Liberty's Last Stand

by Stephen Coonts

  And if tomorrow some bridges were still standing, Gentry planned on launching F-16s carrying two one-thousand-pound JDAMs each. He was willing to trade planes for the bridges.

  Gentry would have loved to have an airborne early-warning airplane in the sky tonight, but he didn’t have one. His F-16s would have to make do by listening to the freqs GCI sites used to control the U.S. fighters. Gentry worried about F-22s, stealth fighters, which could detect and shoot down fighters and bombers of ranges as far as a hundred nautical miles. What he didn’t know was that the F-22 wing had sent all the pilots who were willing to fight for Barry Soetoro, all four, to Barksdale. So there were not going to be F-22s in the air tonight. Had he known, he would have been much less apprehensive than he was, and he might even have stayed on the ground tonight. As it was, he thought the risks were so high that he was unwilling to send his aircrews into combat unless he shared the risks with them.

  JR Hays, no man to evade risks himself, reluctantly agreed. He didn’t want to lose Elvin Gentry, but he had to trust Gentry’s judgment and leadership abilities or get someone else. Barry Soetoro would have never understood.

  Gentry had never before ridden in a Stratofortress, so the pilot’s exercise of the Crosswind Crab Control while they taxied felt spooky. The wheels continued to track the centerline of the taxiway, but the airplane turned to point up twenty degrees to the left, then swung back to point twenty degrees to right.

  On the runway, the wind from the right demanded a crab in that direction, so the centerline of the runway was visible out the left side of the pilot’s windshield. The BUFF accelerated with all eight engines pulling, they reached decision speed right on time for the load they were carrying, and began rotating five to ten knots before liftoff speed. It wasn’t much of a rotation, a bit over five degrees. Then the giant green bomber parted company with the earth.

  On climb out the pilot turned to the general, just to see how he was doing. His face was lit by the glow of the red instrument lights. Gentry was struck by his youth. Captain Rogers, flying a bomber from the 1950s, was all of twenty-seven years old. Gentry felt like a fossil.

  JDAMs were units that screwed into freefall bombs. They were comprised of a GPS receiver, a small computer, and canards that steered the bomb to its target, which was a preprogrammed bulls-eye defined by GPS coordinates. Accuracy was only as good as the GPS coordinates programmed in, so satellite maps of the earth had to be consulted.

  The delivery crew, in this case in a B-52, had to use the onboard weapons system to drop the bomb into an invisible cone with its tip resting on the target and the large open end up in the sky. If the bomb were placed within the cone, it could steer itself to a bulls-eye. If it were released outside the cone, the canards would not be able to get the bomb back into the cone, so it would miss. This nebulous cone was defined by the capability of the canards that steered the bomb, by the prevailing wind, and by the angular velocity imparted to the weapon by the airplane that released it.

  Guided weapons were the future of aerial warfare, Elvin Gentry believed. The days of dropping huge numbers of dumb bombs in the hope that one or two would hit the target you wanted destroyed were history.

  GPS-guided bombs were a technological leap into the future from laser-guided bombs, which steered themselves to a dot of laser light projecting upon the target, projected by the bombing aircraft or a spotter aircraft, occasionally a person on the ground. Unlike laser-guided systems that were useless in bad weather, GPS-guided bombs hit their bulls-eyes all the time, whether they were falling through clear air, clouds, rain, snow, blowing dust, or smoke—as long as you had the correct coordinates for your target: type in a wrong digit somewhere and you missed.

  The cockpit of the B-52 was cramped, almost like a two-seat tactical jet. Gentry sat in the jump seat aft of the pilots, and he didn’t have an ejection seat. After everyone else ejected, he was supposed to go to the lower level, or deck, and jump through the hole in the fuselage left by the recently departed navigator or bombardier. It sounded iffy, but if worse came to worst… .

  The F-16s were out there somewhere ahead on a fighter sweep, looking for bad guys, protecting the bombers from beyond the range of fighter missiles. That was the theory, which was only as good as the fighter pilots. Elvin Gentry consoled himself with the thought that we all have to die sometime. At least, he reflected, he wasn’t in a B-17 on the way to Berlin, harassed every mile by flak and German fighter pilots who knew their business. Those B-17 guys had balls, he thought. This little jaunt tonight was a piece of cake.

  He keyed the intercom and told the crew, “A piece of cake.”

  “Yeah,” the copilot said. “Sir.”

  In minutes, as they were still climbing for altitude, the B-52s split up, each headed for its initial fix, to begin a series of bomb runs on bridges. The bombardiers had been plotting their courses and run-ins to their targets, and were now checking their ordnance panels.

  Gentry heard the cryptic transmissions on the intercom of his BUFF, heard the pilot and copilot running through checklists, and heard the countdown begin to the first bomb release, on the highway bridge on I-20 at Vicksburg. And on the adjacent railroad bridge. The tops of the cones overlapped, so the BUFF would drop four one-ton weapons on this run. He saw the light on the instrument panel as the bomb bay doors came open, he heard the countdown, then the bombs released and he felt the airplane give a jump upward as it became four tons lighter in a fraction of a second. Felt the plane bank into a turn. The next targets were the bridges at Natchez.

  So far, so good, Gentry thought. Then he realized he had been holding his breath. He exhaled and forced himself to breathe deeply.

  Walter Ohnigian was a career F-16 pilot. Flying fighters was all he had ever wanted to do since he watched the Thunderbirds perform at an air show when he was twelve. He had attended the Air Force Academy, worked like a slave to get into flight school, and once in gave it everything he had to get fighters. He had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, had graduated from two courses at USAF Weapons School, and had served a tour as an instructor on F-16s. Along the way he found time to serve a tour in a Navy F/A-18 squadron, which meant a nine-month cruise aboard an aircraft carrier. He had planned to stay in the air force until they forced him to retire.

  The Texas Declaration of Independence changed his mind. Now he was a Texas fighter pilot. His decision had been easy; born and raised in Brady, Texas, he loathed Barry Soetoro and all he stood for.

  Susie Ohnigian, from Colorado Springs, was a tougher sell. She had met Walt when he was a cadet and knew the blood, sweat, and tears he had put in to succeed at his chosen profession. Basically nonpolitical, Susie loved her husband. She knew military aviation has its risks, even in peacetime, and she consoled herself with the indisputable truth that God was in charge of our lives, and He would take Walt when it suited His purpose. He hadn’t yet, and she prayed that He wouldn’t until they were both old and full of years. She took her marriage vows before the altar of God, and thought it her duty to stand by her husband for as long as they both lived, so with some misgivings, she concurred with his choice.

  Tonight he was over southeastern Mississippi, listening to the published approach and departure frequencies for Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle. Ohnigian thought that by the time the air force figured out that bombers were attacking the Mississippi bridges, it would be too late to launch and catch the bombers, which would be several hundred miles west. On the other hand, if Eglin had fighters on a combat air patrol, they could intercept the BUFFs. Or intercept the Texas F-16s.

  So he listened on all the frequencies they might use, and he used the radar in his fighter to sweep the skies for airplanes. Targets. Bad guys. Fighters that might attack the friends in the BUFFs. Fortunately civilian traffic was prohibited by the Soetoro regime. Any targets Ohnigian and Free saw tonight on their radars were enemy airplanes. Or outlaw airplanes whose pilots had decided to roll the dice and take their chances.

  The
F-16s flown by Walter Ohnigian and his wingman Drew Free had two AMRAAMS (advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles) and two Sidewinders each, an internal M-61A Vulcan 20-mm cannon, and a two-thousand-pound external fuel tank. No doubt if there were Eglin F-16 fighters aloft, they were similarly armed.

  The AIM-120C AMRAAM was seven inches in diameter and twelve feet long, flew at Mach four, had an active radar homing seeker, carried a forty-pound high-explosive warhead, and had a maximum range of fifty-seven miles. The AIM-9 Sidewinder was a short-range (up to twenty-two miles) missile with infrared homing; in other words, a heat seeker. It was five inches in diameter and nine feet long and carried a twenty-pound warhead. The latest versions could turn over ninety degrees to chase their targets at speeds up to 2.7 Mach, and could even lock on a target up to ninety degrees off the airplane’s boresight. Sidewinder was the perfect dogfight weapon: when it locked on your quarry’s tailpipe signature, the hunter squeezed it off and the Sidewinder did the rest. Sidewinder even had a limited head-on capability.

  Tonight Walter Ohnigian hoped and prayed that there were no F-22 Raptors aloft. If there were, he would never see them on radar. His first indications of an F-22 would be a Raptor radar locked on him, so he kept his radar warning indicator in his instrument scan. Nothing so far.

  He checked that he was on Eglin Air Force Base tower frequency. Yes, two fighters were taxiing. A flight of two. The lead had a laconic, gravelly voice.

  He headed that way and eased his fighter into a climb. He wanted to be as high as possible so he would have an energy advantage. His wingman to his right and aft stepped up several hundred feet.

  Now the Eglin fighters were airborne and switching to Departure Control. He pushed the button on the radio for the new frequency.

  And he heard that voice again. Jesus, it sounded like Johnny O’Day! Of all people, Johnny O’Day, his roommate at the Air Force Academy, way back when.

  Another transmission to Departure. Hell yes, it was Johnny O’Day, and he flew F-16s. Headed for the B-52s over the Mississippi.

  The bombs from Gentry’s BUFF smashed into the bridges at Vicksburg. They were falling supersonic, so no one on the ground had a clue except for the faint, distant rumble of jet engines way up there in the night. The explosions on each bridge were so close together they sounded like one big bang, which rolled through Vicksburg and woke up several thousand folks.

  Slowly, ponderously, the weight of the now unsupported bridge spans carried them down into the dark water of the big river. There were only two trucks on the highway bridge, since traffic on the interstates these days was down to a trickle. One driver on the highway bridge managed to stop his truck; the other rode the span into the river and drowned in his cab.

  The railroad bridge actually had a train on it, rumbling along at eight miles per hour. The bombs went through a railcar, penetrated the track and ballast, and detonated against the targeted abutment. The spans on either side of the abutment began sagging, dragging the train along, down, down into the river.

  The scene would be repeated tonight up and down the river. America was being cut in half with surgical precision.

  Victory in a modern dogfight usually goes to the pilot in the most technologically advanced fighter, who will usually detect his enemy first and shoot first. Once missiles are launched, the rest is up to the missiles, those marvels of modern weaponry, which, if fired within their operating envelope, are quite deadly.

  Tonight Walter Ohnigian fired two AMRAAMs at the Eglin fighters at a distance of fifty miles, head on. They raced off downhill at their targets and had soon accelerated to four times the speed of sound, the active radar in the nose of the missiles probing the night for their targets.

  “Fox Three,” Walter Ohnigian said over the radio, a transmission he knew Johnny O’Day would hear. He held the transmit button on the stick down and continued, “Johnny, this is Oboe. You better eject.” Johnny was married to an operating room nurse and they had two kids. Ohnigian owed him the warning.

  In his fighter, climbing through ten thousand feet, Johnny O’Day’s eyes automatically scanned the sky for the pinpoint exhausts of the rocket engines in missiles. Oboe—Ohnigian! After wasting several seconds, he looked at his radar screen.

  And saw the tiny dots streaking toward his aircraft and that of his wingman.

  He pumped off chaff and tried to turn a square corner. He was pulling eight Gs when the first missile went off just below the belly of his fighter and showered it with shrapnel that penetrated into the delicate internal organs of his steed. One second later the fighter exploded.

  The second AMRAAM exploded as it went through the expanding cloud of pieces.

  O’Day’s wingman had also turned violently to avoid the oncoming missiles, so after he was sure they had missed him, he had to turn back into the threat to acquire a firing solution on the bogeys on his radar screen. He was turning hard when the first AMRAAM from Ohnigian’s wingman actually struck his machine and exploded. Like Johnny O’Day, he died in the fireball.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Texas Ranger Parker Konczyk went to see Colonel Tenney of the TxDPS. “We think there’s a sniper casing the roofs of buildings around the capitol,” he said. “He’s dressed in a jumpsuit that bears the logo of an air conditioning company. We spotted him with a drone.”

  “What air conditioning company?”

  Konczyk told him. “We talked to the owner. He had the van for sale and an Anglo came along, paid him ten grand for it. He wanted fifteen, but the most the guy would pay was ten, cash, and the owner was way behind on his child support, so he took it. He signed the title and never even got the guy’s name.”

  Konczyk used an iPad to show Colonel Tenney video from the drone. The man in a jumpsuit on the roof of a bank three hundred yards from the capitol didn’t even bother looking at the rooftop-mounted HVAC units, but inspected the roof and lased the capitol and some other buildings, including the hotel with the underground parking garage that was being used by the Texas government as a bomb-proof bunker. “That location hasn’t been published, but half the people in Austin know the government is down there.”

  “A rangefinder?”

  “It looks like a laser rangefinder, a small unit that he holds in both hands up to his eye.”

  The picture on the iPad went to another building and apparently the same man scouted out that roof. Finally, pictures from the drone of the van parked by the curb.

  “So what is your recommendation?”

  “Right now all we have this guy for is not registering the van in his own name, and a few trespass charges. If we arrest him he’ll be out on bail in an hour. And he might not be a sniper; he might be a scout.”

  “Go on.”

  “Or we can wait until someone appears on the roof with a rifle.”

  They discussed it, and decided that the best course was to keep the van under constant surveillance, and the best way to do that and not spook the suspect was to use drones. Konczyk only had access to one.

  “Get a couple more from the National Guard,” Colonel Tenney said. “Let’s just watch this guy for a while, find out where he is staying and who he sees, and try to figure out how big this conspiracy really is, if there is one.”

  Chairman of the JCS General Martin L. Wynette was working late at his office in the Pentagon. The problem he faced was the disintegration of the United States armed forces, all of them, Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. The reports from commanders all over the nation were appalling: huge numbers of troops were not available for duty. In some major commands the AWOL rate approached forty percent. Another thirty or forty percent refused to bear arms against Americans, or as they phrased it, to fight for that son of a bitch Soetoro. Sailors on navy ships were refusing to go to sea. Commandos and paratroopers were refusing to go to Texas, Oklahoma, or Alabama, which had just declared its independence. Pilots were refusing to fly, which made it impossible to get fighters aloft to protect military targets or to attack targets in Texas. T
he most powerful military force on the planet was shattering like old crystal right before his eyes.

  Maybe Soetoro was right, Wynette mused. Maybe it was time to start standing some people against the wall and shooting them to inspire the rest.

  Wynette and several senior members of the JCS staff were trying to figure out just how many willing fighters Barry Soetoro actually had and how to get the willing to where they could fight when the news came in that the interstate and railroad bridges over the Mississippi at Vicksburg had been bombed and were impassable. Even as he tried to digest this information, he learned that bridges were being bombed from Baton Rouge to well above Memphis. Four bridges in Memphis had gone into the river. It was thought that the bombers were B-52s from Barksdale, but of course that was merely speculation.

  On top of all of this were the plights of cities such as Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, metropolitan New York, and Boston. And Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. For seventy-five years architects had created urban buildings that were sealed units and uninhabitable without electrical power. Millions of city dwellers were abandoning the cities for the supposedly better life in the countryside, where some planned to throw themselves on the mercy of the rustics while others planned to rob, steal, and kill their way to a better life.

  Wynette wondered what the heck was going to come of all this. According to radio reports, they were partying in Montgomery tonight. The governor had made a speech, a “rant” according to the reporter on the radio, in which he told Barry Soetoro to go to hell and do something anatomically impossible to himself when he got there. The lights were back on in most of Alabama, and the governor vowed they were going to stay on even if the Alabama National Guard had to defend the plants against Soetoro’s troops and thugs. He also vowed that a copy of the Ten Commandments were going up in every courtroom and classroom in Alabama; if the justices of the United States Supreme Court didn’t like it, he said, they could come to Alabama and take them down, if they could.