“General, that’s
“But, sir…”
“Are you not hearing me, General? Don’t you get it? There’s no government in Turkmenistan anymore, Patrick — that’s been taken over by the Russians! Their army was led either by Russians or Taliban fighters — and now the Russians have executed their president. It won’t help your argument for the president, the Congress, or the American people to learn that the Taliban are now in charge of their military.”
Patrick fell silent. He knew there was no use in arguing any longer.
“Get your guys out of there, and do everything you need to do to protect Hershel’s return.”
“Yes, sir,” Patrick replied.
“Again, sorry about your tilt-jet crew, Patrick. The president and I will send our condolences to the families.”
“Thank you, sir.” Goff terminated the connection. Patrick threw his headset on his console desk and leaned back in frustration.
“Hal has redeployed his guys around Charjew, waiting on the Russian airborne. He does not have permission to open fire yet,” David Luger, seated in the vice commander’s seat next to Patrick, said after a few moments’ silence. “It’s too hot to send in any special-ops guys there, if you’re thinking about an exfiltration, but they can hop on out of there pretty easily. Once they’re north of the Amu Darya River, they’re fairly safe — it’s a clear shot to the Uzbek border.”
Patrick was silent for several more long moments. He then pressed some buttons on his keyboard, calling up status reports on all of the men and women, aircraft, satellites, and weapons under his command. Several minutes later he put his headset back on. “Rebecca? Daren?”
“Go ahead, sir,” Rebecca Furness responded. “We’re both up.”
“I hope you two have had your crew rest.”
“Oh, shit — I don’t like the sound of that,” Rebecca responded.
“I’m in!” Daren Mace shouted happily. “What do you want destroyed, sir, and when?”
Kudrin was the commander of the organization that held operational control of the Russian Federation’s heavy-bomber and support regiments west of the Ural Mountains: Tu-160 and Tu-22M bomber regiments and an Ilyushin-78 air-refueling regiment at Engels Air Base; one Tu-22M bomber regiment at Belaja Air Base near Kirov; one Tu-22M and one Tu-95 “Bear” bomber regiment at Razan Air Base southeast of Moscow; and one Tu-95 bomber regiment at Mozdok Air Base in Chechnya. He had planned this raid on Charjew in record time, launched a large bomber force with minimal preparation and briefings, and had been wildly successful. Now he was ramping up his entire division at Engels, preparing to surge his bomber forces full speed to destroy any opposition in Turkmenistan.
“No fighters up there?” General Anatoliy Gryzlov asked. He was speaking with Kudrin via secure satellite link from the command center in the underground fortress at Sivkovo, southwest of Moscow, built only recently to replace the command center at Domededovo, which had been destroyed in a clash between Russian and Lithuanian bombers several years earlier. “Not even surveillance radar?”
“Not a squeak, sir,” Kudrin replied. “All of the sorties are back, and not one of them was highlighted — not even search radars. The only radars up at all were from units controlled by our ground forces in Mary.”
“Did the fighters keep up with you?”
“We had no problem with our fighter escorts,” Kudrin replied. “We took one squadron from the One-eighty- sixth Fighter Regiment at Astrakhan all the way to the launch point, but they were bored waiting for something to happen.”
“Any trouble from Baku radar?”
“We were never within their airspace, sir. We stayed out over western Kazakhstan and west of the Aral Sea, then a straight shot across Turkmenistan to Charjew. No radar coverage in that area at all. We didn’t need electronic jammers.”
“What support do you need for the follow-on attacks, General?”
“Only one: more fighter protection for Engels Air Base, sir,” Kudrin said. “I’d like at least another air-defense regiment in the area, preferably using the civil airfield at Saratov. Engels is definitely full now: The second strike team will be over Charjew in about two hours, and I’ve got a third team ready to launch in fifteen minutes, just before the first strike team lands at Engels. We’ve got over one hundred heavy bombers flying out of here now every ten hours.”
“All of your bombers are launching out of Engels?” Gryzlov asked. “Isn’t that risky? If the Americans attack, won’t that disrupt all your attack plans?”
“The Tu-22Ms already require one prestrike and one poststrike refueling launching out of Engels, sir,” Kudrin replied. “If they launched out of Ryazan or Belaya, we’d need to give them an extra prestrike refueling. Coordinating all those launch and rendezvous times became too time-consuming and cumbersome. Engels has plenty of fuel and weapons — all they needed were the airframes.”
“General, I didn’t put you in charge so you could cut corners and make life less time-consuming and cumbersome for yourself,” Gryzlov said. He didn’t want to sound too angry — Kudrin was one of his most experienced air force commanders — but this plan didn’t sound right at all. He had a very bad feeling about this. “If you need more tankers and more mission planners, ask for them. I don’t want to overload Engels’s resources, and I sure as hell don’t want all our bombers knocked out by one attack on one base.”
“Yes, sir.” Gryzlov heard a frantic passing and rustling of papers, then, “In that case, I’d like to gain the tankers and fighters from the Eight-fortieth Fighter Regiment at Lipeck and the Ninetieth Fighter Regiment at Morozovsk,” Kudrin went on. “I’ll deploy the Eight-fortieth to Morozovsk, and we can set up another air-refueling anchor near Volgograd for the Tu-22Ms coming from Belaya and Ryazan. The fighters can use the refueling anchor as well.”
“Now you’re saying what I want to hear, General,” Gryzlov said. Kudrin worried too much about the wrong things sometimes — but usually all he needed was a little push in the right direction and he was back in step. “Your request for those units is approved — you’ll have authorization to deploy those regiments immediately. You’re doing good work out there. Let me know if you need anything else.” There was no reply, just the clicking and beeping of digital static. Oh, well, Gryzlov thought, Kudrin wasn’t much of a chitchatter….
Kudrin had hung up the phone in a hurry because, at that moment, he received the first warning that his base was under air attack.
“Search radar, SA-10, twelve o’clock, forty miles,” Daren Mace reported. “Coming quickly into detection range. Let’s step it on down, Rebecca.”
Rebecca pressed the command button on the control stick of her EB-1C Vampire bomber and spoke: “Terflew clearance plane one hundred feet.” The Terflew, or Terrain Following, system commanded the autopilot to fly lower until the aircraft maintained at just one hundred feet aboveground — less than a wingspan’s distance away. “Clearance plane set. How are we doing?”
“Shit, that SA-10 is going to nail us,” Daren said. The terrain in this area was completely and utterly flat, with only a slight rise north of the Volga River. Daren hit his command button. “Launch two TALDs.”
“Still tracking us,” Daren said. “It’s got us and the TALDs together. Our trackbreakers can’t shake it.”
“Hang on,” Rebecca said. “Terflew off.” She jammed the throttles to full afterburner and hauled back on the
