The Boeing roared, pulled up and away from the ice field, then turned west. Marjan laughed again.
General Neil Cooper USAF walked into his outer office.
His secretary, Poppy Dooley, sat at her computer. “Hi, sir. You’re late today; I was about to call the funeral service. I thought you may have passed away.”
“In your dreams, Poppy.”
He had taken her as his personal secretary after meeting her on a visit to Robbins AFB Georgia. She was a basic airman standing in for someone and he had business in the offices for many hours. She was often around and strutted a cheeky style that he liked. He was Chief of the Air Force, but to her he could be just another fighter jockey showing off. He knew he had been that guy once.
“What do you do here, Dooley?” he had asked.
“Shuffle papers, whatever they tell me, sir. When I can, I make paper aeroplanes from them.”
He grinned. “Do they fly?”
“Like a bag of bolt cutters, sir. Fly like shit.”
Cooper knew. “How would you like to do the same thing for me at the Pentagon?”
“Is the pay as good as here? Do you have a hairdresser?”
“As you can see, I don’t need one. But I’ve seen one visiting; a hairdresser I mean. The pay? It’s better.”
“Then you’ve got yourself a deal, sir.”
He’d transferred her and promoted her up to Senior Airman, given her the assignment: Personal Secretary to the Chief of Staff of the Air Force. Not bad for just six months’ service.
Poppy was now indispensable. He poured himself a coffee. A few days after she’d started, he’d asked her to make him a coffee.
“Sir, you flew F16s and you can’t make coffee?”
She’d made herself at home.
“Poppy, get me General Brassneck in here, and that new Colonel, what’s he called?”
“The guy with Vietnamese parents? You mean Colonel Wok Jock, sir?”
“That’s him. Send ’em in when they’re here.” Cooper walked into his inner office and pulled out a document.
A few minutes later, there was a knock and the door opened.
“Hi, Brassneck and Wok Jock I believe?”
“Yes, sir.”
The two of them sat.
“I’ve been in a meeting with the other Chiefs of Staff. I got us an op.”
“Where, sir?” asked General Bruce ‘Brassneck’ Necklin.
“The Arctic.”
Brassneck rolled his eyes.
“Ok, ok, we did overreach ourselves there. I suppose in hindsight it was always going to take more than one strike. Ivan was ready too. Intel people dropped the ball there. This one is more focused and specific.” General Cooper gave them the plan objectives. “So, gentlemen, what’s your view?”
“Wok Jock?” said Brassneck.
“Looking at that, sir, we’ll need JASSM, LRASM and maybe Harpoon. We’ll need to boost the tanker deployment again.”
“Harpoon,” said Brassneck. “Lower range, isn’t it?”
Wok Jock shrugged. “It is about 160 miles, but we could use F/A 18 Super Hornets to come in low for release.”
Brassneck grunted. “The Navy getting in on it: political crap there. Can you get them on board, sir?”
Cooper nodded.
“For a USAF mission, I mean, we have operational control?”
“Yes, I’m sure of it,” said Cooper. He wasn’t, but he reckoned he’d a damn good chance of getting Kamov to agree. Just grease his balls enough and he should give way.
“In theatre, sir,” said Wok Jock. “We’ll need F15 Strike Eagles out of Keflavik. I’d say B1-Bs out of Thule, Greenland. Might be a job for the BUFFs, sir.”
It was the old workhorse, the B52’s nickname BUFF. Big Ugly Fat Fucker. The aircraft had been updated over the years and was a formidable missile platform.
“Ok,” said Cooper, “you’ll get the 5th Bomb Wing out of Minot AFB North Dakota. You’ll need them at Thule, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
Cooper pressed a key on his phone.
Poppy replied. “Yes, sir?” She sighed. “I guess you boys want coffee and doughnuts?”
Cooper smiled. “Another time, Poppy. Call Minot AFB and tell them we need…” He stopped, looked at Wok Jock and raised his eyebrows.
“Eight, sir.”
“Tell them we need eight B52s deployed to Thule, Greenland; long-range strike with anti-shipping war load.”
“Will do, sir.”
Cooper smirked. “Thule’s going to be like LAX for traffic soon. Colonel, you’ll need to coordinate with one of Admiral Kamov’s people for the details of the mission. Ok, gentlemen, if that’s it, meeting over.”
“I’ll go and see CNO Kamov now, sir,” said Wok Jock.
The two of them left the office.
A silent track through space at 18,000mph. No sound, little sense of movement. Like a swooping night owl, the KH-11 Keyhole reconnaissance satellite Buzzard 65 looked down on the world below.
At 3 billion dollars, the National Reconnaissance Office paid half the cost of an aircraft carrier for Buzzard 65. Similar to the Hubble Space telescope, it was the size of a bus. It looked down on the shimmering Arctic Sea, zoomed in with its 2.9-meter mirror and took images of ships, lots of ships. These images were kept in its gigabytes of storage.
Buzzard 65 passed on and away from the scene and sped on silently over Siberia. More tasks were executed, and Buzzard 65 collected more images. Airfields in the Russian central military region, a large factory complex east of the city of Yekaterinburg, the Naval bases of Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk.
Minutes later it passed above and near to the Pacific Island of Guam. The data was passed down to the relay station and from there across to CONUS, then to the NRO Center in Virginia.
The ice flows had been left behind, and stretched out ahead was a mostly grey seascape. There were several breaks in the cold cover and wavelets sparkled and shimmered.
Masts protruded above the waves, leaving a wake trailing off to the northwest. An albatross ducked and circled the masts, but quickly grew bored and sailed on into the grey.
The control room was a mass of displays with crew sat looking into them; many wore headsets. One man sat at an odd painted screen; he wore quality black Sennheiser headphones.
“Chief Engineer reports 85 % charge. No sign of enemy air, sir,” said Benson.
XO Kaminski addressed Nathan. “Good. Not long now, keep to this heading.”
Nathan looked at Nikki Kaminski. “It’ll be many hours until we approach the Northern Fleet’s task force. Get your head down, rest”
“I’m ok, sir.”
“Nikki, get into your bunk, now.”
“Ok.”
The boat sailed on to the south. Four hours later, Nikki walked back into the control room.
“I got a good sleep, sir. Here.” She handed him a coffee from the galley.
Lemineux called out, “Sir, we have a communication from COMSUBPAC.”
“Send it to my station, thanks. XO.” He pointed to his monitor at the conn.
The communication was a series of satellite images of warships, followed by a chart of the Barents Sea with the position of the ships.
“The devil himself,” said Nikki. “There’s Peter the Great and his horde.”
Nathan grunted. “Yeah, and it’s a pretty big horde. Let see what we’ll be meeting.”
Nikki leaned over and touched a couple of buttons. “Types are listed as one Sovremennyy class Destroyer, an Udaloy class Destroyer and two Admiral Gorshkov class Frigates. They look to be his principal screen, but we have another Udaloy and an Admiral Gorshkov out front as picket ships. Needless to say, we have ASW weapons, SS-N-16 Stallion missiles, RBU-12000 mortars, Paket-NK torpedoes. All of the ships fly the Ka-27 Helix ASW helicopter and that bastard packs APR-2 Yastreb torpedoes.”