“Sounds good. I knew I could count on you. Pass them along to Offutt soonest,” Shaw ordered. “Now, lay it on me. Give me your thoughts. Quickly, please.”
“Yes, sir,” Samson said. “I want to make another pitch to the Chief and the National Command Authority about the bomber force. We have got to take them off SIOP alert. I’ve got a series of plans we can present to the NCA—”
“I don’t have time to make the same pitch we tried yesterday, Terrill,” Shaw said. “I’m up to my eyeballs. STRATCOM wants to put nukes on the Strike Eagles now. ”
“What?”
“You heard me,” Shaw said. “We’re going to have all four F-15E Strike Eagle wings — the 3rd at Elmendorf, the 4th at Seymour-Johnson, the 366th at Mountain Home, and the 48th at Lakenheath — loaded for the SIOP and deployed to Elmendorf for operations against North Korea or China. CINCSTRATCOM is looking at North Korea starting a nuclear exchange within a few hours.”
“That’s nuts, sir,” Samson said. “That’ll suck a fourth of your tankers away. Losing Guam was bad enough for the tankers — putting nukes on F-15s for possible missions against North Korea, will drain even more tankers away.”
“You’re exactly correct, Earthmover, and that’s the argument I made — but the JCS and STRATCOM are on autopilot for Armaggedon. They think that if we put more nukes on more planes, the Chinese and North Koreans will back off,” Shaw said. “Anyway, I’m still waiting on a cocked-on-alert call from your Bones. Pass along a good word for me to the boys and girls at Whiteman for a good job in getting the B-2s loaded up so fast.”
They were loaded up and put on alert just so Danforth and Balboa could start dinking around with them, such as putting them on airborne alert, Samson thought bitterly. “I will, sir,” he responded; then, quickly, Samson went on: “Sir, I’d like a chance to meet with you and General Hayes on my plan to neutralize the Chinese strategic forces. We have missions on the shelf right now, ready to go, where we can take out every one of the Chinese long-range-missile silos without using nuclear weapons. I’d like to—”
“Sorry, Earthmover, but I can’t,” Shaw interrupted. “I went to STRATCOM with your suggestions without any luck, and I’ve got a second message in with the chief. They want to keep all the bombers on nuclear alert — they think it gives them the most leverage to have the bombers, especially the B-2s, loaded with nukes and threatening to destroy targets in China.”
“It’s obviously not working, sir, because China went ahead and destroyed Andersen and nearly wiped out the capital city of Guam,” Samson interjected, “and we still haven’t retaliated. Someone did, but it wasn’t us.
“Sorry, Earthmover,” Shaw repeated. “To a certain extent, I happen to agree with the JCS. We can’t risk losing the B-2s on a deep strike mission inside China.”
“The B-lBs can soften up China’s air defense well enough for the B-2s to go in.”
“But then they’re up against thousands of fighters and triple-A sites,” Shaw argued. “We can’t destroy all of them. Eventually, the B-2s would be fully exposed. If we lost even ten percent of the B-2 fleet on this attack, it would be a staggeringly demoralizing loss — and it would seem even worse if we didn’t do commensurate damage to the Chinese military. We might then be forced to use ICBMs or nuclear cruise missiles to destroy Chinese targets, and then we’d be on the very slippery slope we want to stay off. We’d be sending nuclear warheads over the pole, over Russia. That would make the Russkies very nervous, and we don’t want them involved in this fight, on either side.”
“Sir, we’ve got a plan that would practically ensure destruction of the Chinese long- and intermediate-range strategic offensive arsenal, without a devastating loss on our side — and without using nukes,” Samson said. “But I need the B-l and B-2 bombers. All of them. They’re not doing any good loaded with nukes. With you, me, and General Hayes talking to the SECDEF or maybe even the President, we might be able to convince him to let us try my plan before it’s too late.”
There was a slight pause on the other end, followed by an exasperated but resigned sigh; then: “Okay, Terrill, I’ll make the request once more. But it’s not going to work.”
“Thank you, sir,” Samson said. “I can fly out to Washington at any time to meet with the Chief or the NCA.”
“You just stay at Barksdale, and I’ll tell you when to show to give your dog-and-pony show,” Shaw said. “Keep quiet till then, okay?”
“Yes, sir,” Samson replied — but Shaw had hung up before Samson gave his response. It was not a friendly suggestion to keep quiet — it was an order.
Sometime during the conversation with Shaw, Samson was handed a note. He asked a question of the briefer, then half-listened to the reply as he glanced at the messageform — and then his heart skipped a beat. He threw a “Continue on” order to his battle staff and dashed out of the battle staff room to the comm center. “What did you pick up?” he asked the command post senior controller.
“A message on that special SATCOM terminal you had installed here, sir,” the senior controller said. He handed Samson a printout. “Auto decryption on this end.” The message read: “HEADBANGER SENDS. URGENT REQUEST EMER AR RNDZVZ W/ SINGLE DRAGON 16 25N117E 10K ONLOAD. USE RED7 ARFREQ. ADVISE ASAP. OUT.” A later message read: “HEADBANGER FINDS FOUR H-7 MANY H-6 AT TDELTA SKIPPING TFOXTROT AND TGOLF. THX FOR EMERAR WITH DRAGON16. NAV27 ARCP OK. OUT”
“Wasn’t Headbanger the call sign of that modified B-52 that broke out of Andersen past the Navy and U.S. marshals and then disappeared, sir?” the senior controller asked..
“It sure as hell is,” Samson replied excitedly. “Shit. This means that not only is Elliott, McLanahan, and the rest of that motley crew alive, but they’re flying a damned mission — over fucking China). ”
“That attack on the PRC garrison at Xiamen?”
“A SEAD Wolverine cruise missile attack,” Samson surmised. “A couple of those cruise missiles could wipe out dozens of SAM and tripleA sites. Then they get someone to follow up with cluster-bomb attacks.”
“The ‘Dragon-16’? You don’t suppose they mean Taiwanese F-16s? That EB-52 is flying SEAD missions for Taiwanese F-16s?”
“Yep, and then continuing on deep inside China to do more bombing missions,” Samson said proudly. “I’ll bet the next intelligence message we get says that Wuhan has been attacked by unidentified bombers — maybe a couple other targets between Xiamen and Wuhan, or between Wuhan and the East China Sea.”
“But I thought all the Taiwanese F-16s were destroyed, along with their bases.”
“Obviously some survived — along with one Megafortress and Jon Masters’s tanker and a few of his gadgets,” Samson said. He searched a map of China: “The Chinese H-6 bomber base is at Wuhan, west of Shanghai,” he said. “It sounds like McLanahan found some H-7s — those are Tupolev-26 supersonic bombers — and decided to expend their remaining weapons there, instead of a couple other preplanned targets. But where are they flying out of? Who is running that operation?”
“We could find out,” the senior controller said. “If I can still receive their SATCOM transmissions, I suppose we can send them a message just as easy. ”
General Samson broke out into a broad grin, the first one in many, many hours. “Move over, son,” he said excitedly. “I’ve got to call me up some renegades so we can get to work cleaning up this war — before it gets completely out of hand.”