotion. Rumor was he was good at conceptualizing, but not good with details or managerial skills. Still, he was popular with senior NATO commanders as an “idea man” but very poor with field work.
In less than an hour after execution, Eyers had seen his perfectly planned mission unravel. The order terminating Desert Fire was received in the AWACS plane, but not in the F-111G bomber. Only the President, through the Pentagon, could direct the employment of nuclear weapons, and that was true for halts as well as execution orders. That message was not relayed to the crew until very, very late, well after the appointed launch time. Still, for some reason, the crew did not or could not launch the Short-Range Attack Missile. Now he had a crippled plane on his hands with nukes on board — and the mission was not accomplished. One by one, the Air Force was screwing up. “You said the launch time had come and gone — the crew should have launched,” Eyers said to Layton.
“I radioed to them to stop launch.”
“But even you said they shouldn’t respond to that call,” Eyers said in exasperation. “The crewman, whoever the hell he is, verified it himself. The recall didn’t reach them until after launch time, so what happened? Why didn’t they cook it off?”
Layton sat staring at the console in front of him, not believing what he was hearing. Slowly, with deep suspicion burning in his eyes, he turned to Eyers. “You mean you wanted that nuke to go?”
Eyers looked at him as if he were a moron. “No, I want a long protracted ground war so we can get our asses kicked all over the place. Of course I wanted it to go. Launch it and the war’s over in an hour. Done, finis. Nice and tidy. God knows if we’d done it in ’Nam, the gooks wouldn’t have piled up our body count the way they did. In Libya, we should have done the same thing. We still have Qhadaffi to fucking deal with. And now, thanks to your fly-boys, we still have Saddam.”
Layton swallowed hard, thinking: this is the problem with some of these honchos. They’re so self-absorbed in the military, they forget about the real world. Eyers probably modeled himself after the Robert Duvall character in Apocalypse Now. Worse, the guy was in his military. It sent a shiver down his spine.
“Have you considered,” Eyers was now asking smugly, “that perhaps our President wanted to launch the missile? That that’s why the termination order came after launch time? He really wanted it to go, but had to place a termination on record so he could defend himself later? Think about it.”
Layton did. And concluded that Eyers was nuts. Operation Desert Fire was executed only because they believed Israel had been hit by chemical weapons. When that report proved to be false, the termination message was sent. Bruce Eyers, not the President, wanted to launch the nuclear missiles.
“The point remains, the recall message was received after the launch time. The damn bomber crew should have launched.”
For Layton, the question was moot right now — his problem was to get Mace and Parsons safely on the ground. “Sir, I think we should recover that -111 first, then worry about the whys later,” Layton said.
“You’ve made your point, Layton,” Eyers said. “We’ll find out how they screwed up later.”
Obviously Eyers’ mind was made up and the court-martials were already in the mail, Layton thought.
“All right, General, where are you going to set them down?”
“Bandanah would be perfect. Only forty miles from the border, about an hour flying time for the F-111G. We could scramble a tanker and fighter escort from King Khalid Military City and—”
“Bandanah doesn’t exist,” Eyers snapped. “And I don’t want any other aircraft joining on that -111.”
“Bandanah does exist, only not officially,” Layton said. “We know it’s a special-ops staging base for gunship crews penetrating into Iraq and setting up forward refueling bases in the desert. It’s only a highway, but it’s wide enough, lighted, and isolated enough in case there’s a … crash.”
“Can the crew bring that plane back or not?” Eyers asked impatiently. “If not, we’ll send it out over the Red Sea and ditch it.”
“I’ll talk to the crew,” Layton said. “I think the navigator is flying the jet.”
Eyers’ eyes opened wide in shock at that news.
“If that’s true,” Layton said, “he’ll have real problems bringing it in.”
“You mean navigators aren’t trained in flying those things? They have a stick and throttles, but they can’t fly it …?”
“About as well as a tank commander can drive an M1A1,” Layton replied. “They can start it up and buzz around in good conditions, but they aren’t trained to drive it in combat or emergency conditions. But we’ve got experienced crews on these planes, so we might just bring it back in one piece.” Eyers waved his hand impatiently, telling Layton to just get on with it. “And,” said Layton, “I’m ordering an F-111 escort and a KC-135 tanker to refuel the bomber.”
“Disapproved,” Eyers said. “It’ll draw too much attention to the mission. With your flaky nav flying the thing, he’s likely to hit someone.”
“More fuel gives us more options,” Layton explained. “It may be that they can’t refuel, but we have to try.”