by Dale Brown
“As soon as this briefing is over, pal, you’re relieved of duty as Nine-sixty-sixth commander. I will prefer charges against you for disobeying a direct order and for insubordination. You will report to your quarters and await the convening of a court-martial. And if I can, I’ll make sure you spend the last remaining years of your career in a military prison camp.”
“Gary, all you’ve done since I’ve arrived at Lackland is threaten me,” Patrick said. “That’s not leadership — that’s tyranny. I’ll be glad to get the hell out of here, even if it’s to a prison cell, as long as I don’t have to put up with your adolescent nonsense again. Sir.”
4
Over Eastern Siberia, Nine Hundred Kilometers
Northeast of Yakutsk, Russian Federation
That same time
It was one of the most difficult dances in all of aviation, made even more difficult because all the aircraft and the damned drogues were icing up. Someone once described this exercise as trying to stick your dick into a bull while running across a pasture — except now the pasture was slick with ice and snow.
Aviatskiy Kapitan Leytenant Josef Leborov was very, very good at plugging the bull, but even he was having a tough time of it.
This morning, in and out of clouds heavily laden with ice, a formation of twenty-four Tupolev-95MD Modifikatsirovanny Daplata aircraft led an even larger formation of thirty-six Tu-95MS-16 Modifikatsirovanny Snaryad strategic bombers on their mission. Spread out over several kilometers, the six formations of four tankers with their six bombers below and behind them made for a very impressive sight. What was not so impressive was watching each bomber trying to plug in to its tanker.
It was Leborov’s second try — and he was doing better than the others. The ten-meter-long refueling probe was fixed on the Tu-95’s nose, right on the centerline and in plain sight of both pilot and copilot; it had three small lights on the outside edge of the nozzle to illuminate the drogue as it got closer. Once the tanker was forty meters ahead and a few meters higher than the receiver, the tanker’s refueling observer in the tail compartment — formerly the tail gunner’s station — would slowly unreel the drogue. The drogue would swing around wildly for several meters until it got outside the tremendous prop wash behind the plane, but it would then stabilize and begin to drop slightly as the weight of the hose pulled on it. At maximum extension the observer would flash a green light, and the receiver could move forward and plug the drogue.
The drogue — a large, two-meter-diameter padded lighted steel basket at the end of the fuel hose — did not move around so much. The bomber, on the other hand, seemed never to be in one place long enough to get a good feel for positioning the boom. Unlike Western-style boom aerial refueling, here the tanker’s observer could not assist the hookup — it was the bomber pilot’s show all the way.
Leborov cruised slowly up to the drogue, trying to make small control and power corrections — but it was no use. The drogue whistled left just enough for the nozzle to hit the rim, which caused the drogue to skitter away. Leborov pulled off a smidgen of power and swore loudly as he backed away for another try. “This fucking pig! I have either not enough control authority or too damned much!”
“Just think of fucking that pretty little waitress you met a few months ago, Joey,” said Leborov’s copilot and friend, Aviatskiy Starshiy Leytenant Yuri Bodorev. “That’s what I do.”
“Shut the hell up, asshole,” Leborov said, as good-naturedly as he could.
“Refueling behind one of our own planes isn’t as easy as it sounded when they first came up with this idea,” Bodorev remarked. Without external stores, Tupolev-95 bombers had a maximum range in excess of twelve thousand kilometers — air refueling was usually not a necessity. But several months ago they started practicing air refueling again, using Tupolev-16 tankers. Then, just weeks ago, modified Tu-95 tankers had been brought in. No one understood the reason for all this innovation and experimentation — until now. “Want me to give it a try, Joey?”
“No, no, I’m just out of practice,” Leborov said, forcing himself to relax. “How are the gauges looking?”
“RPMs are matched, trims are within limits, power settings are within one or two percent of each other, and fuel tanks are balanced within two hundred kilos,” replied the flight engineer, sitting right behind the copilot.
“Just plug this whore and let’s go, Joey,” Bodorev said. “You’re the flight leader — show the other kids how it’s done.” That seemed to be all the encouragement he needed — along with the image of the long probe protruding from almost right between his legs aimed right for his girlfriend’s manda—because on the next pass Leborev plugged the drogue smoothly and easily, as if he’d been doing it every day for years. The fuel transfer would be agonizingly slow, just a thousand liters a minute, so they would be plugged in for about fifteen minutes just to get a partial offload and allow the other bombers to cycle through.
It took three hours of formation flying with this huge armada to complete the refueling. Along the way five bombers and two tankers had to drop out, because they either couldn’t transfer fuel, couldn’t receive fuel, or because of some other major malfunction; one aircraft had a serious weapon problem that forced it to jettison two weapons on two different wing pylons. Fortunately, they were able to divvy up fuel from the remaining tankers to the remaining bombers, so all were able to get their scheduled onloads and continue the mission.
Since one plane had weapons problems, the formation leader decided that all the weapons had to be visually inspected, in addition to the routine safe connectivity-safe continuity checks. “Weapon safety checks complete, all weapons showing safe, no malfunctions,” the bombardier in the downstairs nose compartment reported. “Clearing off for visual check.”
“Navigator clearing off to assist.”
Leborov turned around and said, “Stay put, Arkadiy. I need a stretch. I’ll go. Pilot clearing off for visual weapons check.” Bodorev donned his oxygen mask — the pilot flying the aircraft was required to wear it while the other pilot was out of his seat — and gave his partner and friend his usual good-luck sign: thumb and forefinger forming a circle, meaning “asshole.”
With his parachute, walkaround oxygen bottle, gloves, heavyweight flight jacket, helmet, and oxygen mask on, Leborov stoop-walked past the engineer’s and electronic-warfare officer’s stations, patted the navigator on the shoulder in the very aft section of the cockpit, undogged the hatch to the lower compartment, climbed down the ladder to the lower deck, sealed the upper-deck pressure hatch, and followed the bombardier aft to the weapons bay’s pressurized bulkhead hatch. There were no ejection seats on the Tupolev-95, either upward or downward; the flight-deck crew slid down a pole that extended through the entry hatch that carried them out into the slipstream and away from the aircraft, while the bombardier and gunner simply rolled out through downward escape hatches in their compartments. Now the bombardier unsealed the aft bulkhead hatch, and he and Leborov crawled aft into the weapons bay.
The deck was slick with frozen condensation and leaking coolant from some of the electronics bays, but the men ignored it and continued aft. They could hear the loud click-click-clack-click sounds of the navigation system, which used Doppler radar and radar fixes to update an analog computer as big as a refrigerator that still used gears and levers to provide position, heading, and velocity information. The noise from the big dual counterrotating propellers beating on each side of the fuselage was deafening, even through their helmets and ear protectors. Leborov found the switch for the port-side weapon pylon inspection light and flicked it on — and there it was. He had seen it and preflighted it on the ground, of course, but somehow it looked different when the Tu-95 was in the air.
The left weapon pylon held one Kh-90 air-launched attack missile. These were experimental missiles, fielded for the first time when two missiles had been launched at a CIA base in Uzbekistan just recently during an operational test. Then the missiles had carried high
-explosive warheads.
But now these missiles carried two one-kiloton thermonuclear devices.
Code-named Sat Loshka, or “Garden Hoe,” the warheads were actually copies of American nuclear “bunker-buster” bombs developed after Desert Storm to destroy deep underground bunkers, cave complexes, and biochem-weapon storage facilities without risking large numbers of civilian casualties. The warheads used rocket motors and armored nose caps to drive themselves down as much as thirty meters underground, even through layers of steel or Kevlar armor, before detonating. That meant that the fireballs would be relatively small and that blast and overpressure damage aboveground also would be small. Each cruise missile had its own inertial-navigation system — a system of electronic gyroscopes and pendulums that gave the navigation computers heading and velocity information — but the addition of GLONASS satellite navigation gave the missiles better than twenty-meter accuracy.
The bombardier walked down to another porthole to inspect the aft section of the huge Kh-90 missile. It was as if they were carrying a small jet fighter on their wings, Leborov thought. He saw a tiny bit of ice around the air inlet under the nose, but that would not be of any concern; less than a minute after launch, the exterior of the missile would heat up to several hundred degrees Centigrade as it approached its top speed of five times the speed of sound. He nodded to his bombardier, indicating they were done with their inspection, then shut off the inspection light and moved to look at the starboard missile. Everything having to do with nuclear weapons always had to be two-officer, even if it meant looking at the weapons from inside the plane.
Two thermonuclear bunker-buster missiles, faster than any antiaircraft missile — and Leborov’s sortie was only the leader of a thirty-one-plane gaggle of similarly armed Tupolev-95 bombers. Each missile had two independently targeted nuclear warheads designed to burrow underground and destroy even the best-protected bunker. The Americans would never know what hit them. Poor bastards.
The bomb bay itself contained a rotary launcher with six Kh-31P long-range antiradar missiles. As they closed in on their launch point, Leborov and three of the other lead bombers would be responsible for shutting down the local radar sites along their intended route of flight, including Yellowknife, Pine Point, Uranium City, Lynn Lake, Fort Nelson, Cold Lake, Edmonton, and Whitehorse. The ramjet-powered Kh-31s had a range of two hundred kilometers and a maximum speed of Mach 3, with a ninety-kilogram high-explosive fragmentary warhead that would shred a radar antenna or a building into pieces in the blink of an eye.
The inspection complete, Leborov and the bombardier crawled along the narrow catwalk back the length of the bomb bay and looked in on the gunner, seated in the very aft tail cabin. They did not ask him to open his pressurized hatch — that meant he would have had to put on his oxygen mask and depressurize his compartment — but instead just knocked on the porthole and got a thumbs-up from him. The gunner was surrounded by box lunches filled with low-residue snacks, a small stack of magazines, numerous bottles of water, and metal boxes to store his relief bags. Normally the gunner stayed up front with the crew in a jump seat until close to enemy territory, but during formation flying his job was to keep an eye on the wingmen through his large windows and tail radar, so he had to spend the entire mission in his little compartment.
Despite the bone-chilling cold, Leborov was bathed in sweat by the time he’d returned to the cockpit and strapped himself into his seat again. “Pilot’s back up,” he reported.
“You look like shit,” Borodev said cross-cockpit to his aircraft commander. “You didn’t rot yego yebal with the bombardier again, did you?”
“Screw you.”
Borodev looked at his friend carefully. “You okay, buddy?”
Leborov was silent for a few moments. Then, “Ah, shit, Yuri, no one deserves to die in their bed under a fucking nuclear fireball.”
“That’s not our concern nor our decision, Joey,” Borodev said. He liked calling his friend the anglicized version of his name, because he was so obsessed with the dichotomy of Americans — their strange mixture of strength, humor, ruthlessness, and generosity. Some thought his preoccupation with all things American would affect his job performance — and, Borodev admitted, maybe they were right. “Our targets are missile-launch facilities and underground command posts for nuclear-warfighting units, not bedrooms. Besides, what’s the difference between dying beneath a fireball and a one-thousand-kilo high-explosive bomb? Dead is dead.”
“You know damn well there’s a difference….”
“No I don’t, partner. I don’t believe there’s a difference. Just like there’s no difference between the American attack on Engels and this attack. These are military attacks against military targets. Maybe some civilians will get killed — that can’t be helped, and we’re doing everything possible to limit civilian casualties, including decreasing the yields on our weapons to limits that very well may not destroy the target. And you gotta enjoy the irony of attacking the Americans with a mini-nuke that they invented and deployed….”
“I’m not in the mood to appreciate irony here, Yuri.”
“Joey, we’re more justified in doing this than the Americans were attacking Engels — we weren’t fighting them, we were fighting the damned Taliban that raided our bases in Turkmenistan,” Borodev went on, driving the point home as hard as he could without attracting the attention of the others behind them. The last thing they needed to hear was their copilot trying to convince the aircraft commander that what they were about to do was right. “The Americans attacked us for no reason. Remember that! They attacked us.
“Damn it, Joey, we were there. We could’ve been killed in that raid. One-third of our own regiment was wiped out that night, Joey. One-third. I lost a lot of good friends in that attack, Joey — so did you — and I know a lot of kids who lost fathers and who can’t stop crying at night because they’re afraid of American bombs falling on top of their heads again. Russia’s finest bomber base is abandoned now — a ghost town. And I’m convinced that the Americans would not hesitate to keep on attacking, using every weapon in their arsenal and threatening us with every other weapon they had, including nukes. That’s why this attack is necessary. I give President Gryzlov a lot of credit for having the courage to order this mission.”
“But why are we using nukes, Yuri?”
“You know damned well, Joey,” Borodev replied. “It’s a tactical decision, not a psychological one — we’re doing a job, not trying to send a message. We’re using nukes because the Kh-90s wouldn’t have the destructive power if we put nonnuclear warheads on them. They wouldn’t put a dent in any of the targets we’re going after.” He looked at the pilot with an exasperated expression. “You know all this stuff, my friend. You certified this mission to the commanding general just three days ago, and he chose you to lead this gaggle specifically because you explained it all so well. Don’t wuss out on me now, zalupa.”
“I’m not wussing out. I believe using nukes and biochem weapons is different from using other kinds of weapons, that’s all.”
“You’re a dipshit, Joey. What’s going on? You get your girlfriend pregnant and now you dream of a perfect world with no fighting and no war? Wake up, pal.” He looked at his friend carefully. “You got her pregnant, didn’t you?”
“Worse — I married her.”
“You jerk! You never listen to a thing I tell you!” Borodev said, slapping him hard on the shoulder. “Congratulations! When were you planning on telling the general?”
“I submitted the paperwork to him three days ago. He signed us off yesterday.”
“The great Josef Leborov, scourge of the gay bars — I mean, the taverns—missing in action because he has a wife and a rug rat now. I’m glad I lived to see the day.” He patted his friend on the shoulder. “Good man. If we make it, you have someone to go home to…and if you don’t, your name carries on. Well done, Senior Captain. Now, can we please get back to fucking work?”
“Affi
rmative,” Leborov said. On intercom he reported, “Crew, all weapons have been visually checked and are ready, and we have visually ensured that our gunner is still with us. Station check.” Every crew member did an oxygen check, checked his equipment, and reported back in order. “Very well. Naviguesser, position report?”
“Thirty-two minutes to the start-countermeasures point,” the navigator responded. The start-countermeasures point was the farthest point from which American radar planes based at Eielson Air Force Base in Fairbanks, Alaska, could detect them. So far their intelligence had not reported any airborne, but Leborov knew that could change at any time, and without warning. “Approximately three hours to the launch point.”
“Thank you,” Leborov said. Borodev looked at him, and he realized that his voice sounded a little high-pitched and squeaky, a combination of his heavy breathing from crawling around almost the entire length of the plane and from the realization that time was passing quickly and the action was going to start very, very soon. He flashed his friend their mutual “okay” signal, ordered a crew-compartment and oxygen check, then decided to finish off his last box lunch now, before things started getting hairy.
Secretary of Defense’s Briefing Room, the Pentagon
A few hours later
If Ayou don’t mind my saying so — and I don’t care if you do or not — you all sound like a bunch of bickering, whining children,” Secretary of Defense Robert Goff said, slumping wearily in his seat. He had just received a rundown on the current emergency from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the chief of staff of the Air Force, the commander of Air Combat Command, the commander of Air Intelligence Agency, and finally Brigadier General Patrick McLanahan — and his head really hurt now. The emergency meeting was called because of the alert sent by the North American Aerospace Defense Command, sent directly to the chief of operations in the secretary of defense’s office.
