This novel is dedicated to all the men and women serving in the armed forces of the United States of America, and especially to the U.S. Air Force bomber crews. At this writing, for the first time since Vietnam, all of our country’s heavy bomber forces are in action during the same conflict, over the Balkans. Doing more with less seems to be your specialty now, but it is a task and a duty you shoulder with extreme pride and professionalism.
This story is also dedicated to the families of all who serve. Without their love and support, the best soldiers and the most powerful war machines in the world would be nothing more than empty shells.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Very special thanks go to two very special air warriors:
Thanks to Air Force General Mike Loh (ret.), former commander of Air Combat Command, for his inspiration, guidance, and suggestions. He continues to be this nation’s strongest and most authoritative advocate for the heavy bomber, strategic airpower, and a strong national defense.
Thanks also to Colonel (BG selectee) Wil Fraser, former commander of the Twenty-eighth Bomb Wing, Ellsworth AFB, South Dakota, for his encouragement and support.
Thanks to Colonel Anthony Przybyslawski, commander, Twenty-eighth Bomb Wing, Ellsworth AFB; Colonel Tim Bailey, vice-commander; Colonel Richard Newton, ops group commander; Lieutenant Colonel Sloan Butler, Twenty-eighth Operational Support Squadron commander; Lieutenant Colonel Stephen “Taz” Wolborsky, Thirty-seventh Bomb Squadron commander; and Chief Master Sergeant Paul Hammett, Twenty-eighth Bomb Wing Senior Enlisted Adviser, for spending the time in explaining the employment of the B-1B and the mission of the Bomb Wing.
Thanks to all the Bomb Wing technicians and experts who demonstrated their skills, pride, and professionalism: Captain Scott Marsfield, Technical Sergeant Jerry Long, and Senior Airman Ryan Schod, Irfe support; Staff Sergeant Robert “Chico” Cortez, weapons loader trainer; Master Sergeant Keith Malone, munitions; and to all the other men and women of the Wing for their time and assistance.
Special thanks to the crewdogs of the Thirty-seventh Bomb Squadron for hosting my spectacular flight in the Bone to Powder River: Captain Dave “Trooper” Johnson, aircraft commander; Captain Jason “PITA” Combs, copilot; Captain Chris “CK” Butler, OSO; and Captain Tom “Opie” Woods, OSO. These Tigers really showed me how lucky we are to have them on duty defending our country.
Last but certainly not least, very special thanks to Staff Sergeant Steve Merrill, Twenty-eighth Bomb Wing public affairs, for his expertise, attention, and professionalism in organizing and conducting a great tour of the Twenty-eighth Bomb Wing.
Thanks also to Michael Rascher and Nancy Dewey for their random acts of generosity and kindness.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Although some real-world names, organizations, and situations are used to enhance the authenticity of the story, any similarities to real-world persons, units, or situations are coincidental and all portrayals are purely the product of the author’s imagination.
Please visit my Web site at www.megafortress.com for more information on Battle Born and on future works in progress.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Kevin Martindale, President of the United States Ellen Christine Whiting, Vice President of the United
States Corrie Law, chief of Vice President’s Secret Service detail
Philip Freeman, General, National Security Adviser Robert Plank, CIA Director Jeffrey Hartman, Secretary of State Jerrod Hale, White House Chief of Staff Arthur Chastain, Secretary of Defense Stuart L. Mortonson, Secretary of the Air Force George Balboa, Admiral, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Victor Hayes, General, USAF, Chief of Staff of the Air Force William Allen, Admiral, commander, U.S. Pacific
Command
Terrill Samson, Lieutenant General, USAF, commander, High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center, Elliott AFB, Groom Lake, Nevada
Patrick S. McLanahan, Brigadier General, USAF
David Luger, Lieutenant Colonel, USAF
Hal Briggs, Lieutenant Colonel, USAF
Nancy Cheshire, Lieutenant Colonel, USAF
Adam Bretoff, General, Adjutant General, Nevada National Guard –
Rebecca Catherine Furness, Lieutenant Colonel, NVANG, 111 BMS/CC John K. Long, Lieutenant Colonel, NVANG, 111 BMS/DO
Kim Kun-mo, General (Ret.), Minister of National Defense
An Ki-sok, General, Chief of the General Staff Lee Ung-pae, Director of Agency for National Security Planning Park Yom, Lieutenant General, Chief of Staff of
Republic of Korea Air Force. Pak Chung-chu, former First Vice President of North Korea and interim Vice President of United Korea
DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF KOREA (NORTH KOREA)
Kim Jong-Il, President of North Korea
Pak Chung-chu, First Vice President
Kim Ung-tae, Vice-Marshal, commander, Artillery Command Cho Myong-nok, Lieutenant General, Chief of Staff of the Korean People’s Army’s Air Forces Kong Hwan-li, Captain, commanding Nodong missile unit Kim Yong-ku, Master Sergeant, Kong’s assistant
PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
Jiang Zemin, President of China Chi Haotian, Minister of National Defense Chin Zi-hong, General, Chief of Staff of the People’s Liberation Army
Qian Qichian, Minister of Foreign Affairs Xu Zhengsheng, Assistant Deputy Secretary of Cultural Affairs, Chinese embassy, Pyongyang
Zhou Chang-li, Ambassador to the United States
RUSSIAN FEDERATION
Yevgeniy Maksimovich Primakov, President of Russia Dmitriy Antonovich Aksenenko, Deputy Foreign Minister
REPUBLIC OF JAPAN Kazumi Nagai, Prime Minister of Japan Ota Amari, Minister of Foreign Affairs REAL-WORLD NEWS EXCERPTS
A CORNERED PYONGYANG COULD STRIKE OUT, WARNS U.S.
-Manila, Philippines (Reuters), May 21, 1997 The commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific said Wednesday that forcing famine-hit North Korea into a corner could drive it to attack its southern neighbor, resulting in heavy loss of life.
Adm. Joseph Prueher said the severity of the famine in the North remained unclear, but Washington‘s immediate concern was that Pyongyang “retains a considerable military capability to lash out.”
“Should they try and conduct a full-scale assault they will not prevail, but it would nonetheless be a very difficult situation with a lot of loss of life because of the military capability North Korea maintains,” he said. . . .
RIMPAC WILL ONLY INCREASE TENSION
-Pyongyang, June 6, 1998-(KCNA [Korean Central News Agency, official government news agency of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea]) Rimpac joint military manoeuvres involving the United States, Japan, South Korea, etc, will be reportedly held on the Pacific for a month from early July.
. . . The present South Korean regime, which styles itself a “government of people,” is hell bent on confrontation and war preparations against the fellow countrymen in the north. It has frequently staged military exercises simulating an invasion of the north throughout South Korea under the pretext of “coping with the enemy’s provocation of a limited war.” It is obvious that the participation in the joint manoeuvres by the South Korean puppets, who are aggravating the situation of the Korean peninsula with north-south confrontation and war preparations, is aimed at invading the north in league with outside
S. KOREA PLEDGES MILK TO THE NORTH
-Washington Post, July 22, 1998 South Korea, overlooking recent spy incursions by North Korean agents, is sending 781 tons of powdered milk to help the starving North.
N. KOREAMAY BE BUILDING NUCLEAR SITE; ACTIVITY RAISES CONCERN ABOUT ARMS PRODUCTION
-Washington Post, August 18, 1998 American intelligence is worried that some 15,000 North Korean workers are building a huge underground nuclear facility. The suspected activity runs counter to an agreement Pyongyang made to suspend nuclear weapons research in favor of massive amounts of aid dollars. The White House officially refused to comment on the matter, except to note that North Korea remains in compliance with the 1994 accord and the situation is being closely watched.
CONGRESSIONAL AIDES REPORT HIGH HUNGER TOLL IN N. KOREA
-Washington Post, August 20, 1998 Upwards of 800,000 North Koreans are dying from starvation or hunger-related illnesses. A group of bipartisan congressional staffers, following a week-long factfinding tour of North Korea, said the country is in miserable condition and the situation is only getting worse.
PYONGYANG ROCKET ‘CRASHED OFF ALASKACOAST‘
-South China Morning Post, September 17, 1998 North Korea’s missile test nearly reached Alaska. A piece of the rocket traveled about 6,000 km and splashed into the Pacific near the Alaskan coast.
H. KOREA REPORTED TRAINING PILOTS FOR KAMIKAZE ATTACKS
-Baltimore Sun, September 20, 1998 North Korea is reportedly training some 140 pilots for kamikaze missions against key South Korean targets, should war break out on the divided peninsula.
NK OFFICIAL SAYS WAR GROWING IMMINENT
-Pacific Stars & Stripes, October I, 1998 North Korea’s vice foreign minister, Choe Su Hon, said in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly that the danger of another Korean War is “getting even more imminent” because the peninsula remains divided. Choe said reunification would remove the danger but called the U.S, military presence in South Korea the major obstacle.
EXPERT URGES MISSILE DEFENSE
-Pacific Stars & Stripes, October 22, 1998 U.S, military strategist William Taylor warned Japan, South Korea and the U.S, are “totally naked” to missile attacks from rogue nations like North Korea. He urged that missile defense systems planning take priority in Washington, Tokyo and Seoul.
PENTAGON: NUCLEAR UPGRADE NEEDED FOR DETERRENCE
-Washington Times, December 4, 1998 A blue-ribbon Pentagon panel is urging the Clinton administration to improve the nation’s nuclear forces for decades to come in the face of Russia’s large arsenal and China’s growing strategic force. The report by the Defense Science Board task force challenges key U.S. arms-control policies, including the ban on nuclear testing, reliance on arms-reduction agreements and monitoring of nuclear-warhead reliability. A major finding is that the Pentagon lacks a long-term planning mechanism for nuclear-weapons programs.
JOINT ‘MIND WARFARE’ UNIT SET UP WITH U.S.
-South China Morning Post, January 15,1999 U.S, and South Korean officials agreed to set up a joint psychological warfare unit that will attempt to win over North Korean civilians in the event of war.
PORTRAIT OF A FAMINE: STARVING NORTH KOREANS WHO REACH CHINA DESCRIRE A SLOWLY OYIN6 COUNTRY
-Washington Post, February 12, 1999 As best they can, North Korean refugees drag themselves through snow and bitter cold to reach haven in China. Those who survive their personal exodus disclose horrifying tales of a slowly dying country, where famine is a continuing nightmare. . . . Aid supplies gathered by various agencies and sent to North Korea don’t usually get to ordinary people, despite what international aid agencies proclaim. Most food and medicine is routed to families of the Workers’ Party and the military. . . .
PROLOGUE.
OVER NORTH-CENTRAL NEVADA.
APRIL 2000.
Get pumped, hogs!” the B-1B Lancer’s pilot shouted excitedly on interphone. “We’re coming up on the squid low-level. I’m ready to kick some ass! Let’s show them who the top dogs are. I’m going to give us a few seconds on this way point, Long Dong. Thirty knots should do it. I want lots of room to rock and roll when they jump us. Power coming back to give us a few seconds’ pad. I want some shacks!” He pulled the throttles back until the time over target matched the required time over target on the flight plan. Then he pulled off one more notch of throttle until he had a good twenty to-thirty-second pad.
“Go for it, Rodeo,” the B-lB’s OSO, or offensive systems officer, responded eagerly. He glanced at his flight plan for the time over target, then at the time-to target readout on his forward instrument panel. Being a few seconds late at this point meant they could fly faster on the bomb run itself, where the threats were likely to be heaviest. They fully expected to get jumped by fighters on this run, which meant they’d be running all over the sky trying to stay alive. –
As he made the airspeed adjustment, the pilot strained forward in his ejection seat to look at his wing- man, a second B-1B bomber in loose formation on his right wing. The B-l “Bone” (few called it by its official nickname, “Lancer”) rarely fought alone. If one B-1B supersonic bomber was a devastating weapon, two were triply difficult to defeat. They would need every possible advantage to win this battle.
Sure, this was only an exercise, not a true life-or death struggle. But everyone in the B-1B was playing it as if it were the real thing. As someone once said, “The more you sweat in practice, the less you bleed in battle.” Besides, in the eyes of these U.S. Air Force heavy bombardment crewdogs, getting “shot down”-especially by the U.S. Navy-was almost as bad as a real-life kill.
Naval Air Station Fallen was the home of the Navy Strike and AirWarfareCenter and the new home of the “TOP GUN” FighterCombatSchool. All aircraft carrier fighter and bomber aircrews were required to report to Navy Fallon before a deployment to certify their knowledge and skills in air-to-air and air-to-ground combat tactics. The NavyFallonTargetRange comprised over ten thousand square miles of an isolated corner of northern Nevada east of Reno, with some of the airspace restricted to all other aircraft from the surface to infinity, so the crews could practice live air-tog round bombing, gunnery, and air combat maneuvers. Powerful TV cameras located throughout the range would score each bomber crew’s attacks, and instrument packages onboard each aircraft sent electronic telemetry to range control stations, allowing great scoring accuracy in air-to-air engagements during post-mission briefings.
Because the Navy liked to mix it up with as many different “adversaries” as possible, the U.S. Air Force was frequently invited to “play” at Navy Fallon. For the USAF bomber crews, there was no greater thrill than to blow past the Navy’s defenses and bomb some targets on their home turf.
Ever since the B-lBs arrived in Reno, there had been a heated competition between the Air Force and Navy about who were northern Nevada‘s best military aviators. The competition would be even hotter today, because the B-l unit in the box was the Nevada Air National Guard’s 111th “Aces High” Bomb Squadron from Reno-Tahoe International Airport, just a few miles west on Interstate 80 from Navy Fallon. The 111th was one of only three Air National Guard wings to fly the sleek, deadly B-1B Lancer. Some serious bragging rights were on the line here. “Get us some range clearance, Mad Dog,” the pilot ordered.
“Rog,” the copilot responded. On the discrete “referee’s” radio frequency, unknown to the defensive players, he announced, “Fallon Range Control, Fallon Range Control, Aces Two-One flight of two, Austin One Blue inbound, requesting range clearance.”
“Aces Two-One flight, this is Navy Fallon bomb plot,” came the response. “Aces Two-One cleared hot into Navy Fallon ranges R-4804, R-4812, R-4810, Austin One MOA, Gabbs North MOA, and Ranch MOA routes and altitudes, maximum buzzer. Altimeter two niner-niner-eight. Remain this frequency, monitor GUARD.”
“Two-One, cleared into -04, -12, -10, Austin One, Gabbs North, and Ranch, two-niner-niner-eight, coming in hot and max buzzer, check,” the copilot responded.
“Two,” the second B-l’s pilot responded. The less a wingman said on the radio, the better.
On interphone, the B-l’s copilot announced^ “We’re cleared in hot, maximum buzzer.”
“Let’s go fry us up some squid, then!” the pilot shouted again. There was no response. The rest of the crew was getting ready for the action.
Two systems operators, the OSO and the DSO-the defensive systems officer-sat behind the pilots in ejection seats in a small compartment just above the entry ladder hatch. As his name implied, the OSO handled the bomber’s weapon and attack systems. The DSO’s job was to call out threats as they appeared, monitor the system to make sure it responded properly when a radar threat came up, and take over operation of the defensive gear if the computers malfunctioned.
A tone sounded over interphone, a slow, almost playful deedle . . , deedle . . , deedle. “E-band early warning radar, gang,” the DSO announced. “Bad guys are searching for us. No height finder yet. Time to go low.”
“Copy,” the pilot said. On the interpiane frequency, he radioed, “Trapper, take spacing. Keep it within eight miles.”
“Rog, Rodeo,” the wingman’s pilot responded, and began a slight turn, letting the distance between the two bombers increase. Although they would both be flying the same route and attacking the same target, they would fly slightly different paths, separated by at least thirty seconds. This would hopefully confuse and complicate the defender’s task. The two bombers also used air-to-air TACAN to monitor the distance between them, and they had emergency procedures to follow if the distance dropped below three miles and they didn’t have each other in sight. “See you in the winner’s circle.”
“Radar altimeter set AUTO, bug set to 830, radar altimeter override armed,” the copilot announced on interphone. “Both TFR channels set to one thousand hard ride. Wings full aft. Flight director set to NAV, pitch mode select switch to TERFLW, copilot.”
“Set pilot.” The pilot was flipping switches before the copilot read each step. The command bars on his center vertical situation display, or VSD, dipped to twenty degrees nose-down. “Twenty pitch-down command. Here we go.” When he pressed the TERFLW, or terrain following, switch on his Automatic Flight Control System control panel, the B-l bomber dove for the hard desert earth below like an eagle swooping in for the kill. In the automatic TERFLW descent, the
350,000-pound bomber was screaming earthward at over fifteen thousand feet per minute.
“Min safe altitude nine thousand,” the OSO called out. “Looking for LARA ring-in.” Just as he announced this, the low-altitude radar altimeter locked onto the earth. Now that the bomber knew exactly where earth was, it descended even faster. Dirt, dust, a piece of insulation, and a loose flight-plan page floated around the cabin in the sudden negative Gs of the rapid descent. The OSO felt like breakfast was soon going to follow, and he pulled his straps tighter.
Suddenly, the DSO shouted, “Bandits eleven o’clock, thirty miles and closing fast! Looks like a Hornet!”
“Shit!” the pilot cursed. He was hoping they wouldn’t find them so early. “Hang on, crew.” With his gloved right index finger, he pulled the trigger on his control stick to the first detent, then rolled the B-l up on its left wing until they were almost sideways. The sudden loss of lift from the sleek, blended fuselage made the bomber plummet from the sky even faster.
“Passing twenty!” the OSO shouted a few seconds later, after pinching his nose through his oxygen mask and blowing against the pressure to relieve the squeezing in his ears. “Passing fifteen! C’mon, Sonny? let’s get down there! Push it over!” The pilot didn’t roll the bomber upside down, but he did increase the bank angle to well over ninety degrees. It roared out of the sky like a lightning bolt.
Just seconds before it would have hit the ground, the pilot rolled out of his steep bank with a fast yank of the control stick. The big but nimble bomber snapped upright with the speed and agility of a small jet fighter and leveled off less than a thousand feet above the ground. Its AN/ASQ-164 multimode radar displayed a profile of the terrain out to ten miles ahead of the aircraft on both pilots’ VSDs. The B-l punched through a layer of clouds at six thousand feet-and before their eyes was the high-terrain, snow-encrusted Dixie Peak staring right back at them, nearly filling the windscreen. “Damn!” the pilot shouted, banking left again to fly around the peak. “I hate letdowns over mountains!”
“That cumulo-granite might’ve just put the fear of God into that squid pilot chasing us,” the OSO reminded him. “Let him try to chase us now, with Dixie staring in his face!”
With the valley floor in clear sight, the rest of the descent went smoothly. The Offensive Radar System electronically scanned ten miles ahead and to both sides, measuring the width and height of the entire terrain and providing pitch inputs to the autopilot so the bomber would clear it by the selected altitude. The pilots first selected TF 1000 and accomplished a fast check of both redundant TFR system channels, then stepped the clearance plane down to its lowest .setting of TF 200. They also selected “hard ride,” which would command steeper climbs and descents over the terrain so they could hug the earth even closer.
Now that they were clear of clouds and could see the ground, after checking the TERFLW system for a few moments, the pilot deactivated automatic navigation and used visual contour procedures to guide the huge bomber. Instead of gripping the control stick, he pushed on the sides of it with an open palm, dodging and cutting down and between any significant terrain features while allowing the automatic TERFLW system to guide them over high terrain. Flying in a straight line only made it easier for defenders to find them. Hugging terrain contours while letting TERFLW keep the B-1B as low as possible was the best and safest tactic. “Where’s that bandit, D?” the pilot shouted.
“Moving to four o’clock, twenty-five miles,” the DSO replied. “He’s not locked on .., wait, he’s got a lock! Notch right, reference heading two-four-zero!”
“Aces, notching right!” the pilot shouted on the interplane frequency. He then honked the B-l into a tight sixty-degree bank turn to the right, changing course ninety degrees to their original track and placing themselves on the back side of DixiePeak. Most modern-day fighters like the F-15, F/A-18, and F-22 used pulse-Doppler attack radars, which acquired targets based on relative speed. Turning ninety degrees to the fighter’s flight path made relative speed equal to the fighter’s speed, causing the fighter radar’s computer to analyze the target as a terrain feature and squelch the target. The turn would also complicate the fighter pilot’s attack geometry and give the bomber a chance to hide behind terrain. The B-l descended to less than three hundred feet above the desert floor, flying over six hundred miles per hour.
“Lost the bandit,” the DSO reported. “He’s somewhere at five o’clock.”
“Rog,” the pilot said. He knew that DixiePeak was between him and the fighter, and the longer he kept it there, the closer he’d get to his target before the next attack. ^
“Clear to the IP, pilot,” the OSO shouted. “Center up, steering’s good.” The pilot started a left turn back toward the target area, drawing a mental picture of the air situation.
It was not a favorable attack setup for him and his crew, but these Navy air intercept exercises were usually one-sided affairs. Austin One Military Operating Area, or MOA, acted as the “funnel” of airspace that led to the three restricted areas where practice targets were attacked with live weapons. Navy fighters could chase a bomber all the way down as low as it could go in Austin One. Fighters could continue the chase in the restricted areas, but had to fly no less than a thousand feet above the ground to stay clear of bomb explosions. The Ranch MOA at the western end of the run was the “recovery zone,” where the bombers and fighters had to disengage and establish safe altitude separation while the bombers turned around. The bombers were required to fly through the restricted area again and clear their bomb bays of all other weapons before they could exit the range complex.
The Navy pilots knew all this, of course, so all they had to do was wait at the bottom of Austin One for the bomber to enter the restricted areas. It gave the fighter jocks a little less time to intercept before bomb release, but they were almost assured of a kill. The first fighter they encountered was probably a young jock on one of his first fighter-intercept exercises, hoping to score an early kill while the bomber was at high altitude.
Well, the B-1B Lancer was not that easy to kill. It had almost the same agility as a jet fighter, it was just as fast, and it had one-half the radar cross section. Down low, no fighter in the world could keep up with a B-l if it dared even to fly down close to the dirt.
The pilot released the trigger on his control stick, and the bomber made a relatively gentle thirty-degree bank turn toward the IP, or initial point, the start of the bomb run itself. The air-to-air TACAN read six miles-just right, about thirty seconds apart. “Lead is two NAP from the IP,” he radioed on interplane.
“Copy,” the wingman replied. “We’re seven NAP. We’re popeye.”
“Bandits at seven o’clock, no range,” the DSO announced.
“Hold steady,” the OSO called out. “Let me get my ACAL and get a patch.”
“Range nine miles, five o’clock,” the DSO shouted. “I think he’s got a lock. Notch right, reference three-zero-zero.”
“Got my ACAL, guys,” the OSO said on interphone. “Clear to notch!” The pilot complied with a sharp right turn. Staying on a straight-line course for more than a few seconds with enemy defenders in the area was deadly for a bomber. The bombing computers needed accurate altitude data to compute bombing ballistics, and the OSO had to fly over a specific point on the route, usually the initial point of the bomb run, to calibrate altitude. There were several ACAL points on the route, but the one prior to the bomb run was the most important.
“AI’s down,” the DSO shouted. The fighter had turned off his radar, knowing he would disappear from the bomber’s radar threat sensors. “He might have a visual on us!”
“ADF zero-three-zero, pilot!” the OSO shouted. The pilot turned hard left back toward the inbound track line to the target. By “ADF’ing” the course, he would return to the original inbound heading to the target, making it easier for the OSO to find the target on radar.
As soon as the pilot rolled out of his turn, the OSO switched to the target itself. Exactly as predicted, the first target appeared right under his cross hairs. ^”Got you, you bitch!” he crowed. “Pilot, give me twenty right, and I’ll get a patch.” When the pilot rolled out on his new heading, the OSO moved his cross hairs directly on the box, clicked the left button on his radar controller down twice, then clicked the button up.
The high-resolution synthetic aperture image on his digital display resembled a black-and-white photograph. The clarity was startling-he could actually make out the outline of a large tractor-trailer vehicle. “Hogs, I got a big mother trailer-sized vehicle-looks like a Scud missile reloading operation.” He centered the cross hairs directly on the image. “You’re cleared to the target! Let’s nail that puppy! We’re seven seconds late. Give me twenty more knots, pilot.” The pilot goosed the throttles a bit more-they were now screaming inbound to their target at almost ten miles per minute. “TG twenty seconds.”
“Bandits four o’clock, twenty miles and closing!” the DSO shouted. “Notch right!” “
The pilot yanked the control stick right . . . “No! TG fifteen! Wings level!” the OSO responded. “Stay on the bomb run!”
Suddenly, they all heard a faster-pitched deedle deedle deedle tone, no longer playful at all. “SA-6 up!” the DSO shouted. The SA-6 was a mobile Soviet-made medium-range surface-to-air missile system, widely exported all over the world. Its mobility, its top speed of almost three times that of sound, and its all-weather, all-altitude capability made it a deadly threat. The SA-6 fired a salvo of three missiles that were almost impossible to evade. “Three o’clock, within lethal range! Trackbreakers active!”
At the same moment, several white arcs of smoke traced across the sky, the thin white trails aiming right for the B-l, and the warning tone on interphone changed to a fast, high-pitched deedledeedledeedle. “Smoky SAMs!” the copilot shouted. Smoky SAMs were little papier-mâché rockets, no threat to the bomber by themselves, but signifying a missile launch against the bomber crew. It meant the crew hadn’t done their job protecting their bomber.
“Simulated SA-6 launch!” the DSO shouted. “Uplink shut down! Chaff, chaff!” Clouds of thin tinsel shot out of canisters along the Bone’s upper spine, creating a radar target several hundred times larger than the 400,000-pound plane itself.
“Hold heading!” the OSO shouted. “TG ten! Doors coming open!”
The copilot watched as one of the simulated SAMs passed directly overhead. Talk about the “bullet between the eyes,” he thought grimly-if that had been a real antiaircraft missile, they’d have been dead meat. And he would have watched the final stroke all the damned way.
“Ready . . , ready, now\ Bombs away!” the OSO shouted. One cluster bomb canister dropped free of the aft weapons bay. At the precise instant, it split apart and scattered the bomblets across the target area in a direct hit on the trailer.
“Bomb doors closed!” the OSO shouted. “Clear to maneuver!”
“Pump right, now!” the DSO shouted. The pilots rolled the bomber to the right away from the target area and pulled back on the control stick until the stall warning horn sounded, then released the back pressure. The DSO ejected more clouds of chaff behind them, successfully breaking the “enemy” radar locks and allowing the bomber to escape.
“That release looked good from back here, pilots!” the OSO yelled gleefully. “What did you see up there?”
“We saw our shit get blown away by a SAM!” the copilot yelled. “They had us dead-on!”
“I had the uplink shut down,” the DSO protested. “No way that missile would’ve hit . . .” “Well, then they used an optical tracker or they got I lucky,” the pilot said. “But they got us. If one of those smoky SAMs was a real one, we’d’ve gotten nailed. Shake it off, Long Dong. Nail the next one. These Navy ; pukes aren’t playing fair anyway.”
“Shit!” the OSO cursed into his oxygen mask. A perfect bomb run, a perfect release . . , and they got zilch. All that hard work for nothing. He angrily entered commands into his keyboard to sequence to the next target area. “Steering is good to the next target complex, pilot. We’ll take out the next Scud missile site.”
“What are the defenses in the area?” the copilot asked.
“SA-3s, SA-6s, and Zeus-23s,” the DSO replied. !
“All right. Shake it off, guys,” the pilot said. “No ! more mistakes. Let’s kick some ass this time.”
“I’ve got another SA-6 and an SA-3 up,” the DSO reported. “SA-6 is nine o’clock, moving outside lethal range. The SA-3 is at one o’clock.” I
“Where are the fighters?” the pilot asked, j
“No sign of ’em,” the DSO replied.
“Clearing turn coming up,” the pilot said. “Back me f up on altitude, co.” He banked the B-l up on its left wing, then strained to look aft up through the eyebrow windows for any signs of pursuit. When he had turned almost ninety degrees, he initiated a steep left turn. “I got it,” he told the copilot. “Find the damn-“
“Aces!” they suddenly heard on the interplane frequency. It was their wingman, five miles somewhere behind them. “Bandit coming down the ramp! I think he’s on you! You see him?”
Both pilots furiously scanned out their cockpit windows. Suddenly, the copilot shouted, “I got him! Two o’clock high! He’s diving right on top of us! He’s got us nailed!”
The pilot swore loudly, then racked the bomber into a steep right turn, jammed the throttles to full military power, pulled the pitch interrupt trigger to the first detent, and zoomed the B-l skyward.
“What are you doing, Rodeo?” the copilot shouted.
“I’m going nose-to-nose with this bandit!”
“Are you nuts?”
“The best way to defeat a fighter on a gun or close-in missile pass is nose-to-nose,” the pilot said. “I’m not going to let this Navy puke get a clear shot on us!”
Both pilots clearly saw the oncoming fighter as it plummeted toward them. It was a Navy or Marine Corps F/A-18 Hornet, the primary carrier attack plane, which also had a good air-to-air capability. The Bone’s nose was thirty degrees above the horizon in the steep climb. All they could see was blue sky and the fighter diving down on them.
The sharp zoom maneuver was sapping their speed quickly. “Airspeed!” the copilot shouted-just a warning right now, not an admonition. The aircraft commander was still in charge here, no matter how unusual his actions seemed.
“I got it,” the pilot acknowledged. He pushed the throttles forward into full afterburner power. “C’mon, you squid bastard. You don’t have a shot. You’re running out of sky. Break it off.”
“We better get back down, pilot,” the OSO urged him. “We’re off our force timing!”
“Get the nose down, pilot,” the copilot warned.
“You lost us, bub,” said the pilot, addressing the pilot of the Hornet.
The OSO switched his radar display to air-to-air, and the ORS immediately locked onto the Hornet. “Range three miles and closing!” he shouted. “Closure rate one thousand knots! This doesn’t look good!”
“Airspeed!” the copilot warned again. They were now draining fuel at an incredible three hundred pounds of fuel per second and going nowhere but straight up.
“Pilot, we’re off our force timing and three thousand feet high!” the OSO called. “We’re inside the one-mile bubble!” For safety’s sake, the rules of engagement, or ROE, at Navy Fallon prohibited any pilot from breaking an invisible one-mile-diameter “bubble” around all participants. “The ROE-“
“Shut up, co!” the pilot snapped. “We still got three seconds!” Breaking the ROE could put all the players in serious danger-and he was breaking rules one after another. “We’re not going to show ourselves. He’ll have to break it off.”
“Get the nose down, dammit!” the copilot shouted again.
Then, seconds before the copilot was going to push his control stick and try to overpower the pilot, the fighter rapidly rolled right. They had lost almost three hundred knots of airspeed-and for what? They saved themselves from the fighter but were now in the lethal envelope for any surface-to-air missile battery within thirty miles.
“Ha! Where are you going, you wussie?” the pilot shouted happily. He was breathing as hard as if he had just finished a hundred-yard sprint. “Keep him in sight, co,” he panted.
“This will work out perfectly, hogs,” the OSO said. “This next target is a Zeus-23. We’ll stay high and nail him! Center up.”
The pilot started a left turn toward the next target. “Where’s that fighter?” he asked.
“Eleven o’clock, moving to ten o’clock, way high,” the DSO reported.
“Zeus-23 at twelve o’clock,” the DSO reported. The real “Zeus-23,” or ZSU-23/4, was the standard Russian antiaircraft artillery weapon system, a mobile unit with four 23-millimeter radar-guided cannons that could fill the sky with thousands of shells per minute out to two miles away-deadly for any aircraft.
“That’s our target, crew,” the OSO stated. He put his cross hairs on the Zeus closest to the preplanned target area. “Action left forty-five.” When the pilot rolled out of his turn, the OSO took a radar patch on the target. “I got the patch. Steering to the target is good. Give me full blowers, Rodeo!” The pilot shoved the throttles back into max afterburner, and a few seconds later they broke the speed of sound. “Bandit now at nine o’clock, ten miles and closing!”
“Stand by .., bombs away!” the OSO yelled. The CBU-87 cluster bomb scored a direct hit.
“Zeus-23’s still up,” the DSO said.
“What?” the OSO yelled. “That run looked great! We were a little off, but well within the kill zone. Those squids are jacking us around, guys! That was a good kill all the-“
“Forget about it, Long Dong,” the pilot interrupted. “Where’s my steering?”
The OSO called up the last target in the third restricted-area bombing range. “Steering is good,” he said. “Single Scud-ER transporter-erector-launcher with communications van. Supposed to be tucked in between some hills. Max points if we get this one, guys-it’s worth more than all the other targets put together. Gimme a little altitude so I can see into the target area.”
“Scope’s clear,” the DSO immediately reported.
It was clear to see why the OSO needed some altitude. The pilots couldn’t see much more than a few miles ahead, and if they couldn’t see, the radar could see even less. They were several seconds late too, and the faster speed meant even less time to spot the target. “Get ready for a vertical jink,” the pilot said. He reset the clearance plane switch to one thousand feet, and the bomber responded with a steep climb.
“I got . . , squat,” the OSO reported. The cross hairs went out to a large section of blackness. There were no radar returns yet in the target area. His hesitant voice infuriated the pilots even more. “ADF a one-three-five track, pilots. Clear back down.”
The pilot released the pitch interrupt trigger, and the bomber settled back down to its roller-coaster ride just two hundred feet above the blurred earth zooming by. “You got the target?” he asked.
“Not yet,” the OSO responded. “The radar predictions said we won’t see the targets until four NAP if we stay low-we’d need to go up to two thousand to see it sooner. Let’s get back on planned track, and then give me another jink so I can get a better-“
“Bandits!” the DSO interrupted. “Eight o’clock, fifteen miles and closing! I think it’s an F-14-no, two F-14s! Give me a hard left thirty!”
“I’ll lose my look down the canyon!” the OSO objected. But the pilot rolled into a hard ninety-degree bank turn, rolling out just far enough to track perpendicular to the fighter. “Reverse as fast as you can!” the OSO said. “I need one last look down that canyon!”
“Clear to turn back!” the DSO said after only a few seconds. The pilot started a right turn. “Trackbreakers active! Bandits never turned. They’re nine o’clock, nine miles.”
“Give me a vertical jink now!” the OSO said.
“Negative!” the DSO interjected. “We’ll be highlighted against the horizon! If the fighter gets a visual on us, he’s got us!”
“I need the altitude!” the OSO cried. “I can’t see shit!”
“If we climb, he’ll spot us!” the pilot protested.
“Then center up!” shouted the OSO. “I’ll try to get a lock close-in.” He knew he’d have only seconds to see the target on radar before bomb release.
Sure enough, as they closed in on the target, all he could see on the digital radar screen was dark green, interspersed with flecks of white. The terrain was shadowing every bit of ground radar returns. Nothing showed up on the MTA display-no moving targets at all.
“Twenty TG,” the OSO said. “Action left thirty. I need one thousand feet, pilot, and I need it now” “All right,” the pilot said. “You got about five seconds.” He spun the clearance plane switch and they climbed. “You get your fix, Long Dong?”
The last climb did it. The cross hairs fell on a lone radar return in the very southern edge of the gully. When the pilot rolled out of the turn, the OSO snapped a patch image of the last target. “Got it! Steering is good!” he said. Damn, what a relief. His cross hairs were nestled right over a long, thin target, small and partially hidden. Magnifying the radar image showed a definite Scud transporter-erector-launcher on the move. A small, mobile target-max points if they hit it. “Let’s nail this sucker! Fifteen TG! Ten . . , doors coming open . . , five . . , bombs away!” The pilots could see the target, a white trailer with an old sewer pipe strapped atop it, configured to look somewhat like a Scud missile. “Doors coming closed . . .”
“We got it!” the copilot shouted happily. “We nailed it!”
“Let’s start a right turn to two-four-three,” the OSO said.
But just as they zoomed past the target area and crossed over the southern edge of the gully, a flurry of smoky SAMs filled the sky. “I’ve got SA-3s, SA-6s, SA-8s, and triple-A all around us!” the DSO shouted. “Scram! Scram left!”
The B-l snap-rolled to the left so hard that the OSO’s head hit the right bulkhead. Then he was thrown forward as the bomber quickly decelerated. He cried out in pain, his vision swimming with stars.
The pilot threw in forty degrees of bank and pulled on the stick to 2.5 Gs-almost tripling their weight, then pulled the throttles to idle to slow to cornering velocity.
“C’mon, Rodeo, turn!” the OSO shouted. “Pop the brakes! Go to ninety degrees bank!”
“We’re restricted . . .”
“We’re gonna get hosed if you don’t get that nose around, pilot!” the OSO said. “Pop the brakes! You’re VMC. Go to ninety degrees bank!”
“Speedbrakes coming out,” the pilot shouted on interphone, then flipped the speedbrake OVERRIDE switches and thumbed them to decelerate even faster. The “scram” maneuver was an emergency turn designed to get away from ground threats as quickly as possible. It meant instantly slowing the B-l bomber to cornering velocity, a speed that increased the turn rate but wouldn’t normally sacrifice controllability.
“SA-8! Zeus-23! Eight o’clock, lethal range!” The electronic countermeasures system was ejecting chaff and flares as fast as possible, but the threats stayed locked on. The sky was suddenly filled with white lines-smoky SAMs, dozens of them, flitting around them like bees around a hive. Several of the little paper rockets hit the Bone, though there was no way they could do any actual damage-they weighed less than two pounds and were as fragile as a toy.
The pilot kept the back pressure on his control stick right at 2.5 Gs until the bomber had decelerated to their planned cornering velocity, then shoved the throttles to max afterburner. The maneuver worked. By the time he had plugged in the afterburners, they were headed virtually in the opposite direction. He pushed the control stick right to roll wings-level and thumbed the speedbrake control to retract the speedbrakes so they could recover their lost airspeed . . .
. . , except that the bomber never rolled upright. They were still in a steep bank. “Damn! Damn! Damn!” the pilot kept shouting. “What’s happening here?” The TERFLW FAIL warning tone sounded, a continuous low tone signaling that the terrain-following system had failed. The system automatically performed a 3-G fail-safe pull-up, designed to fly the bomber away from the ground-but if it was in a steep bank angle, a .fly-up would drive it into the ground unless the pilots intervened quickly. “Shit, what’s going on?” yelled the pilot. “It won’t roll wings-level! Mad Dog, get on your stick. I think my controls failed!”
“Get the nose down! Airspeed!” the copilot shouted as he grabbed for his stick. He tried to move it, but the bomber would not respond. He checked the flight control indicators. “Retract your speedbrakes! Spoilers are still up.” The pilot thumbed the switch to retract them, but there was no change. “Check my OVERRIDE switches!” he yelled.
The copilot reached over to the center console and checked the switches. “Spoiler OVERRIDE switches are normal,” he said. “What’s going on?”
The OSO could feel a definite sink building-it felt like the bomber was mushing, on the verge of a stall. It was yawing to the left as well, as if the pilot had pulled back power on the left engines. “Roll out! Roll out!” he shouted on interphone. “TF fail! You got it, pilot? Altitude!” But he didn’t have it. –
The pilot saw his altimeter beginning to spin down faster and faster. He felt a weightless sensation, felt his body floating in his straps. They were going in! Oh shit! Oh shit!
No choice, no warning-the pilot put his hand on his ejection lever, closed his eyes, and pulled.
Without warning, the upper hatch over each crew member’s station popped free, followed by a roar of windblast and a cloud of debris and dust that enveloped the aft compartment a split second before the rocket motors blasted the pilot up the ejection seat rails. A crushing blow slammed against his right shoulder, and he felt his body tumbling hard through the sky as it was snatched into the slipstream.
The last thing he remembered was seeing the sleek, deadly looking B-1B slide underneath him, still in a moderate left bank but with the nose up in a gentle climb. The pain in his shoulder was excruciating. He saw a tremendous fireball, a massive cloud of fire as big as the mountains surrounding his home back in Reno . . .
. . , and he saw two ejection seats, with partially inflated parachutes, fly right into that hellish wall of flames.
Seconds later he felt a sharp blow to his back and head . . , and then everything went black.
WONJU AIR BASE, REPUBLIC OF KOREA
THAT SAME TIME
In recent months Wonju Air Base had been placed on alert at least once a day, so when the Klaxon sounded that night, the ROK crews assumed it was more of the same. They ran to their planes and prepared to launch their fighters with surprising calm.
Because Wonju was South Korea’s northernmost air defense installation, less than thirty miles from the Demilitarized Zone and about one hundred miles from the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, it would always be one of the first to react to any incursion by North Korean attackers. Wonju had a mixed fleet of aircraft. The primary air defense weapon was the F-16K, a fighter license-built in South Korea by a conglomerate of Korean heavy equipment manufacturers. The fighters were designed to respond to a massive invasion force, so had only one centerline external fuel tank; but they carried two radar-guided AIM-120 AMRAAMs (advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles) and eight AIM-9M Sidewinder short-range heat-seeking missiles, plus 200 rounds for the 20-millimeter cannon. A minimum of twelveF-16Ks pulled round-the-clock alert at Wonju.
The base’s fleet also included a number of Frenchbuilt Mirage Fl fighters, American-built F-5 fighters for daylight intercepts-the North Korean Air Force was ill equipped to fight at night-and American-built F-4E Phantom jets for both bombing and air defense work. The alert fleet of twelve F-4Es was loaded with high-explosive and incendiary “firestorm” bombs specifically targeted for low-level, high-speed bombing raids of key selected North Korean targets, should the expected—many said inevitable-invasion from the North take place.
At the sound of the Klaxon, all alert crews went to their fighters and bombers, started engines, and monitored the air defense network. Even though they were in a heightened state of alert, no planes launched. A “launch on alert” could set off an uncontrollable military escalation between North and South in minutes. With engines running, the entire alert force could be in the air in less than two minutes. With planes talking off every fifteen seconds from the main runway and the two taxiways, twenty-four warplanes could be in the sky from this base alone in less time than it took a high-speed attacker to fly ten miles.
The crews listened and waited. Was it the actual invasion this time? Was this the big showdown between the Communists and the South here at last?
“Unidentified aircraft heading south at three-four-zero degrees bearing from Wonju, fifteen miles, you are in danger of crossing the Demilitarized Zone at your present heading and airspeed,” the South Korean air defense controller warned. “This is your final warning. If you cross restricted airspace, you will be fired upon. Unidentified aircraft, turn north immediately or you will be fired upon.” At that same moment, two green lights flashed on the flight-line ready board. The first two South Korean F-16s had launch clearance.
As soon as they were airborne, the lead pilot switched his wingman to the air defense controller’s call-up frequency. “Sapphire Command, Tiger flight of two, passing three thousand, check.”
“Two,” his wingman replied.
“Tiger flight, Sapphire Command reads you loud and clear,” the controller responded. “Switch to blue seven.”
“Tiger flight going to blue seven now.” After receiving a curt “Two” from his wingman-any good wingman will answer all calls with little more than his position in the formation-the two pilots changed over to a secure HAVE QUICK radio frequency. The channel “hopped” to different frequencies at irregular intervals, making it difficult for outsiders to eavesdrop. “Sapphire, Tiger flight with you passing four thousand, check.”
“Two.”
“Tiger flight, this is Sapphire Control, read you loud and clear,” the air defense controller responded, his voice now slightly garbled by the computer-controlled frequency-hopping algorithm. “Say position from Solar.”
The lead pilot flipped his navigation system to the Solar way point, an imaginary point from which they could give position reports without revealing their position to outsiders. “Tiger flight is zero-six-three degrees bearing and one-niner miles from Solar.”
“Roger, Tiger flight. Fly heading two-niner-five and take base plus one-four.” Base altitude today was ten thousand feet, so the F-16s started a climb to twenty-four thousand feet. A few minutes later, when they were less than twenty miles from the DMZ, the controller called, “Linear.” The lead F-16 pilot activated his APG-66 attack radar, and seconds later the radar locked onto a target directly off the nose. “Tiger flight is tied on, bogey bearing two-niner-seven, range thirty-two, low, speed three-zero-zero.”
“Tiger flight, that’s your bogey,” the controller replied.
The F-16’s APG-66 pulse-Doppler radar could track several targets simultaneously, but just for good measure the lead ROK pilot broke lock on the target and let the radar scan the sky again. No more targets. A lone invader from the North? The North rarely flew singleship. A tight formation of many invaders? The Communist fliers were not known for their formation flying skills in daytime, and they rarely flew at all at night, much less in formation.
But the ROK pilot had learned never to rely on such assumptions. It was always better to assume there were numerous attackers out there. “Tiger flight, tactical spread, now.”
“Two.” The second F-16 left his leader’s right-wingtip and spread out several hundred feet laterally and two hundred feet above, close enough to keep his leader in sight in the darkness but still be able to move and react quickly if the tactical situation changed. The Communist pilot might be able to see two targets on his radar screen-if he bothered to turn his radar on. So far, there was not one squeak from the threat-warning receiver, meaning he was not using his attack radar. Some of the North’s advanced J-7 and MiG-29 fighters purchased from China had infrared tracking devices and infrared-homing missiles, so radar wasn’t necessary close-in, but it was still very strange for an attacker to charge blindly into enemy territory without using radar.
The target continued across the DMZ without the slightest change in airspeed, altitude, or heading. The Communists had just committed an overt act of war, breaking the fragile truce between North and South.
The second Korean War was under way.
To the ROK pilot, this was not just an act of war–this was an act of barbarism. The two nations had been struggling for years to make peace and eventually reunite their two countries. Covert probes by North Korean special forces and provocative but nonaggressive border “incidents,” meant to trip the South into reacting with force for propaganda purposes, were bad enough. But this was a deliberate air-attack profile.
There was plenty of mutual distrust to go around. The South was accused of building up an invasion force by buying or license-building American fighters, warships, antiaircraft systems, radars, and high-tech precision-guided weapons. The North was accused of continuous spy missions and of deploying improved surface-to-surface missile systems capable of bombarding Seoul with chemical, biological, or even nuclear warheads. Everyone knew the arms race between the two countries had to stop, but neither side wanted to make the first substantive move.
Both nations tried “baby steps” toward peace. The North agreed to dismantle its breeder nuclear reactors in favor of light-water reactors, less capable of producing weapons-grade nuclear material. The West promised huge grants of cooking and heating oil so the North would not be tempted to trade weapons for oil from unfriendly Middle East nations such as Iran. The South canceled joint U.S, and Japanese military maneuvers, removed Patriot and Rapier air defense systems from the DMZ, and reduced U.S, military presence to less than ten thousand troops. But the distrust continued.
The ROK pilot wanted nothing more than to see the entire Korean peninsula reunited once again-under a Korean, not a foreign, flag. That had been the dream of all Koreans since the Chinese and Japanese occupations. But what he wanted didn’t matter right now. Right now his homeland was under attack, and it was his sacred responsibility to stop it.
He scanned an authentication encoder-decoder card strapped to his left thigh. Even though the pilots and the controller were on a secure frequency and had already verified each other’s identity, they were entering a critical phase of this mission. Careful coordination and verification was an absolute must. The card was changed every twelve hours and would provide positive .command validation for all upcoming orders: “Sapphire Command, this is Tiger flight, authenticate Tango-Alpha. Over.”
“Sapphire authenticates Alpha.”
“Authentication received and verified. Tiger flight requests final intercept instructions.”
“Stand by, Tiger flight,” the controller responded. The wait was not long. “Tiger flight, you are ordered to attempt to make visual contact to verify the target’s identity. If it is a hostile aircraft, or if identification is not possible, you are instructed to attempt to force the aircraft to land at a category Charlie, Delta, Echo, or Foxtrot airfield, military or civilian. If the hostile will not respond, or if you are approaching any category Bravo airspace, you are authorized to destroy the hostile aircraft.” Then the controller read the current datetime group and authentication code, and it matched.
The F-16 lead pilot called up the coordinates of the closest category Bravo airspace, which happened to be Seoul itself. They were only fifty miles north of the edge of the thirty-mile Buffer Zone around the South Korean capital. At their current airspeed, the pilot had only about seven minutes to convince the Communist invader to turn around or land before he had to shoot him out of the sky.
He tried the radio first. In Korean, then in broken Chinese, he radioed, “Unidentified aircraft seventy-eight miles northeast of Seoul, this is the Republic of Korea air defense flight leader. You have violated restricted airspace. I have you in sight and am prepared to destroy you if you do not reverse course immediately. I warn you to reverse course now.” No response. He tried the universal emergency frequencies on UHF, VHP, and HF channels as well as several known North Korean fighter common frequencies, but there was still no response.
It took two minutes for the F-16 pilot, with his wingman flying high cover position, to maneuver alongside the hostile aircraft. Thankfully, it was only a single plane, not an entire attack formation. It was easy to intercept the intruder visually because he had all of his outside navigation and anti-collision lights on-and, the ROK pilot soon realized with surprise, he had his landing gear and takeoff flaps still down too! Incredibly, this pilot had launched and flown hundreds of miles with his gear and flaps down. He was sucking fuel at an enormous rate, and at over three hundred knots had probably overstressed them both to the breaking point. The ROK F-16s were equipped with three-thousand candlepower spotlights on the left side of the plane, and when the pilot was close enough to see the plane’s shadowy outline in the darkness, he flicked them on.
“Sapphire, this is Tiger flight lead, I have visual contact on the hostile,” the ROK pilot reported on the secure HAVE QUICK channel. “It appears to be an A-5 Qian attack plane.” The A-5 was a Chinese-made attack plane, a thirty-year-old copy of the ancient Soviet Su-7 attack fighter. It was a mainstay of the North Korean People’s Air Army. “Configuration as follows: single engine, single pilot, small cylindrical fuselage, with short delta wings, large nose intake, and a small radome in the center of the intake. I see a red and blue flag of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea on the side, along with a tail code, ‘CH,’ and number one one-four.” The “CH” stood for Ch’ongjin, a North Korean air-attack base.
Ch’ongjin was known to have large stores of chemical and possibly nuclear weapons.
“The A-5 is carrying three external stores: one one hundred-deciliter centerline fuel tank and another one hundred-deciliter fuel tank under each wing.” He steered the searchlight across the weapons, gulped in shock, then added in a barely controlled voice, “Correction, Sapphire, correction. The stores under the wings are not fuel tanks, repeat, not fuel tanks. They appear to be gravity weapons, repeat, gravity weapons. I see four purple stripes around the center of the starboard gravity weapon.”
This was the worst possible news. The purple stripes around the bomb, a standard marking in both the communist Chinese and the old Soviet military from which all of North Korea’s weapons came, meant that they were thermonuclear bombs. They were the old-style Yi-241 weapons, disguised to look like fuel tanks-the Chinese and Soviets had once even stored them outside secure areas to try to convince Western intelligence analysts that they were not nuclear bombs. But each of these “fuel tanks” had the explosive power of 600,000 tons of TNT-more than enough to level Seoul or any other city in the world. Because they were considered unreliable, two of them were dropped on a single target-if the first one detonated, the second would “fratricide” in the fireball.
There was a moment’s tense pause. Then the controller ordered, “Tiger leader, this is Sapphire; you are instructed to attempt to divert the hostile away from category Bravo airspace in any way possible.” The F-16 pilot could hear the quiver of fear in the controller’s voice. “You must not allow the hostile aircraft to close within fifty miles of category Bravo airspace, but you are instructed to shoot down the hostile only as a last resort.” The reasoning was clear: if the pilot put a missile into the A-5, at best the explosion would scatter nuclear material; at worst, the devices could detonate, causing widespread destruction. The ex-Chinese and ex-Soviet weapons did not have the numerous safety features of Western nuclear devices-they were designed to explode, not designed to safe themselves.
“Tiger flight copies,” the leader acknowledged. “Check.”
“Two copies,” his wingman responded immediately. With the safety radius now increased to fifty miles, they had less than three minutes to get this intruder turned around.
The lead pilot shined the searchlight into the A-5’s cockpit canopy from a distance of less than fifty meters. What he saw shocked him yet again: the North Korean pilot was not wearing a helmet! It looked as if he had simply climbed in the plane and blasted off without any of his flight gear. This was astounding, although it did explain why he never heard the radio or configuration warnings.
The North Korean pilot shielded his eyes from the searchlight-and, thankfully, turned away from the F-16. Good-they were no longer heading directly for the heart of the capital. The ROK pilot edged closer to the A-5 and again shined the light into the cockpit; again, the A-5 turned away. He was heading almost southeast now, well away from Seoul. This time the F-16 pilot flew slightly above and closer to the North Korean plane. As the A-5 descended and turned away, he saw that the pilot appeared to be screaming, gesturing wildly at the ROK plane while trying to shield his eyes from the blinding light.
The F-16 pilot called up a list of nearby category Echo airfields and found a deactivated military base, Hongch’on, less than thirty miles away. It was isolated; the nearest populated area was a small town over twenty miles distant. There was no time to search for a better choice.
The North Korean seemed to be weirdly single-minded, which worked to the F-16 pilot’s advantage: if he steered away from the A-5, the Communist pilot tried to turn right toward Seoul, but if he crowded him, the pilot turned left, away from him. If he climbed over him, the Communist descended, but if he flew at the same altitude, the A-5 pilot would try to climb back to original altitude or maintain altitude. Good.
“Sapphire Control, this is Tiger lead, I have the hostile turned toward Hongch’on, and I will attempt to get him to land. Have security and special weapons maintenance crews standing by. Our ETA is fifteen minutes.”
They were over Hongch’on in a little over 4wenty minutes. The airstrip was illuminated by several trucks shining their headlights onto the concrete; there was more than enough light. But herding the reluctant North Korean pilot to land on the nine-thousand-foot long runway was proving more difficult. It was as if the North Korean pilot had finally realized what the F-16 was forcing him to do, and he kept trying to turn away from the runway. Finally, the wingman got on his left side, and they boxed the A-5 in. But when the leader tried to force it lower and along the runway centerline, the plane rolled hard left, striking the wingman’s right wingtip.
“Damn! He midaired me! Tiger Two is lost wingman!” the second F-16 pilot shouted as he climbed away from the North Korean attack plane. “Lead, I have substantial damage to my right wingtip and number ten weapon station. I am climbing, passing five thousand.”
“How is your controllability?” the leader asked. “Do you need an escort?”
“Negative,” the wingman replied. “I feel a slight vibration from the damage area and I’ve lost some airspeed, but I have no warning or caution lights and my controls feel okay. I have safed and locked all my weapons. Still showing full connectivity on all stations except number ten. I am visually inspecting my right pylon . . .” The lead F-16 pilot knew his wingman was fishing a flashlight out of his flight suit pocket so he could see his wingtip: “I have lost my number ten weapon. Substantial damage to my right wingtip, but very little observed damage to my right wing.”
“Good,” the lead F-16 pilot responded with relief. “Stay above us at ten thousand feet until I end this intercept, and then I’ll escort you back to base.” The wingman had over an hour’s worth of fuel remaining. More than enough.
The A-5 pilot was trying to turn back toward Seoul again. The lead F-16 moved in tight on his right side and fired its 20-millimeter cannon. The blaze of the muzzle flash made the pilot leap in shock, and he turned away exactly as before. The ROK pilot waited until the A-5 was almost in the direction of Hongch’on. Then he yanked the throttle, dropped back a few hundred feet behind it, kicked in a little left rudder, and fired a one-second stream of shells across the tail, being careful not to shoot below the wings at the thermonuclear bombs.
The shells ripped across the horizontal and vertical control surfaces, tearing them to shreds. Several rounds entered the engine exhaust, and the F-16 pilot could see sparks, then a fire spreading inside the engine compartment. TheA-5’s airspeed, already limited because of the hanging gear and flaps, was cut nearly to nothing as the engine slowly began to disintegrate. The fighter dropped like a brick.
Although the Communist pilot was obviously suffering from mental lapses evidenced by flying without his gear, his instinct and training took over as the A-5 began to die. The fire was extinguished as it fell, and the plane nosed over to help build up airspeed. As it did, the pilot was able to maneuver his stricken jet toward the runway at Hongch’on. Incredibly, he nearly managed to plant it on the runway. It was in a landing attitude, nose up slightly to try to preserve some airspeed, at the moment that it slammed into the ground about three miles short of the runway, digging into the soft peat surrounding the airfield. The F-16 pilot, trying to keep it in sight as long as possible, watched in horror as it flipped upside down in the soft earth, then spun across the ground. The bombs and fuel tank scattered. He couldn’t see where they landed.
As the ROK pilot climbed away from Hongch’on, he thanked the gods that his own intended landing base was many, many miles away. The provincial police evacuated the village of Hongch’on quickly and efficiently, and forces from the Republic of Korea Army base at Yongsan sealed off the area within twenty miles of the crash site. Village officials were simply told that a military plane had crashed, and that was good enough reason for them. Fortunately, the early morning winds were light, so the authorities anticipated no further evacuations for several hours, after the rising sun stirred the atmosphere again.
Slowly, deliberately, the Army nuclear weapons experts closed in toward the crash site. There was evidence of fire and debris everywhere, but they detected no radiation. The fires were small, probably because the A-5 had little fuel left in its tanks-just enough for a one-way suicide run over Seoul to dispense the cargo of death. There were no signs of explosion.
The wreckage of the fighter was found inverted, facing opposite from the direction of flight. The plane was almost intact, a tribute to its tough-as-nails construction. The centerline fuel tank was crushed up into the bottom of the fuselage, the cockpit canopy had been flattened-and the nuclear weapons were nowhere in sight.
While searchers fanned out to look for them, the pilot’s body was pulled out of the cockpit. His head was crushed. He was wearing a dark brown wool flight suit ringed at the collar and cuffs with lamb’s wool, typical of the North’s Air Army, but he had no other flight gear at all-not only no helmet but no gloves, no survival gear, not even flying boots. How he survived the nearly one-hour ordeal in the freezing-cold cockpit was impossible to guess. There was no name tag. Some of his insignia, including the pilot’s wings and flag of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, had been partially torn off. Either he was trying at the last moment to hide his identity or country of origin-or he was ashamed to reveal it.
But the most incredible revelation was the pilot’s body itself. It was as emaciated as a scarecrow. He could not have weighed more than one hundred pounds. His chest was sunken, his ribs were visible, and his skin was stretched taut across his bones. He looked like a concentration camp survivor, so skeletal that investigators guessed he might not have had a regular meal in months. The body was carried away from the crash site for further investigation.
Less than an hour later, searchers found both thermonuclear gravity bombs. By a remarkable stroke of fortune, neither had ruptured. One bomb’s housing had cracked, but there was no spill and the basketball-sized globe of fissionable material was intact. The second bomb was fully intact except for its tail fins and several dents and scrapes. The weapons were carefully packaged in lead-lined caskets and carried away for analysis.
South Korea had now acquired its first two thermonuclear weapons. Unknown to it or to the rest of the world, the tiny nation would never be the same again. CHAPTER ONE.
MILITARY TECHNOLOGY SUBCOMMITTEE,
SENATE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE,
RAYBURN BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.
SEVERAL WEEKS LATER.
I hoped we’d never be facing this question again in my lifetime,” the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said, his voice serious. “But here it is. Looks like the devil’s goin’ to the prom, and we’re praying he don’t ask us to dance.”
The main part of the morning’s classified, closed hearing had already concluded; the scientists and comptrollers had packed up their charts and spreadsheets, leaving only the subcommittee members, several general officers, and a few aides. This was the open debate portion of the session, a “chat session” where everything was fair game and the uniformed officers had a last chance to persuade. It was usually more casual and more freewheeling than formal subcommittee testimony, and it gave all involved a chance to vent their frustrations and opinions.
“I’d say, Senator,” Air Force General Victor G. Hayes, the chief of staff of the Air Force, responded, “that we’ve got no choice but to dance with that devil. The question is, can we keep him from only tipping over the punch bowl, or is he going to burn down the whole school gymnasium if we don’t do something?”
“You characterize the attacks on Taiwan and Guam as just a tipped-over punch bowl, General?” a committee member asked.
General Hayes shook his head and wiped the smile from his face. He knew better than to try to get too chummy or casual with these committee members, no matter how plain-talking and down-home they sometimes sounded.
This was the first time Victor “Jester” Hayes had testified before any committee in Congress. Although the Pentagon gave “charm school” classes and seminars to high-ranking officers on how to handle reporters, dignitaries, and civilians in a variety of circumstances, including giving testimony before Congress, it was simply impossible to fully prepare for ordeals like this. He did not feel comfortable here, and he was afraid it showed. Big-time.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Navy Admiral George Balboa, was seated beside Hayes. The other members of the Joint Chiefs-General William Marshall, Army chief of staff; Admiral Wayne Connor, chief of Naval Operations; and General Peter Traherne, commandant of the Marine Corps, along with senior deputies and aides-were also seated at the table facing the subcommittee. Out of the corner of his eye, Hayes could see the barely disguised amusement on some of their faces. Balboa in particular seemed to be enjoying the sight of Hayes roasting a little in front of a congressional subcommittee.
Screw ’em all, Hayes told himself resolutely. I’m a fighter pilot. I’m an aerial assassin. These congressmen may be high-ranking elected government officials, but they wouldn’t understand a good fight if it kicked them in the ass. Be yourself. Show ’em what you got. As far as Balboa was concerned-well, he was a weasel, and everyone knew it. He was virtually powerless, allowed to keep his position by the good graces of powerful opposition party members in Congress even though he publicly ambushed his Commander in Chief.
“Forgive me for trying to take some of the doomsday tone out of this discussion, Senator,” Hayes responded. “After two days of secret testimony on some of the new ‘black’ weapons programs we’ve included in the Air Force budget, I thought it might be time for a little break. But I assure you: this is a very serious matter. The future of the United States Air Force, and indeed the fate of our military forces and the nation itself, will be determined in the next several years by the decisions we make today.
“I characterize the ballistic missile attacks on Taiwan and Guam by the People’s Republic of China as a repudiation of thirty years of arms reduction efforts and a warning to the United States armed forces that we must develop a multilayered antimissile defense system immediately. We bargained away our antimissile capabilities in the 1970s, believing that nonproliferation would lead to peace. Now, in the face of renewed aggression, rearmament, terrorism, and the spread of small-scale and black-market weapons of mass destruction, I feel we have no choice but to rebuild our defensive forces. The days of believing that our conventional precision war-fighting capability obviated and obsoleted decades of nuclear warfare strategy and technology are history.”
“Apparently so,” one committee member said ruefully. “I for one am mystified and angry about this waste of time, money, and resources. We’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars on these new ‘smart’ weapons, and now you’re saying they won’t protect us?”
“I’m saying that the rules are changing, Senator,” General Hayes said earnestly, “and we must change with them.
“We gave away our defensive capability because we kept a large, strong offensive force, including nuclear deterrent forces. We then dismantled those deterrent forces when the threat from other superpowers diminished. Now the threat is back, but we have neither defensive nor deterrent forces in place. That leaves us vulnerable to criticism at best and attack at worst. The China incident is a perfect example.”
“That’s all fine and good, General, but these budget numbers are staggering, and the path you want to embark on here reminds me of the nuclear nightmare times of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Reagan,” the senator went on, motioning to his staff report. “You’re asking for billions more on some truly horrifying programs, like antiballistic missile lasers, space-based lasers, and these so-called plasma-yield weapons. What’s going on, General? Is the Air Force so desperate for a mission right now that you’ll even go back to ‘mutually assured destruction’ doctrines of the Cold War?”
“Members of the committee, I asked Secretary of Defense Chastain and Secretary of the Air Force Mortonson to give the Air Force a budget for the deployment of a new class of weapons not to shock or galvanize the Congress, but because I truly believe the time has long passed for us to be thinking about this kind of war fighting,” General Hayes went on. “China’s recent nuclear attacks on Taiwan; its suspected nuclear sabotage of the aircraft carrier USS Independence in Yokosuka Harbor; and its shocking, unprovoked, and horrific ballistic missile nuclear attack on the island of Guam, which all but wiped Anderson Air Force Base off the map three years ago, all are a warning to the United States.”
“It’s a warning, all right,” another senator offered. “But it seems more a warning to avoid stepping up to the edge of that slippery slope. Do we want to start another nuclear arms race?”
It seemed as if most folks in America had all but forgotten what had happened only three years ago, Hayes thought grimly. In 1997, just before their “Reunification Day” celebrations, the People’s Republic of China launched a small-scale nuclear assault on Taiwan, which had just declared full independence and sovereignty from the mainland. Several Taiwanese military bases were decimated; over fifty thousand persons lost their lives. At the same time, a nuclear explosion in YokosukaHarbor outside Tokyo destroyed several American warships, including the soon-to-be-retired aircraft carrier USS Independence. China was accused of that unconscionable act, but the actual culprit was never positively identified. When the United States tried to halt the PRC’s attacks against Taiwan, China retaliated by launching a nuclear ballistic missile attack on the island of Guam, shutting down two important American military bases in the Pacific.
The reverberations of that fateful summer of 1997 were still being felt. Japan had closed down all U.S, military bases on their soil and had only recently begun allowing some limited access to U.S, warships-provisioning and humanitarian shore leave only, with ships at anchor in the harbor, not in port, and no weapons transfers in their territorial waters. South Korea was permitting only routine provisioning and shore leave they were allowing no weapons transfers within five miles of shore and prohibited staging military operations from their ports. It was the same for most ports of call in the western Pacific. American naval presence in the Pacific was almost nil.
And America’s response to China’s attacks was . . , silence. Except for one massive joint Air Force/Navy defensive air armada around Taiwan that all but destroyed China’s Air Force, and an isolated but highly effective series of air raids inside China-largely attributed to American stealth bombers, aided by Taiwanese fighters-the Americans had not retaliated. It was world condemnation alone that eventually forced China to abandon its plan to force Taiwan back into its sphere of influence.
“I’m concerned about the path Russia, Japan, and North Korea are taking in the wake of the economic collapse in Asia and the conflict in the Balkans,” Hayes went on. “Russia appears to be back in the hands of hard-liners and neo-Communists. Food riots in North Korea have led to the slaughter of thousands of civilians by military forces foraging for food. Japan has isolated us out of the Pacific and is proceeding with plans to remilitarize, all in an apparent attempt to shore up confidence in its government. I don’t believe the United States sparked this return to the specter of the Cold War, but we must be prepared to deal with it.”
“We are all shocked and horrified about all those events as well, General,” the senator pointed out, “and we agree with the President that we must be better prepared for radical changes in the political climate. But this . . , this buildup of such powerful weapons that you’re asking for seems to be an overreaction. What you are proposing goes far beyond what any of us see as a measured response to world events.”
General Hayes swallowed hard. This was turning into a much harder sell than he had expected. While the world slowly went back to an uneasy, suspicious peace, President Kevin Martindale was roundly criticized for his inaction. Although China was stopped and an all-out nuclear conflict was averted, many Americans wanted someone to pay a bigger price for the hundreds of thousands who had died on Taiwan, Guam, and onboard the four Navy warships destroyed in YokosukaHarbor. The hawkish President was slammed in the press for abandoning the capital onboard Air Force
One during the attacks on Taiwan, while failing to use most of the military power he had spent his entire career in Washington trying to build up.
No one could say precisely what Martindale should have done, but everyone was convinced he should have done something more.
“Then what is a ‘measured response’ to those attacks, Senator?” General Hayes asked. “The People’s Republic of China devastated Taiwan and Guam with nuclear weapons, taking hundreds of thousands of lives. Our response was to secretly attack their last remaining ICBM silos. Although we caused a lot of damage and prevented China from launching any more attacks against the United States, that country still retains a tremendous nuclear force and is still a threat. Our best conventional weapons didn’t work.”
Army Chief of Staff Marshall spoke up to reinforce Hayes’s point. “My concern,” he said, “rests with other rogue nations that may want to use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us. Intelligence reports say China has delivered nuclear warheads to North Korea via Pakistan in exchange for its missile technology. Combine that with North Korea’s new long-range missiles and nuclear-capable aircraft delivery systems, and it could have a first-strike nuclear force in place in a few years, perhaps sooner. Iran, Iraq, Syria, and even Japan could be next.”
“The question is, Senators, what does the United States do if another attack from one of these rogue nations occurs?” General Hayes asked. “Obviously, our conventional weapons superiority failed to deter China-it certainly won’t deter any smaller nation. Do we use strategic nuclear forces? No American president would dare consider using a city-busting bomb unless the very existence of the United States itself was in jeopardy. “Does this mean we do nothing, as the world thinks we did against China? That would be the safest move. But we look indecisive and weak, and I think that perception makes us appear ineffectual to our allies and ripe for more attacks by our enemies. South Korea and Japan think we abandoned them, and both are clamoring to renegotiate defense treaties to allow them to build up their military forces once again. As you know, Japan doesn’t allow any more U.S, warships to homeport or even dock there. And they’ve concluded a multibillion-dollar defense deal with Russia for MiG-29 fighters because they’re afraid of not being able to buy American jets.
“To the Air Force,” Hayes went on, “the answer is costly and politically hazardous, but absolutely clear. We must put a multilayered aircraft, satellite, and ballistic missile defense system in place immediately and rebuild our rapid-response intercontinental heavy-strike forces. The cornerstone of the five-year plan we are requesting is early deployment of the airborne laser and additional funding for the space-based laser defense system.”
“Well, let’s get into the specific programs and their status right now, gentlemen,” the subcommittee chairman said. The subcommittee members leaned forward in their seats; this was where the sparks would begin to fly. “I’d like to begin with the Navy. Admiral Connor, start us off, please.”
“Thank you, sir,” Connor said. “The Navy has vastly improved its air defense and ABM technology over the years and is now ready, with congressional support, to field the world’s most advanced, most mobile, and most flexible antiballistic missile defense systems. The Aegis Tier One system is in service now and has demonstrated a credible ABM capability, but Aegis Tier Two, using components available right now, will increase its lethality tenfold. Aegis Tier Three will be the ultimate ship-launched air defense system, capable of defending the fleet and large sections of allied territory. We’re on track and on budget to deliver both systems.”
“General Hayes?”
“The Air Force is continuing development and acquisition research on the airborne laser, the nation’s only air defense system designed to kill ballistic missiles in the boost phase rather than in midcourse or reentry phases of flight,” Hayes said. “Mounted on a 747 airframe, ABL can rapidly respond to a crisis, can set up anywhere on the globe in less than twenty-four hours, and can give theater commanders an effective multishot missile kill capability.” “When can the ABL system be ready, General?” one senator asked.
“With continued funding support, ABL will reach initial operating capability with three planes by the year
2005 and full operating capability by 2007.”
Hayes could see many of the senators shaking their heads-that was far longer than they recalled when the program was first introduced. “But Patriot and Aegis Tier One are ready now, is that correct?” one senator asked. “When can Aegis Tier Two be ready?”
“In two years, sir,” Admiral Balboa replied proudly. “Modifications to the existing Standard missile, improvements on the Aegis radar system-all of which benefit fleet defense as well as improve ABM capability.”
“Very good,” the chairman said. “General Marshall?”
“The lead agency in antiballistic missile weapons technology has always been and will continue to be the U.S. Army,” General Marshall began. “Our PAC-3 version of the Patriot missile is the only battle-proven antimissile system deployed right now. Our improved Patriot system, the Theater High Altitude Air Defense, or THAAD, system, is progressing and should be ready for initial operating capability in three years, providing we receive full requested-funding approval.”
“But as I understand it,” one senator said, “the performance of the weapon depends right now on the use of this so-called baby nuke. Is that a fair assessment, General Marshall?”
“No. That term is incorrect. The plasma-yield warhead is not a thermonuclear device, Senator,” Marshall said. “It is a new technology high-explosive device that will increase the capability and effectiveness of all classes of theater or strategic antimissile defense . . .”
“Excuse me, General, but that sounds like doublespeak for a nuclear bomb to me,” the senator interjected. “Would you mind explaining what these things do and omit the soft-soaping?”
“What plasma-yield weapons are, Senator,” Marshall answered, “are the next generation of high explosive weapons, designed to be small, lightweight, but very destructive warheads for antiballistic missiles, antiaircraft missiles, and cruise missiles. They are not ‘baby nukes,’ and I’m concerned that this characterization will deprive our arsenal of a very promising futuristic weapon. Although I’m not a physicist or engineer, I know enough about the process and the application of the device to explain it for the committee:
“Simply put, plasma is ionized gas-a cloud of charged particles, usually consisting of atoms that have had electrons stripped from them so their charge is unbalanced or dynamic. It is the most abundant form of matter in the universe-the physicists tell me that ninety-nine percent of all known matter is plasma. Because the gas is composed of charged particles called ions and not atoms or molecules as air and water are, plasma has unique properties. We don’t really know how to contain it, but we do know a lot about shaping it-in essence, plasma can be programmed. We can control its size, shape, mass, and what materials it interacts with.
“Plasma-yield weapons give us added flexibility by giving smaller weapons and delivery systems more punch, until we can improve our missiles’ accuracy enough to allow smaller conventional warheads,” Marshall explained. “The weapons use a small fission reaction, not to generate a thermonuclear yield, but to generate radiation . . .” “A fission reaction-as in a nuclear explosion}” one senator asked, his tone incredulous.
“A rapid but controlled fission reaction more like a nuclear power plant, generating heat rather than an explosion,” Marshall responded. “We bring nuclear material together to start a fission reaction, but our goal is not to create the chain reaction that leads to an explosion. We’re only looking for the intense radioactivity to develop for a very short moment-milliseconds in fact-and then the reaction stops. The radioactivity is concentrated along a magnetic field and hits a pea-sized pellet of nuclear fuel. This forces ions-positively and negatively charged particles-to be stripped from atoms, producing a bubble of energy called plasma. Because there is no explosion per se, we can precisely control the diameter of the bubble, making it as small as a few hundred feet or as large as a city block.
“There are two noteworthy properties of a plasma yield effect,” Marshall went on. “First, there is no large-scale release of radiation because the fission reaction is terminated gigaseconds after it starts. There is no nuclear chain reaction that produces the large explosion and release of nuclear particles and creates tremendous heat. The yield of this weapon is many times smaller than a thermonuclear detonation, and the levels of released radiation are far smaller than even the proportional size of the yield.
“The second property of this effect is that the plasma reaction cannot take place outside the field, or bubble, created by the explosion,” General Marshall went on. “This is called the Debye effect. The plasma field basically consumes itself as it is created; it dies at the same time as it is born. The size of the field can be precisely determined, which is why plasma is used in such commercial operations as making microchips and drawing images in a plasma TV set. Outside the plasma field, there is no overpressure and very little heat or radiation. There is no shock wave as the plasma field is formed. The field grows to whatever size it’s programmed to grow to, then stops. The weapon doesn’t even make that much noise when it goes off.”
“It doesn’t make noise?” one senator asked, sounding startled.
“Some, but not as much as you’d expect for a small nuclear device,” Marshall responded. “You see, the weapon doesn’t explode as we all commonly think of explosions. It doesn’t transform matter into energy and expanding gases, and it doesn’t compress the air around itself. It simply changes matter-solid, liquid, or gas to plasma, which is just another form of matter. As you know, there’s no sound when ice turns to liquid or when liquid turns to gas.”
“But there’s got to be heat, light, flame, radiation, all that stuff,” one senator pointed out. “Isn’t that a pretty violent reaction? We’re concerned about what the international community and the American people will think about our military forces using these weapons on missiles and bombs. How do we explain it, General?”
“We do tend to think of something changing properties as a violent process, Senator,” Marshall explained, recognizing he was having difficulty getting his point across, “but in reality it’s not. When a pond freezes over, it’s not a violent thing. In physics, it’s merely a transfer of energy-the molecules of water release energy in lower temperatures and don’t bump around as much, forming a solid. Liquids boil when they turn to gas, but that’s not a violent thing either-it’s an atmospheric thing, the gases in the liquid flowing to a region of lower pressure when the absorption of energy separates water molecules. It’s the same with a plasma field. Matter is transformed to another form of matter by absorbing energy.” “You make it sound so damned peaceful, so natural, like a flower blooming or a sunrise,” a senator said acidly. “We’re talking about a killer weapon here, General. Let’s not forget that.” He paused for a moment, then asked, “So what happens to the matter, the solids . . , oh, hell, you know, the buildings, the people, who get hit by this thing? What happens? Where do they . . , well, go?”
“They become plasma-that’s the simple answer,” Marshall responded. “The plasma field takes matter, absorbs energy, and converts it to ionized gas. The target is .., well, the target’s just not there anymore, at least not in a form that our senses can detect.”
“You mean . . , vaporized,” said one of the senators.
For a moment, Marshall’s face was impassive. Then he nodded, looked the senator straight in the eye, and said, “Yes, sir. Vaporized. The target becomes a cloud of ionized gas, equal in mass to its original mass, but simply a collection of charged particles.”
The committee sat in stunned, horrified silence. The members did not even look at each other-they simply stared at Marshall and the other service chiefs in utter disbelief. Finally, the committee chairman said, “This is incredible, General, absolutely incredible. And you are proposing that we actually deploy this weapon? You are asking this committee to write an amendment to the new budget to allow the military services to put this . . , this plasma-yield weapon on a missile? It sounds incredibly dangerous.”
“One property that I didn’t mention, sir,” Marshall explained, “is that the plasma-yield weapon is more effective at high altitudes, because atmospheric pressure dilutes the plasma field. This makes it a good warhead to use in applications such as air defense, antiballistic missiles, and antisatellite weapons, and not as good with land- or sea-attack weapons. That’s another reason the Army and Navy are using it in their ground and sea-based antiballistic missile systems. Because we get a bigger bang, they can afford to use tracking and intercept systems that aren’t quite as precise-or expensive.”
“This is simply unbelievable,” the chairman said, clearly shaken by what he had heard. “A weapon that can kill thousands silently, yet small enough to be put in a suitcase.” As he looked at the others on the subcommittee, he shook his head. “I for one don’t want to start traveling down this road without more facts. I think we should table this discussion until we review more scientific facts about this technology.”
It was, General Hayes thought grimly, an urbane way of saying they didn’t want to think about it any more. Apparently, everyone on the subcommittee shared the sentiment, because there was no dissent, no further discussion. Hayes was shaken. It seemed as though the vote had been suddenly, silently taken, and it was unanimous. No funding for the plasma-yield technology weapon-which probably spelled the end of the Army’s THAAD program, and maybe the Navy’s
Tier Two and Tier Three antiballistic missile programs as well.
Then, just as it appeared that the chairman was going to adjourn the hearing, a new voice spoke up. “Excuse me, Mr. Chairman. Permission to address the subcommittee?”
The Joint Chiefs turned toward Air Force Lieutenant General Terrill Samson, one of the aides supporting the Air Force chief of staff. The subcommittee chairman said, “The chair recognizes General Samson. Please be brief, sir.”
“Thank you,” Samson said. Terrill Samson, a large black man known as Earthmover to his friends, had risen through the ranks from high school dropout Air .Force enlistee to three-star general and was the commanding general of the Air Force High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center, or HAWC, a secret research and test facility hidden in the deserts of south-central Nevada in an area known as Dreamland. “My group has been working with the Army in testing plasma-yield technology used in THAAD. Senator, the Air Force has an interim concept for a ballistic missile defense system that improves on THAAD and provides a near-term technology solution until ABL comes online in the next five to ten years. We call it Lancelot. Part of our budget request was for an operational Lancelot flight test in the next several weeks.”
“Lancelot?” The subcommittee chairman flipped through an index, then turned to an aide, who scanned another set of files. “I don’t see anything in here about a Lancelot program, General Samson.”
“Lancelot was designed and built by one of our defense contractors, Sky Masters Inc., with help from my engineers at Elliott Air Force Base,” Samso said. “With all due respect, General Marshall, we saw how poorly the THAAD and Tier Two programs were progressing and worked to address the difficulties. We used off-the-shelf components and shaved funds from some of our other programs, including our fixed operating budget.”
“You mean, you just made up this weapon without any specific funding?” one senator asked. Samson nodded. “And now you’re ready to test it, but you’ve run out of money; and besides, you can’t fly it without approval from the Pentagon, right?”
“That’s it in a nutshell, sir,” Samson responded.
“Interesting,” the senator remarked. He looked at General Hayes, noted his barely disguised discomfort, and asked, “General Hayes, do you know anything about this Lancelot program?”
Hayes took a deep breath, let it out, then said in an even voice, “General Samson was handpicked by the President and the secretary of defense to run the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center, our nation’s primary air weapons research center. In all honesty, sir, I did not know about Lancelot . . .”
“Neither did I,” Admiral Balboa interjected hotly. “I know Dreamland is supposed to be a top-secret installation, General, but not from me”
“Quite frankly, sir,” Hayes went on, “if General Samson waited to give me a detailed briefing and get my approval for every one of the hundreds of programs he manages every month out at HAWC, he’d never get any work done. We pay him to get results, not waste time in Washington giving briefings.” He noted the irritated frowns on the subcommittee members’ faces, grinned inwardly, and quickly went on: “If General Samson says it’s good and it’s ready to fly, then I support him. I’m sure General Samson enjoys the enthusiastic support of the White House.”
Balboa had no response to that because he knew it to be true. After the successful counterstrikes against
China staged by weapon systems developed at Dreamland, Samson was the new golden boy at the White House. He and his senior staff members were far more popular than Dreamland’s bombastic first director, Bradley James Elliott-who was missing and presumed killed in the attacks against China’s intercontinental ballistic missile sites-had ever been.
“Good,” the senator said, as if he expected no other response than that. “I’m sure GAO will have to look into the legality of General Samson raiding his budget for unapproved weapons research, but that’s a question for some other committee. If it fails, you’ll be the goat. If it works, you might be a hero.”
“It’ll work, sir,” Samson said enthusiastically. “My troops and I believe in Lancelot so much that we’ve put our careers on the line to prove it’ll work. If it doesn’t, I’m sure General Hayes will be looking for a new director at HAWC. But we believe that won’t happen, Senator. Lancelot will work. We can go into initial operational capability with one squadron, eight aircraft, within six months. Lancelot will give us a worldwide antiballistic missile, cruise missile, antiaircraft, and even antisatellite defense capability second to none until the airborne laser is deployed. We’re betting our careers on it,”
The members of the committee looked at each other, some with puzzled expressions. Then the subcommittee chairman said with a grin, “General Samson, General Hayes, I think that’s a sucker bet. You come back to us with a working, deployable antimissile system, and I for one will enthusiastically support it. Until then, it’s off the books and so not under our purview. Air Force will have to handle it from their existing budget-or scrap it. If there’s no other business?” He waited one breath, then said, “This session is in recess.” He rapped his gavel. A clerk immediately read a warning that the session was classified top secret and not to be discussed outside the committee chambers, and the meeting was over.
Joint Chiefs Chairman Balboa managed not to say a word until he and the other blue-suiters were out of range of any photographers or TV cameras that might be nearby. Then he exploded. “Goddammit, Samson,” he swore, “you’d better start talking, and it better be good. What is this Lancelot thing? Why wasn’t I notified of it?”
“It’s a parts-bin project put together by my new deputy commander, sir,” Samson explained. “He got some help from a military contractor buddy of his, Jon Masters.” Balboa nodded-everyone in the defense business had heard of Jon Masters. That lent some credibility to Samson’s case. “The thing works, sir. It’s better than THAAD and it’s ready right now, not five or ten years from now.”
Balboa smiled as he felt the anger slowly drain away. He shook his head and said, “You’ve just been on the job a couple years, Samson, and already you’re hanging it out. Shades of that bastard Brad Elliott.” Samson’s jaw tightened-Brad Elliott was a friend of his, and his mentor; Brad Elliott had sacrificed himself so guys like Balboa could look like leaders. “It must be the damned desert air, the isolation-it makes you HAWC commanders crazy, makes you do stupid things. Makes you put your asses and careers on the line.” He turned to General Hayes and said, “You’re on your own, General. You want to blow your budget on this man’s wet dream and embarrass yourself and your uniform, go ahead. But I’m not recommending any additional funding for this Lancelot program. Any money you need comes out of Dreamland’s or ABL‘s budget. General Samson, let me warn you for the last time: you bushwhack me like that again in front of a congressional committee, and I’ll can your ass on the spot. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Samson responded quickly and loudly. But Balboa was already in the car and on his way.
The two Air Force officers dropped their salutes as soon as Balboa’s car was out of sight. Hayes took a deep breath. “You know, Terrill,” he said, “the only guy I knew who even dared joust with Balboa and lived to tell the tale is dead. I think that’s the only way you’ll stay out of that guy’s bear trap.” He paused, then turned to the big three-star. “Well, what the hell is Lancelot?” “I’d rather show you than tell you, sir,” Samson said. Hayes rolled his eyes in exasperation, about to protest, and Samson quickly added, “We need an extra pilot to fly a chase plane-perhaps you’d care to accompany me on a Lancelot test launch. I guarantee, sir, you won’t be disappointed.”
“Earthmover, be careful playing games-just when you think you’re having fun, the real world has a tendency to jump up and bite you in the ass.” Then Hayes shrugged. “What the hell-we’re already chin-deep in the shit. We might as well show ’em something. Put it together. I’ll get you your funding for one test, and I’ll come out and watch this Lancelot thing in action. I need the flying time anyway. But it better work, my friend, or you’ll be on the street so fast it’ll make your head spin.” THE BLUE HOUSE,
REPUBLIC OF KOREA PRESIDENTIAL PALACE,
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA.
THAT SAME TIME.
The presentation had just concluded; the full report was before each member of the Republic of Korea‘s National Security Council, the government’s senior national defense policy-making board. Each member sat in stunned disbelief at what he had just heard.
“It is apparent that the crisis in the North has grown to dangerous, even epidemic levels, my friends,” Kwon Ki-chae, the president of South Korea, said in a low monotone. “Now is the time for decisive action.”
President Kwon had been elected to the presidency by the ElectionCollege less than a year ago, after the resignation of the elderly President Kim Yong-sam following a no-confidence vote in the National Assembly. Short and thin, younger than any of the others on the council by many years, educated in the United States, Kwon was a fixture in South Korean politics-but not because of his wisdom and insight into national and international politics. Kwon’s power base came from South Korea’s dominant private industries, which had groomed him from the start for the mantle of power he now possessed. He represented himself not as “the new South Korea,” but as “the new Korea.”
Kwon, the leader of the ultraconservative People’s Democratic Party and a longtime National Assembly member, had won an uneasy coalition of support for his ideas on reuniting the Korean peninsula and for his get-tough policies regarding relations with North Korea. The thirty members of his State Council, including the members of the National Security Council, shared these premises. But until recently, there was little anyone in the South Korean government, even the powerful among them, could do to change the slow, dangerous course of the political, social, and military standoff between the two Koreas.
Now Kwon saw his chance. These men were scared to death and looking for guidance.
“Nuclear bombs, gentlemen,” Kwon began, resting his hands on the council table and staring each of his colleagues in the eye. “No longer a supposition, no longer an intelligence estimate, but reality. Not only does the North possess nuclear weapons technology, but they have nuclear gravity bombs and the means to deliver them. This is the most significant and dangerous situation on the Korean peninsula since the Japanese invasion.”
“Surely you exaggerate, Mr. President,” Park Hyoun, leader of the United People’s Party for Political Reform, said. The UPPPR was a small but rapidly growing opposition party; it had doubled its number of seats in the National Assembly in just two years. Although not yet a threat to Kwon’s ruling party, RepresentativePark had been invited to sit in on this National Security Council meeting, along with the leaders of the other major Assembly parties, as a show of solidarity and of full disclosure. “Look at your intelligence reports. The North Korean pilot was starving to death; his aircraft was easily spotted and intercepted; and he had no fuel to complete his mission, let alone return, even if he had somehow avoided our air defenses.”
“All valid points, Mr. Park,” President Kwon acknowledged. “Perhaps it was nothing more than the desperate attempt of a starving madman for glory or suicide at someone else’s hands. But I don’t think that’s all it was. I think we were fortunate-this time. The next attack could be a single Nodong rocket launch, or a dozen, or a hundred, all with nuclear warheads. We might be able to intercept a fraction of them with our borrowed American Patriot antiaircraft missile batteries, but even one nuclear warhead allowed to hit the capital would kill hundreds of thousands of our citizens.”
“But what do you propose, Mr. President?” another party leader asked. “Peace talks have broken off again. The United States is delaying its next shipment of fuel oil and surplus wheat until the North resumes peace talks and agrees to inspection of the Yongbyon facility under construction …”
“Which are two conditions not a part of the original
1994 Agreement Structure,” Kwon reminded them irritably. The Agreement Structure, a negotiated deal between the United States, the two Koreas, Japan, and other world powers, gave North Korea a trillion dollars of aid over ten years. In exchange, North Korea was to dismantle all of its old Soviet-style breeder nuclear reactors, the ones capable of producing weapons-grade nuclear material. The agreement had been plagued with problems almost from the start. “With all due respect to our powerful American allies, they are hampering peace by imposing these conditions on the North without consultation or negotiations. I feel these conditions were added purely for American political reasons. It was an unfortunate choice by our American allies.
“But now we have seen the error of our past policies of appeasement and delay,” Kwon went on. “We have sent billions of yuan of cash, food, oil, and humanitarian supplies to the North, we allow increased family visits, we look the other way when their spies and minisubs wash up on our shores. And what do they do? They build two-thousand-kilometer-range ballistic missiles to sell overseas and to threaten us and our neighbors, and they have the audacity to test one of their rockets by firing it over our heads! Now we discover they have nuclear weapons, and their starving soldiers are so desperate that they will actually use them. The North is coming apart, and they threaten to tear our own country apart if something is not done immediately.
“The already tense political and financial situation in the North has obviously seeped into the military ranks, and that is a danger that far surpasses the former East and West Germany situation. Then East Germany was sufficiently encumbered by the Soviet Union that a unilateral military action was almost impossible. But North Korea has no such constraints. No one holds the North’s leash. China and Russia have both disavowed any responsibility for the child they have spawned. Now their child has grown into an angry, starving, vindictive, and pathological monster. This monster must be stopped.”
The members of the Security Council were silent. They knew President Kwon was right. They knew what must be done-but no one dared speak it or even think it. They left it up to Kwon to say the words and initiate the actions that could change their destiny.
“It is time to put our plan into motion, my friends,” Kwon said. “Our military forces will be at their greatest stage of readiness prior to and during the Team Spirit exercises. In addition, we will have Japanese and American air and naval forces in our waters as well. That will be the perfect time.”
“But will the North be ready?” the defense minister asked.
“I believe they are ready now,” Kwon said. “But the burden will not only be on those in the North to act-it will be up to us to respond as well. When the time comes, we must be prepared.”
“What about Pak?” another council member asked. “Will Pak Chung-chu stand with you when the time comes?”
“Let us find out right now, shall we?” Kwon picked up a telephone and ordered the operator to dial a secure number in Pyongyang, North Korea.
OVER THE PACIFICOCEAN, WEST OF SAN CLEMENTEISLAND SEVERAL WEEKS LATER
I’ll tell you right now, Earthmover,” said Air Force General Victor Hayes, “I hate surprises. I mean, I really hate surprises. And I’m really hating this already.” Then he did an almost perfect aileron roll.
It had been years since Hayes, the Air Force’s senior uniformed officer, had been at the controls of any tactical jet. He had reluctantly left his last tactical command, the legendary First Fighter Wing, Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, over ten years ago. His aviation incentive pay had been decreasing for the past five years, and now, with two kids in college, he could barely pay his phone bills on time. Yet even though he had been flying a desk for so long, he was still a fighter pilot through and through. Short in stature, astronaut-like in build, with broad shoulders tapering down to slender ankles, his piercing blue eyes forever seemed to be scanning the sky for any sign of “bandits.”
He definitely had the feeling he was looking at a bandit right now.
“Don’t send the kids to the showers before you’ve seen them play, sir,” Terrill Samson responded, his deep, booming voice amplified over the intercom system. The two men were sitting side by side in the cockpit of an F-l 11 fighter-bomber, used by the Air Force as a photo “chase plane” on flight tests. They were flying a few hundred yards off the right wing of a black B-1B Lancer bomber, at an altitude of only two thousand feet above the Pacific Ocean off the southern California coast. Victor Hayes found it hard to believe Samson had managed to squeeze himself inside the F-111’s rather small cockpit, but now that they were both strapped in, he was clearly right at home there. “I usually don’t go on a flight test without knowing more about what I’m getting into,” Hayes said. In truth, he was enjoying the hell out of this flight-he got to fly so seldom these days. “You mind filling me in?”
“I was just going to get to that, sir,” Samson said. His formation flying skills were excellent, Hayes had noted-he had chosen to hand-fly the big supersonic bomber the entire flight so far, and they might as well have been welded to the B-l’s right wingtip. Very impressive-even with over ten thousand hours of flying time in over a dozen different military warplanes, Hayes doubted that he could fly as well, especially given all the years since he’d been operational in any tactical unit. “We’ve got about five minutes to go.
“As you know, sir,” Samson went on, “my group at Dreamland helped test the Army’s THAAD system. In fact, we launched some targets from that same B-l . . .”
“I know,” Hayes said. “Looks like THAAD is turning into a money pit. You find a way to fix it?”
“Not exactly,” Samson said. “THAAD’s supposed to be an improved Patriot system-to destroy ballistic missiles in the upper atmosphere, or in near-space, at least twice as high as Patriot. It’s supposed to keep the warhead and critical pieces of the missile away from defended territory while staying as far away from the forward edge of the battle area as possible. But as you know from the Senate hearing, the technology to place a small antimissile missile close enough to a high-altitude, fast-moving target still isn’t fully matured-it’s literally a ‘bullet hitting a bullet’ from hundreds of miles apart. The problem is hitting a target in the midcourse or reentry phase of flight. THAAD can’t do it except with the plasma-yield warhead, which increases the cost of the system tremendously. Well, I had my guys start trying some things . . .”
Beneath his oxygen mask and sun visor, Hayes winced. HAWC’s first commander, Lieutenant General Bradley James Elliott, was famous throughout the Pentagon for “trying some things,” mostly with exotic aircraft and weapons being secretly developed at Dreamland. Elliott had this knack for taking a weapons development program and turning it into a military marvel-or monstrosity. The truth was, his inventions were often successfully-and secretly-used in real emergencies all around the world to try to avert conflicts before they escalated into major shooting wars.
The problem was, Elliott sometimes sent his monstrosities off to war without letting certain key folks know about it-like anyone in the Pentagon, Congress, or even the White House. A conflict would be brewing somewhere in the world-China, Ukraine, Russia, the Baltics, the Philippines-and almost before anyone could react, Elliott’s “creations” were on their way. He had been slapped down many times, even forced into retirement, yet he kept on coming back. As Hayes saw it, the curse of Brad Elliott now seemed to have fallen on Terrill Samson, former commander of Eighth Air Force, the command in charge of the Air Force’s dwindling fleet of heavy bombers. There was no doubt that Samson was a protégé of Brad Elliott, especially in the development and deployment of the heavy bomber and it certainly looked as though he was pulling some of the same tricks.
“So you built Lancelot-illegally, I might add,” Hayes said. “You built it with money and equipment you didn’t have, and now your ass is in a sling. I realize the fate of HAWC is tied up in this test, but what makes you think that Lancelot is going to be better than THAAD? You’re using the same technology.”
“Yes, it’s the same technology, because no one has the money to build new stuff,” Samson said. “But we attacked the problem from a different angle. We solved one major, fundamental problem with THAAD. My guys thought, ‘If THAAD is too far away from the bad guys to intercept a target in the boost phase, why don’t we bring THAAD closer?’ “
“Closer to what?” “Closer to the bad guys,” Samson said. “The problem with THAAD is that it still relies on hitting a missile in the midcourse or reentry phase, when it’s maneuvering, it’s small, it’s fast, it’s probably over friendly territory, and it’s high. Those are the two worst phases of flight if you want to do an intercept. The best time is during the boost phase-it’s flying slowly, it doesn’t try any evasive maneuvers, its propellants and airframe are under intense chemical and aerodynamic pressure, it has that big rocket plume behind it, it’s still over enemy territory, and the warhead hasn’t armed. But of course, getting an antiballistic missile close enough to the missile to destroy it during the boost phase was the problem-a big one.
“The aircraft-based ABL and space-based Sky bolt laser systems were designed to kill missiles in all phases of flight, including boost phase, but they’re still a few years from full deployment. So we’ve combined THAAD with ABL. We’re going to launch an antiballistic missile weapon from a penetrating bomber.”
“What?” Hayes exclaimed. “No shit!” “Fireman flight, this is Neptune, two minutes,” the warning message said.
“Fireman flight, roger, two minutes, check,” the pilot of the B-l responded.
“Two,” Samson responded on the command frequency.
“Fireman flight, take spacing.”
Again, the B-l pilot acknowledged and Samson responded with “Two.” Then he said to Hayes, “I’ve got the airplane,” and took the F-111’s control stick, giving it a shake to verify that he had control, then maneuvered the plane a few hundred yards away. “The launch is coming up. The Navy is going to launch one of several short-range Pershing test ballistic missiles from launch barges on and around San Clemente Island. We don’t know which one.”
Hayes motioned to the large multicolor display on his side of the cockpit. “So explain what I’m looking at,” he said. “This is a great-looking display-pretty sharp. Where’s it coming from? An observation plane?”
“We’re looking at what the B-l’s sensors are looking at,” Samson explained. “We would ordinarily know through intelligence reports where the enemy’s ballistic missiles are set up. If we don’t, our system can integrate sensor information from many different sources through the Joint Tactical Information Distribution System-we can hook into AWACS or Joint STARS radar planes, satellites, other strike aircraft, or naval or ground forces. But for today’s demonstration, we’ll operate independently, using only sensors mounted on the B-l itself.
“This is the first bomber to use LADAR-laser radar,” Samson continued. “You’re looking at a LADAR image. The smaller wavelengths mean a more high-resolution image. In addition, the LADAR emitters are so small, much smaller than a big radar dish, they can be mounted almost anywhere on the plane. That B-l can look in all directions because it has LADAR emitters on the belly, on the fuselage, even in the tail.”
“But you told the Senate committee you’d only used off-the-shelf components for Lancelot. If this is the first bomber to use LADAR, how can it be off-the-shelf?”
“LADAR has been in use in active-homing missiles and in artillery ranging and counterfire systems for years,” Samson replied. “We just stuck it on a Bone, that’s all. It has relatively low range for the amount of power it uses, but for attacking ballistic missiles, it’s perfect.”
“And the missile itself is off-the-shelf too?”
“Yep,” Samson replied proudly. “We revived the old second-generation short-range attack missile and gave it the combined infrared and active radar terminal guidance system from the AIM-120 Scorpion air-to-air missile. We then put a fifty-pound high-explosive fragmentation warhead on it. That’s Lancelot. We actually resurrected a project that Brad Elliott started eight years ago, after the SRAMs were taken off strategic alert.”
The B-l started a turn away from the launch area; a minute later it was heading the opposite direction from San Clemente Island. “All units, stand by,” said the voice of the Navy range master.
A few moments later a warning tone sounded in their headphones. “Missile launch detection,” Samson said. “The launch pad is on a barge out on the ocean. We’re seventy-eight miles from the launch pad …”
“But SRAM-II had a range of .., what? A hundred miles max? Aren’t we a little far away?”
“Lifting our missile up to altitude with a carrier aircraft acts like an extra rocket motor, so we’ve effectively doubled the missile’s range,” Samson said. “Plus, by putting the uplink sensors aloft and closer to the target, we can provide our missile with more precise steering signals.”
“Stand by,” they heard the B-l’s bombardier call. “Safe in range . . , missile counting down . . , doors coming open . . .”A warning tone sounded on the radio channel. As they watched, the B-l’s forward bomb bay doors opened. “. . , release pulse, missile away, missile away.” The Lancelot missile dropped free, fell for a few seconds, and then ignited its first-stage solid rocket motor.
Hayes caught a glimpse of it as it fell. It was less than twenty feet long, with a triangular-shaped fuselage no more than eighteen inches in diameter at its widest point. It had no fins-Hayes remembered that SRAM-II used thruster jets for directional control. The missile streaked ahead, then began a sharp climb and arced backward on an “over-the-shoulder” trajectory. A few seconds later they heard a high-pitched crrack-boom as the missile broke the sound barrier, then another boom as the larger, more powerful second-stage motor ignited.
“Good launch!” Hayes said excitedly. “Go, baby, go!”
It was too high to see clearly, but seconds later they saw a flash of yellow-orange fire and a large puff of smoke. Range control gave them the good news moments later: “Target intercepted, T plus fifteen point seven seconds, altitude seventy-three thousand feet, twenty-nine point one miles downrange, velocity twenty-five hundred feet per second. Intercept circular error thirty-seven point four feet. Repeat, target intercepted. All participants, remain clear of Romeo-1402 for the next ten minutes to stay clear of falling debris.”
“Thirty-seven feet! Incredible!” Hayes crowed. “With a fifty-pound warhead, that’s overkill!”
“Fireman flight, range gives you clearance for secondary release,” the launch controller radioed.
“Fireman flight copies range clearance, check,” the pilot aboard the B-l responded.
“Two,” Samson responded in turn.
“Okay, Earthmover, what’s happening now?” Hayes asked.
“The next part of Coronet Tiger one-plus,” Samson explained. “You see, we’re not satisfied with destroying the ballistic missile-we want to destroy the launch site and all the associated launch command facilities. Remember, we’re over enemy territory, and we don’t see any reason to be over enemy territory killing rockets if we can’t do some more mayhem while we’re there. The laser radar tracks the missile and at the same time computes the launch point and feeds it into the bombing computers. The B-l has already computed the probable launch point using the launch detection signal and the radar track-all we need to do is attack.”
A few moments later the aft bomb bay doors on the B-l bomber opened, and a small missile dropped into the slipstream. It was much smaller than the Lancelot missile, with a fat forebody tapering quickly to a thin tail section and a star-shaped fin group aft. As it dropped, a pair of long, thin wings popped out from under the fuselage. It released a small puff of smoke as an engine started up, and soon the missile turned and descended. “Was that a JASSM cruise missile?” Hayes asked.
