Times had certainly changed, all right.
TWENTY-ONE
“Very impressive,” General Cole said half-aloud as Colonel Lafferty, the wing vice commander, entered the office. Cole ran one hand across his black-haired flattop and handed the report he was reading over to Lafferty with the other. “It’s the preliminary Air Combat Command readiness report from Maintenance Group.”
“What? So soon?” But Lafferty’s skeptical expression turned into one of surprise, then grudging admiration as he scanned the report. Lafferty was not the easiest man in the world to impress. A Naval Academy graduate who transferred to the Air Force after Navy flight assignment drawdowns went into effect following Vietnam, Lafferty looked like a typical fighter jock, with a large expensive Rolex, rolled-up sleeves on his flight suit, visible dog tags, and non-military-issue aviator sunglasses on top of his head. He loved fighters and flyers, but wasn’t overwhelmed by either until both proved themselves to him. “Well, all right—the new guy aces out the other groups his first day on the job. Mace must’ve really lit a fire under Razzano’s behind.”
“He fired Razzano,” Cole said. “Sent him to me for reassignment. Made Lieutenant Porter his exec instead — even promoted her to captain.”
“Shaking things up in the old office? Housecleaning?” Lafferty shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well, it’s his prerogative. Razzano was on autopilot anyway, waiting for a reassignment, and Mace is a crewdog — he’ll cut the ground-pounders out and put in junior officers or other crewdogs every time. But I was afraid he’d do his ex-Marine head-busting routine.” He scanned the report, then: “Boy doesn’t pull any punches, either — he’s saying we’re only slightly better than minimally mission-capable. You going to upchannel this?”
“With the boss coming, I have no choice.” Cole sighed. “If my MG says it may take over seventy-two hours to generate the force for SIOP or for a max-rate deployment, I have to go along with it. But he’s got a plan to compensate. He’s moving eight Vampires into the shelters — says he’s going to put them into preload status right away.”
“We’re going to preload eight bombers?” Lafferty asked, astonished. “Jesus, spare us from the old retread SAC guys. That means we’re going to start flying with external tanks again?”
“Afraid so. With eight planes in preload status, that means he’ll need to keep at least ten, maybe twelve planes with tanks on the line.”
“God — wintertime with external tanks.” Lafferty moaned. “Remember all the problems we had? Frozen feed lines, crew chiefs pounding on tank pylons with wheel chocks to unstick frozen valves, incompatible mountings, upload tractor breakdowns …”
“Yeah, and remember the last Bravo exercise we had, where we had to cut the deployment exercise short by two days because three of our tankers went off-station and we couldn’t get enough external tanks on our planes?” Cole asked. “We’ve been kidding ourselves, Jim — we call ourselves mission-capable a lot of times when in reality we couldn’t get half this wing overseas in the required amount of time. If Colonel Mace wants to take on the challenge of maintaining one-third to one-half of our bomber fleet in preload status, let him. We’ll give him until the end of the second quarter to see if he can do it without breaking the bank or causing his entire Group to resign.”
“Well, I’m going to miss flying with slick wings,” Lafferty said. “Flying with externals is a real disappointment. What do you want to do with Razzano?”
“I have no earthly idea,” Cole said. “I’ve got a call in to check on his assignment to Seymour-Johnson, but no word yet. You got any special projects you need handled?”
“Right off, he can collect and process all these readiness reports,” Lafferty said. “We should—”
There was a knock on Cole’s door, and before Cole could respond, Major Thomas Pierce burst into the office. “Excuse me, sir …”
“Something wrong, Tom?”
“Something’s happening in the Ukraine again, sir,” Pierce said, going over to Cole’s television and turning the channel to CNN. “About five minutes ago, all the network stations just interrupted their normal broadcasts. About thirty seconds ago, we got an all-stations standby poll from NEACAP. STRATCOM is advising—”
“What? NEACAP? The President is airborne …?”
Pierce nodded, his face taut and grim. NEACAP, or National Emergency Airborne Command Post, was the high-tech Boeing 747 reserved for the President and others in the military chain of command in case of war. Except for annual exercises, it had not been used in many years. Normally all four of the nation’s E-4B NEACAP planes were stationed at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, but one had been moved to Andrews Air Force Base and placed on alert weeks ago when the conflict in Europe started to heat up. “Jesus … this is some serious shit.”
Just then, Cole’s executive officer stuck his head in the door as well; after checking that no uncleared persons were in the office, he said, “Sir, Command Post called. An A-Hour has just been declared.”
“A what?” Cole demanded, shooting to his feet. “What in the hell is going on? You two, follow me.” He rushed out the door, shouting to his executive officer, “Captain, call in the entire staff to the battle staff conference room on the double,” as he headed out of the office and downstairs to the underground command post. What the fuck had happened over there? Had Velichko finally gone off the deep end? The declaration of an A-Hour, or Alert Hour, confirmed their worst fears after learning that the President had abandoned the capitaclass="underline" the A-Hour was an order relayed from the President of the United States through his specified commanders to prepare for a nuclear war.
The command post at Plattsburgh had remained virtually the same as it was when it was all but abandoned in 1990, after the FB-111A bombers were removed from the base; except in recent weeks when events had started really heating up, it was used only occasionally for alert exercises. The wing commander and his staff members used a CypherLock keypad to gain entry through the outer door, which was locked behind them. They were now inside a small enclosed hallway, called an entrapment area, where the officer in charge of the command post could see them as their identification was checked one by one by an armed security guard. Inside, they went through a small office area and then into the communications center, where two command post technicians and one officer manned a complex of several radios, covering many bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, allowing them to communicate by voice or data to anywhere in the world. One wall was covered with an aircraft-status board, showing the location, crew complement, and status of every wing aircraft, both at Plattsburgh and at Burlington International Airport.
Cole was about to hurry into the battle staff area, from where he could receive reports and watch the news on banks of television monitors, but at that moment a warbling deedledeedledeedle alerting sound came over the loudspeaker, and a shadowy voice, probably a controller from the Pentagon speaking on the microwave link judging by the clarity of the voice, announced, “I say again, I say again, SKYBIRD, SKYBIRD, message follows: two, Bravo, Tango, India, seven, one, seven, Lima …” The cryptic message, read out as numbers or as phonetic characters, continued on for a total of exactly thirty-seven alphanumerics, then repeated once again. On one of the readbacks, the controller’s nervous voice cracked with the tension, and he had to issue a “Correction, character twenty, Whiskey, reading on beginning with character twenty-one, Uniform, five, five …” until the message was reread successfully.