Air Force Colonel Hal Briggs was instantly awake — a trait that, although it served him well as a forward combat air controller and chief of security at HAWC, was irritating because he knew that now that he was awake, it would be nearly impossible for him to go back to sleep. He glanced at the glowing red numerals on his bedside alarm clock and groaned theatrically. “Top, I just got to bed five friggin’ hours ago. What the hell is—?”
“Sir, you’re
Hal knew that Chris Wohl wouldn’t awaken his boss if it weren’t pretty damned important — usually. He quickly dressed in pixelated Arctic battle dress uniform, cold-weather boots and gloves, wool balaclava, and a parka, and headed to his unit’s ready room.
Shemya Island was only six square miles in area, the largest of the Semichi Group of volcanic islands in the western Aleutian Island chain. Much closer to Russia than to Anchorage, the Aleutians were barely noticed before 1940; Russian blue foxes far outnumbered humans along almost the entire chain. But the islands’ strategic location did not go unnoticed at the start of World War II. The Japanese invaded them in 1942, occupying Adak Island and attacking Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island. If the Aleutians could be captured and held, the Japanese could control the entire North Pacific and threaten all of North America.
Admiral Chester Nimitz ordered the construction of an airfield on Shemya in 1943 to enable the staging of air raids on Japanese positions on Adak and Kiska Islands; Shemya was chosen because it was relatively flat and was not bothered as much by fog as were most of the other Aleutians. By 1945 Shemya housed over eleven hundred soldiers, seamen, and airmen, plus a fleet of B-24 bombers and P-51 fighters. Its tremendous strategic importance as the guardian of America’s northern flank was in direct inverse proportion to the level of morale of its troops, who endured years of stark isolation, lack of resources, the worst living conditions of any base in the American military, no promotions, and severe psychological depression. It was without a doubt America’s version of a Soviet-style gulag.
After the end of the Korean War, Shemya’s importance steadily declined, as radar and eventually satellites took over the important job of watching the Arctic skies for any signs of attackers or intruders. At the end of the Cold War, with the Russian threat all but eliminated, the Air Force station was closed and put into caretaker status, with just a handful of civilian technicians on hand to service the massive COBRA DANE ballistic-missile tracking radar, nicknamed “Big Alice,” and other intelligence-gathering systems. The island became a massive dumping ground for all of the Aleutians, since it was far easier to dump even expensive equipment than it was to haul it back to the States. Shemya became “The Rock” once more.
But since the advent of President Thomas Thorn’s “Fortress America” initiative — eliminating overseas military commitments and building up the defense of the North American continent — Shemya, fifteen hundred miles west of Anchorage on the western tip of the Aleutian Island chain, was busier and more important than ever. Already vital as an emergency-abort base for transpolar and Far East airline and military flights and as a location of ballistic-missile tracking radars and other intelligence-gathering facilities, Eareckson Air Force Base, formerly just an air station but now advanced to full air-base status, was the location of the Aerospace Defense Command’s long- range XBR, or X-band radar, and the In-Flight Interceptor Communications System, which provided ultraprecise steering information to ground-based interceptor missiles fired from silos in Alaska and North Dakota.
Eareckson Air Force Base was now in an almost constant state of upgrade and new construction. Nearly two thousand men and women were based there in modern concrete dormitories, connected by underground tunnels and interspersed with comfortable, albeit subterranean, offices, computer rooms, laboratories, and other amenities. The runway facilities could now handle any aircraft in the world up to a million pounds gross weight and could land a suitably equipped aircraft in almost any weather, including the frequent and usually unexpected near-hurricane- force windstorms that were as much a part of life on Shemya as were Russian blue foxes, the cold, and the loneliness. Every aircraft that arrived in Shemya was housed in its own hydronically heated hangar — sometimes in better facilities than at its home base.
Along with the construction workers and engineers assembling the new missile-defense network, Shemya was host to many other government and military organizations — and that included the Air Battle Force. It was not the first time they had been there: Rebecca Furness’s 111th Bombardment Wing, from where all of the Air Battle Force’s B-1 bombers originated, had been deployed there during the War of Reunification, to prevent an outbreak of nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula. Shemya’s strategic location against Russia, China, and all of Far East Asia — especially now that all bases in Korea and Japan were closed to permanent American military forces — made the little island the stepping-off point for most military operations in the North Pacific theater.
Hal decided not to take the tunnel to the ready room out on the flight line — and almost instantly regretted it. Although nights were fairly short in early spring, the changing seasons meant changing weather. In the short walk to the ready room, Hal experienced almost every possible climatic change: It went from cold and frosty to horizontal snow and stinging ice to horizontal freezing rain to windy but clear in a matter of a couple minutes. Once he had to brace himself against a light pole to keep from being knocked off his feet by an errant blast of wind.
There was one consolation: Hal was able to see a rare Aleutian sunrise, the first one he’d ever seen. The golden light illuminated the nearby islands and turned the sea from dark and forbidding to an unbelievable crystal blue. He was almost breathless with amazement — until another gush of icy wind brought his attention back to the here and now.
Hal was hesitant to remove his balaclava to speak, but when he did, he found that it was warming up quickly outside now that the sun was up. All part of living and working in Alaska. As the old saying went, “If you don’t like the weather on Shemya, wait five minutes.” “Duty Officer,” Hal spoke into thin air, “get the door for me, will you?”
Of course, Hal realized, it would’ve been far easier, faster, and more efficient for the Duty Officer to awaken him if there was something urgent happening — but getting the boss’s ass out of bed was a pleasure Sergeant Major Wohl obviously reserved for himself, no matter what the weather.
The ready room for the Air Battle Force was actually their aircraft hangar, where barracks, planning, storage, and communications rooms had been set up. Two MV-32 Pave Dasher tilt-jet aircraft waited inside. The MV-32 resembled the MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor special-operations transport — with a big, boxy fuselage; stubby, high- mounted wings; large tail structure; and a drive-up cargo ramp — except the MV-32 was larger and used four turbojet engines, two on each wingtip and two on the tips of the horizontal stabilizer, in place of rotors. Like the MV-22, the Pave Dasher could take off and land vertically yet fly like a conventional fixed-wing aircraft, but the MV- 32 could fly 50 percent faster than the -22 on just a little more fuel. The MV-32 was air-refuelable and had an infrared camera and radar for terrain-following flight and precision navigation and targeting. It could carry as many as eighteen combat troops and also carried two retractable and reloadable weapon pods on the landing-gear sponsons, along with a twenty-millimeter Minigun in a steerable nose turret with five hundred rounds of ammunition.
Hal Briggs threw his parka and hood onto a chair. “Someone get me coffee, and someone else talk to me,” he said, “or I’m about to get very cranky.”
“Some increased NORAD activity, sir,” Chris Wohl responded.
“We know that already, Top,” Hal said irritably. “That’s why we’re here. The general convinced NORAD to put fighters on patrol until they can push out the radar surveillance.”
“It’s something else, sir,” Wohl went on, handing Briggs a large mug of steaming coffee. “NORAD just issued a BEELINE report for sudden, unexplained radar outages along the North Warning System.”
That didn’t sound good. “Where are the fighters?”
“NORAD put one fighter from Eielson on patrol over the Arctic Ocean — his wingman should be airborne
