Power Curve (41 page)

Lu Zoulin spoke first, welcoming Bender. Wentworth murmured a translation, and Bender was sure he heard a conciliatory tone in Lu’s voice. He replied with the customary courtesies and then handed the letter over. “President Turner is worried that peace is rapidly slipping away and may be forever lost if we don’t reach a mutually agreeable solution in the very near future,” he said. It was diplospeak for “time is running out and you had better get your act together or else.”

Wang spoke in English without waiting for a translation. “Has Mrs. Turner set a deadline?”

Wentworth’s face turned deathly white. They had jumped to hardball negotiations and bypassed the required niceties. “She has instructed me to deliver the letter and answer any questions you may have,” Bender replied. “I
am to wait until six this evening. Then I must return to Washington with or without a reply.”

“We will read the letter,” Lu Zoulin said. The meeting was over, and their guide escorted them to a waiting room.

A whispered, very undiplomatic “Oh, shit” escaped from Wentworth when they were alone. “What’s Wang doing here? He’s the leader of the hawks.”

I’ve got thirty minutes
, Bender thought. He sipped at his tea and tried to relax in the low, heavy overstuffed chair the Chinese preferred. The waiting room was starkly functional, and books were stacked on shelves around the walls. A cold wind beat at the windows, but the room was warm and stuffy. He checked his watch again: Twenty-nine minutes left. Wentworth seemed totally at ease and unconcerned with the passage of time. “How much longer before we receive a reply?” Bender asked.

“I don’t know what was in the letter,” the younger man replied. “I imagine Lu and Wang are trying to arrive at a consensus.”

The door opened, and the woman entered. “Please accept my apologies for the delay,” she said. “You will have a reply to your president’s letter in an hour.”

Before Bender could answer, Wentworth spoke. “As you know, General Bender has been instructed by his president to return immediately with or without a reply. He cannot wait any longer.”

“Surely an hour,” she coaxed, “cannot be too long to wait on a matter of such importance. Perhaps you would like an early dinner?”

“I can wait until six o’clock,” Bender said, “then I must leave.” She bestowed a dazzling smile on them and left. “A very impressive and cool lady,” Bender muttered.

“She’s bait,” Wentworth said.

“Not interested,” Bender replied.

“Not for you, for me. No doubt, we’ll meet again under very intimate circumstances.”

They fell silent, and the minutes dragged. Finally, Bender stood to leave. He was returning empty-handed. Again, the door opened, and the woman appeared. This time she did not smile as she led them back to the office.
She turned and left, shutting the door behind her. Wang was seated alone behind the big desk. “Your Mrs. Turner is very naive,” he said in English. “In her letter she urges a return to the status quo yet offers nothing in return.”

“Except peace,” Bender replied.

Wang ignored him. “We were expecting an accommodation similar to our agreement with President Roberts for the peaceful reversion of Taiwan. I am afraid you are here under false pretenses, General Bender, and have wasted our time.”

Bender’s face turned to granite. “Thank you for your hospitality. I will relay your observations to President Turner.” Wang gave him a stony look and picked up a report on his desk. The exchange was over, and the woman met them at the door to take them to their waiting car.

Once they were safely inside and away from the building, Wentworth felt free to talk. “No one treats a special emissary from the president of the United States like that. I’ve got to report this to the ambassador, and you’ve got to get out of China immediately.” He knocked on the window to the driver and told him to stop at the embassy. Just before he got out of the car, he sanitized Bender’s briefcase, only leaving his passport. “I wish you had diplomatic status,” he said. “I’m absolutely serious about getting out of China. Don’t delay.”

“What’s going on?” Bender asked as Hazelton got out.

“A transfer of power, Chinese style,” Wentworth answered. “Not even a Machiavelli or a Kissinger can predict what’s going to happen next. Go.” He ran past the Marine guard and into the embassy.

The driver made good time on the trip back to Shahe Air Base and drove directly up to the waiting C-137. Bender ran up the steps, and Larry Burke, the steward, closed the hatch. “You’re late,” Burke said. “We were getting worried.”

Bender went forward to speak to the pilots as the engines came on line. Rod Davis, the copilot, was talking on the radios and getting answers in Chinese. “They were speaking English,” he said.

“Son of a bitch!” Bill Courtland, the pilot, shouted. Outside, two trucks had stopped in front of the C-137 and
blocked it from moving. A squad of soldiers was fanning out. “I don’t think we’re going to get clearance to taxi,” Courtland muttered. He punched a number into the high-frequency radio to send a distress message. A loud, raw, rasping squeal flooded his headset, and he hit the off switch. “They’re jamming the shit out of us. Shut ’em down,” he told the flight engineer, Otis Jenkins.

Washington, D.C.

Madeline Turner leaned her head back into her chair and took a deep breath. The Oval Office vibrated with tension as her advisors sat transfixed, afraid to speak. The small carriage clock on her desk read exactly nine o’clock. She turned and looked out the window. It was an usually bright and clear morning. Wednesday, February 13, she thought. How will the historians record this date? What will they say fifty years from now? She felt old and very weary. “So they thought I had sent General Bender to sell out Okinawa.”

Barnett Francis kept looking at the message from the embassy in Beijing hoping to find some good news. But there was none. “Wang Mocun did make specific reference to the reversion of Taiwan.”

“I see,” she said. “And there is no word on General Bender?”

“He was last reported on his way to the air base to board his plane,” Francis replied. “He should be airborne by now.”

“Have the Chinese changed their posture?” she asked.

“We are monitoring a sudden increase in communications traffic,” the DCI answered. “They’re using a new type of code, and it may take a few days, maybe a week, to break it.”

“Madam President,” General Charles said, “the fact that they are using a new code is a sign they are gearing up for more action.”

“Can you be absolutely sure of that?” she asked, still looking out the window.

“No, ma’am,” he answered.

“I see.” She closed her eyes. “The atoll, where they dropped their bomb, I assume no one survived and it is uninhabited.”

“As far as we know, yes. We are collecting all the data we can and may put a survey team ashore. It all depends on the level of radioactivity.”

She made her decision and spun around to face them. “General Charles, the officer with the football?”

“He’s in the outer office,” Charles replied.

“Please ask him to come in.”

Okinawa, Japan

The summons to the command post came just before midnight and woke Major Bob Ryan from a sound sleep. He dressed hurriedly and drove as fast as he could down the darkened streets. A sergeant was waiting for him when he came through the heavy blast doors and escorted him into the Intelligence vault where the battle staff was waiting. Martini entered a few minutes later and waved them all to seats. “Gentlemen,” he began, “we have received a valid emergency action message ordering a selective release on the same atoll the Chinese nuked sixty-five hours ago.”

“It’s about time,” the Operations Group commander growled.

Martini ignored him. “The primary and backup crews will be here in a few minutes to validate the Quebec Zulu release message and brief the mission. Keep the questions to a minimum.” He turned to Ryan. “I want you to observe them for any signs of instability that might disqualify them from flying the mission.” He looked around the room. “Okay, bring them in.” The commander of the Forty-fourth Fighter Squadron opened the door and ushered the four captains into the vault.

Ryan listened in stunned horror as the briefing played out with the lockstep of an execution. He refused to believe he was in the room with sane, rational human beings, and nothing in Martini’s voice or demeanor indicated he was about to take the world a step closer to a nuclear
holocaust. Ryan focused on the primary pilot and weapons system officer who would fly the mission. Maybe, just maybe, they couldn’t do it. Maybe he could declare one of them unfit and delay the mission from happening until cooler, more rational heads had a chance to reevaluate the situation. He studied Chet Woods, the pilot, looking for a telltale tick or sign of nervousness. Nothing. The captain was as solid as a rock and this was just another mission. Ray Byers, the WSO, was worse. He was treating it as an intellectual exercise on a par with a video game.

Maybe that was it
, Ryan thought. He could claim Byers was exhibiting disassociative behavior and unfit to fly the mission. He glanced at the backup crew standing against the back wall and knew it was hopeless. Both men were eager to get the chance and prove they could fly the mission.
What kind of men are these?
he wondered.

Martini stood up. “Gentlemen, good luck.” The briefing was over, and the vault rapidly emptied.

That took less than ten minutes
, Ryan thought. Ten minutes to put the world on the road to total war. Pete Townly, the chief of Intelligence, wandered over to him.

“Nothing for us to do here,” he said. “Why don’t we go watch it from Habu Hill?”

“Will we be able to see the detonation from there?”

“At night?” Townly answered. “Oh, yeah.”

The big doors of the fuel cells building rolled back, and a sirenlike wail rolled out of the darkened building as Woods pulled the jet fuel starter handle and the F-15E Strike Eagle’s right engine came to life. Almost immediately, the left engine spun up. Outside, a guard dropped the rope barrier and the aircraft taxied out, a winged beast of prey free of its cage. A full complement of air-to-air missiles hung from under the wings and along the fuselage. A single bomb hung from the centerline. It was a sleek, shimmering dart, twelve feet long and weighing just over 700 pounds. The control dials inside the bomb had been set to the lowest yield, 10 kilotons, the equivalent of 10,000 tons of TNT, half the size of the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. By thermonuclear standards, it was a microcosm among giants.

The bright moonlight illuminated the taxipath and the pilot, Chet Woods, taxied quickly for runway 22 left. He turned onto the active and never slowed. He firewalled the throttles, and the dark gray raptor lifted into the clear night sky, its afterburners torching the night. The two men standing at the guardrail on Habu Hill looked straight ahead as the jet passed by at eye level, seventy-five feet off the deck. It held the runway heading as it disappeared to the southwest. “That’s as high as they’ll get,” Pete Townly said. Then he added, “Until they toss the bomb.”

Chet Woods engaged the autopilot and rooted the airspeed on 480 knots as they raced for the target, 120 nautical miles from Kadena. In the backseat, Ray Byers kept glancing at the four video display scopes in front of him as he ran his checklist. He asked the pilot for verification of the permissive action link code. Chet’s numbers agreed with his, and he dialed them into the PAL control box on the right-hand console. The light cycled from red to orange telling him the bomb was unlocked and could be armed.

Automatically, he checked the right-hand video scope where the radar warning and threat display was called up. The tactical electronic warfare system’s highly sensitive antenna were only picking up the sweep of a friendly radar, and the threat audio was quiet. His hand hovered over the nuclear arming wafer switch next to the PAL control box. “Nuclear consent switch,” he said.

In the front cockpit, Woods broke the wire seal on the guarded switch, flipped the cover up, and moved the toggle switch to the up position. “On,” he replied, providing the two-man control that allowed the bomb to arm. Byers rotated the wafer switch to AIR for an airburst. He waited for the orange light to cycle to green. Nothing happened. He counted to ten and let out his breath when the light blinked to green. The bomb was armed.

“That took longer than I thought,” he muttered. He hit the emission limit switch and the APG-70 radar came to life, sweeping the area in a mapping mode to update their position. The target was on the nose at sixty-five miles. “Take it down,” he said. Woods lowered the clearance limit on their terrain following radar to fifty feet, and the
jet descended twenty-five feet. “Looks like a milk run,” the WSO said. He hit the EMIS limit switch, and the powerful radar returned to standby. “Push it up, now.” Woods inched the throttles forward and the Strike Eagle accelerated to 540 knots. Two minutes later, Byers hit the EMIS limit switch, and the radar came to life. Byers drove the radar crosshairs over the target and locked it up. The attack display in the pilot’s HUD came alive, and they were in the primary delivery mode. But Byers was ready to cycle through three backup modes if anything went wrong.

Byers called the countdown. “Ready, ready, now!” The Strike Eagle was still on autopilot, and it pitched smoothly up into a sixty-degree climb. The weapons release computer had been programmed with the bomb’s ballistics and was processing a wealth of information coming from the radar and inertial navigation system. At the precise moment when everything matched—airspeed, distance from the target, climb angle, speed,
g
loading, and altitude—the bomb separated cleanly from the F-15 and arced high into the air. “Bomb gone!” Byers yelled.

Woods flicked off the autopilot and took control for the escape maneuver. He jammed the throttles full forward and rolled the F-15 as he reversed course and slammed the nose toward the ocean, 2,000 feet below them. He leveled off at 400 feet and kept the throttles in full afterburner as they accelerated to Mach 1.6 and ran from the target. “She won’t go any faster,” he said. He engaged the autopilot, and both men lowered their gold visors that turned opaque in the flash of a nuclear explosion to save their eyesight.