Nicolas Desaix paid little attention to the rest of General Vichery’s briefing. He found details on ordnance loads, mission parameters, and flight paths utterly uninteresting. Only the effects mattered. Poland and its partners were about to learn that defying the European Confederation could be an extremely expensive proposition.
Six pairs of swept-wing, single-tailed Mirage F1E fighters roared off the main runway of the old Soviet air base at Juterbog, leaving one after the other at precisely timed intervals. None climbed higher than five hundred meters above a gently rolling landscape of forests and farmland.
Originally intended primarily as an interceptor, software and radar system upgrades were supposed to make the F1 a capable all-weather strike aircraft. The pilots flying this mission intended to prove that beyond any doubt. Each Mirage carried two long, angular shapes slung under its wings — Apache cruise missiles. The Apache was one of the newest French weapons, a stealthy, ground-hugging cruise missile specifically designed to evade enemy radars and air defenses.
Formed up in three four-plane flights, the F1s dove even lower and turned toward the rising sun. Their shadows rippled across a patchwork of fields and woodlands as they flew east at five hundred knots.
Staff Sergeant Jim Frewer, USAF, stood near the hardened aircraft shelter’s open doors, watching carefully as a Polish Air Force captain realigned the APG-70 radar antenna on an F-15. Quick, efficient work was critical because this fighter would leave for Brno in a few hours and from there for Hungary and combat. To get at the radar system, they had the Eagle’s pointed nose unlatched and hinged all the way back. Technical manuals stuffed full of Polish-language crib sheets were stacked on a wheeled parts and tool trolley nearby.
Frewer smiled. Captain Aleksander Giertych was good, but he still had trouble with some English technical terms. Even after some months spent as part of the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group in Poland, the sergeant found it strange to see officers doing maintenance work that would have been handled by enlisted men back in the States. Different systems, different ways of doing things, he reminded himself. It was a reminder he’d used many times while watching the Polish fliers and their ground crews make the faltering leap from Russian MiGs to American F-15s.
In the Russian system, which the Poles had inherited, officers handled all the technical work, while their conscript enlisted personnel did little more than sweep up. Eventually that would have to change, but it couldn’t possibly happen overnight. To their credit, the Polish maintenance officers hadn’t stood on rank, they’d listened to his lectures like rapt schoolboys.
They had done more than that, of course. Despite the differences in their ranks, his “students” had taken him into their homes and families. They’d made him part of the 11th Fighter Regiment. He thought of them as his “boys” and their planes as his “birds.”
Poland was a long way from Minnesota, where he’d grown up, and Langley Air Force Base, in Virginia, his last duty station, but he could easily relate to the men here and what they were doing.
Right now Frewer’s formal classes were on hold. The entire regiment was on a war footing, working almost around the clock readying a second squadron for service over Hungary. He spent all his time on the line with them, performing systems tests and making final adjustments. Six months of MAAG training just wasn’t enough to teach the 11th’s maintenance crews everything, and he’d be damned if he let men go into battle with planes that weren’t ready.
Like this one. Red 201 couldn’t fly south — not with an out-of-whack radar. The sergeant moved a little closer, ready to offer advice if Giertych asked for it. He stayed near the doors, though. They’d left them open to let in much-needed light and fresh air, and he wanted to take full advantage of both. After a long, cold winter it felt good to stand in the sunlight with a cool morning breeze on his back. The only thing he’d disliked about serving in Poland had been the long spell of wet weather they’d endured. Maybe he’d spent too much time in the hot, bone-dry air at Nellis Air Force Base, deep in the Nevada desert north of Las Vegas…
Warbling, high-pitched sirens went off all around the airfield. An air-raid warning! Frewer and Giertych stared at each other in shock for a single instant and then reacted. The captain shouted something in rapid-fire Polish to one of his men near the door controls. Nodding rapidly, the corporal whirled around and hit a switch on the panel. Smoothly and quickly, with a roar like a volcano rumbling to life, the massive armored doors slid into place, sealing the shelter in dimly lit darkness. The solid slam as they came together was almost loud enough to mask the sound of the first explosion outside.
Frewer followed Giertych toward the personnel exit on the side of the reinforced aircraft shelter. Standing regulations be damned. He needed to see what was happening.
Smoke billowed up from one side of the base — right where the operations center was located. Just as they tumbled out the shelter door, another low rumble and a shock wave rattling through the pavement carried more bad news.
They turned to see a flaming cloud and debris arcing through the air. A small shape, no more than a black streak, flashed into view and dove into the same area. A second blast shook the ground. Oh, Jesus, Frewer realized, those were the repair shops. The other members of his training team were on duty there. Without pausing for further thought, he started running. Giertych took off after him.
The repair shops were at least a quarter mile away, but they could already see red and orange flames dancing through the rising smoke.
Another streak, identifiable this time as a cruise missile, skimmed over the rooftops at blinding speed. It had to be French or German, he thought. It was coming from the wrong direction to be Russian.
The missile came apart in midair, suddenly dissolving into near-invisible black specks. Bomblets, Frewer thought dully. Sounding like firecrackers popping off in one long, crackling string, they smothered the maintenance sheds in hundreds of individual explosions. Unlike the aircraft shelters, Wroclaw’s repair facilities weren’t armored or protected in any way. Thousands of white-hot fragments sliced through thin aluminum roofs and walls and into the rooms and corridors inside.
Frewer knew what they could do. The U.S. Air Force had its own bomblet dispensers, spewing out softball-sized devices by the hundreds. Each weighed a few pounds, and was equally capable of penetrating armor, scything down exposed personnel, and even starting a good-sized fire. He was sure the EurCon weapons were just as advanced.
Even as he neared the burning buildings, he cursed himself for knowing so much about what those weapons could do to the men trapped inside. Then he cursed the enemy who’d used them, struggling to breathe in with lungs that were laboring under the strain of running so far so fast.
The two men pulled up short of the building, about a hundred meters away. Thick, greasy smoke and the heat coming off the fire made it impossible to get any closer.
Fire crews, some in shiny, asbestos hot suits, were making some headway against the flames, but there was nothing left to save. Frewer looked frantically for survivors. He couldn’t see any — only corpses lying silent on the grass nearby, not yet covered. Some wore Polish uniforms, but many, too many, wore U.S. Air Force blue.
Anger and grief flowed through the sergeant. They’d all speculated on how EurCon might react to the Polish intervention in Hungary, but the idea that the French and Germans would attack Polish bases, especially without some sort of ultimatum, had been dismissed as insane by everybody.
Everybody had been wrong, Frewer realized. The cruise missiles, weapons capable of incredible precision, had to have been deliberately targeted on buildings full of American personnel. EurCon knew that, he thought angrily. They just don’t give a shit. Well, he did, and as far as he was concerned, America was in the war now, all the way.