Plan of Attack

Patrick ignored the surprised stares of his office staff as he hurried into his office and slammed the door shut. He hung up his Class A uniform jacket on the coatrack behind his door, poured himself a cup of coffee, dumped it out, grabbed a bottle of water instead, and nearly squished it as he tried to open the cap. He finally flung himself onto his chair and was on the phone moments later.

David Luger picked up the secure phone and could barely wait for the encryption circuits to lock in before speaking. “Patrick—”

“Houser ignored my report,” Patrick said heatedly. “He’s not going to send in any recon personnel.”

“Patrick, listen—”

“Dave, I’ve never been so damned frustrated in my whole life,” Patrick moaned angrily. “Houser threw me out of his battle-staff meeting. He’s probably going to throw me out of the Nine-sixty-sixth, if not the entire Air Force….”

“Patrick, listen to me,” Dave said. “We’ve been studying the imagery from the NIRTSats today, and—”

“Were you able to move the top constellation?” Patrick asked. “We need better images of Yakutsk. I have a feeling that’s going to be the key. We should keep an eye on Bratsk and Aginskoye, too, but all the activity up in —”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Patrick, so just listen!” Dave interjected. “We moved the second constellation like you asked, and the orbit dropped down to around eighty-eight miles, and it’s only going to be aloft for another few hours, but we finally got some good shots of Yakutsk, and—”

“Good job. What did you—”

“I’m trying to tell you, Muck It looks like half the Russian air force is parked there all of a sudden,” Dave said. “We counted sixteen Tu-16 Blinder tankers and — get this—twenty-four Ilyushin-78 tankers. They only have about thirty in the whole fleet!”

“My God,” Patrick said. “Ninety percent of the Russian tanker fleet is on one base, in the middle of nowhere in Siberia! Something’s going on. What about—”

“I’m getting to that, too, Muck,” Luger said breathlessly. “We spotted twenty-four Blackjacks at Blagoveshchensk. We haven’t verified if they’re all different airframes, but they’re sitting there being loaded with some kind of weapons we haven’t identified yet — probably cruise missiles.”

“We’ve got to alert Air Force.”

“That’s not all, Patrick. We counted at least twenty Backfires out in the open at Bratsk, Novosibirsk, and Aginskoye — that’s at least twenty bombers at each base. They’re being loaded, too. And they have huge fuel-drop tanks on their external hardpoints — they’ve got to be five or ten thousand pounds apiece, maybe larger. I mean, all these planes appeared out of nowhere! Twenty-four hours ago there was nothing — today, boom, the entire Russian bomber fleet is being readied for takeoff. And we’re only counting the ones we can see — there might be twice that number in shelters or hangars or dispersed to other bases we’re not watching. Where in heck did they all come from?”

“I’m sure they’ve been there for a long time, Dave — we just weren’t looking for them until now,” Patrick said. “Did you report this to anyone else yet?”

“It just crossed my desk, Muck.”

“Can you transmit it to me?”

“It’s on the way.”

At that same moment, Patrick received a message on his computer with the image files. “I got them. Hold on.” Patrick punched in a telephone code for the battle-staff area. Colonel Griffin picked up the phone. “Tagger, I need to speak with General Houser right away. I’m e-mailing you photos just taken from the two NIRTSat constellations. The Russians are on the move.”

“I’ll try,” Griffin said, and he put the line on hold. But moments later he came back on: “The general said not now, Patrick. I’m looking at the images. I see lots of planes, Patrick, but these are raw images. We need analysis and verification before we can present it to the staff.”

“Tagger, these images were verified by the intel guys at Air Battle Force,” Patrick said. “The location and identification data have been verified. It’s real, Tagger. Houser has to look at them now.”

“Hold on.” But the wait was even shorter. “I’ll be right down, Patrick,” Griffin said. “The general wants me to go talk to you.”

“This can’t wait, Tagger. I’ll come up there.”

“Don’t, Patrick. Sit tight. I’ll be right there.” And he hung up.

Shit, Patrick thought, now I’ve succeeded in getting Trevor Griffin kicked out of the battle-staff meeting also. But this was too important to just sit on. “Houser won’t look at the imagery, Dave,” Patrick said to David Luger when he got him back on the line. He thought for a moment, then said, “I’m going to send a message to the secretary of defense’s office and let them know what’s happening. They’ll have to contact NORAD to activate the North Warning System, OTH-B, and put every fighter they can find on five-minute alert.” But at the same time as he said those words, he knew it was going to be an almost impossible job to convince anyone that the threat was great enough to warrant activating one of the pillars of the Cold War: ADC.

Years earlier the continent of North America was defended by the Air Defense Command, or ADC, which was a joint U.S.-Canadian integrated system of military and civilian ground-based radars and military jet-fighter interceptors that stood poised to stop an attack by enemy bombers or cruise missiles. Its parent organization, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, still existed, but “aerospace defense” had been replaced with “air sovereignty,” which generally dealt with detecting and interdicting drug smugglers. Since the late 1980s, the threat that Russian bombers would launch cruise missiles against the United States had all but disappeared, while drug smugglers had virtual free rein over America’s skies, so any resources set up to detect and defend against obsolete Russian bombers was shifted to detect, track, and interdict smugglers.

Along with squadrons of jet fighters stationed in Alaska, Canada, and the northern United States, the ADC used a series of long- and short-range unmanned radar sites to detect unidentified aircraft. Called the North Warning System, this system replaced the 1950s-era Defense Early Warning, or DEW Line, consisting of manned radars in Alaska and Canada. The ultimate radar system was deployed in the late 1980s: Called OTH-B, or Over- the-Horizon-Backscatter radar, it could detect aircraft as far away as three thousand miles by bouncing radar energy off the ionosphere. In ideal conditions, OTH-B radar operators in Colorado could see Soviet bombers taking off from their Siberian bases. Along with the radar net, there were fighter interceptors on round-the-clock alert, ready to hunt down and destroy any unidentified aircraft. At one time there had been a dozen bases and many dozens of fighters on twenty-four-hour alert.

But as the threat diminished, so did readiness. OTH-B shifted from a full-time system to part-time only, and finally it was placed in “ready” mode, meaning it could be reactivated if needed. The North Warning System radars shifted to part-time mode as well, to reduce annual maintenance and operating costs. Finally, one by one, the fighter-interceptor squadrons were inactivated, disarmed, reassigned to drug-interdiction duties, or placed on “generation recall” status, meaning that the fighters could be placed on the line only after long days of preparation. No one cared: The Russians had only a handful of nearly obsolete bombers that were capable of launching ineffective, inaccurate, and unreliable cruise missiles; the Russian deterrent lay in its arsenal of land-and sea- launched ballistic missiles; the United States had even reactivated and modernized its anti-ballistic-missile defense system.

The problem was soon obvious: Could the air-defense network in North America be reactivated quickly and effectively enough to stop a modern threat? Cranking up the Air Defense Command system was only practiced twice a year, and even so it seemed like a lost and arcane art. Patrick had no idea how to go about ordering an ADC reactivation — and he doubted if it could be effective enough to stop a massive Russian attack against the United States such as the one they were seeing develop right now.

“What do you want me to do, Muck?” David Luger asked.

“You need to get your surveillance and intelligence data over to Air Force as soon as possible,” Patrick replied, “because when I hit SECDEF with my concerns, they’re going to want proof.”

“Patrick…Muck, what in hell do you think is going on?” Luger asked. He sounded more scared than Patrick had heard him sound in a long time. Despite his traumatic recent history, David Luger was one of the most unflappable — many called it “emotionless”—persons he knew. Luger possessed a well-trained scientific mind. Everything could be explained, even forecast, by using the proper mixture of research, reasoning, and theory. He never worried about