Dale Brown - Sky Masters

“Colonel Dunigan, Command Center, sir, ” came the voice of his command center’s duty senior controller, Colonel Audrey Dunigan. Dunigan was the first woman senior controller, rising through the ranks from KC-135 tanker pilot all the way to a Headquarters senior-controller slot. Dunigan was now the senior controller of the busiest shift in the Command Center, in direct communication with the Pentagon and all the SAC’s military forces around the globe, and she seemed to take charge of the place like no one else before her. “Zero-Tango in ten minutes. Command Center out.”

“Alpha copies. Out, ” Tyler replied. Turning to Stone, he said, “Let’s go, Rat Killer. In my car. We’ll have a little impromptu on-the-job training.” He dropped his racket on the bench and loped toward his waiting sedan, not even bothering to make apologies to his staff-whom he knew would be right behind him anyway. Stone piled into the front seat beside Tyler’s driver and they roared off. “We got a Zero-Tango notification, ” Tyler told Stone. “You should be familiar with that: notification by NCA or Space Command directly, teleconference of the NCA, JCS, specified and unified commanders, all that stuff.”

“I’ve only been in one, ” Stone replied, “and I was the one who called it. Just before the Philippine elections last year, Manila was a war zone. I thought Clark was going to be overrun. I had to kick General Collier at PACAF in the butt to do something. I raised a ruckus that obviously went right to CINCPAC, but he finally made the call and we got the support we needed.”

“I remember that, ” Tyler said. “From what I read in the messages, Rat, Clark could have looked like the American em bassy in Tehran in ‘79. Landing that Marine Expeditionary Unit on Luzon may have seemed like overkill to most of the Pentagon and the press, but it defused the situation perfectly.” “Sure it did, ” Stone added dryly. “And I got shit-canned for even suggesting it.”

“Best thing that could have happened to you was getting bumped out of Pacific Air Forces and coming to work at SAC, Rat, ” Tyler said. “You know as well as I do that everyone will remember the last commander of Clark Air Force Base. Wherever you went in PACAF, that stigma would have followed you. It would have hurt your chances for promotion-I know it sounds shitty, but shit happens. Here at SAC, I get a topnotch expert in the Pacific Theater and maritime warfare, and you get a fair shot at your third star.” A coded message was being read over the radio, and Tyler squelched it out. Stone said, “You’re not going to monitor the alert network?”

“The messages are for the crews, not for me, ” Tyler replied. “When I try to second-guess those messages, I give myself ulcers. Now I try to relax, think about what I need to do, and think about what I should be hearing when I get to the Battle Staff area. “And the whole staff gets notified and called in?”

“Yep, ” Tyler replied, hanging on to the seat back as Meers negotiated a tight turn, switching on the siren to clear some traffic out of an intersection. “At this time of day it’s no problem. When we get one at two in the morning, it can get real hairy.”

“How often do you get these notifications?”

“Not very often lately, ” Tyler admitted. “A lot of the notifications can be expected-the riots in Lithuania just before their independence, the SCUD missile attacks during DESERT STORM, the assassination in Iraq, shit like that. You can read the evening paper and pretty much anticipate that a Zero-Tango was going to be called. But things just aren’t all that critical in the real world these days.” They were approaching SAC Headquarters, a low, generally unimpressive building in the center of the base. The building was unimpressive because only three stories were above ground-there were five more stories underneath. Stone could see the Minuteman I missile out in front of the building, a lone dedication to the thousands of SAC crew members who spent as much as a third of their careers on twenty-four-hour alert, sitting near their planes, in underground missile-launch complexes, or in windowless command posts, ready to respond in case deterrence failed-in case they were called on to fight World War III. He also saw the weeping willow on the lawn in front of the headquarters building, and the sight struck Richard Stone as oddly ironic. Fifty feet under that lone weeping willow, men and women were ready, at the direction of the President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, and the man in the car with him, to unleash thousands of megatons of explosive power all across the planet with uncanny precision. The location of the willow, Stone realized, was even a little absurd-several nations probably had their thermonuclear weapons aimed at that precise spot, ready to knock out the two-thirds of America’s nuclear forces controlled from this one location. No wonder Tyler turned off his radio, Stone thought. Even in these days of relative stability and peace, the thought of being flattened and vaporized by the first incoming warheads was enough to drive a guy crazy. “In ten, Sergeant Meers, ” Tyler told his driver. “Got it, sir.” “Keep your badge in sight and follow me in, Rat, ” Tyler told Stone. “We might have to put you in the ‘press box, ‘ but you’re certainly cleared inside the Command Post. It should be fun, whatever we got going here.” Stone blinked at the four-star general. “General, you mean you don’t know what’s happening?” A grim-faced expression from Tyler gave Stone his answer. At the outer gate to the parking lot / security perimeter around SAC Headquarters, a security guard had his M-16 rifle in one hand, and with the other hand he held up four fingers. Meers flashed the guard five fingers, then one finger, and the guard let him through. If Meers had added wrong and flashed the wrong number-he had to add the right amount of fingers to the guard’s fingers to equal ten, the security number that Dunigan had relayed to Tyler in the notification message and the one that she would have relayed to the gate guardsthey would probably have had their tires shot out by two or three well-trained guards, and their noses would be pinned to the pavement a few seconds later. They had to pass through a second gate before reaching the building, and this time the guard was kind enough to flash eight fingers so Meers had to raise only two fingers in response. Meers stopped the car just outside an enclosed doorway, guarded by a single security policeman. Tyler and Stone ran past him, not bothering to return his salute, and Tyler punched in the code to the Cypher-Lock beside the steel door. The door buzzed, and Tyler yanked the heavy steel door open, ran inside, flashed his security access badge to a guard in a bulletproof booth, and trotted to the private elevator that would take him four floors down, directly to the underground Command Center. The guards, Tyler noticed, all wore subdued smiles as he dashed by-it must be fun for them, he thought, to see a two- and four-star general in warmup suits running around the place. One more guard in a bulletproof booth checking ID badges, through a metal-detector device, another guard, two blast doors, past the Command Center weather station, and they were in the SAC Command Center itself. The Command Center consisted of three areas, separated by thick soundproof glass and remote-controlled privacy shutters-the Battle Staff area on the main auditorium floor area, the Essential Elements area behind the main auditorium, and the Support Staff area in a balcony over the auditorium. All three areas could see the “big board, ” the eight 5-by-6-foot computer screens in the front of the Command Center, but depending on the security classification of the activity and the occupants, the senior controller could seal off either area to prevent eavesdropping-an unclassified briefing could be going on in the Support Staff area while a Top Secret briefing could be given in the Battle Staff area, with complete security. Tyler glanced up at the Command Post status board just inside the entrance and found red lights flashing near the signs that read “Battle Staff” and “Essential Elements”-the rooms were both classified Top Secret. Tyler pointed to a doorway to their right. “Take those stairs up to the Support Staff room, Rat, ” he said. “They’ll direct you from there.” Stone did not argue or hesitate, but went through the door, which locked behind him. A set of stairs took him up to the glassed-in observation area overlooking the Battle Staff area, where a technician had him put on a pair of headphones as he sat down to watch. The shutters remained open, which meant he could watch the big board but not hear any of the conversation going on below. The Battle Staff area below him resembled a small theater, with forty seats of three semicircular levels facing the big board in the front of the Command Center. Tyler took his seat in front row center, behind a director’s computer console with two phones, a keyboard, and four 19-inch color monitors. The seat beside him was already occupied by the Vice Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command, Lieutenant General Michael Stanczek. Around them were arranged the various deputy chiefs of staff of the Command, most of whom were already in place by the time Tyler had arrived from the tennis court. Each staff position had two flip-up color computer monitors, a small keyboard, a telephone, and a microphone. The first thing Tyler did after taking his seat in the Command Center was check the rows of digital clocks above the computer monitors. The first row of clocks had times in various places in the world-Washington, Omaha, Honolulu, Guam, Tokyo, Moscow, and London. London was labeled “Zulu, ” the time along the zero-degree-longitude Greenwich meridian used by SAC as a common time-reference point. Below that were three event timers, and one was already activated-it read 00:15:23. The third row of timers and clocks were thankfully still reading zero-those were the clocks that set reference times used by American strategic nuclear forces to execute their nuclear strike missions. Two of those timers, the L-hour and A-hour, were set by Tyler himself, but the other one, the ERT, or Emergency Reference Time, could be set by the National Command Authority if the President himself ordered a nuclear strike. Tyler hit the mike button on his console: “Alpha in position. Log me in, please, and let’s get started.” A voice on the auditorium’s loudspeaker immediately chimed in: “Major Hallerton, with an Event One situation briefing.” Hallerton was the shift’s ADI, or Assistant Chief of Intelligence. “Approximately fifteen minutes ago, Space Command was alerted by a FOREST GREEN nuclear-detonationwarning sensor on three different NAVSTAR satellites. The event remained unclassified by NORAD and DIA for several minutes until verification could be made by DSP resources, and they have not made a conclusive evaluation yet. However, by authority of CINCSPACECOM, an Event One warning was issued to us and to JCS and Zero-Tango conference initiated. SPACECOM is currently reporting a high probability of a small-yield nuclear explosion in the South China Seas region near the Philippines. Tyler felt his jaw drop. “Ho-ly skit.” Stanczek just sat there, a blank expression on his face. Tyler asked, “Just one explosion?”