The blast over-pressure waves of the Gorky and Dzerzhinsk bombs had shaken them up — momentarily, they had all been convinced the bomber was going to disintegrate when the first wave caught up with them — but it was the proximity to the 3.8 megaton air bursts’ electromagnetic pulses which had comprehensively blinded The Big Cigar. Only the instrument landing system, the intercom and a couple of the jamming gizmos remained serviceable; mainly because they had been switched off during the bomb run. It they got back home they might — at a pinch — be able to navigate over the North American continent and land or more likely, crash the bird; right now they were defenceless in the vastness of the Russian night. Moreover, unless the tankers turned on their beacons — Nathan liked to think that if he was on a KC-135 on a night like this he would be calling his wounded and fuel-hungry ‘big friends’ to ‘come home to Mama’— The Big Cigar would run out of fuel and crash somewhere over the North Pole.
The trouble was that the tankers would have to disregard SOP — standard operating procedure — to advertise their presence this close to Soviet airspace, so basically, nobody onboard the B-52 was getting his hopes up.
There had been very little chit chat on the intercom since the bomb run.
Nathan had been glad to focus on dead reckoning navigation; trying hard not to think how badly lost The Big Cigar already was if the compasses had been damaged. The loss of the entire electrical and sensor suite was a thing they trained for; in combat it was different because nobody was trying to kill you in an exercise. That the B-52 was flying into the darkness of the Arctic night was little comfort, nor was the tacit assumption that this far north the Soviet air defence net must be spread so thin as to be positively porous.
The pilot’s voice cut through the static.
“I have the glow of big fires to the east.”
In Strategic Air Command every navigator was a graduate level university geographer who was expected to know the political and physical map of the Northern Hemisphere not as intimately as the back of his hands, but much better. In fact, the standard required was ‘perfection’. Flight times, distances from the nearest centre of population, why a town or a city was where it was, which rivers flowed through it, the changing character and topography of the surrounding countryside from one season of the year to another, on and on, ad infinitum.
Vorkuta.
What was there at a small mining town in the boondocks of Northern Russia that could possibly be worth attacking with a nuke? Vorkuta, located in the Pechora coal basin of the Usa River had a population of somewhere around one hundred thousand. There had been big labour camps around the town to service the coal mines until recently; and for all Nathan Zabriski knew, there still were. Militarily the place was a backwater. There were no known major bases, radar stations or missile batteries located with a hundred miles of Vorkuta.
“That will be Vorkuta, skipper!” He called back over the intercom.
The pilot’s drawl was so relaxed that in other circumstances members of the crew might have got the impression the co-pilot had to keep poking him in the ribs with a sharp pointed stick to stop him dropping off to sleep.
“That’s good, Nathan.” A pause. “Just so all you good old boys back there know the colour of my money,” the pilot went on, chuckling laconically, “we’re about an hour away from the nearest gas stop. No sweat, The Big Cigar is flying like she wants to go home as badly as we do and we’ve got a couple of hours of gas in the tank. That is all.”
Chapter 9
The city of Buffalo in western New York State was located on the eastern side of Lake Erie at the head of the Niagara Peninsula opposite the Canadian city of Fort Erie on the Ontario shore. The city of Buffalo and its surrounding metropolitan area had a population of well over one million people, making it the largest urban populous of any city in Upper New York State.
Buffalo was still enjoying the warm glow of the post-1945 American economic boom but insurmountable problems lay in its future, problems that its city fathers and state administrators in the capital, Albany, saw on the horizon but had elected not to do anything about in case they risked bringing on the troubles ahead of time. And in any case, in these enlightened times the view from the Governor’s mansion in Albany was that the days when the Federal Government left the great cities of the Republic in the lurch were a thing of history. In the modern age all things were possible.
It was a cruel irony that the inevitability of Buffalo’s future decline was the direct corollary of its successful past. The city had begun as a tiny trading post on Buffalo Creek, growing fast after the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 of which it was its western terminus. Like other Great Lakes cities; Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Toledo, Milwaukee and Cleveland, Buffalo’s expansion and development had been fuelled by the cheap, easy water-borne flow of raw materials and grain. At the zenith of its success early in the twentieth century Buffalo was the eighth largest city in the United States of America, a great railroad hub and the home of the biggest combined grain storage and milling operation in Christendom.
Buffalo’s pre-eminence had depended entirely on the historical accident of its location at the Atlantic end of four of the Laurentian Great Lakes; from west to east, Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, Lake Huron and Lake Erie. But already in the fall of 1962, the completion three years before of the St Lawrence Seaway enabling even the biggest ocean going ships to transit directly from Lake Erie to the Atlantic — and therefore the rest of the World — via Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence River, had fatally undermined Buffalo’s previously unrivalled status as the gateway to both the western and the eastern markets of the North American continent. Far sighted planners had long foreseen the inevitable decline of the grain industry, the collapse of the vital trans-shipping business and the subsequent death of the city as a key national railway centre. They understood that shipping in the Great Lakes would eventually bypass Buffalo, that the Great Lakes system would be opened up to ships from elsewhere in the World bringing with them imports that would destroy the old heavy industries, shut down the steel mills and in time, lead to the relative impoverishment of what had been for over a century one of the richest cities in America.
But on that night in late October 1962 most of that decline still lay in Buffalo’s future; many, many years down the road. In 1962 the city was enjoying the last Indian summer of its glory days, justly proud in its civic history and of the role it had played in the story of America’s unstoppable rise to be the World’s foremost economic powerhouse.
Therein lay the real tragedy of war.
The city fathers’ worries about the downside of an unknown and possibly unknowable future, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent and unsuspecting men, women and children were snuffed out in a split second by the fifty million degree fireball of the 5.3 megaton airburst which erupted at 00:13 Eastern Standard Time approximately four thousand feet above the eastern boundary of the campus of Buffalo State College.
The Soviet R-16 inter-continental ballistic missile which had delivered the hammer blow had been launched from a pad in north-west Kazakhstan fourteen minutes and seven seconds prior to warhead initiation over Buffalo.