Up in the cockpit, the pilot let his engines stabilize for only a second, then released his brakes and started to accelerate rapidly down the long runway. As he began to move, the second Bone taxied forward, pushing his throttles into afterburner to begin his take off roll behind his leader.
The radios sprang to life.
“Thunder Flight, this is McConnell tower on guard. Abort. Abort. Abort. I say again. Thunder Flight, this is McConnell tower on guard. Abort. Abort. Abort.”
Immediately the pilot in the lead B-1 slammed his four throttles back to idle. He was already traveling at over one hundred and forty miles an hour, and now he had to stop the 400,000 pound aircraft before it reached the end of the runway. He extended his speed brakes to full deflection then began to press down on the brakes. Two thousand feet behind him, number two had already done the same thing. The computerized antiskid braking systems immediately slowed the massive aircraft to a comfortable pace. It wasn’t until then the pilot got on the radios.
“Thunder Flight, push button two.” They all responded immediately, and ten seconds later they had all checked in back on the tower frequency.
“Tower, this is Thunder lead. What the devil’s going on? And this better be good.” The lead B-1 was just slowing to taxi speed as he turned onto the last taxiway at the end of the airfield. Three other B-1 s were following him in tow.
“Thunder Flight, unable to explain at this time. You are directed to return to your parking spot and shut down. Alpha will meet you there.” Inside the lead B-1, the pilot muttered and stole a quick glance toward his copilot.
Alpha was the can sign for the wing commander. The head honcho. The big cheese. He was the one-star general who was in command of the entire wing. The very mention of Alpha made every crew member aboard the four B-1 s begin to sweat. All of them had to seriously wonder. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t something small.
Lt Colonel Truman Smith listened to the tower’s explanation, then dropped his car into gear and began to accelerate across the open tarmac. Driving with his left hand, he reached down with his right and switched his radio over to the command post frequency. The squawk of an electronically scrambled conversation immediately filled the air. The command post had turned their radios over to “magic,” the secure voice network that scrambled their conversations so that they could talk classified information over the radio. Smith flipped a small switch on the side of his radio, then entered a five digit code on the keypad. The descrambler on his radio was immediately activated, and the noise of the squawking ducks was replaced by an understandable conversation. Smith only caught the tail end of what was being said, but it was enough to let him know that his B-1s had been recalled by Headquarters, Air Combat Command. A stop-launch and general aircraft recall was standard procedure when the Department of Defense went to a higher state of alert.
Racing across the cement airfield tarmac, dodging between rows of parked jets, Smith steered toward the Operations Center. Parking in front of the wing headquarters, Smith ran through the double steel doors of the Ops Center, flashing his security badge as he passed the sentry, and trotted into the battle staff room. There he encountered the chaos. The room was packed with senior officers and rolling with noise. Everyone seemed to be yelling, either to each other or into a phone. Smith stepped to the side and stood for a moment in the semi-darkness, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dim light. Glancing toward the current status board, he read their current war tasking and a quick shiver ran down his spine.
They had been given the order. Preparations had already begun.
Within three hours, all of the B-1s in Lt Colonel Smith’s squadron had been towed to the alert parking area, where they were immediately surrounded by men with machine guns and guard dogs. Circling the alert ramp were multiple layers of high-voltage electric fences, laser detectors, and motion sensors, all designed to provide the aircraft with the tightest security in the world.
Then the weapons experts and maintenance crews went to work. For the next fifty-six hours, they scrambled to load each aircraft with a deadly combination of nuclear missiles and the latest generation of smart bombs. By the time their work was complete, the weapons tucked inside a single B-1 represented far more destructive firepower than any other weapon on earth.
SEVENTEEN
The enlisted men inside aircraft number 8-0564 were young and brutal by training and nature. They were Asiatics, hard men from far eastern Siberia and the northern republics. Human suffering was no mystery to them, for it had hardened the minds and hearts of their people for the past thousand years. The officers, culled from elite Russian units and thoroughly trained for this special duty, were some of the best warriors Russia had ever produced. They were intelligent and demanding and, teamed with the brutal Asiatics, they made a frightening combat team.
The interior of the Russian IL-76 transport was illuminated only by two small green lights, one on each end of the troop compartment. Inside the cabin, the seventy-five fully equipped warrior soldiers sat on the thin nylon-webbed seats that stretched along both sides of the aircraft, packs at their feet, AK-47 machine guns across their laps. Tight parachutes were strapped across their chests, and as they flew inbound to the Drop Zone (DZ), they continually checked each other’s rigging to make sure that everything was in order. The men’s faces had been painted black and gray to merge with the night shadows. None of them wore any rank or insignia on their uniforms. Only small silhouette of a black hog sewn across each of their shoulders identified the unit.
The Ninth Airborne Division. The Black Hogs. The most battle-hardened troops the Russians had to offer.
If the Ukrainians had suspected that the Black Hogs would be held in reserve to battle across the Ukrainian border-front, they were mistaken. In a brilliant move by Fedotov, the Hogs had been ordered to attack the port city of Sevastopol, home of the Black Sea fleet, prize of the Ukrainian navy. From there, the Hogs, along with six reinforcement divisions, would begin to battle northward toward the main battle group that would then be pouring across the Ukrainian border.
It was 0200 hours. In fifteen minutes, they would be over the DZ. Ural Moon would be one of the first aircraft to fly over the target in a finely orchestrated plan of flying aircraft, falling men, and parachuting machinery and equipment. Two hundred twenty-six aircraft would fly over the exact same piece of earth within just seventeen minutes of each other.
The Russians anticipated a significant number of casualties even before the invasion got into full swing. A midair collision between some of the transports was almost inevitable. Some soldiers would parachute out of an aircraft, only to have another transport fly through the clutter of descending men. There would also be parachute failures. As a statistical average, 05 percent of the seventeen thousand Russian soldiers to jump would have a parachute that failed to open. And finally, there was the possibility of becoming a “buterbrod krovi”, or “blood sandwich”. That was what the paratroopers called it when a tank or armored personnel carrier descended by its parachute silently out of the pitch black sky to land on an unwary soldier, crushing him into the ground.