Lion Resurgent

by Stuart Slade

  It was hard to see the aircraft, the dark gray of the Buccaneers tended to be lost against the waves and ever-present gray haze that dominated the North Sea. That was, of course, why they were painted that color. In the end, it wasn’t the aircraft that he saw first but the white line the concussion waves they generated left on the sea behind them. The two aircraft made their drops, Both Carter’s bombs hit dead midships as expected. Kingsman didn’t do as well. He picked the wrong angle, left his correction too late and had to pull a tight turn to get lined up properly. By then, he was at the wrong distance from his target and the skips wouldn’t align properly. One of his Highballs missed the destroyer, passing in front of her bows. The other actually arced over her and made three or four more skips before finally sinking at the end of its run.

  “Sorry, Sir.” Kingsman’s voice came over the radio, subdued and depressed.

  “Not as easy as it looks, is it?’ Mullback spoke comfortingly. Everybody had to start somewhere and there were many worse things Kingsman could have done.

  “No, Sir. Sorry, Sir.”

  “Cheer up lad; we all did that at first. Highball’s a tricky beast. Get some more simulator time in and you’ll get the hang of it.” Mullback changed to his internal circuit. “Alex, course for home please.”

  “Set up, Jerry. We’re about 10 minutes out. Carrier Controlled Approach is waiting for us to initiate our ran in.” Alex Peters was Mullback’s ‘GIB’ - guy in the back -responsible for navigation and handling the electronic warfare systems. Also for looking backwards and making sure no fighters with evil intent were lurking in the six o’clock spot.

  As usual, the air control team on HMS Furious were on the ball. They brought the four Buccaneers in perfectly. She was an old ship, almost as old as the destroyer her aircraft had just used as a target but the Royal Navy had looked after her and she’d just finished a major refit. One that had taken four of her eight four inch guns and been given new MOG missiles imported from Australia instead. If plans went the way they were supposed to, that would hold her until the new carriers were built to replace Furious and her two sisters. If they were built, that was. The government was prevaricating over finding the funding again.

  XT-279 trapped perfectly, catching the second wire and halting properly positioned for taxiing off the angled deck. Mullback raised his hook, releasing the wire, and started folding his aircraft’s wings. The parking spot behind the island was cramped. The Courageous class carriers were really that bit too small for the aircraft they carried and that meant parking took care. It was always a relief when the Buck was properly in place without hitting anybody or anything.

  “How did the new kid do, Jerry?” The bomber squadron commander, Commander Dickie Ravenswood, greeted Mullback as he climbed down the steps from the cockpit.

  “Blew it of course. Didn’t we all first time out?” Mullback shook his head with memories of fouled-up Highball attacks. “We running to schedule?”

  “Don’t sweat it, Jerry. We’ll have you back in Pompey in time to marry Sam. Assuming she isn’t modeling of course. Does The Sun publish on Saturdays?” Ravenswood tried to look as innocent as possible. The fact that one of the Flight Commanders was about to marry The Sun’s leading Page Three model was a matter of awed disbelief to the entire carrier air group.

  “It does, but they shoot the pages well ahead of time. Make the news up in advance as well you know.” Mullback delivered the line deadpan. “Make sure you’re at the ceremony and Sam’ll give you the racing results for the next meet at Epsom. A week in advance, of course.”

  Conference Room, White House, Washington D.C.

  “I’m afraid, Mister President, that it’s only a question of time before the Argentine armed forces move.”

  “You sound very sure of that Seer.” President Reagan drank in the details of the presentation and looked through the satellite imagery with keen interest. “I never realized the detail on these things was so good.”

  “Those were taken from one of the new Polar Orbit Manned Orbiting Laboratories. MOLPOL for short. Previously, our coverage was always a bit rough that far south, not least because there was nothing down there to interest us. Using a polar orbit allows us much better coverage. We’ve got three MOLPOLs up now; meaning we do a run over each area at roughly eight hour intervals. When the program is complete, we’ll be reducing that to every four hours.”

  “MOLPOL is a NASA program?” The President had been in office for about nine months and was still getting the fine details sorted out. At least one reason for that was his insistence in learning as much as possible about each subject he was expected to make decisions on. It was that hunger for information that The Seer thoroughly enjoyed. After four years under President Carter, who had treated the Friday Follies as a barely tolerable nuisance, having an audience who actually enjoyed learning for its own sake was a serious pleasure. The Friday Follies had dropped to barely ten minutes and the detailed briefing book that went with it was rarely, if ever, opened. In contrast, under Reagan, the briefing and question session went on for two or more hours and the briefing book was returned dog-eared from heavy use and with annotations in the margins where something hadn’t been quite clear enough or where Reagan disagreed with the analysis. They were getting fewer now though. The Seer reflected he’d been getting into bad habits under Carter.

  “No, Sir. It belongs to Strategic Aerospace Command. It’s part of our target acquisition and identification system. The B-70s can download information directly from the MOLS and use it to finalize their bomb runs. So can the RB-58s. In theory, at least. Anyway, we haven’t tried out the system yet, not live. Only on exercises.”

  “MOLPOL.” President Reagan rolled the world around in his mouth. “I don’t suppose I can go up to one?”

  In the background, one of the Secret Service bodyguards spoke quietly to his thumb, listened and then shook his head. The risk was considered too great. Reagan looked immeasurably sad for a moment, he’d dreamed of going up into space for years but now his position made it impossible. His ride in a Valkyrie, something that was almost a standard part of the orientation process for a new President, had been as far as the Secret Service was prepared to go.

  “So if the Argentines move on Chile?”

  “Given the way the troop concentrations are being handled, it looks like a coup de main to seize the disputed islands in the Tierra del Fuego area, coupled with major air strikes intended to destroy the Chilean Air Force and an overland invasion aimed at Santiago and Valparaiso in the center of Chile, at Colhaique further south and Punta Arenas in the far south.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a minor dispute over a few islands to me.” Reagan reread the balance of forces being deployed. “This looks like a full-scale invasion leading to a conquest. I thought we’d made it clear we don’t allow that sort of thing?”

  “We did, Sir, once. But that message got blurred over the last few years and it’s only been a question of time before somebody pushed hard enough to test whether the line still held. In many ways, this situation developing is our fault. For many years, we simply ignored South America. Like Northern Europe, it didn’t really count in the world scale of things. We had relatively little to do with them, they had about the same to do with us. Back in the Second World War, Brazil sided with us from around 1945 onwards; even sent a few troops to Russia. A brigade or so if my memory serves me well. Mostly they helped out with ASW work in the Atlantic. Chile’s got a pretty strong democratic tradition but they kept out of the Second World War although they offered us refueling rights if we had to go around the Horn for any reason. Argentina was strongly pro-Axis right through to 1947. They were an Axis-tilting neutral right up to the time we did the lay downs all over Germany. Post-war they’ve been the refuge of choice for Germans who still had sympathies for the Reich. It’s not surprising they’re the ones doing the pushing now.”

  “Then we’d better make damned sure that they know it still does.” Reagan paused once ag
ain as he re-read the information on the Argentine armed forces. “Can they pull this off?”

  The Seer thought carefully and ran the various permutations through his mind. “In fairness, Sir, I don’t think they intend a wholesale annexation. At least, they would be really asking for trouble if they did so. I believe their intention is to seize the disputed islands down south and then use the invasion of the center and mid-south as a sledgehammer to force Chilean acquiescence.” He paused for a second and ran some more details through the equations. “They may have annexation in mind but that’s a hellish big mouthful for a country with serious economic problems. They might pull it off, but it’s more likely they’ll get a bloody nose in the attempt. The Chilean Army is pretty good and the Andes are a natural defensive wall. I’d guess the Chileans are mining the passes like crazy and possibly blowing some of them up. They’ll funnel the Argentines into kill zones and take them down. In the far south, invading those islands will be quite a trick to pull off. The weather down there is foul. So the Argentines may well end up being stalled.

  “And there, Sir, lies the real danger. Argentina is a military dictatorship and it faces a lot of internal dissent. My guess is that they’re setting this whole thing up to bring about a surge of patriotism from a successful little war. If that scheme falls flat, they’ll up the stakes. We know Argentina has nuclear weapons. They’re a self-declared nuclear power just like Brazil. They’re all too likely to try a nuclear strike to break things loose. Obviously, we can’t allow that.”

  “My predecessor would have done.” Reagan’s voice was bitter. He was spending most of his time trying to clear up the mess left by Jimmy Carter’s disastrous four year term as President. Carter had been obsessed with trying to ‘rebuild America’s image in the world’ and ‘atoning for past mistakes.’ His efforts to achieve that had done an incredible amount of damage. He hadn’t succeeded in doing anything to reduce the fear and resentment that marked other country’s attitudes to the United States but he had managed to degrade the respect that came from unmatched power and the willingness to use it. He’d even contrived to damage the Russian alliance that was the foundation of U.S. foreign policy. Fortunately, to the great relief of both governments, Reagan had already managed to repair those wounds.

  “Probably not, Sir.” The Seer’s voice was dry. He’d spent four years trying to make sure that the so-called ‘peace initiatives’ coming out of the White House hadn’t undermined National Security too badly. It had been a hard struggle and he had found it more wearing than most of the wars he’d fought over the years.

  “Certainly not. We can thank God that this whole business is cropping up now, not a year or so ago. What would you recommend as our course of action if Argentina does move on Chile?”

  “I’d suggest, Sir, that we don’t let it get that far. What I would recommend is that we send George Schultz down to Buenos Aires with a stern warning. Basically, tell the Generals down there, ‘we can see you, we know what you’re up to. Don’t.’ And do some overflights of Argentina with B-70s at the same time. A few islands here or there are of no great consequence, and it does nations good to let off a little steam now and then, but this Argentine plan is way beyond that.”

  Reagan nodded, thinking the implications over. “And if they don’t listen?”

  “We take out their airfields, naval bases and troop concentrations. Then we ask them, very politely, if their hearing has improved. If it hasn’t, we take out everything else. We have to make an example of somebody to show the world that the prohibition on wars of aggression still remains in place. Argentina is as good a candidate as any.”

  Reagan gulped slightly at that. “I guess we better hope they listen then. Where next?”

  “Africa, Mister President. Still a constant low-level war going on there. There’s the Caliphate in the North, South Africa down south and a great strip of chaos in between them. Some parts of the region, Kenya for example, are stable and reasonably well-run. Others, like the Congo and the Central African Empire are gruesome nightmares. The South Africans absorbed Rhodesia and the old German and Portuguese colonies but they’ve stopped there. Smart people, they’re holding what they can without over-extending themselves. They just do raiding operations further north to disrupt any efforts to mount a threat against them.”

  “Ah, not risking Imperial Overstretch.” President Reagan was a lot better-read than his political enemies realized and his tastes in books spread widely. He looked around and saw everybody present, including the Seer grinning broadly.

  “Definitely not. Something that we, also, are trying to avoid, by the way. We prefer to nuke our mortal enemies into oblivion without a second thought.”

  “I should hope so!” Reagan put mock irritation into his voice. “Another Russian Front is a nightmare scenario. Any sign of Caliphate involvement in Africa?”

  The Seer thought carefully. “There’s some, but not much. Ever since the 1973 bombing, the Caliphate has gone quiet. Oh, they’re still expansionist and they move into any power vacuums that develop, but they aren’t the hyper-aggressive power they were a decade ago. They’ve eased back on internal repression as well; a little anyway. And their ‘Governing Council’ these days seems to be neither seen nor heard. The bad news is that they’re picking up a little on industrial development. They’re building things that a few years ago they wouldn’t even have attempted.”

  “And their military equipment still comes from Chipan?”

  “It does, Sir. Arms in exchange for oil; the devil’s bargain the Chipanese have been running for three decades now.”

  “So, if we kick the props out from under the Chipanese, we cut off both the supply of arms to the Caliphate and also their supply of money.”

  “We surely do Sir. Although, the problem won’t be bringing Chipan down, they’re folding anyway. It’ll be bringing them in to a soft landing. We don’t want a spasm of use-it-or-lose it.”

  “Get your people working on that, Seer. I want to know how we can do it. Another thing; I greatly enjoy reading your briefing books. Is it possible to read them for the last four years? Are they kept on file?”

  “Of course, Sir.” Naamah spoke up for the first time. “I’ve got everything on file. Would you like them all at once or one at a time?”

  Reagan laughed at the thought of four years worth of weekly situation reports piled on his desk. “A month at a time if you please Naamah. Starting with the earliest ones from four - no, make it five - years ago. If you could give me each set as I finish the previous one, that would be ideal.”

  “It’ll be done, Sir.”

  “He never read them did he?” Reagan’s voice was soft but still the condemnation seeped through. The President had a very personal dislike for his predecessor in office. It was a mixture of big and little things. The big ones were associated with a completely different world view. The little ones were personal. Carter had allowed a degree of casualness that Reagan thought inappropriate for buildings and institutions owned by the American people and just borrowed by their occupants.

  “I can’t say, Sir. Confidentiality.” Naamah’s voice was equally soft. She knew that one look at them would tell Reagan that the briefing books had never been opened.

  “Very proper. Naamah, I may often forget to say so, and probably will all too many times, but I find your help invaluable. Never think that the efforts you make go unnoticed.”

  “Thank you, Sir.” Naamah knew that even the lowliest member of the White House team was treated with the same respect. It was one of the many differences between the Reagan and Carter White Houses.

  “And thank you for the briefing, Seer. Excellent as always. One thing though, a little more care with the grammar and punctuation in the briefing books would be a good thing.” The Seer winced at that. Often the only comment he’d had back from Carter on the briefing books was a supercilious typo correction. He grinned ruefully at the President who winked back. Reagan was beaming broadly as he made his way out.
He loved the Friday Follies.

  Married Quarters, McDill Air Force Base, Florida

  “Drink your milk Tommy.”

  “Aww, mom…”

  Master Sergeant Selma Hitchins-Yates tilted her head to one side, half closed her eyes and lifted one eyebrow. Thomas Yates, at the ripe age of ten, knew the signs of impending trouble and gulped down his glass of milk.

  “There, that wasn’t so bad was it?”

  “Mom, other kids get chocolate or strawberry flavor for their milk.”

  “Tommy, that stuff is loaded with sugar. It will make your teeth rot. You don’t like having your teeth drilled do you?”

  “No, but…”

  “There you are then. Now, school bus is due in five minutes. Have you got everything? Susie? You got everything you need?”

  “Yes, Mom.” Her two children chorused the answer together, knowing what was coming next.

  “Let’s see, shall we?” Selma picked up a clipboard hanging from a hook on the wall. “Morning checklist. Lunch?”

  “Check.” Another two-voice chorus.

  “Homework?”

  “Check.”

  She ran down the list, reading off each item in turn. General LeMay had been a great promoter of the check list system and Selma had found it worked just as well at home as it did on SAC’s bombers. Of course, it didn’t help much with marriages themselves. SAC was a brutal environment for married couples. Up to 70 percent of SAC marriages ended in divorce. The Hitchins-Yates family had been one of the lucky exceptions. Ten years, two children and still together. It probably helped that they were both serving SAC personnel so they both knew the problems first-hand. Selma was prepared to bet that the marriages that failed were between somebody inside and a partner outside.