Rawlings, now in his battle dress utilities, jumped to the ground and surveyed the hangar apron. The usual contingent of US Air Force personnel busily repairing aircraft were missing, replaced by still more British guards. A finger, owned by a sergeant, pointed him in the required direction. Rawlings and Gonzales grabbed their gear and waddled inside, duffels on each shoulder. Banks followed at a safe distance, sporting his own personal guards, armed, of course.
“Captain Rawlings,” shouted a tall, black man, sitting on his duffel bag by the side entrance. He rose and jogged over in loping strides. First Sergeant Anthony Pickford was the senior enlisted man in the team. His smooth ebony skin reflected the dim light thrown out by the fluorescents, the hangar resembling a poorly lit cave. Inside, the steel-reinforced enclosure contained only one Pave Low helo, a big, ugly charcoal thing pushed to the rear. The other Team members formed around their officers and the first sergeant, their faces capturing a wide range of feelings.
“We heard the States were attacked by the Russians,” one chimed in excitedly.
“Nukes,” added another.
“No shit?” The chatter rose till Rawlings couldn’t think. His mouth dropped. Gonzales winced, making eye contact with one of the staff sergeants. Banks stayed back and feigned ignorance, wagering that an explosion was a distinct possibility.
Rawlings’s world came crashing down around his ankles. He turned on Banks. “What the fuck is going on?” The SAS men with Banks fingered their weapons. Rawlings’s A-Team moved to flank their captors, no set plan in mind — an instinctive but stupid move, given the circumstances.
“There’s nothing I can say, Captain. We don’t know the details ourselves. A decision on your status is pending in London. You’ll have to sit tight, just like your aviators.” Banks surveyed the stunned group with studied concentration, cataloguing their reaction.
Rawlings stared unblinkingly at the retreating major, feeling completely helpless, emotion choking back any words.
“Good day.” He stepped away.
CHAPTER 30
General John McClain, the brash Commander-in-Chief, Strategic Command was at the end of his rope. Lying passively on his aluminum-frame cot, his penetrating gray eyes stared blankly at the olive-green canvas hanging loosely above. His thoughts were directed toward the fate of his brave bomber crews sent plunging into Russian airspace twenty-four hours earlier. Only a handful had reported in from locations scattered around the globe, some intact, some piles of useless junk. He gritted his smoke-yellowed teeth in frustration at his damned helplessness. His staff was scratching feverishly for any assets left in the depleted inventory that could reach the former Soviet Union. Even mothballed B-52Gs were being targeted for secret refurbishment at undisclosed sites in the Southwest. But they wouldn’t be ready for weeks, if then. He personally thought it a patently stupid idea, but it had the blessing of the reconstituted Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Meaningful search and rescue (SAR) missions for missing B-52H and B-1B crews were unthinkable. Widespread fallout, impossible distances, and thousands of Russian air-defense troops roaming the countryside made the effort a pipe dream. It burned his insides raw to realize he had no choice but to write those heroic young men off. He still hadn’t been able to piece together a worthwhile bomb-damage assessment of the strike results. It was still too early for the rolls of film from the high-speed cameras mounted in the bellies of the surviving bombers or the super-secret reconnaissance aircraft close on their heels. Even the normal flood of satellite data had slowed to a trickle. The ASAT threat had forced him to move his prized KH-11 and Lacrosse birds to high-altitude havens, degrading their sensitivity. The few pieces he did have were tantalizing. The fragments painted a picture of success. But without consistent, high-confidence intelligence, he was groping in the dark. His carefully stashed reserve forces had to be committed soon, or they’d most certainly be lost. It was only a question of time until the Russians found them.
To make matters worse, the new president was sticking his nose into McClain’s turf. He didn’t dispute the man’s constitutional legitimacy, only the questionable presumption that he possessed the requisite knowledge to juggle strategic war-fighting issues in the middle of an all-out war. McClain had willingly dedicated his entire adult life to just this purpose — to successfully prosecute a nuclear war — yet precious time was running through his fingers. The STRATCOM infrastructure was melting away under an unrelenting onslaught. Another two days, and it would be virtually impossible to launch any coordinated counterattacks. Repeated Russian ad-hoc strikes were taking a mounting toll, methodically shooting holes in McClain’s dwindling land-based forces. He sensed his men momentarily had the upper hand, despite a reserve force that favored the Russians. The ferocity of the US counterstroke had caught them unprepared, and US interceptors had shot the pants off of the lumbering Bear and supersonic Blackjack bombers. Only a handful had reached their intended targets in the United States.
The key for McClain was to act immediately to press this advantage while their enemy scrambled to regroup, in order to preserve the momentum gained by the sacrifice of countless lives. The ideal weapons for that particular mission were the navy’s Trident submarines safely burrowed in the seas, out of reach of the hapless Russian Navy. The Trident’s hundreds of hard-target-killing warheads could easily finish the job, but they were now denied to him by NCA fiat. A few of the devastating missiles had been fired early on, but the majority of the submarine skippers had been ordered to avoid detection at all costs. The president considered the Tridents his trump card, but McClain smelled Bob Thomas on that one.
McClain’s simple quarters, a ten-by-twenty-foot air-conditioned tent, was part of the extensive STRATCOM mobile-headquarters complex that stretched intermittently over ten miles, hidden in the Ozarks in Southern Missouri. He and his assembled battle staff had been evacuated from STRATCOM headquarters at Offut AFB minutes before the antiquated underground command center was pulverized by the direct impact of a six-hundred-kiloton Russian nuclear bomb delivered by an ancient SS-19. His team was just now getting organized. CINCSTRAT’s mobile command center was identical in appearance to the NCAs, but had twice the communications gear and enough computing power to run any of the national weapons labs. A spiderweb of fiber-optic cables wound through the forest, creating an entity whose sole purpose was planning the destruction of the neo-Soviet empire.
“Colonel, when does General Thomas arrive?” McClain asked the man framed in his tent entrance. He wasn’t pleased one bit at having to receive the emissary of the new president. Bob Thomas was a good man, but McClain feared he was about to be reined in by the bureaucrats. One day into the war, it had been McClain’s show, and his handpicked STRATCOM team was performing heroically. He wasn’t about to let them down.
“The general will be here any moment, sir. We’ve got comms with his helo.”
“Very well.” McClain eased his large frame up and grabbed his cap. “I’ll be in the operations tent.”
The Army Special Forces Blackhawk helicopter set down on a chalk-marked field two hundred yards from the nearly invisible complex. Thomas waited until his five-man guard detachment, lead by Benton, deplaned before he unbuckled his harness and eased himself to the ground. The reddened late-summer sun was beginning to dip beneath the tree line, and a welcomed cool breeze took the edge off the evening heat. Thomas stretched to work out the soreness from the long helo flight, scanning the horizon to get his bearings. His body still ached, and his arm hurt like hell. Painkillers helped, but he had to keep the dose down.