She looked at him, looked at his eyes to read the seriousness of his words — and what she saw scared her. Howell was the former fighter pilot on this command crew. He’d been involved in strategic air defense for almost his entire career. He was always the stoic, unflappable Canuck — and if he thought this was a real emergency, he meant it. He also rarely called her by her rank, except if VIPs or commanding officers were in the Mountain — if he used her rank now, he was probably scared, too.
That warning from the U.S. Air Force was certainly weird. Normally intelligence data flowed directly from whatever source, usually Air Intelligence Center or sometimes directly from the U.S. Space Command, to NORAD. This time a warning had been issued by the chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force. This indicated some kind of turmoil in the Pentagon. That was usually very, very bad news. Someone had broken the chain of command, which usually resulted in confusion and chaos.
She heard through the grapevine that it was a flap in Air Intelligence Agency, involving its powerful commander and the new commander of one of its information-warfare wings, none other than Patrick McLanahan. That, Kearsage thought, explained a lot. McLanahan had the worst reputation of any general officer since Lieutenant General Brad Elliott. He was, simply, a flakeoid. He couldn’t be trusted. He’d obviously said or done something that got everyone at the Pentagon riled up — his specialty. Now they had to expend lots of time, energy, manpower, and resources proving how stupid the guy was.
Kearsage studied the map of North America. The lone F-16 and the tanker from Eielson would soon be in the last known area of the first F-16, and the E-3C AWACS and the two F-15s from Elmendorf would join up a few minutes later. Assuming there was a big outage of several North Warning System radars, their first priority would be to fill in those gaps.
She looked over at the list of available assets in Canada and was pleased to see that two NATO AWACS planes were based at Four Wing, Canadian Forces Cold Lake, Alberta, probably deployed there to support a MAPLE FLAG air-warfare exercise. “Let’s get an AWACS and a couple CF-18s airborne from Cold Lake moving north to cover that gap in the North Warning System,” she ordered.
“Roger that.” Howell picked up his telephone and hit the button that would connect him immediately to Canadian Air Defense Forces headquarters in North Bay, Ontario. The NORAD-tasked fighter units in Alaska and Canada were very accustomed to these sudden air-sovereignty missions — they would have those three planes launched in less than half an hour.
“MWC, I’m about to wake up the world,” Kearsage said seriously. “I need to know if we have an attack, an incident, or an anomaly. Give me your best guess.”
There was a slight hesitation before he responded, “Triple-C, MWC believes we do not have an attack. We may have sustained some sort of large-scale power outage or malfunction of a communications network, but without further investigation. I’m not prepared to say it was an enemy or terrorist attack on our radar sites.”
“Very well,” Kearsage said. The first rule of NORAD surveillance: When in doubt, report it. Even though it could be nothing more than a short circuit or a polar bear eating through a power cable — that happened all the time — the loss of those radars needed to be reported.
She flipped open her checklist, filled in some blanks with a grease pencil, used her authenticator documents to insert a date-time group, had Howell check it over, then picked up the telephone and dialed the Air Force Operations Support Center in Washington. When she was connected, she read from the script: “Monument, this is Anchor with a Priority Secret OPREP Three BEELINE report, serial number two-zero-zero-four-four-three. We have lost contact with three LRRs and five SRRs of the North Warning System, and we have lost contact with a single Foxtrot-sixteen assigned combat air patrol, reasons unknown. DSP reports brief unexplained infrared events with no tracks taking place near the radar sites. We are investigating further but do not believe that these are attacks against NORAD assets that would require a PINNACLE FRONT BURNER report.
“We have deployed additional air-defense and airborne-surveillance assets in the affected area, and we are investigating the radar and radio outages.” She ended the message with the date-time group and the proper authentication code. A BEELINE message was an alert notification to the U.S. Air Force only, letting them know that there was a problem and what NORAD was doing to fix it. It was one step below a PINNACLE FRONT BURNER report, which was a notification of an actual attack or deliberate action against NORAD.
Kearsage received an acknowledgment from the Air Force Operations Center — they were now responsible for channeling the report to the proper agencies. She would surely get a phone call in the next few minutes from the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon, asking for updates and clarification. “MWC, anything?” Kearsage asked after she received an acknowledgment that the report had been copied and understood.
“Negative,” came the response. “No further events. Village still reports negative contact with their LRRs and their F-16s, reason still unknown.”
“Roger, Triple-C copies.” Joanna sat back in her chair, wishing she could light up a cigarette. There was nothing else to do but wait and see what the troops in the field could find out next.
5
NORAD’s long-range early-warning radars at Point Hope and Scammon Bay couldn’t see them, and even RAPCON’s — Nome Radar Approach Control — precision approach-control radar didn’t spot them until they were well over Kotzebue Sound, heading away from the Seward Peninsula and into the forbidding Arctic wastelands of Alaska. The groundspeed readout for the target did indeed say “540”—540 knots, over 570 miles per hour — but the electrically charged atmosphere, magnetic anomalies, and terrain often confused and scrambled radar plots in Alaska.
Still, with a few sketchy reports of some kind of air-defense activity up in the northeast part of Alaska, reporting even likely radar anomalies was far better than making no report at all. The Nome Approach controller issued a “pending” contact report to Fairbanks Approach Control, with an estimated time of radar contact. At the same time, the RAPCON supervisor issued a similar report to the Alaska NORAD Region headquarters at Elmendorf Air Force Base near Anchorage. NORAD would in turn alert the short-range radar station at Clear Air Station in central Alaska to watch for the contact as well.
Except those manning the station would never get the chance to see it.
The activity wasn’t a radar anomaly or magnetic disturbance — it was a formation of two Russian Tupolev- 160 supersonic bombers, which had been flying nap-of-the-earth for the past hour, since well over the Chukchi Peninsula of eastern Siberia.
It originally started as a formation of four bombers, but one could not refuel and another suffered engine failure and had to abort the mission. Their route of flight took them not over Siberia but along the Bering Sea close to the commercial polar transoceanic flight routes, where their presence would not cause alarm until the flight approached the American Air Defense Identification Zone. By then the two remaining bombers — fully refueled and with weapon, flight, engine, navigation, and defensive systems all working perfectly — descended below radar coverage and drove eastward toward their objective. Flying at very low altitudes — sometimes just a few meters above the sea — the bombers successfully slipped through the gaps in the long-range NORAD radars along the western Alaskan coastline.
By the time the bombers were detected, it was too late…but even if they had been detected earlier, there were no fighters to intercept them and no surface-to-air missile systems to shoot them down. The two alert fighters at Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks had already been committed to the air patrol over northern Alaska with the E-3C AWACS radar plane; the four F-15C Eagle fighters being prepared for alert duties were still being armed and manned and wouldn’t be ready to respond to an alert call for several minutes. The bombers were completely unopposed as they headed east, into the heart of the Alaskan wilderness.
U. S. Marine Corps Sergeant Major Chris Wohl stuck his head in the door, letting light from the hallway spill across the bed inside the small room within. “Sir, you’re needed in the ready room,” he said loudly and without preamble.
