Plan of Attack

from high altitude down to just a few hundred meters from the surface. There were actually three Backfires that had launched from their secret Siberian base, but after their last aerial refueling, the crews chose the best- operating aircraft to complete the mission.

Skirting the Bishkek radars, the Backfire bomber proceeded at low altitude across the vast southern Kazakh plains, staying below the coverage of air-defense radars in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Minutes later the bomber started a slight wings-level climb. At an altitude of one thousand meters, it began its attack.

The Tu-22M carried three large air-launched missiles called the Kh-31, one in the bomb bay and one on external hardpoints on the non-moving portion of each wing. Each six-hundred-kilogram missile had a ninety- kilogram high-explosive fragmentary warhead designed to blast apart lightweight structures like radar arrays and antennas with ease. After release, the missile shot ahead of the bomber using its small first-stage solid-rocket motor, then climbed rapidly through fifteen thousand meters’ altitude using its big second-stage motor. When the second-stage motor burned out, the motor casing became a ramjet combustion chamber, which automatically fired and quickly accelerated the missile through Mach 3. The Kh-31 initially used its inertial navigation system to steer toward its target, but it received position and velocity updates through its GLONASS satellite-navigation system, which greatly improved its accuracy to near-precision quality. It needed less than four minutes to fly the two hundred kilometers to its target. Once within thirty seconds of its target, it switched to a passive radar detector and homed directly in on a specific radar frequency.

One Kh-31 missile lost contact with its carrier aircraft and hit harmlessly somewhere in the central Uzbek deserts — but the other missiles continued their flight with devastating accuracy, destroying the air-defense radar sites at Tashkent and at Samarkand, a large city in southeastern Uzbekistan. With the Uzbek radars shut down, the Tu-22M proceeded south into Uzbekistan and set up an orbit, blanketing the area with electronic jamming signals and also monitoring the activities about to begin.

The second part of the operation had actually taken place nearly a half hour earlier. Orbiting over southern Siberia at fifteen thousand meters, a Tupolev-95MS “Bear” bomber, a long-range turboprop aircraft first designed in the 1940s, had released two eleven-meter-long missiles from wing pylons about twenty seconds apart. Code-named the Kh-90 “Karonka,” or “Crown,” it was one of the world’s most advanced land-attack missiles. The missiles’ first stage was a solid rocket motor, which accelerated the missile to almost Mach 2. As in the Kh-31s launched by the Backfire bomber, when the first-stage motor burned out, the rocket chamber became a ramjet engine. Air was compressed and accelerated inside the ramjet, and liquid rocket fuel was injected and burned. As the missile gained speed, air and fuel were squeezed and accelerated even more, until the missile soon was cruising at over eight times the speed of sound.

The missiles streaked across Siberia and Kazakhstan, climbing to twenty-five thousand meters’ altitude, then started a steep dive toward their target. Steered by signals from the Russian GLONASS, their accuracy was superb. At an altitude of ten thousand meters, each missile ejected two independently targeted 150-kilogram high-explosive warheads.

The CIA operations base next to the abandoned airfield outside Bukhara, Uzbekistan, consisted of only four buildings inside a ten-acre fenced compound — two aircraft hangars, each of which doubled as a storage facility, ammo dump, and training center; a natural-gas-fired power generator and well pumphouse; and a headquarters building, which doubled as a barracks. The warheads hit each structure dead on. The explosions were so powerful that the fuel and munitions inside the hangars did not even have a chance to explode.

They simply disappeared in a cloud of superheated gas.

2

Barksdale Air Force Base, Bossier City, Louisiana

Days later

What in hell do you mean, you don’t know where it came from?” Lieutenant General Terrill Samson, commander of Eighth Air Force, thundered. Terrill Samson was a truly imposing man, even when seated, and a few of the staff members arrayed around him in the headquarters battle-staff area jumped when he shouted, even though they were accustomed to his loud, frequent outbursts. “A Russian bomber completely wipes out a CIA field-operations base in Uzbekistan, and you’re telling me we still don’t know where it came from or what weapon it used, General McLanahan? It didn’t just pop up out of nowhere!”

“Sir, we’re working on it,” Patrick McLanahan said. He was speaking via secure videoconference from the Command and Operations Center of the Air Intelligence Agency at its headquarters in San Antonio, Texas. “The Nine-sixty-sixth should have that information shortly. We have almost constant surveillance on every Russian bomber base west of the Urals. So far every one of those bases’ normal inventory has been accounted for—”

“What about Engels’s bombers, General?” Major General Gary Houser asked.

“Sir, we still have no firm estimates on how many planes survived, how many damaged planes were reconstituted, or where any survivors were relocated,” Patrick responded. Engels Air Base in southwestern Russia was the largest bomber base in Russia and the headquarters of Aviatsiya Voyska Strategischeskovo Naznacheniya (A-VSN), or Strategic Aviation Force, Russia’s intercontinental-bomber command, composed of subsonic Tupolev-95 Bear bombers, supersonic Tupolev-160 “Blackjack” bombers, Ilyushin-78 “Midas” aerial-refueling tankers, and Tupolev-16 “Badger” tankers and electronic-warfare aircraft. “Our poststrike intelligence after the raid reported twelve possible Backfire survivors, plus another ten with only minor damage. The base itself is still not operational, but it may be usable, so it’s likely that any surviving bombers could have made it out.”

“Engels’s bombers, eh?” Samson muttered, shaking his head. “I should have known.” It was well known throughout the command — and most of the world — that Patrick McLanahan’s former unit, the Air Battle Force, had conducted a surprise bombing raid on Engels Air Base. During the conflict with Turkmenistan, Russia was about to initiate a massive bomber raid from Engels against government and Taliban troops threatening Russian bases and interests in that oil-rich country. Using his fleet of unmanned long-range bombers launched from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, Patrick had destroyed several Russian bombers on the ground at Engels, damaged several more, and severely damaged the base itself.

Although Patrick’s raid had halted the conflict in Turkmenistan and allowed United Nations peacekeepers to enter that country safely and establish a cease-fire, most of the U.S. government, the Pentagon, and the world had blamed Patrick McLanahan for the rising tensions between Russia and the United States. No one expected him still to be wearing an American military uniform, let alone a general’s star.

Least of all Lieutenant General Terrill Samson, Patrick’s new boss.

“We’ve tried to account for the survivors, through surveillance as well as through diplomatic channels, but have not been successful,” Patrick went on. “We should have an answer shortly as to where they came from. The Russians are bound by the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty to state exactly how many long-range bombers they have and their precise location; under the Open Skies Treaty, we have a right to verify that information ourselves. Russia can’t legally withhold that information. We will—”

“General McLanahan, thanks to your unsanctioned, wasteful, and wholly unnecessary attack on Engels, we will be lucky to get any cooperation from Russia on any aspect of the CFE or SALT agreements,” Samson interrupted. “You will make it your top priority to find out exactly where those bombers came from and what Russia’s current long-and medium-range strike capability is. I want that info on my desk in twenty-four — no, I want it in eight hours, in time for the next scheduled battle-staff meeting. Is that understood?”

“Perfectly, sir.” Patrick knew that was all his staff had been working on ever since U.S. Strategic Command alerted them of the attack — they would have the info ready by then.

“What do you know about the attack?” Samson asked heatedly.

“Reports from Uzbek air-traffic-control authorities in Tashkent have confirmed that the aircraft that crossed over from Russia was a Tupolev-22M bomber, call sign Mirny-203,” Patrick said. “Air-traffic controllers from Alma- Ata, Kazakhstan, reported the bomber to Tashkent but did not provide any flight-plan information. The aircraft was spotted about one hundred and seventy-five miles north of the Uzbek border by radar operators at Tashkent before the radars were knocked off the air and communications were disrupted.