Dale Brown - Sky Masters

“Yes, sir. Curtis turned to Cunningham. “We got a satellite system up there that can find a Chevy in a parking lot full of Fords, on a cloudy night, from four hundred miles in space-now’s the time to use it.”

“Amen to that, ” Cunningham said. “Sir, the Independence carrier group should be notified of the incident and briefed on their actions. I’d like to set up the two-hundred-mile exclusion zone and put fire-first provisions in the ROEs.” “Two-hundred-mile exclusion zone approved, ” Curtis said. “Fire-first provisions only for aircraft on antiship cruise-missile profiles. Any other actions have to come through the NCA. “Get a full report from Admiral Walheim on Ranger, then brief me ASAP on what we need to send to Manado to assist our troops in Indonesia; I need a laundry list for the State Department. Find out what ships are available to replace Ranger-including submarines. I want to be able to take control of those waters as quickly as I can.” Cunningham turned to his communications console to begin issuing his orders. The orange light on his console illuminated, and Curtis donned a headset and plugged it into the phone jack. “Curtis here.”

“Hold for the President, please.” A moment later: “Yes, Wilbur, what’s going on?”

“Mr. President, we have an incident near the Philippines. The aircraft carrier Ranger was hit by a Chinese air-launched cruise missile and damaged with loss of life. Two Navy fighter planes were shot down as well.”

“Oh, no.. .” the President murmured, obviously not wishing his feelings to be heard by others with him. He was speaking on a scrambled cellular phone, but from the background noise Curtis heard, it sounded as if he were at a luncheon and were still right at the table. “I’ll be out of here in ten minutes. Ask ‘laddie’ to come up and see me when he can.” The line went dead. Curtis could not help but smile at the casual, almost backwoods code words the President liked to use during conversations like this: “laddie” was this month’s code word for the National Security Council, whom he wanted assembled in the White House Situation Room immediately. To his communications officer, Curtis said, “Call the White House communication office and get the NSC in the Situation Room ASAP.” The phone line began to come alive at that moment, and Curtis motioned for someone to get him a glass of water as he settled in. Two or three calls to get a better picture of the situation, then formulate a plan of action during the car ride to the White House. It was as it always was: he was cut out of the loop for most of the really important policy decisions, but when the shit hit the fan, he was expected to have all the answers. Well, he told himself, he was going to have all the answers when the National Security Council met. The next call came from Guam: “General Stone here, sir.”

“Rat, got a report for me?” “The Ranger got jumped by B-6 bombers and Q-5 or B-7 fighters, sir, ” Stone replied. The exhaustion in his voice was obvious, even over the scrambled satellite link. “We didn’t see them coming until about a hundred and fifty miles out. We had the radar planes bug out, and we thought the Navy fighters turned them away, but they weren’t after the radar planesthey were going after ships right away. Only two of the first flight of six were armed for air defense; the other four were carrying two each C60 1 missiles as well as heat-seeking air-toairs. “Are you sure they were 601s?”

“Pretty sure, judging by the flight profile and the damage they caused. They were a hell of a lot bigger than C801s or Exocets.”

“No evidence of… special warheads?” It was possible that the C601 missiles were carrying nuclear warheads but they simply failed to go off. Curtis could hear a genuine sigh of relief even through the static-charged transmission: “No, thank God.” The alternative, as Curtis well knew, could have been much worse. In 1946, during secret tests code-named OPERATION CROSSROADS, the Navy wanted to see the effects of a twenty-kiloton nuclear blast on an aircraft carrier. CV-3 USS Saratoga was towed out to Bikini Atoll and the device set off five hundred yards away. The blast of that one warhead threw the forty-thousand-ton aircraft carrier nearly fifty feet out of the water, pushed it sideways nearly a half-mile, crushed its seventeen-inch armor plating and caved in the flight deck, then sank it in seven hours. Ranger would have suffered much the same fate. “We got pictures of the aircraft on the ground in Zamboanga after the attack-they were B-6 bombers all right, ” Stone continued, shaking Curtis out of his reverie. “The Chinese put their top-of-the-line maritime-attack plane in Zamboanga. Each one had two C601 missiles and two PL-7 or PL-9 missiles. No definite ID on the fighters-only the B-7, F-8, or the A-5 with air reftieling have the legs these guys had to go after Ranger from that distance. We also got pictures of Y-8 reconnaissance planes and PS-5 antisubmarine-warfare planes out there.” The Chinese were moving a major naval air force into the south Philippines, Curtis decided. With this force they could seal off the entire area and conduct bombing raids on the government bases on Mindanao. Curtis asked, “Do they own the Celebes Sea, Rat Killer?”

“I’m afraid so, sir, ” Stone replied. “Air, land, sea, everything. We gotta go in hard if we want to have access. Curtis knew what that meant-no more fucking soft probes, no more RC- 1355 no matter how many escorts they had. Sending Sterett into the Celebes Sea now would be a big mistake. “I copy. Looks like Doctor Masters’ gadgets are going to be the only intel we get for a while.” “He’s giving us some great poop, sir, ” Stone said. “His gadgets are working just fine. I’ve already transmitted some pictures to you via Offutt; they should be in your hands very soon. You should have some more detailed shots of the Chinese positions in Zamboanga within a couple hours.”

“Good. I meet with the boss in thirty minutes; he’s going to want to see them. What else have you got for me?”

“With Masters’ gear set up here, General Harbaugh from Third Air Division, General Houston from Fifteenth Air Force, and I have already played out a couple strike scenarios for the south Philippines, ” Stone replied. “We’re definitely going to need the Air Battle Force-and then some-to dislodge our Oriental buddies.”

“What kind of scenarios have you come up with?” Curtis asked. “Can you send me some of your data?”

“I sent the scenarios to you along with the photos, ” Stone said. “It’ll make interesting reading for you. Masters practically duplicated the entire Air War College and Naval Postgraduate School war-gaming computer models right here in my command post, complete with up-to-the-minute intelligence data, and we’ve built and revised data tapes for the B-52’s Offensive Avionics System suite and for the B-1’s AP 1750 strike computers for the Air Battle Force aircraft. We’ve fought the battle of Mindanao three times already.” Curtis remembered the old saying, “Don’t ask the question if you can’t stand the answer, ” but he asked anyway: “Who won?”

“It depends, sir, ” Stone replied. “Exactly how bad do we want the Chinese out of the Philippines?”

“What I want is to send a ship into the Celebes to search for the downed crews from the Tomcats we lost. I also want to get the Navy back in there just to tell the Chinese they can’t lock us out. I need some air cover. The Navy planes are grounded for now. “Sorry, sir. Don’t think we can help, ” Stone said. “We’ve only got seven F-15 fighters on station-we’d need at least twenty to cover a rescue operation. None are modified for air-to-surface ops. Curtis swore to himself. With Ranger out of the fight, they were really stuck for both offensive and defensive punch. It would take time to send in another carrier group, and that would allow the Chinese to fortify their own sea and land forces. What they needed was real offensive and defensive power. They needed the Air Battle Force in there-right now. THE WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM THIRTY MINUTES LATER “You told me the carrier battle groups could protect themselves, General, ” the President began. “One hit, and now we’ve got sixty dead and hundreds more injured.” All eyes of the members of the National Security Council swung toward him. All but Thomas Preston. The Secretary of Defense believed that this confrontation was inevitable, but he obviously saw it not as the beginning of the end of tensions in the Philippines, but the beginning of dangerous hostilities. Like looking down the barrel of a nuclear-loaded gun. Curtis rarely agreed with him, but this time he very well may be right…. “Sir, there was a malfunction of one SM-2 Aegis missile during the cruiser Bunker Hill’s response, Curtis explained. Thirteen more men had died of their injuries in the past thirty minutes alone; thirty more were given no better than a fiftyfifty chance of survival. It was hard for Curtis to formulate an objective, detached analysis of why and how so many men had died. He was numb, but pressed on: “Bunker Hill had positive control of the situation until the time of the mishap. Admiral Walheim’s antiair-warfare deputy, who was in command of the engagement from Bunker Hill’s CIC, terminated all the rest of the missile launches that, in all probability, would have destroyed the last incoming missiles. Control of antiair functions transferred to the cruiser Sterett, and the switch was made smoothly, but Sterett couldn’t put enough firepower in the air to stop all the missiles.”