“I was in the break room when it happened.” Tamara tapped the keyboard. Delta Crew had been due to relieve Charlie at midnight because they were the next up in the five-crew rotation. Now, however, both teams were at work because of missing personnel. She shrugged. “I always get here early. Gives me time to catch up on my reading and some quiet time for myself. I don’t like to be in my apartment when my roommate gets home at night. Gets way too weird sometimes.”
“She had a date?”
Tamara smiled a little. “Definitely. New guy she met at the hospital. Tiffany goes too fast in her relationships, then they blow up—usually because she gets bored—and she wonders what happened.”
“I thought you were going to move out.”
“I thought about it, but I can’t. She’s like a little sister. After eight months of living with her, I feel kind of responsible for her.”
Jim nodded. While they’d been paired for his training, he’d learned quite a bit about Tamara. She was the oldest of nine children, seven of them girls, and she had definite firstborn characteristics. She still sent money back home to her family to help pay the college tuition of her younger siblings. The Air Force had taken care of Tamara’s college in exchange for compensatory time in service. Her generosity with her family members had resulted in her string of strange roommates, and her caregiver nature had kept them around. Tiffany was Tamara’s latest “lost cause.” Tamara was also a Big Sister, and if anyone in the complex had a benefit or fund-raiser going on, Tamara was known as one of the softest touches on the crews.
“So,” Jim said, “do you think it will happen?” He stared at the airfields, watching the thermographic displays that showed the crews readying the B-52H Stratofortresses at the Air Logistics Center at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. Other bases around the United States were making the same preparations with their fleets.
“What?” Tamara clicked the trackball, capturing more images. “War?”
Jim’s mouth dried. He didn’t know how they could sit there and discuss the subject as calmly as though they were placing a breakfast order. “Yeah. That.”
Tamara hesitated. “I don’t know.” She glanced at her monitor, turning her head just enough to let Jim know she was checking the reflection of Colonel Dan Hatton, the Delta Crew commander who had stepped in to replace the missing Colonel Morris Turner.
Colonel Hatton, an American, was one of the most senior officers at the complex. He stood quietly, granite-jawed with his hands clasped behind his back. During his time at Cheyenne Mountain, Jim was certain Colonel Hatton had seen plenty of DEFCON 3s come.
And go, Jim told himself quietly. All those other DEFCON 3s had come and gone. Otherwise, a nuclear war would have broken out.
The bases Jim watched were strategic. The B-52s were the world’s best long-range heavy bombers. Armed to the teeth, a B-52 carried seventy thousand pounds of mixed ordnance, including bombs, mines, and missiles. Air-launched cruise missiles, Harpoon antiship, and Have Nap missiles were standard fare for the big bombers.
The B-52 bomber originally debuted in 1955 as a primary factor in the Cold War. Armed with nuclear weapons, the planes were tasked to fly into Soviet airspace and take out Moscow and other key Russian cities with nuclear weapons. Back in those days, the nukes had still been referred to as atom bombs. Today that arsenal was referred to as weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs. The targets essentially remained the same: deep within Russia or China.
Two B-52Hs—the current updated model with new avionics, defense systems, data-link communications, and precision-guided weapons capabilities—could patrol 140,000 square miles of ocean surface within two hours. Capable of flying at 50,000 feet and at low levels, the B-52 was a dreadnought of air-strike capability. Without being refueled in the air, a Stratofortress had a range of 8,800 miles.
In actuality, the B-52 never had to leave the sky or a threatening posture because the Stratofortress could be refueled in midair. During the Gulf War, the longest strike mission in the aircraft’s history was launched by a group of B-52s that took off from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, flew to Iraq and took out targets, then returned to the home base thirty-five hours later. Only the ability of the crew to function without succumbing to fatigue limited the B-52’s performance.
“The Russians have had some disappearances,” Jim said, cycling through his list of targets. “I’ve seen some of the reports. The CIA is feeding information to us from their agents on the ground there.”
“I know. That’s why the Russian military is in motion.”
“Saber rattling?” God, Jim prayed, just let it be saber rattling. Never before had he felt so vulnerable. Before he’d gotten the Cheyenne Mountain posting, he’d known when international events had turned tense, but he’d never had as great an access to how things were actually shaping up. As a military man, he’d always known that the world hovered daily on the brink of destruction. But settled in at a console in the Cheyenne Mountain complex, he had the distinct experience of being part of the process.
“I don’t think so.” Tamara’s eyes flicked from one monitor to the other. “The Russians are scared.”
“Scared? Of what?”
“You know what happened in Israel in January of last year.”
“When the Russian fighters got knocked from the air by that freak meteor storm.”
“Meteor storm?” Tamara smiled with polite disdain. “Is that what you think happened?”
“That seems to be the best answer.”
“Does it? A freak meteor storm that didn’t leave any meteors behind?”
“Most people who don’t know better just assumed that the destruction of the Russian jets was because the equipment they used was inferior.”
“But you don’t think that?”
“No way. If those fighters had been inferior, they wouldn’t have made the hop from Russia. And for all of them to decide to self-destruct more or less at the same time?” Jim shook
