Murphy shrugged. “I’ll bone up on that stuff before the briefing tomorrow. These briefings are bull anyway … Coming to the Club with us for lunch?”
“In a while; it’s only eleven-thirty. I’ll meet you there at noon.”
“Man, you are so dedicated.”
“Knock it off.”
“No, really, I mean it,” James’ crew navigator said. “You’re always studying. You know your stuff backwards and forwards, and you know everyone else’s too. If it’s not EWO communications procedure it’s security or avionics or computers or target study. You got your hands in everything.”
“That’s my job, Murph.”
“Well, at least you’re getting some reward for it. Making commander of a B-1 Excalibur in less than two years was moon-talk until you came along. They’re saying you might make flight commander in a few weeks. You’re really burning up the program.”
James slapped his pencil down on the table, smiled. “You’re buttering me up, man. Okay, okay, I’ll buy lunch. Just let me finish.”
“Hey, hotshot, can’t you take a compliment? I know attaboys are rare around here, but I think you can still recognize one.”
James raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. Thanks, Murph, but I’m not doing anything special here. I do this stuff because it’s my job and because it really interests me, and because my ass will be grass if I don’t learn this communications stuff by tomorrow morning.”
“Message received. I’m outta here.” Murphy stood and headed for the door, then stopped.-”You’re an Academy grad, aren’t you?”
“Right.”
“Top of your class, from what I heard.”
James looked at Murphy. “Get to the point, Murph.”
“I thought so, I just want to know why you chose B-1s. You could have had your pick of any hot jet in the inventory, but you picked B-1s.”
“I liked them. I always did. They’re big and sexy — just like your wife …”
“Asshole.”
“… and I still have a stick and afterburners and Mach-one speed like a fighter. I hated it when Carter canceled them. I think they should build another hundred of them. At least. Answer your question?”
Murphy nodded. “But you seem a little, I don’t know, out of place.”
“Out of place?” His stomach tightened as he looked closely at his radar nay.
“Yeah. Like B-ls are just a jumping-off place for you. I mean, you’re not advertising it or anything, but somehow, old buddy, I get the feeling you’re on your way somewhere. Care to tell?”
Ken James forced himself to smile. This big Irishman was hitting too close. “Just between you and me and the fence-post?”
“Sure, man.”
“I did get an assignment, I think. When I filled out my last dream sheet I was sort of … well, daydreaming. Appropriate, huh? Anyway, I put down that I was interested in the High Technology Advanced Weapons Center—”
“HAWC! You got an assignment to Dreamland? I don’t believe it! Do they actually give assignments there?”
“I didn’t think they did, either. Like I said, it was a long shot. And I don’t have any assignment yet. But I did get a letter back from the deputy commander, a Brigadier General Ormack. He sounded interested. It was sort of a don’t-call-meI’ll-call-you letter, but at least I got an answer back.”
“I don’t believe it,” Murphy said. “Dreamland. You realize that all of the world’s hottest jets and weapons in the past thirty years went through there? Those guys fly planes and test weapons out there that are years ahead of anything that exists in the real world. And you’re going to be assigned there—”
“I said I don’t have an assignment, Murph. So keep this under your hat, okay? Besides, how do you know so much about Dreamland?”
“I don’t know much of anything, except that anybody who even accidentally overflies Dreamland gets sent to our version of the old Gulag Archipelago. Every now and then you hear about an ex-Los Angeles Center air-traffic controller telling stories about Mach-six fighters or planes that fly vertically to fifty thousand feet over Dreamland. It’s got to be the assignment of a lifetime.”
“Well, like I said, keep all this under your hat,” James said. “Now take off. I want to polish my briefing before we do our dry runs this afternoon.”
After Murphy left, James got up from his seat, went to the door, locked it, put a chair in front of it. He returned to the small pile of red-covered books and manuals on the desk in the front of the conference room and selected one marked: “COMBAT CREW EMERGENCY WAR ORDER COMMUNICATIONS PROCEDURES-TOP SECRET/NOFORN/SIOP/WIVNS.” It was the master document used by all the American strategic combat forces all over the world — aircraft, submarines, intercontinental missile sites, and command posts — outlining every one of their communication sources and methods, procedures, frequencies, timing and locations of the nation’s domestic and overseas communications facilities. The hieroglyphics after the title warned that the document was top secret, not releasable to foreign nationals, part of the Single Integrated Operations Plan — the master plan on how the United States and its allies would conduct “the next world war.” This particular volume was dated 1 October 1994, some two months from now, because it belonged to the new SIOP revision scheduled to take place at that time. The procedures in that manual would be used by all strategic forces for the next twelve months afterward.
It made it convenient for him and the KGB, Ken thought, to have to do these once-a-year briefings for the wing commander. The annual Mission Certification briefings were required by law. The wing commander of each SAC base with nuclear missions had to certify to the Commander-in-Chief of SAC, and he in turn to the President of the United States, that each crewman knew precisely what his duties were in case the SIOP was “implemented”—a euphemism for the so-called unthinkable, the declaration of World War Three. Normally the certification briefings were given once, when a crewman became mission-ready. But the SIOP was revised each year, reflecting new rules, new tactics, and so every year each crewman had to dig out the changed books, study them, then brief the wing commander on the revised mission. The top-secret books were trotted out for the certification, studied for a week, then locked away, usually never to be seen again except for base-wide exercises or inspections. The opportunities were rare to have such free access to these manuals, and Ken had to work fast.
He opened the manual to section four, “ELF, LF, HF and SATCOM SIOP Frequencies and Broadcast Schedules,” and propped the pages open with a couple of books. This section detailed all of the frequencies used by aircraft and submarines to broadcast and receive coded messages from SAC and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with what time of the day these broadcasts would be made. Anyone knowing these frequencies and times could jam or disrupt them, specific broadcasts could be intercepted and decoded. The crew charts had stickers that had only one frequency, but this book had all the frequencies for the nuclear strike force of the United States.
James unzipped a leg pocket of his flight suit and took out what looked like a thick-barreled marking pen. Moving his chair so his body would cast no shadows across the pages, he twisted and pulled the cap, held the device a couple of feet over the pages, and pressed the pocket clip to activate the shutter.
Murphy was close, James thought as he worked. He would have liked to get assigned to F-15s or F-16s, or the new F-117 Stealth fighter unit, but he went where Moscow told him to go, and that was where he could learn as much as possible about the new B-1’s nuclear-strike mission. Dreamland was the most secret base in the country. B-1 Excalibur bombers were fine, but he would give anything to get his hands on the United States’ newest fighters.