KOLD was an independent station that was also trying to become a superstation. Like TBS, WOR, and a few others, it had its own satellite link to cover a wide viewing area. A daring financial gamble, it had not yet paid off for the investors who were running the station on a highly leveraged shoestring out of an old and almost windowless building northeast of the city. The station used one of the Anik-series Canadian satellites and reached Alaska, Canada, and the North-Central US reasonably well with its programming, which was mainly old network shows.
The KOLD building had once been Denver 's first network television station, and was constructed in the pattern originally required by the Federal Communications Commission in the 1930s: monolithic reinforced concrete, fit to survive an enemy bomb attack — the specifications pre-dated nuclear weapons. The only windows were in the executive offices on the south side of the building. It was ten minutes after the event that someone passed by the open door of the program manager. He stopped cold, turned and ran back to the newsroom. In another minute, a cameraman entered onto the freight elevator that ran all the way to the roof. The picture, hard-wired into the control room and then sent out on a Ku-Band transmitter to the Anik satellite, which was untouched by earlier events, broke into the reruns of The Adventures of Dobie Gillis across Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, Idaho, and three Canadian provinces. In Calgary, Alberta, a reporter for a local paper who'd never got over her crush on Dwayne Hickman was startled by the picture and the voice-over, and called her city desk. Her breathless report went out at once on the Reuters wire. Soon thereafter, CBC uplinked the video to Europe on one of their unaffected Anik satellites.
By that time, the Denver FBI had a pair of men entering the KOLD building. They laid down the law to a news crew that protested about the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which argument carried less weight than the men with guns who shut the power down to their transmitter. The FBI agents at least apologized as they did so. They needn't have bothered. What had been a fool's errand from the beginning was already an exercise in futility.
“So, what the hell is going on?” Richards asked his staff.
“We have no idea, sir. No reason was given for the alert,” the communications officer said lamely.
“Well, it leaves us between two chairs, doesn't it?” That was a rhetorical question. The TR battlegroup was just passing Malta, and was now in range of targets in the Soviet Union. That required “The Stick's” A-6E Intruders to take off, climb rapidly to cruising altitude, and top off their tanks soon thereafter, but at that point they had the gas to make it all the way to their targets on or near the Kerch Peninsula. Only a year before, U.S. Navy carriers, though carrying a sizable complement of thermonuclear bombs, had not been part of the SIOP. This acronym, pronounced “Sy-Op” stood for “Single Integrated Operations Plan,” and was the master blueprint for dismantling the Soviet Union. The drawdown of strategic missiles — mostly land-based ones for the United States — had radically reduced the number of available warheads, and, like planners everywhere, the Joint Strategic Targeting Staff, co-located with headquarters SAC, tried to make up for the shortfall in any way they could. As a result, whenever an aircraft carrier was in range of Soviet targets, it assumed its SIOP tasking. In the case of USS Theodore Roosevelt, it meant that about the time the ship passed east of Malta, she became not a conventional-theater force, but a nuclear-strategic force. To fulfill this mission, TR carried fifty B-61-Mod-8 nuclear gravity bombs in a special, heavily-guarded magazine. The B-61 had FUFO — for “full fusing option,” more commonly called “dial-a-yield”—that selected an explosive power ranging from ten to five hundred kilotons. The bombs were twelve feet long, less than a foot in diameter, weighed a mere seven hundred pounds, and were nicely streamlined to cut air resistance. Each A-6E could carry two of them, with all of its other hard-points occupied by auxiliary fuel tanks to allow a combat radius of more than a thousand miles. Ten of them were the explosive equivalent of a whole squadron of Minuteman missiles. Their assigned targets were naval, on the principle that people most often kill friends, or at least associates, rather than total strangers. One assigned SIOP mission, for example, was to reduce the Nikolayev Shipyard on the Dniepr River to a radioactive puddle. Which was, incidentally, where the Soviet carrier Kuznetzov had been built.
The Captain's additional problem was that his battle group commander, an Admiral, had taken the chance to fly into Naples for a conference with the Commander of the United States Sixth Fleet. Richards was on his own.
“Where's our friend?” Roosevelt 's CO asked.
“About two hundred fifty miles back,” the operations officer said. “Close.”
“Let's get the plus-fives right up, skipper,” Jackson said. “I'll take two and orbit right about here to watch the back door.” He tapped the chart.
“Play it cool, Rob.”
“No sweat, Ernie.” Jackson walked to a phone. “Who's up?” he asked the VF-1 ready room. “Good.” Jackson went off to get his flight suit and helmet.
“Gentlemen,” Richards said, as Jackson left, “since we are now east of Malta, we are now part of the SIOP, therefore a strategic and not a conventional asset, and DEFCON-TWO applies to us. If anyone here needs a refresher on the DEFCON-TWO Rules of Engagement, you'd better do it fast. Anything that might be construed as a threat to us may be engaged and destroyed on my authority as battle group commander. Questions?”
“Sir, we don't know what is happening,” the ops officer pointed out.
“Yeah. We'll try to think first, but, people, let's get our collective act together. Something bad is happening, and we're at DEFCON-TWO.”
It was a fine, clear night on the flight deck. Jackson briefed Commander Sanchez and their respective RIOs, then the plane captains for the two Tomcats sitting on the waist cats walked the flight crews out to them. Jackson and Walters got aboard. The plane captain helped strap both in, then disappeared downward and removed the ladder. Captain Jackson ran through the start-up sequence, watching his engine instruments come into normal idle. The F-14D was currently armed with four radar-homing Phoenix missiles and four infra-red Sidewinders.
“Ready back there, Shredder?” Jackson asked.
“Let's do it, Spade,” Walter replied.
Robby pushed his throttles to the stops, then jerked them around the detente and into afterburner, and signaled his readiness to the catapult officer, who looked down the deck to make sure it was clear. The officer fired off a salute to the aircraft.
Jackson blinked his flying lights in reply, dropping his hand to the stick and pulling his head back against the rest. A second later, the cat officer's lighted wand touched the deck. A petty officer hit the firing button, and steam jetted into the catapult machinery.
For all his years at this business, his senses never quite seemed to be fast enough. The acceleration of the catapult nearly jerked his eyeballs around inside their sockets. The dim glow lights of the deck vanished behind him. The back of the aircraft settled, and they were off. Jackson made sure he was actually flying before taking the aircraft out of burner, then he retracted his gear and flaps, and started a slow climb to altitude. He was just through a thousand feet when “Bud” Sanchez and “Lobo” Alexander pulled alongside.
“There go the radars,” Shredder said, taking note of his instruments. The entire TR battle group shut down every emission in a matter of seconds. Now, no one would be able to track them from their own electronic noise.
Jackson settled down. Whatever this was, he told himself, it couldn't be all that bad, could it? It was a beautifully clear night, and the higher he got, the clearer it became through the panoramic canopy of his fighter. The stars were discrete pinpricks of light, and their twinkling ceased almost entirely as they reached thirty thousand feet. He could see the distant strobes of commercial aircraft, and the coastlines of half a dozen countries. A night like this, he thought, could make a poet of a peasant. It was for moments like these that he'd become a pilot. He turned west, with Sanchez on his wing. There were some clouds that way, he realized at once. He couldn't see all that many stars.