Ian Slater - World in Flames

In any event, it was decided that deep-diving submersibles out of Vancouver should be used to inspect the network in the area of the attack. But if they were wrong about fish fry, Norfolk warned, it would mean that the United States had suddenly become vulnerable to close-in ICBM sub attack— America could be blindsided.

There was no malfunction in the SOSUS, however — the “sonograms” called up on the computer showed that like a seismograph picking up the slightest tremor, SOSUS had had no difficulty picking up the sound of the dud Soviet torpedo hitting the steamer, which had been well within the supposed impenetrable Anti-Submarine Warfare Zone. Something was wrong.

The moment Frank Shirer was told he wouldn’t be flying “Looking Glass” and instead was given the innocuous, flesh-colored eye patch from the outgoing pilot at Andrews, he understood his mission and was immeasurably depressed. He knew it meant his chances of seeing Lana for the next several months were zilch.

Oh, he realized full well that he was being accorded the highest honor — the “True Grit” or “Duke” eye patch the ultimate accolade a flyer could receive, its recipient being the man in whose hands the fate not only of America but of the West might reside.

“What’s the matter with you?” asked the outgoing pilot. “Look like you’ve been poleaxed.”

Shirer glanced down at the patch. “Yeah.”

“Christ, man, this is it. As good as it gets. What d’you want? You’ll have to beat pussy off with a stick. Top Gun Shogun — that’s what you are, buddy.”

Shirer looked up at him. “What if the balloon goes up?”

The other man shrugged. “That’s the downside. Comes with the territory. Hell, if I could stay on, I’d—” The man didn’t finish.

Shirer thanked him, shook hands, and walked out on the tarmac toward the cavernous hangar containing the six-story-high “Taj Mahal,” the most sophisticated command plane in history. He had mixed emotions. In a sense, coming back to the $400 million Boeing 747B was like coming home to the job of test pilot he had had before the war, as one of the elite, selected from among the top guns of the top guns — the few who were entrusted with the responsibility of flying Air Force One in the event of nuclear war. More important than Looking Glass.

The sight of the huge plane took him back before the war and to the day of the outbreak of hostilities, when, from the pool of peacetime Air Force One pilots, he’d requested active service with the F-14s. And now it had come full circle. They had recalled him. Which either meant that some member of the Taj Mahal’s “pool” had cracked or was over forty, considered too old for the quick reflexes necessary should the president find himself aloft in a “nuclear exchange.”

The conversation he’d had with the outgoing pilot had unsettled him, not only because piloting Air Force One would mean he and Lana would be separated longer than he’d thought, but because if nuclear war broke out, the Aleutians, where America herself had tested the A-bombs on Amchitka, would be a prime target for the Russians’ ICBMs on Kamchatka Peninsula. Even those Americans, like Lana, at Dutch Harbor and the other easternmost islands of the chain close to Alaska which were not directly targeted would be in the path of the radioactive clouds, carried swiftly via the millimaws, engulfing the islands in the fallout. Lana and everyone else would the of radiation poisoning — a lingering, painful death which Shirer wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy — not even La Roche.

The young communications lieutenant aboard Air Force One was eager to show him the latest wizardry, pointing proudly to a signal jammer. “Course, we’d still use basic flares against heat seekers as the first line of defense against incoming. Trouble is, Russians have reportedly got the French R-50 Air-to-Airs. They don’t go for heat but home in on the radar beam.”

“No kidding,” said Shirer. The sarcasm was out before he could stop himself.

“Sorry, sir. Guess you’re familiar with all this stuff.”

“No,” Shirer answered. He pointed to a console that he knew was another radar beam jammer. “What’s that?”

“Echo delay mode, sir. Slows down the Bogey’s radar pulse — so he gets the echo later than he normally would. Thinks his target is further off than it is.”

“What happens if we’re in the missile’s path anyway?” Shirer asked.

“Console also has CDC — chaff-dispensing capability.”

Shirer smiled despite himself. Give the military manufacturers a simple idea and they’d give it a fancy name to impress the congressmen on the defense budget committees. “ ‘CDC— you mean it drops foil strips to scramble enemy radar?”

“Yes, sir. But we do have electronic jammer backups as well. This baby’s got over two hundred and forty miles of sheathed wiring. Sixty-one antennas.”

Shirer wasn’t sure an electromagnetic pulse could be prevented by sheathed or “condom” wiring, as the technicians called the pulse-resistant fiber-optic cable. It was certainly better than the old microchip circuits, which an electromagnetic pulse would certainly knock out and which had been replaced to some extent by gallium arsenide chips. But he wondered aloud whether the cables could survive a close-in nuclear air burst.

“Ah — manual doesn’t give minimum air burst radius, sir.”

“Didn’t think they would,” said Shirer. “Don’t think we’d like the answer.”

The lieutenant was quickly getting teed off with the new pilot, as he told the ground crew later. “He’s a moody son of a bitch,” the lieutenant charged.

“Heard he was an okay guy,” put in one of the electronic engineers. “One crackerjack of a pilot, by all accounts. An ace, my man!”

“Yeah — well, I’m not the fucking enemy.”

“Probably lonesome for his missus,” put in the engineer. “Though I thought they liked bachelors to drive the beast. No family to think about — might stop the trigger finger.”

“Dunno whether he’s married or not,” said the lieutenant disinterestedly.

“Well,” put in another technician. “Maybe something else is buggin’ him. Maybe he’s been drinking tap water.”

“Then he wouldn’t be sick,” said the engineer. “He’d be dead.”

“Could be he’s lovesick,” said another of the ground crew.

“I don’t give a shit,” said the communications lieutenant. “Whatever his problem is, I’d rather not be one of his crew if it hits the fan.”

“Don’t worry,” said the engineer, tearing open a sugar packet, letting it stream into his coffee. “It won’t go nuclear.”

Normally David wouldn’t have shown such irritability. Maybe it was the bad weather, the overcast still so low, you could almost touch it, and the rubble from the Soviet rocket attacks still not cleared, partially covered by snow turned dirty from the coal fire pollution — or “bad ions in the air,” as his brother Ray would have said.

Whatever the reason for his mood, the Gallic shrug of the stationmaster at Ezemaal thirty miles east of Brussels bugged him. He suspected the man could speak English but was refusing to do so on principle, continuing to rattle away in either Flemish or French. As the unhelpful stationmaster walked on by them, a porter nearby told David slowly and clearly, “Un train est déraillé! Pres de Roosbeek.”

“Son of a bitch!” said David, turning and walking quickly back to the Humvee.

“Come on,” he yelled to his driver, Corporal Parkin, who had just started to relax with a cigarette. “Let’s go! They say a train’s been derailed.”