“So what does this mean? Are these planes out of commission?”
Bud was hoping the DCI would answer the President but the silence dictated that he finish his line of thought. “Down for the count Mr. President. It’s a smart way to disable an aircraft. When the strut blows, the weight of the aircraft comes straight down. The strut then impales the fuselage and does major damage to the airframe and the innards. That’s the bulging you see at the back of the canopy there. The strut is pushing equipment up and to the sides and deforming the fuselage.”
“But why not blow the planes up completely?” the President wondered. “Wouldn’t you get a bigger bang by tossing a bunch of explosives in the air intake? I admit I saw that in some shoot-‘em-up movie somewhere, but it seems logical. Couldn’t these be repaired?”
“Not really, sir,” Bud responded. “If you’re trying to just take out a target, you want to use the minimum force necessary. As for repair — not with the reduced capability the Cubans are exhibiting. There’s not much left to cannibalize.” The NSA let it sink in, for himself as well as the President. “And the most intelligent aspect of this is the fact that the aircraft will be able to be repaired in the future, when they might want them. It appears the rebels have thought this out. They’re being very, very smart.”
The President was obviously pleased, very much so. He allowed a slight smile, then looked to the DCI, whom he had had doubts about before being convinced to nominate him to fill the position. The critics, however, were being proved wrong.
“You saw this in Vietnam, Bud?” the President inquired.
The NSA nodded. “A very effective technique.”
“Proven by the winners, you might say,” Merriweather commented.
It was an effective jab, notching up Bud’s internal “Nam meter” to a place it hadn’t been in years. Veterans of the Indochina experience had dealt with crap of the sort the DCI had just dished out frequently in the years following the fall of the South, but not so much recently. Bud was fully aware that Merriweather, a fervent Yalie who had ironically held the History chair at Harvard in the late sixties, was no fan of the war. It was becoming more apparent now that, despite any effort to counter it, the DCI was never going to be a fan of Bud’s.
“Well, not everybody who wins deserves to,” the President observed. “Anthony, what about these other aircraft? They look like helicopters.”
“Mi-24 Hinds. Russian-built gunships. They’re wonderful against insurgents, like they proved in Afghanistan.”
Jesus Christ! Bud was having trouble believing his ears. Merriweather was using positive examples of the Viet Cong and the Cold War era Russians to flavor his little performance.
“They lost in Afghanistan, Anthony.” Bud’s retort was sprinkled with the barest amount of sarcasm.
“And the mujahedeen were left fighting the crony government in Kabul for how long?” The DCI sniffed a quiet chuckle, with no smile attached to it. “Then again, we pulled out of South Vietnam also. But it didn’t take the North Vietnamese Army that long to take what they wanted after that.”
He couldn’t stand it anymore. “Anthony,” Bud began, his head shaking slowly from side to side as a smile that could only be one of disgust came to his lips, “some of us were there, you know, unlike—”
“Hold on. Hold on.” The President leaned farther forward, looking alternately at both of his advisers. Drummond had shifted back to an upright position on the couch. “We are here to discuss Cuba. Not Vietnam. Christ, I was barely out of high school when all that came to an end. But I am here now, and we may be able to do something to put one of those checks back in the ‘democracy’ column. All right?”
To be castigated by the President was not entirely unheard of, but it had not happened to Bud. Worse yet, he deserved it, and he had allowed Merriweather to advance his apparent agenda that much further by behaving as a reactionary. Bud looked to the DDI but did not engage in any eyeplay to test the situation. There was no need to draw Drummond into this if he was able to maintain a working relationship with his boss. God dammit, Bud. Play smarter.
“Go on, Anthony.”
“Yes, sir. If you’ll watch the monitor.” The DCI lifted the remote from the coffee table and clicked on the video player, pausing it as soon as a picture appeared. The scene was in black and white, very high contrast, and was filmed from a very high angle. “This is a video record from the KH-12 on a pass over the same airfield as the stills, except this was timed to concur with the beginning of the attack. It was taken using the same type of IR imaging as the stills. Remember, this is in darkness, with low moonlight, so what you will see are the heat signatures of objects.”
The President nodded while keeping his eyes on the screen.
“Watch the left top corner of the screen.” The DCI started the video. From where he had indicated, several objects came into view, their forms growing in a white intensity as the camera slowly crossed the area. “Those are the Hinds. They’ve just fired up their engines — that’s the heat you’re seeing there as it bleeds off of the exhaust and radiates from the engine through the body of the helicopter. And there.” Merriweather noted several small white blobs crossing into the frame. “Those are people, probably soldiers, running to where the aircraft were blown.”
Bud was watching with interest. As a spectator in a game where he should have been on the field, it was all he could do.
“See how the heat signature is growing in intensity? They’re readying to take off.” Merriweather paused for just a moment, a look of anticipatory satisfaction obvious on his face. “Watch carefully.”
Two of the Hinds moved slightly, a perceptible jump upward, then each turned to the right and began moving low above the ground. Suddenly, from the tail of each helicopter, within a second of each other, a bright flash and shower of white erupted, and instantly each Hind changed attitude and spun violently to the right. The motion ceased abruptly a few seconds later, an obvious crash.
“It’s amazing to watch this without sound,” the President commented. “Can you imagine what that sounded like on the ground?”
“Impressive,” Bud had to admit. “How did they do it?”
Drummond sensed that it was his turn to join in his boss’s presentation. “It looks like some sort of tail-rotor failure. Not an explosive of any kind; otherwise, that bloom you saw when it failed would have been a hell of a lot brighter. Somehow they tampered with the rotor housing or something, because when it came up to speed, the thing just came apart. If you look real closely, you can actually see blades flying off as it disintegrates.”
“And the other two Hinds suffered the same fate a few minutes later,” the DCI added. “The Cubans must have thought the first two were shot down. You can imagine the confusion there. Unfortunately the satellite was not able to keep its sensors on that area of observation.”
Bud perked up at that comment. “Why not?”
“There’s a problem with the stabilization system for the real-time sensors,” the DCI explained. The “real-time sensors” were the video camera systems, which were often used to transmit images as they happened, hence the name.
Fantastic! The only platform to observe and provide the intelligence the rebels wanted wasn’t fully functioning. There were three KH-12s in orbit, two of which were tasked with monitoring the removal of the former Soviet ICBMs from the Ukraine. The more capable KH-12 ENCAP (Enhanced Capability) was almost out of fuel. It was presently, as it had been for the previous year, running a straight orbital path at five hundred miles altitude. Budget cuts and the lack of any real threats had resulted in the refueling flight by the Space Shuttle being postponed indefinitely. Bud knew there were other means to maintain the country’s “eye in the sky” capability, but this situation damned sure didn’t warrant the risk of exposure or the expense.