The base commander fidgeted. He was always the decisive type, for a senior officer. There wasn’t any point in scrambling more fighters. The only four pilots he could positively count on were already airborne. The tolerance of his people was, to put it mildly, nearing its limits. Sending up the rest of the squadron might just be giving the enemy reinforcements. He paused at the E-word thought. So strange, but it felt right.
He still had one card up his sleeve though. Some of his staff had an interesting plan to jam all GPS signals in a 20-mile radius. Normally, he never would have considered the idea, since it was such a huge threat to all the civilian aircraft around. Thanks to the Feds, they now had an opportunity…and the desperate need to try it.
He had a space operations team at the base; primarily staffed by contractors. As long as their paychecks kept coming, their loyalty wasn’t such an open question. They were pretty motivated about the idea of reprogramming some of the airfield’s powerful radio transmitters to override all military and civilian GPS bands in the vicinity. The job was theoretically straightforward, since they had all the hardware, software and codes necessary, but it had never been tried before.
The chance to do something truly new, to turn a radio antennae and computer into a weapon, guaranteed the loyalty of the civilian technicians more than the promised bonuses. Forcing them to stay on duty at the base during the eventual airstrikes helped guarantee high quality work as well.
The jamming could be overcome, of course. The military sinks a lot of money into R&D every year. Not all of it is siphoned off by unscrupulous, overbilling contractors. Every now and again, all that money spent yields useful products. For example, each of the $2 billion B-2 bombers closing in on Nellis was equipped with state-of-the-art anti-jamming equipment. All the electronic firepower aimed at the aircraft had little effect on their instruments. That’s why they didn’t have the slightest idea what the enemy was trying to do.
While the bulk of the Air Force’s aircraft were properly shielded, no one ever thought to protect the GPS-guided bombs they dropped. Putting $50k electronic countermeasures onto something you were going to blow up anyway was an expense that even those extremely generous congressmen on the Armed Services Budget Committee thought a tad wasteful.
After the infamous Nevada strike, the Air Force would get all the funding they needed to upgrade their ordinance. That came later, sadly. It wouldn’t do much to save the citizens of North Las Vegas today.
The great thing about GPS guided weapons isn’t how accurately they can be dropped. A 2,000 lb. bomb gives a lot of room for error. What is revolutionary is how far away they could be deployed from. You can stand off miles and, thanks to GPS controlled canards on the rear of the death sausages, still be sure the package will hit within five meters of the target.
Somewhere over the Hoover Dam, four stealth bombers unleashed their payloads from 50,000 feet high and almost 15 miles away. A mix of 24 large HE and cluster bombs arched towards the rebellious base below. With their GPS guidance shut off, the suddenly “iron bombs” made no corrections for atmospheric conditions or ballistic wobbling. In short, with every mile they fell, they missed their programmed targets by hundreds, sometimes thousands, of meters.
Cold War-era air raid sirens screeched all over Nellis Air Force base. The rebels scurried to shelter in the sturdiest structures they could find: the partially buried ordinance bunkers. None appreciated the humor of hiding in a bunker packed with explosives to survive the bombs coming towards them. At first. Once they heard faint blasts safely in the distance did they start joking again. The comedy respite ended abruptly when somebody pointed out they came from the west. In town. For some reason, out here in the middle of a sprawling desert, this military base jutted right up against civilian areas.
One great big bomb slammed into a Wal-Mart less than half a mile from the base’s main gate. The cheap corrugated tin roof of the sprawling shopping Mecca wasn’t sturdy enough to trigger the point fuse. The bomb didn’t detonate until it struck a shelf full of flat screen TV’s. 2,000 pounds of high explosive turned the entire electronics department into a crater and destroyed the building from inside out. Scores of satisfied shoppers and minimum wage earning associates were either vaporized or shredded apart by millions of cheap Chinese made chunks of plastic shrapnel.
A bit to the north, a cluster bomb sprayed hundreds of ball bearing packed death canisters over an elementary school. With class being out and all the kids at home, due to the self-imposed national crisis, that hit should have counted as a lucky break. Would have been too, if the school wasn’t also being used as a polling station for the referendum. In typical monkey fashion, dozens of people rushed out into the parking lot to see what all the booms in town were about…just as hundreds of small booms erupted around them. Even worse, this polling location had a number of reporters doing exit interviews. Some survived with their cameras intact.
Across the country pundits, politicians and other crazy people had their self-righteous rants interrupted with “breaking news” from out West. Washington maintained an impressively firm “no comment” line, hoping to avoid any mention of loose nukes. Their silence was far more incendiary than any rhetoric.
The first network to seize the initiative in this information vacuum got to define the narrative: that of a preemptive airstrike on a potentially rebellious state. Anti-Fed talking heads hopped up and down in their seats at the live footage of unarmed rebels being slaughtered, regardless of which way they were voting. Pro-Fed commentators, already a sinking majority, found themselves even further divided. That dwindling minority still preaching calmness and negotiation pretty much realized it was time to shut up and pick a side.
Biggs Army Airfield
Fort Bliss, Texas
“What a fucking joke!” General Lyon threw down his binoculars only to quickly snatch them up again. A battalion of Army Rangers waited helplessly in C-130’s on the Biggs Army Airfield because of a handful of Texas Rangers. Black and white SUV’s blocked their runways and kept 400 of his best men out of the fight. Of all the problems he had, this was the easiest to fix. Should have been, at any rate.
Even after kicking out the president’s pet idiot, the Pentagon, under obviously intense White House pressure, demanded he do nothing to engage these intruders. Something about a political solution in the works. Politics, at a time like this! Couldn’t those nitwits in Washington see the country was at war?
They had a couple of months to work out a political solution. Negotiation now should be confined to prisoner exchanges. The most important Special Forces operation since the Syrian chemical weapons seizure, derailed by some cowboy hat wearing amateurs! He could, and should, sweep these dozen or so poorly armed civilians aside without breaking a sweat.
Lyon gripped the radio mike, keyed to the Ranger commander, so tight his knuckles turned white. Discipline and obedience to orders made a last stand against the massed forces of common sense and outrage. Just before he unilaterally declared war on Texas, one of his intelligence officers reported.
“Sir, we have some new developments. It looks like the rebels are changing their plans.” He redirected the general’s attention back to the digital map screens.
“SIGINT believes, and two friendly human sources on the base have corroborated, that Sacramento charted some commercial flight out of the private airport in Vegas. The Hawk also clearly shows the rebels preparing to move out with several truckloads of nukes in one big convoy. Looks like the airstrike spooked them, even if we didn’t hurt them much.” He recovered from the shock caused by the unprecedented airstrike failure enough to be embarrassed.