making a mental note. STRATEGIC AIR COMMAND HEADQUARTERS OFFUTT AIR FORCE BASE, NEAR OMAHA, NEBRASKA WEDNESDAY, 21 SEPTEMBER 1994, 1425 HOURS LOCAL neral Larry T. Tyler, commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command, was getting ready to make his first serve of the tennis match between members of the headquarters staff when the beeper on his portable radio went off. But, like a baseball pitcher halfway into his windup, he completed the serve and managed to hit his Reserve Forces Advisor, Colonel Hartmann, in the left leg. Hartmann was distracted and didn’t expect his boss to finish his serve. “Cheap shot, General, ” Hartmann shouted. Tyler raised his racket to offer an apology to Hartmann, who politely waved it off, then trotted over to the bench, where his radio was sitting. Tyler’s driver, a young buck sergeant named Meers, heard the beeper and immediately started up the General’s staff car, which was waiting just a few dozen yards away. In Tyler’s footsteps was his doubles partner, the former commander of Pacific Air Force’s Philippine-based Thirteenth Air Force, Major General Richard “Rat Killer” Stone, who was to become Tyler’s Deputy Chief of Staff of Pacific Operations in a few weeks. It had been said that CINCSAC-the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command-was a prisoner of his job, and to a certain extent it was true-the radio, the car, and the driver were his constant companions. But the fifty-six- year-old ex-Notre Dame football quarterback was determined not to let the awesome responsibility of his position disrupt his lifeand that responsibility was truly awesome. Tyler was in charge of the United States’ smaller but still potent nuclear combat force of ninety B- lB Excalibur bombers, two hundred B-52G and H-model Stratofortress bombers, ten B-2A Black Knight stealth bombers, six hundred Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles, one hundred railgarrison Peacekeeper ICMBs, fifty MGM-134A Mustang road-mobile ICBMs, eight hundred AGM-129A advanced cruise missiles, and one thousand AGM-131A Short-Range Attack Missiles. In addition he commanded several hundred aerial refueling tankers, strategic reconnaissance aircraft, airborne command posts, and communications aircraft, and a total of about eighty thousand men and women, civilians as well as military, all around the globe-and his job was to stay within momentsnotice contact with each and every one of his sixty active and reserve units at all times. Although he was at the very pinnacle of his Air Force career, he was determined not to get jabbed in the ass by its sharp point. As Tyler made his way to the bench where his radio sat, he noticed the amber rotating lights at the street intersection nearby-the SAC command post was recalling the alert crews, and the amber warning lights told other drivers to be aware of alert crews heading toward the flight line. Offutt Air Force Base had an alert force of four KC-135 aerial refueling tankers that would prepare for takeoff to support airborne command post aircraft at Offutt, as well as other strike and communications aircraft. The alert crews were tested regularly to make sure their response time was always within limits. But Tyler knew the schedule of all alert crew exercises, especially for the E-4 and EC- 135 aircraft-if enemy warheads were inbound, Tyler himself would transfer his flag of command and take an EC 135 airborne-and this wasn’t a scheduled exercise. His pace quickened as he grabbed for the radio; his tennis partners sensed his sudden anxiety, saw the rotating lights, and immediately made their way to their staff cars as well. With Stone standing a discreet distance away-he had a Top Secret security clearance but was not yet recertified for the 510P, or Strategic Integrated Operations Plan, after losing his command in the PhilippinesTyler keyed the mike to turn off the beeper and spoke: “Alpha, go ahead.”
“Colonel Dunigan, Command Center, sir, ” came the voice of his command center’s duty senior controller, Colonel Audrey Dunigan. Dunigan was the first woman senior controller, rising through the ranks from KC-135 tanker pilot all the way to a Headquarters senior-controller slot. Dunigan was now the senior controller of the busiest shift in the Command Center, in direct communication with the Pentagon and all the SAC’s military forces around the globe, and she seemed to take charge of the place like no one else before her. “Zero-Tango in ten minutes. Command Center out.”
“Alpha copies. Out, ” Tyler replied. Turning to Stone, he said, “Let’s go, Rat Killer. In my car. We’ll have a little impromptu on-the-job training.” He dropped his racket on the bench and loped toward his waiting sedan, not even bothering to make apologies to his staff-whom he knew would be right behind him anyway. Stone piled into the front seat beside Tyler’s driver and they roared off. “We got a Zero-Tango notification, ” Tyler told Stone. “You should be familiar with that: notification by NCA or Space Command directly, teleconference of the NCA, JCS, specified and unified commanders, all that stuff.”
“I’ve only been in one, ” Stone replied, “and I was the one who called it. Just before the Philippine elections last year, Manila was a war zone. I thought Clark was going to be overrun. I had to kick General Collier at PACAF in the butt to do something. I raised a ruckus that obviously went right to CINCPAC, but he finally made the call and we got the support we needed.”
“I remember that, ” Tyler said. “From what I read in the messages, Rat, Clark could have looked like the American em bassy in Tehran in ‘79. Landing that Marine Expeditionary Unit on Luzon may have seemed like overkill to most of the Pentagon and the press, but it defused the situation perfectly.” “Sure it did, ” Stone added dryly. “And I got shit-canned for even suggesting it.”
“Best thing that could have happened to you was getting bumped out of Pacific Air Forces and coming to work at SAC, Rat, ” Tyler said. “You know as well as I do that everyone will remember the last commander of Clark Air Force Base. Wherever you went in PACAF, that stigma would have followed you. It would have hurt your chances for promotion-I know it sounds shitty, but shit happens. Here at SAC, I get a topnotch expert in the Pacific Theater and maritime warfare, and you get a fair shot at your third star.” A coded message was being read over the radio, and Tyler squelched it out. Stone said, “You’re not going to monitor the alert network?”
“The messages are for the crews, not for me, ” Tyler replied. “When I try to second-guess those messages, I give myself ulcers. Now I try to relax, think about what I need to do, and think about what I should be hearing when I get to the Battle Staff area. “And the whole staff gets notified and called in?”
“Yep, ” Tyler replied, hanging on to the seat back as Meers negotiated a tight turn, switching on the siren to clear some traffic out of an intersection. “At this time of day it’s no problem. When we get one at two in the morning, it can get real hairy.”
“How often do you get these notifications?”
“Not very often lately, ” Tyler admitted. “A lot of the notifications can be expected-the riots in Lithuania just before their independence, the SCUD missile attacks during DESERT STORM, the assassination in Iraq, shit like that. You can read the evening paper and pretty much anticipate that a Zero-Tango was going to be called. But things just aren’t all that critical in the real world these days.” They were approaching SAC Headquarters, a low, generally unimpressive building in the center of the base. The building was unimpressive because only three stories were above ground-there were five more stories underneath. Stone could see the Minuteman I missile out in front of the building, a lone dedication to the thousands of SAC crew members who spent as much as a third of their careers on twenty-four-hour alert, sitting near their planes, in underground missile-launch complexes, or in windowless command posts, ready to respond in case deterrence failed-in case they were called on to fight World War III. He also saw the weeping willow on the lawn in front of the headquarters building, and the sight struck Richard Stone as oddly ironic. Fifty feet under that lone weeping willow, men and women were ready, at the direction of the President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, and the man in the car with him, to unleash thousands of megatons of explosive power all across the planet with uncanny precision. The location of the willow, Stone realized, was even a little absurd-several nations probably had their thermonuclear weapons aimed at that precise spot, ready to knock out the two-thirds of America’s nuclear forces controlled from this one location. No wonder Tyler turned off his radio, Stone thought. Even in these days of relative stability and peace, the thought of being flattened and vaporized by the first incoming warheads was enough to drive a guy crazy. “In ten, Sergeant Meers, ” Tyler told his driver. “Got it, sir.” “Keep your badge in sight and follow me in, Rat, ” Tyler told Stone. “We might have to put you in the ‘press box, ‘ but you’re certainly cleared inside the Command Post. It should be fun, whatever we got going here.” Stone blinked at the four-star general. “General, you mean you don’t know what’s happening?” A grim-faced expression from Tyler gave Stone his answer. At the outer gate to the parking lot / security perimeter around SAC Headquarters, a security guard had his M-16 rifle in one hand, and with the other hand he held up four fingers. Meers flashed the guard five fingers, then one finger, and the guard let him through. If Meers had added wrong and flashed the wrong number-he had to add the right amount of fingers to the guard’s fingers to equal ten, the security number that Dunigan had relayed to Tyler in the notification message and the one that she would have relayed to the gate guardsthey would probably have had their tires shot out by two or three well-trained guards, and their noses would be pinned to the pavement a few seconds later. They had to pass through a second gate before reaching the building, and this time the guard was kind enough to flash eight fingers so Meers had to raise only two fingers in response. Meers stopped the car just outside an enclosed doorway, guarded by a single security policeman. Tyler and Stone ran past him, not bothering to return his salute, and Tyler punched in the code to the Cypher-Lock beside the steel door. The door buzzed, and Tyler yanked the heavy steel
