Plan of Attack

with air-burst fuzes to destroy aboveground facilities, others with penetrating bunker-buster fuzes to destroy the ground-launched interceptor silos.

“Next was an attack against three major military bases in eastern Alaska, near Fairbanks,” Venti went on. “Eielson Air Force Base is the home of the Three-fifty-fourth Fighter Wing, an F-16 and A-10 attack wing, but it also houses several components of the national missile-defense infrastructure, including the Alaskan headquarters for the system. Fort Wainwright and Fort Greely are Army installations housing several infantry units, but they also contain several key NMD facilities. The bases were hit by eight nuclear-tipped missiles.”

“How many men and women at those bases, General?” the president asked woodenly, dreading the answer.

“About…approximately fifteen thousand in all four bases, sir,” Venti responded.

“My…God…” Thomas Thorn felt his face redden, and tears flowed into his eyes. He could barely fathom such a number killed all at once. His voice cracked as he said, “Those bastards…!” He rested his head on his fingers, blankly staring straight ahead. After a few moments, with his head still bowed, he asked, “Do we know what kind of bombers they used?”

“The attacks against Alaska were accomplished by an unknown number of high-speed bombers, probably Tupolev-160s, code-named ‘Blackjack,’ ” Air Force Chief of Staff General Charles Kuzner responded. “The Blackjack’s standard strategic attack armament is sixteen AS-16 ‘Kickback’ missiles, inertially guided, short range, high speed, similar to our obsolete AGM-69 short-range attack missiles that used to arm our strategic bombers. The bombers probably came in at treetop level all the way from Siberia. FAA and NORAD spotted them as they came ashore, but we couldn’t get any more interceptors in the air fast enough.” The president raised his head and stared accusingly into the camera, which prompted Air Force General Kuzner to blurt out, “Sir, we had already launched fighters from Eielson and Elmendorf because of the air-defense threat farther north and—”

“I’m not blaming anyone, General,” Thorn said.

“We had four fighters rolling at Eielson when the base came under attack,” Kuzner went on. “We had two more coming up from Elmendorf searching for them, but the electromagnetic pulses from the aboveground nuclear explosions were scrambling radar and communications for hundreds of miles. The F-15s couldn’t see a thing, couldn’t talk to anyone, couldn’t do a damned thing to stop them….”

“I said I’m not blaming you, General Kuzner,” the president repeated. He could see Kuzner’s Adam’s apple bobbing up and down and his facial muscles slacken as he silently tried to deal with the horror — the horror that his forces might have prevented, had they been more prepared.

Venti waited until he could see the president look at him, silently asking him to continue, then cleared his throat and went on. “The first CONUS base to be hit was Minot Air Force Base, thirteen miles outside the city of Minot, North Dakota. That base is the home of the Fifth Bomb Wing, with twenty-four B-52H Stratofortress bombers and twelve KC-135R Stratotanker aerial-refueling tankers. Minot is also the home of the Ninety-first Space Wing, a Minuteman III missile wing, which comprises fifteen underground launch-control centers spread out over eighty-five hundred square miles of North Dakota. Each LCC controls ten LGM-30G Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles; in compliance with the START II treaty, each Minuteman has been downgraded from three independently targeted warheads to just one W78 nuclear warhead. We have detected direct hits on the base itself and several hits near the LCCs, but we don’t yet know how many were knocked out.”

“What about the base?”

“Unknown yet, sir,” Venti responded somberly. “It took two direct hits.”

“How many personnel on that base?”

“About…about five thousand military.” Left unsaid was the obvious fact that perhaps two to four times that many military dependents and civilians living near the base could have perished.

“My God,” the president breathed. He could scarcely believe that this was happening — and yet he reminded himself that the death toll had not even begun to be calculated. “What about the city?”

“A few reports of damage, a few casualties, but it appears the city itself was not affected.”

“Thank God.”

“The attacks on the continental U.S. appear to have been done by Tupolev-95 Bear bombers, launching very long-range AS-19 hypersonic missiles, code-named ‘Koala,’ ” Venti said. “The Bear bombers are not supersonic, but their range is almost twice that of the Blackjack bomber. Several Bear bombers were intercepted and shot down over Canada by Canadian air-defense forces.”

“AS-19—isn’t that the same missile supposedly used over Uzbekistan?” Vice President Busick asked.

“Yes, sir,” Secretary of Defense Goff said. “Apparently the attack against our CIA station in Uzbekistan was an operational test launch.”

“Oh, shit…”

“Next to be hit was Grand Forks Air Force Base, sixteen miles west of the city of Grand Forks, North Dakota,” Venti went on. “Grand Forks is the headquarters of the new U.S. National Missile Defense Command, the agency that will control our ballistic-missile defense forces. The base also has a reserve nuclear-weapon storage facility that houses approximately four hundred and forty Minuteman-missile warheads, air-launched cruise-missile warheads, and B61 and B83 nuclear bombs, all in secure storage. It was hit by a single Russian cruise missile with great accuracy. It’s possible the direct casualty count here is very small, although that doesn’t take into account the fallout and contamination from the warheads that were not incinerated in the blast. The base was also home to the Three-nineteenth Air Refueling Wing, with twenty-two KC-135R tankers.”

The president could do nothing but shake his head, almost overwhelmed by the enormity of this disaster. The effect of the fallout — dirt and debris bombarded by gamma radiation, making it radioactive, then carried aloft by the force of the blast, spreading over hundreds of thousand of square miles by high-altitude winds, then falling back to Earth — was something to which very little attention had been paid since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Thorn remembered the civil-defense exercises he’d participated in as a child, and fallout was one of those fearsome things that caused nightmares in impressionable young children. Now they had to face it for real — and he found he was still scared of the harm it might cause.

“Next was Malmstrom Air Force Base, just six miles east of Great Falls, Montana,” Venti went on. “The Three-forty-first Space Wing there deploys two hundred Minuteman III missiles in twenty LCCs spread out over twenty-three thousand square miles of Montana. The base itself, which does not have an operating runway, did not appear to be hit. Unfortunately, the missile-silo fields surround the city of Great Falls on three sides, and we have detected explosions all around the city. It’s possible casualties could be relatively small here, too, but it’s too early to tell.

“Next was Ellsworth Air Force Base, twelve miles east of Rapid City, South Dakota. Ellsworth is the home of the Twenty-eighth Bomb Wing, a B-1B Lancer-bomber base. It was hit by a single missile. This target is somewhat unusual, in that all the other places targeted by the Russians were related to nuclear warfighting — Ellsworth’s B-1 bombers were made nonnuclear eight years ago to conform to Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty limits. Although it’s possible to make them capable of carrying nuclear weapons, it would take many months to do it, and it would greatly downgrade our conventional bombing capability. This signals a flaw in the Russians’ intelligence matrix — either they forgot that we made the B-1s nonnuclear or they thought we were about to turn them back into nuclear bombers.”

“Which is precisely what we should be doing, sir,” Kuzner interjected, “along with the aircraft in flyable storage. As soon as we convert them and train crews to man them, we should put them on alpha alert.”

“I have no intention of putting nuclear-loaded bombers back on alert, General,” President Thorn said. “Those days are over.”

“With all due respect, Mr. President, it looks to me like those days are back again,” Kuzner said bitterly. “Without the ICBMs we have no choice but to put every aircraft we can back on nuclear alert — not just the bombers but every tactical jet capable of carrying a thermonuclear weapon.”

“General Kuzner…”

“Mr. President, we can’t waste any time on this. It’ll take four to eight weeks to recertify a new B-1 aircraft with positive-control switches and devices for nuclear weapons, plus twenty to thirty weeks to train a new aircrew and forty to sixty weeks to train a new maintenance technician. We need to—”

“That’s enough, General,” Thorn said sternly. “We’ll discuss this when the time comes.”

“Will we? Or are you just going to let another six thousand airmen on one of my bases die?”