Arc Light (16 page)

“How long if you risk it?” Stuart asked.
“Logical problem solving,”
Stuart could see in his mind's eye as the PRP boys filled out his evaluation.

“Maybe thirty, twenty-five minutes.”

“Do it. It's on my authority,” Stuart said in a voice that he deepened for effect.

“Okay, sir,” Kline said. “Oh, uh, sir . . . would ya mind keepin' me informed?”

“Sure,” Stuart said, hanging up with a smile. Stuart knew he had “done good.”
Get the bird off the ground at all costs.

“How long till number eight's back on line?” Langford asked. The smile was still on Stuart's face. “Kline said half an hour, minimum.”

Langford stared back at Stuart for a second but then went back to the checklist they had each been running through after the initial alert. Stuart picked up the laminated pages of the manual held together by three rings at the top and went to the beginning of the preceding page as was procedure if you were interrupted.
Bet Langford didn't think to do that,
Stuart thought smugly.
Score one for the Kid.

As Stuart idly ran through the checklist, he glanced around the ceiling of the capsule for the camera that he'd heard they'd begun hiding for the “Purps.” The row of lights in front of him shown from his console.
I bet the birds aren't even on our line,
he thought.

“Clear!” “Clear!” “Clear!” rang out, starting from the opposite end of the hangar and moving toward Chandler. At each shout, an airman raised his right arm straight up. The shouts grew closer.

“Clear!”
the air force technical sergeant next to Chandler yelled, raising his own arm and then dropping it. The arms of the airmen down the line promptly fell also. As the sounds of roaring jet takeoffs from the runways outside still continued almost nonstop, the technical sergeant turned, walked over to a panel similar in appearance to a circuit breaker box, and pressed an oversize green button.

All at once the button lit up and a loud horn began repeatedly blasting out one short buzz after another. There was a loud mechanical click, and a deep rumble resonated throughout the hangar. The wall immediately in front of Chandler began to rise, moving slowly but at an even pace.

In a couple of seconds the whole scene on the tarmac became visible. In the artificial glare of lights whose sole purpose was to turn night into brilliant day there sat a fleet of eight aircraft over which frantically clambered dozens of air force personnel.

DELTA, AMERICAN, CONTINENTAL
read the names along the gleaming white fuselages of their transports, their familiar colors and logos seeming terribly incongruous given their intended mission. A few cheers and
“all rights”
rang up from the masses of men in the hangar. Chandler guessed that they, as he, had expected air force transports with webbed straps folded out from the wall.

The sights in the background, however, quickly squelched all conversations. A strategic bomber, a B-1B, roared down the runway, the blue flame streaking a hundred feet to the rear of its four engines as it rattled the night air with its awful noise. Many of the men covered their ears as the sound bordered on painful, and as the plane quickly receded into the distance and the technical sergeant shouted, “What?” into the telephone on the wall next to him, another bomber turned out onto the runway. Just before its roaring engines lit up the night, Chandler heard the wail of a siren slowly rising and then falling.

“Yours is the Delta L-1011 at the far end of the first row, Major!” the technical sergeant shouted to Chandler over the roar, pointing at the aircraft.

“What the hell's going on?” Chandler shouted back.

The man stared back, his face a blank mask. “Air raid” was all he said.

“Air raid?” Chandler shouted.
“Here?”

The man just nodded his head, every bit as shocked as Chandler. “You'd better get your men on that aircraft.”

Chandler looked out at the Delta jet. A large silver-haired man in a pilot's uniform stood on the landing atop the stairs, waving his arm toward the hangar furiously and throwing his head to one side in what must have been an angry shout. Master Sergeant Barnes and First Lieutenant Bailey looked over at him. Everyone was waiting.
Waiting on me,
Chandler realized.

He lifted the large camouflaged duffel bag heavily laden with gear that Barnes had obtained for him and turned for the first time to view the sea of faces staring at him from the column that had been formed behind him. “Double t-i-ime,
ha-a-a-rch!”
he shouted, and then turned and began the slow run, laboring under the heavy load of equipment. Looking back out of the corner of his eyes after a few steps, he saw that the men and women were following.

The 485,000-pound Russian SS-18 Model 4 was nearing the end of its boost phase, having risen to over 60 miles above the earth and the same distance to the north of its silo. At 121 feet in length and 10 feet in diameter, its throw-weight exceeded that of every other
missile of war in the world. When its final stage shut off, the rocket booster motors would have given it nearly all of the impetus that it would need to carry it in the Minimum Energy Trajectory high over the polar ice cap to its target just east of Los Angeles, well within the 11,000-kilometer maximum range.

Just behind the warheads, the inertial guidance package's accelerometer was busy measuring the accelerations experienced by the spacecraft, converting those accelerations into estimates of distance traveled and speed. The onboard computer took the accelerometer's estimates and waited for the precise moment at which the momentum of the missile was perfectly matched to its point in space to allow for a ballistic trajectory onto the warheads' targets. The calculation was constantly changing as the position and velocity of the missile changed, but the computer easily handled the calculus. It was the accelerometer and the booster's engine on which all depended.

Assembled in a “clean room,” the accelerometer was capable of causing hundreds of meters of variance of the actual from the designated ground zero if a single mote of dust was to foul the device. And the solid-fuel booster, chosen because of its nearly constant state of readiness, was not nearly as easily shut off at the end of the boost phase as the liquid spray of the older rockets. If its burn were one one-thousandth of a second too short or too long, the warheads would miss by 600 meters, a critical error when your targets were hardened missile silos and launch centers. This missile's target, however, was March Air Force Base, relatively soft and much larger, therefore more forgiving of slight errors.

Each of the components of the missile in the boost phase got only one chance. When the accelerometer's estimates caused the computer to shut off the booster, the missile went ballistic, becoming an artillery projectile on a long arc. The booster could not be restarted.

Shutoff came eight minutes and thirteen seconds into the burn. Shortly after the fire of the rocket motors died out, the bus carrying the Post-Boost Vehicle decoupled from the booster and the long quiet ride through space began. Separated in the darkness of space by thousands of meters, the other PBVs of the squadron raced toward their various targets. The squadron's missiles carried with them 120 thermonuclear warheads, each fourteen times more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs put together. They were joined as they rose to pass over the clean white Novaya Zemlya of far northern Russia by ten other squadrons' missiles, all arcing soundlessly through space toward the United States.

“This has been a news bulletin from ABC Radio. Stay tuned for news as it happens here on your ABC Radio network. We return you now to your regularly scheduled broadcast.” The pains had come and gone again, but Melissa now felt as if she had to stop to go to the bathroom. “We've got forty-five minutes of nonstop rock and roll coming up for you, starting out with Led Zeppelin's ‘Whole Lotta Love', so stay tuned to your classic rock station, the Z-e-e-e.”

“Looking for a quality used car but tired of all that hype . . . ” Melissa hit the
SCAN
button on the radio. As Mexican music burst forth, she saw the sign for
MARCH AFB NEXT EXIT
up ahead. The radio's tuner moved on, and as she passed the exit she readjusted the seat belt, which had begun to press uncomfortably against her belly.

“No-no-no-no. That's where the caller is all wrong. President Livingston doesn't have the backbone to stand up to a salesman on the telephone much less lead this nation into war. No, the North Koreans will make some promises and . . . ”

Melissa drove past the massive air base, thinking how close she was to David, to someone to help her through whatever was coming.

“ . . . sources in Moscow say the bursts were just south of the city. We go now to John McDonald, who is on the telephone now in Moscow. John?” Melissa quickly stabbed at the radio to stop the tuner from scanning on.

“Peter, the bursts lit up the early morning sky of the Moscow skyline not fifteen minutes ago. I was asleep in bed when the first hit, and narrowly avoided serious injury as the second, which was much closer to where I am, shattered the windows of my apartment on Vokzalnaya Ulitsa in the west-southwestern part of the city. When I went out onto my balcony I could see three, repeat, three mushroom-shaped clouds, all to the south and east of my vantage point, and many fires spreading all around in that part of the city.”

“John,” the radio announcer interrupted, “John, is there any doubt in your mind that those blasts were nuclear explosions?”

“None, absolutely none whatsoever, Peter,” the clearly shaken Moscow reporter said. “I've pulled the phone as far as it will reach and can see one of the mushroom clouds from here. Even though roughly fifteen minutes have passed, the cloud is still generally in the same shape as it was before. That should attest to its size. It literally reaches from the ground up into the heavens and blew a large, round hole in the cloud cover that has hung low over Moscow these past few days. The top of the cloud is just now beginning to show signs of drift on the winds; like the top of an anvil-shaped head of a
major thundercloud it is being blown downwind, which by my roughest of initial estimates appears to be away, I repeat, away from downtown Moscow.”

“My God,” Melissa said, her skin crawling and eyes thickening with moisture.

“Do you have any idea, John, any idea at all what might be going on?”

“Oh my God oh my God,” Melissa repeated, the words barely squeaking out of her throat as panic set in.

“Really, no, Peter.”

The horn of a speeding Mercedes sedan blared past Melissa as it weaved at high speed first in front of her car and then back into the left lane through the growing traffic.

“As I said, I was awakened by the blast, and Moscow radio and television are both off the air. Of course, there is Russia's ongoing war with China, which is a nuclear power.”

A loud, high-pitched hum replaced the talk on the radio. It whined on and on and on. There was no explanation of what the tone was, no prerecorded qualifiers that it was only a test. None of that was necessary. It was a familiar tone. Melissa had grown up hearing it periodically, and no one needed to tell her what it meant. She lowered her foot to the floor, and her Mazda accelerated easily past 100 miles per hour, the engine noise drowned out by the sound of the Emergency Broadcast System's hum.

The first narrow fan of energy emitted by the huge radar transmitter skimmed across the horizon to the north in a straight line until it sliced through the sky high above the Arctic Circle in northern Russia. For a fraction of a second, it bathed in its beam of energy the slender cylinder rising through the last reaches of the earth's atmosphere. The packets of energy in the beam bounced off the missile's fuselage like tiny BBs.

Several of the tiny packets of energy bounced straight back and in an instant collided at widely separated points on the radar's football-field-size phased-array antenna. The energy collected by the antenna was minute, but it was enough to rise above the transient background energy noise that was automatically filtered out by digital computers in the radar's processing center. The antenna registered a return.

An instant later, the second fan of energy, whose elevation was only fractions of an arc-second separated from the lower first fan's, bathed the same missile at an altitude hundreds of meters above the point of the first fan's return.

The computers now had two points in space and a time interval in between. They calculated the position, direction, and velocity of the missile and projected the general area of its target. The entire process from transmission of energy to calculation of data was nearly instantaneous, and the information flashed onto the Big Boards at
NORAD
and the other three American national command centers and at the Canadian Defense Ministry in Ottawa, setting off another round of alarms and flashing lights.

“I still just don't know,” the President said. “I just don't know.” He shook his head. “Where exactly are the Russian missiles headed?”

“All
TELINT,
Telemetry Intelligence, can tell us at this point is these general areas,” General Starnes said, touching his pen with a click to the monitor recessed into the wall of the conference room. The monitor had a number of lines and symbols on it, some flashing and some in blue, green, and red. But Lambert could tell one thing: the general outline of the map was North America, and the general's pen was circling areas all over the United States.