Within moments the place that was once the city of Vedeno was completely engulfed in fire. Over four square kilometers were leveled and burned instantly, and the overpressure caused by the multiple fuel-air explosions destroyed anything within seven square kilometers. The only thing left standing was the Caucasus Mountains, completely denuded of all vegetation and wiped clean of snow, with immense blankets of smoke and steam rising into the night sky.
“Good job, everyone,” Gryzlov said. He shook hands with the systems officers, then returned to the copilot’s seat. The pilot was just checking in the rest of the formation — all aircraft in the green, all aircraft released live weapons, all aircraft returning to base. “Excellent job, everyone,” Gryzlov radioed on the secure command frequency to the other bombers in the formation. “I’m buying the first round back home.”
Air Force Colonel Daren Mace decided to drive his beat-up Ford pickup into town to look around before heading out to the base. The town of Battle Mountain was hardly more than a dusty bump in the road off Interstate 80 in northern Nevada. With the construction of the Air Reserve base, several civilian construction projects were also under way — a large chain hotel and casino, a sizable truck stop, several apartment buildings, and a small single-family-home subdivision — but even after three years since construction began on the base, the town had changed very little. It still had its old, isolated, mining-town rough edge.
Closing in on the big five-oh, Daren Mace had recently turned into the world’s biggest health freak, which for him was a complete one-eighty from his previous lifestyle. Not long before, his favorite hangout for everything from mission planning to dating to doing his taxes was in a tavern somewhere — he was such a fixture in some of his favorite places that he could often be seen serving drinks or repairing equipment in his spare time. But then he found himself needing glasses for reading, found his flight suits getting a little tight around the middle, so he started an exercise regime. Now every day started off with a run. His consumption of beer, cigarettes, and pizza also declined, as did his blood pressure and cholesterol count, so he was able to maintain the same lean, trim figure he’d had most of his adult life, even though he was getting more and more deskbound in his military career.
Sure, the hair was turning grayer, and he was popping aspirins almost every morning to counteract the unexpected little aches he’d encounter. But those were all signs of maturity — weren’t they?
Maturity was never one of his strong suits in the past. Born and raised in Jackpot, Nevada, several hours’ drive northeast of Battle Mountain, the younger Mace found that his main concerns usually involved staying one step ahead of his strict parents, the game wardens during his many illegal hunting trips in the high desert, the fathers of his various love interests, and — first on the list — getting the hell out of back-country Nevada. The Air Force was his ticket out.
His twenty-three-year Air Force career wasn’t all aches and pains. Because of his exceptional knowledge, his skills, and his ability to think, plan, and execute quickly and effectively, Mace was one of the youngest aviators ever chosen to fly the FB-111A “Aardvark” supersonic strategic bomber, at a time when there were only forty of the long-range nuclear-armed bombers in the Air Force inventory and only six navigators per year chosen from the entire force to serve on them. He didn’t disappoint. He was not only a knowledgeable and hardworking bombardier and crew member, but he took the time to study the aircraft, all its systems, and its incredible capabilities. Mace soon became known as the primary expert in all facets of the “Go-Fast” supersonic strike aircraft.
So in 1990, during Operation Desert Shield, Daren Mace was the natural choice for one of the most important and dangerous missions conceived as a result of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the tensions created in the Middle East — the American response to an all-out nuclear, chemical, or biological attack by Iraq or one of the other hostile nations against U.S. forces in the region. Should such an attack take place, Mace’s mission was to take off in his FB-111A bomber from a secret air base in eastern Turkey and launch thermonuclear-tipped missiles at four of Iraq’s most important underground command-and-control centers, all in one mission.
On January 17, 1991, the Iraqis attacked Israel with a SCUD rocket armed with what was thought to be a chemical-weapon warhead, and several more SCUDs hit areas of Saudi Arabia, close to where American troops were garrisoned. Mace and his squadron commander took off from Batman Air Base in Turkey on their deadly mission to stop the Iraqi war machine from launching any more weapons of mass destruction. Loaded with four three-thousand-gallon fuel tanks and four AGM-69A short-range attack missiles tipped with three-hundred-kiloton thermonuclear warheads, they zoomed in at treetop level under cover of darkness, at full military power or greater the whole way. They received the execution order: It would be America’s first nuclear attack since World War II.
Except it hadn’t been a chemical-weapon attack. It was determined that the Iraqi warhead did not contain chemical or biological weapons — the rocket had hit a dry-cleaning facility, and the chemicals released from inside the building mimicked chemical weapons. Within minutes an abort code was sent to the strike aircraft.
Moments before launch, the crew received a coded message. There was no time to decode it before launch, and they already had a valid strike order authorizing them to launch their missiles — but Mace canceled the attack anyway. Legally, procedurally, he should have fired his nuclear missiles. Instead Mace used his common sense and his gut feeling and aborted.
Now deep inside enemy territory, flying right over Iraq’s most sensitive military areas, the crew had relied on the nuclear strike to help them escape. Without it they were in the fight of their lives. With no fighter protection, low on fuel, and heavily loaded with dangerous weapons, they were attacked mercilessly with every weapon in the Iraqi air-defense arsenal. Mace’s aircraft commander was badly injured and his plane shot up and flying on one engine. Mace managed to do an emergency refueling with a KC-10 aerial refueling tanker that had crossed the Iraqi border to do the rendezvous before the FB-111 flamed out, then crash-landed his plane on a highway in northern Saudi Arabia.
In anyone’s book, in any other situation, Mace would’ve been a hero. Instead he was ostracized as the bombardier who couldn’t follow orders and had lost his nerve. He was bounced from assignment to assignment, squirreled away in remote operational locations, and then finally offered a Reserve commission. His fitness reports were always “firewalled”—meaning he always got the highest marks on job performance — but he was never considered for any command assignments, never believed to have the right stuff to command a tactical unit. His last assignment was as a protocol officer in the secretary of defense’s office, where he’d been relegated to escorting VIPs and running errands for the honchos in the Pentagon.
Battle Mountain seemed to be the newest “squirrel’s nest” for him.
Daren always seemed to gravitate toward bars and taverns located on the wrong side of town, and he did so again that night. There were four very small casinos in Battle Mountain, one open-all-day restaurant and eight that were open part-time, eight motels, four gas stations, and one truck stop. The truck stop had billiard tables, friendly waitresses, good burgers… and, next door, a brothel.