Bring up all available video and recorded radar footage from each missile strike, he mentally ordered.
Downloaded through his neural link, the imagery scrolled through his mind at high speed. Okay, Patrick thought, reviewing what he’d observed, each attack involved a salvo of between fourteen and sixteen missiles. And those missiles were fired in rapid succession, with no more than four seconds between each launch. So what did that tell him?
For one thing, it almost certainly ruled out the use of any land-based missile system, he realized suddenly. The Russians did have mobile coastal defense batteries equipped with Kh-35s. But each Bal-E battery contained up to eleven specialized vehicles — including self-propelled command and control centers, launchers, and reloading machines. He strongly doubted Gryzlov’s mercenaries could hope to move that much equipment along the nation’s roads and highways without raising eyebrows somewhere… even if it were possible to believably disguise the launchers and command vehicles as something more innocent.
Nor could they hope to fire the Kh-35s from the ground undetected. The add-on boosters required to accelerate those missiles to attack speed from the ground generated huge plumes of flame and smoke. Maybe you could get away with a stunt like that out somewhere deep in the Mojave Desert, he thought. But not in Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, or Texas — the five states within possible striking range of Barksdale. Rural or not, there were too many people living and working in those places for anyone to have missed seeing a torrent of fire climbing skyward that would have made the biggest county Fourth of July fireworks display look like kids shooting off a couple of bottle rockets.
He sat up straighter, hearing the servos in the exoskeleton that supported his body whine softly. That left only one realistic option: The Russians were launching their cruise missiles by air. But how exactly?
Quickly, he called up more data. Like the U.S., Moscow didn’t have many long-range bombers left, no more than a handful each of their sleek Tu-22M-3 Backfires, turboprop-powered Tu-95 Bears, and supersonic Tu-160 Blackjacks. Both the Backfire and the Blackjack maxed out at eight Kh-35 cruise missiles apiece, so a sortie would require two aircraft. And while a single Tu-95 did have the necessary payload capacity, it was impossible to imagine even one of the big, slow-flying Bears successfully penetrating so far into U.S.-monitored airspace without being picked up on civilian and military radars. In fact, none of the Russian bombers were stealthy by any stretch of the imagination. There was just no conceivable flight profile that would let any of them hit either target and escape detection.
Which meant Gryzlov’s forces were flying in plain sight, Patrick thought coldly. They had to be using a civilian aircraft — one converted to launch cruise missiles. What was more, it had to be a good-sized plane, one with multiple engines and plenty of payload capacity. Jerry-rigging Cessnas or Gulfstream business jets to carry a couple of missiles each wouldn’t cut it. And since there was no way the Russians could hope to hang sixteen Kh-35s off the fuselage and wings of any commercial jet without raising all kinds of unanswerable questions, they must have modified their attack plane to carry its weapons internally.
He nodded to himself. No other possibility fit all the known facts. Besides, this wasn’t even a new idea. Way back during the Carter administration, there had been a lot of talk about converting Boeing 747 Jumbo Jets to launch up to fifty Tomahawk cruise missiles as a cheaper alternative to the B-1 Lancer bomber program. He doubted the Russians were using anything as big as a 747 for their clandestine air campaign. If they had, they’d be salvoing a hell of a lot more than sixteen of those Kh-35s in every attack. No, based on the numbers of missiles they were launching, Gryzlov’s pilots were probably flying a converted twin-engine jet — something like a Boeing 737 or an Airbus 300 or 320.
But that still left a hell of a lot of possibilities. Between Boeing and Airbus alone, well over twenty-two thousand of those planes were still flying worldwide. And more than two thousand commercial cargo flights crisscrossed U.S. airspace on any given day. Was there any way he could winnow out the single kernel of wheat he wanted from all that chaff? For a few moments more, he contemplated the problem — raising possible approaches and as rapidly discarding them.
And then, with the sudden zigzag streak of lightning-like inspiration, he saw the answer.
Access Federal Aviation Administration flight plan and air-traffic-control databases, Patrick told his computer through the LEAF’s neural link.
Access achieved, it reported. If ever a collection of circuit boards and software could sound smug, this one did. Years ago, while he was still president, Kevin Martindale had made sure he could covertly gain entry to most of the federal government’s computer networks — using carefully concealed back doors written into their operating systems’ software. He’d justified his actions to those in his inner circle by arguing he needed a way to bypass elements of the cumbersome federal bureaucracy during a crisis. Now that Martindale headed Scion, of course, those same hidden back doors allowed his intelligence analysts and field operatives to roam practically at will through the mountains of information routinely collected and squirreled away by a host of different government agencies and departments. The FAA, for example, kept recordings of everything its air traffic controllers saw on radar and said over the radio or telephone for forty-five days.
With the assurance of long practice, Patrick began sorting through thousands of filed flight plans and air-traffic-control radio contacts — ruthlessly discarding anything but that pertaining to commercial aircraft transiting the critical zone centered on Barksdale Air Force Base within thirty minutes of the time the first Kh-35 missile exploded. Given the enormous volume of airspace it contained, he still wound up with a list of dozens of different planes that could have been in the right place at the right time to carry out a missile launch.
While that was a measurable advance over their prior state of complete ignorance — usually abbreviated as NFC, for “no fucking clue,” on internal Scion reports — it was still insufficient. But now, solely because the Russians had carried out a second cruise-missile strike, he should be able to winnow that list down even further.
Unfortunately, when he ran the same kind of search focused on the possible launch zones for the Kh-35s that had hammered the Pacific Fleet, he drew a blank. Oh, there were plenty of cargo aircraft flying through U.S. airspace or bound for Mexico during the half hour or so before the cruise missiles were detected… but none of them matched those on his list from the attack against Barksdale.
Patrick frowned, deep in thought. Had he gotten this wrong? Was he missing something obvious?
Of course he was, he realized suddenly. He’d committed a classic error of intelligence analysis — relying on assumptions that were too narrowly focused. Expand my time parameter, he ordered. Retrieve all available information for flights through the highlighted regions for up to six hours before the attack.