Cauldron

by Larry Bond

  The chief sonarman, standing behind the two seated operators, replied. “Single transient, sir. Loud and broadband. Depression angle says it’s deep.”

  Conroy realized that the chief was letting him make his own evaluation. The description only fit one thing. “An explosion?”

  “I concur, Captain.” The chief shrugged. “No way to tell who fired or what hit what, if it hit anything at all. Damn far off, though.”

  Both operators sat up. One of them tapped his screen.

  “Same thing again, Chief. Two of them this time, closely spaced. Torpedoes, most likely.”

  Both Conroy and the chief studied the display, which showed two sudden, broad pulses of light. More explosions off in the distance. Somebody was dying out there. But who?

  They could only wait and listen and hope.

  Five minutes later, a new signal appeared on the sonar display. It was a coded sonar pulse, the kind sent out by a communications sonobuoy. Dropped by a friendly ASW aircraft, the transmission ordered all three SSNs to radio depth. It took several more minutes to carefully come up and signal they were in position.

  The SSBN hunt was over. A controlling P-3 Orion passed the word. A fourth Los Angeles-class boat, Louisville, hunter to their hounds, had just sent a Le Triomphant-class missile sub to the bottom. While Boston and her companions came in from one side of the French patrol area, Louisville had crept in from the other direction — almost drifting with the current more than using her single screw for propulsion.

  Once inside the patrol area, she had positioned herself along the SSBN’s most likely escape route.

  When the French boat moved to avoid Boston and its companions, it had become slightly more detectable itself. That was when it had fallen prey to Louisville.

  Only one of the first two torpedoes it fired had hit, but a second salvo finished the wounded boat. Sixteen missiles carrying ninety-six 150-kiloton nuclear warheads were lost to the French cause. So were 135 crewmen.

  The Orion’s brief report was followed by new orders. They were going hunting for the second French boomer reported at sea. Any celebration would have to wait until they returned to port. Damn Louisville’s luck, Conroy thought. Maybe he would get his chance for a kill next time.

  JUNE 26 — IRBM COMPLEX, PLATEAU D’ALBION, FRANCE

  The Plateau d’Albion lay east of the southern French city of Avignon, in the Haute-Provence. On one side of the plateau, the ground rose sharply, climbing to meet the first foothills of the Alps. To the west, it fell away into the vineyard-laced Rhone Valley.

  The plateau was home to the silos housing eighteen intermediate-range ballistic missiles — the land-based component of the French strategic nuclear forces. Organized in two squadrons of nine missiles, each S3 IRBM carried a single 1.2-megaton warhead and had a range of nearly 2,200 miles. One hit could turn a city the size of Moscow or London into a charred, radioactive ruin. Determined to preserve their nation’s strategic independence and status as a world power, successive French governments had spent billions of francs building, maintaining, and periodically upgrading its “force of last resort.”

  They spent hundreds of millions more protecting their investment from ground or air attack. Bunkers and minefields ringed the missile complex, manned by soldiers wearing the large midnight-blue berets of the 27th Mountain Division. Batteries of Roland and Improved Hawk surface-to-air missile launchers were deployed to provide a last-ditch defense against enemy air raids. But the IRBMs’ main protection came from the underground silos themselves — layer after layer of heavily reinforced concrete hardened against nuclear attack.

  BATTERY A, 5TH AIR DEFENSE REGIMENT

  Battery A’s electronics van was parked under camouflage netting a short distance away from its trailer-mounted target acquisition radar. Its crew had the van’s door open to catch the remnants of a gentle night breeze tinged with the aromatic smell of pine and eucalyptus. Three triple-rail Hawk launchers surrounded the van and radar trailer.

  “There they are again, sir,” the sergeant manning the SAM battery’s radar console announced with some reluctance. “The same bearing as before, but closer.”

  Captain Claude Jussey sighed and set the technical manual he’d been studying aside. By rights, the tall, lantern-jawed officer thought wearily, he should be in bed, not sitting inside this crowded van watching men watching blank radar screens. Unfortunately, ever since the Americans and British began bombing targets in northern France and Germany, periodic drills and false alarms had been cutting into his sleep time. He rolled his chair closer to the console. “Where?”

  “It’s gone again.” The sergeant sounded frustrated. He was a man who liked dealing in certainties and right now he seemed to be seeing ghosts. “I can’t seem to get a solid return, just faint sparkles that fade to nothing in the next second.”

  He sat up suddenly. “There! You see them?”

  Jussey blinked, not sure whether he had or not. The radar traces had flickered out so fast — literally from one second to the next. Was there a glitch in the target acquisition program? Or was there really something out there? Something able to absorb or deflect the radar pulses striking it? Would the Americans risk their precious stealth aircraft this far from England?

  Irritation turned to unease. He lifted the direct line link to the central Air Defense Command center.

  Outside the van, a bomb fell through the night sky. Seconds from impact, the Paveway III sensor rigged on the bomb’s nose “saw” the laser light illuminating its target and fed a series of guidance commands to fins at the back. The 2,000-pound GBU-24 veered, settling onto a slightly different course while still falling.

  “Command Center.”

  Jussey kept his eyes on the glowing radar display, noticing the faint sparkles again. “A Battery here, we have a possible air contact bearing…”

  The electronics van exploded — torn apart by a massive blast that threw fragments over a wide area and left the mangled wreck ablaze. Jussey, his sergeant, and the five other men inside died instantly.

  Within seconds, the 5th Air Defense Regiment’s other SAM batteries met the same fate — obliterated by a perfectly timed and perfectly aimed salvo of laser-guided bombs.

  Six miles away and six thousand feet above the plateau, twelve very odd-looking aircraft banked north. Black against a pitch-black sky, they were extremely hard to see with the naked eye. More important, the U.S. Air Force 45th Tactical Fighter Wing’s F-117A stealth fighters were practically invisible to enemy radar.

  Radar-absorbent materials and mesh screens over their engine intakes helped reduce each jet’s radar signature, but the real stealth secret lay in its strangely shaped fuselage and wings. Each F-117 was made up of a series of small flat surfaces, or facets, angled in different directions. Radar pulses striking each plane could only bounce back from those few sections aimed straight at the radar set itself. In flight, no facet would ever point toward a given radar for very long. So the aircraft would literally “appear and disappear” in seconds — confusing search radar crews and making it almost impossible for SAM and antiaircraft gun fire control sets to lock on.

  In 1991 America’s stealth technology had proved itself in the skies over Iraq. Now, seven years later, it was proving itself over France.

  With their mission accomplished, the twelve F-117As headed home for a base in southern England. Behind them, the door to the Plateau d’Albion missile complex lay wide open and unguarded.

  RINGMASTER, CIRCUS STRIKE, OVER FRANCE

  If the men aboard the big, lumbering E-3 Sentry AWACS plane were nervous about being so far inside French airspace, they were hiding it well, Brigadier General Robert Keller decided. The voices coming through his headphones were remarkably steady.

  He looked up from the radar repeater display at his command station. Rows of equipment consoles crammed the converted 707’s interior, each manned by a U.S. Air Force officer or enlisted man. From time to time, their hands moved, adjusting settings or fine
-tuning controls, but mostly the operators stayed still — keeping their eyes glued to the glowing displays in front of them. All told, they were responsible for coordinating the movements of more than eighty U.S. aircraft.

  One of his strike controllers came over the intercom circuit. “Lion Tamer exiting the target area. The SAMs are down.”

  Here we go, Keller thought, tensing. The stealth fighters had done their work. Now it was up to the rest of his strike force to finish the job. Reports began pouring over the intercom in a rapid, precise sequence:

  “SpaceCom confirms Keyhole will be up in five.” The general nodded to himself. One of America’s KH-11 spy satellites would be coming over the target area horizon in five minutes — ready to transmit high-resolution pictures back to the photo interpreters in Washington. For this strike, realtime BDA, bomb damage assessment, was critical. They couldn’t afford to leave any undamaged missiles behind.

  “Pile Driver, Strongman, High Wire, and Freak Show are all in position.” The strike’s attack aircraft, fighter escorts, SIGINT, and jammer support planes were ready, Keller clicked the transmit button on his throat mike. “All Circus units, this is Ringmaster. Initiate attack!”

  The cluster of blips on the radar display representing his strike force surged ahead. The general watched carefully, alert for any last-second hitch or unexpected enemy move. But his eyes kept straying to the second hand sweeping around a clock mounted next to the display. Since no one knew how the French National Command Authority would react to the threatened destruction of its precious missile force, no one could rule out a French decision to launch their nuclear missiles under attack.

  If Paris gave its commanders the order to fire, Keller’s planes would have just two hundred seconds to destroy the silos before the first S3 IRBMs roared aloft.

  PILE DRIVER LEADER, OVER THE PLATEAU D’ALBION

  Colonel Neil Campos watched the darkened landscape roll away beneath his F-15E Strike Eagle. The chain of fires marking destroyed French Hawk batteries flashed past and vanished astern. “Got anything yet, Mac?”

  His backseater, Jeff McRae, spoke up. “Nope. But the computer says we’re still on course.”

  The thirty-six F-15Es under the colonel’s command were converging on the French IRBM complex at high speed — racing through a radar and radio jamming corridor created by two EF-111 electronic warfare aircraft. Two squadrons of F-16s followed behind, ready to jump any French fighters that tried to interfere.

  The Strike Eagles carried drop tanks on their wing hard-points and two LANTIRN infrared pods on special hard-points — one for targeting, the other for navigation. Sparrow radar-guided missiles mounted next to their drop tanks provided air-to-air combat capability. Each of the two-seater attack aircraft also carried one massive GBU-28 laser-guided bomb on its centerline pylon.

  The 4,700-pound GBU-28 was an extraordinarily powerful weapon developed under extraordinary circumstances. During Desert Storm, several of the first U.S. attacks on Baghdad’s hardened command and control bunkers failed when 2,000-pound bombs bounced off or failed to pierce multiple layers of reinforced concrete. Frantic requests for more potent air ordnance resulted in the GBU-28 penetrator, commonly called Deep Throat. Designed, built, and shipped to the combat zone in seventy-two hours, the weapon was a miracle of ingenuity and improvisation.

  The Deep Throat was also as ugly as hell. To manufacture it, U.S. arms experts had snagged surplus eight-inch gun barrels, machined them out, and buried them upright in the ground. Then bucket gangs of men wearing protective suits took turns pouring molten explosive right into the open barrels. Once the explosives cooled, specialists fitted a delay fuse and laser guidance system to the front and control fins to the back. The whole result looked very much like a giant, homemade pipe bomb.

  But it was incredibly effective. When dropped on Iraqi targets, the GBU-28 had vividly demonstrated that it could punch through more than twenty-two feet of reinforced concrete or more than one hundred feet of packed earth before exploding. Now America’s war planners were betting the same weapons could rip open the French missile silos.

  Campos hoped they were right. The penalties for failure were too terrible to contemplate.

  The colonel checked one last time, making sure his wingman was still back there — ready to attack immediately after he and McRae rolled off the target. The Eagles were attacking in pairs. Their orders were clear: even if the first bomb scores what looks like a solid hit, dump the second Deep Throat in right after it. When attacking heavily protected weapons that could kill millions if they got off the ground, air force doctrine was explicit — bounce the rubble.

  “Bingo!” McRae had spotted their assigned missile silo several miles ahead and several thousand feet below!

  A new steering cue appeared on the F-15E’s HUD.

  In the Strike Eagle’s backseat, McRae stared hard at the LANTIRN display. Despite the darkness, the surrounding barbed-wire fence and an adjacent radio mast showed up clearly in infrared. He looked for the flat concrete slab that covered the silo itself and found it. His hand settled on the laser designator, switched it on, and held the beam right in the middle of the slab. “Anytime you’re ready, Neil.”

  Campos nosed over into a gentle dive and held the Strike Eagle on course so he wouldn’t pull the laser off target. Sure that he had the right parameters, he thumbed the weapon release on his stick.

  The GBU-28 dropped away from the F-15 and fell toward the French missile silo.

  SILO 5, 1ST SQUADRON, FRENCH STRATEGIC MISSILE FORCE

  Guided by McRae’s laser, the bomb slammed nose-first into the thick silo cover. Still moving at more than six hundred miles an hour, it smashed through layers of steel and concrete and exploded inside the silo itself — just meters away from the forty-five-foot-tall S3 ballistic missile.

  White-hot fragments shattered the delicate mechanism of the missile’s nuclear warhead, turning the deadly device into useless junk. Others ruptured the missile casing and plowed into tons of packed-solid fuel propellant.

  The propellant ignited.

  The whole concrete cover bulged and then blew off — tossed to one side by what looked like the world’s biggest Roman candle. A blinding plume of fire and flaming gas rocketed hundreds of meters into the air, turning night into day across the Plateau d’Albion.

  JOINT DEFENSE SPACE COMMUNICATIONS FACILITY, WOOMERA AIR STATION, AUSTRALIA

  The picture being transmitted from a point 22,300 miles above the earth’s equator showed a darkened globe fringed with sunlight spilling along its eastern horizon.

  For more than twenty years, data from American DSP early warning satellites in geosynchronous orbit over the Indian Ocean had been routinely processed at the Woomera facility, code-named Casino, before being transmitted to the United States. But nothing about this morning was routine for the air force officers crowding around the monitoring station. They were watching for the first pulses of light that would signal French missiles roaring up and out of their silos.

  Even though the Circus strike had been timed so that one of the two operational G-PALS constellations was over northern Europe, no one knew how effective the system would be against a real missile attack. And no one really wanted to find out. The space-based defense system’s Brilliant Pebbles had proved they could knock down satellites following predictable orbits. Detecting and intercepting ballistic missiles arcing up from the atmosphere was likely to prove considerably more difficult.

  Bright white lights blossomed suddenly across a small section of southern France.

  One of the watching officers, a colonel, turned ashen. “Flash message to the NCA! Possible IRBM launches from the Albion complex!”

  Another man, this one monitoring satellite-relayed radio transmissions from the strike controller, interrupted him. “Negative! Negative! Ringmaster radar shows no missile tracks! Repeat, no missile tracks! Those plumes are secondary explosions.”

  Some of the men closest to the screen whistled so
ftly in admiration. All of the eighteen white-hot tongues of fire bathing the Haute-Provence in an eerie glow had appeared within seconds of each other. General Keller’s F-15 crews had achieved an almost perfect time-on-target attack.

  France no longer possessed a land-based strategic nuclear deterrent.

  JUTERBOG AIR BASE, GERMANY

  Pairs of Mirage F1Es soared off the long, concrete runway, climbing fast into the gray, predawn sky. In itself there was nothing unusual about that. The interceptors and fighter-bombers based at Juterbog had been flying sorties over the Polish front since the war began. But these planes were flying west — back to France.

  Colonel Manfred Witz stood near the windows of the base control tower with his hands on hips and an angry expression on his face. The small, spare Luftwaffe officer scowled down at the frantic scene unfolding on his flight line.

  French ground crewmen in greasy coveralls scurried back and forth between aircraft shelters, ordnance bunkers, and maintenance workshops. They were loading gear aboard a long line of canvas-sided trucks guarded by French military police. Other crews were mustering beside a camouflaged C-130 Hercules transport.

  Despite heated German protests, the French Air Force squadron at Juterbog was pulling out — under orders from Paris. Witz knew they weren’t the only ones going. He’d seen message traffic recalling at least two other air units and several SAM batteries. With U.S. and British planes apparently roving over France at will, the French were desperately trying to strengthen their own air defenses.

  The colonel grimaced. Transferring so many aircraft away from the Polish front was madness — especially right now. Caught between their own combat losses and the steady tide of U.S. reinforcements flying into Poland, the Luftwaffe and the French Air Force were already increasingly unable to control the air over the battlefield. This latest move would only make the situation worse.

  He turned abruptly and stomped away from the window. The tower’s junior officers and enlisted personnel saw him coming and hastily bent to their work. When the colonel was in one of his rages, it was safest to stay out of his way.