The horror that he was about to unleash was—
Suddenly a flash of light popped off to his left, and a yellow flare arced skyward, disappearing in the cloudy sky, then descended to earth on a small white parachute. It was a perimeter-warning flare — there were intruders nearby! A shot rang out, then the sound of a rifle on full automatic. Kramko instinctively ducked as he felt the pressure of slugs whizzing near his head. He pulled out his walkie-talkie: “Security, this is Alpha. Report!”
“Intruders in the perimeter, unit one, north of my position at about three hundred meters.”
Oh shit, Kramko thought. What a damned nightmare! He didn’t want the missiles to launch at all, but now that there was someone out there trying to stop the launch, he wanted them to fire off immediately! “All security units, set condition red,” he radioed. “Stand by to repel. Missile launch in approximately two minutes. Alpha clear.” Kramko then bolted for the security trailer.
A guard was hiding in the shadows near a tree a few meters away from the trailer, scanning the buildings near the airfield itself. The rest of the guards must have gone to their defensive positions, Kramko thought. He rushed into the trailer. “Status of the launch, Sergeant—?”
Heads turned toward him — but they weren’t Byelorussian soldiers. They were dressed in black and wore thick bulletproof vests and face masks. Three men were sitting at the launch-control console with their masks off, talking in English. Two soldiers grabbed Kramko and secured his hands behind him with plastic handcuffs. “Kto tam?” Kramko said in Russian. “Myneyeh ehtah nyee nrahveetsah. Who are you? Stop what you’re doing!”
“The thing’s locked, Gunny,” one of the soldiers said. “Won’t accept operator inputs. I tried resetting the system but it’s not responding.”
“Great,” Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant Lobato said. He turned to Kramko and said in Russian, “Captain, we are American Marines. Do you understand me?”
Kramko’s eyes widened with surprise. “Americans? Here? How did you get here?”
“Captain, do these missiles have nuclear warheads?”
Kramko hesitated One of the soldiers slapped him in the chest. Kramko replied, “I will not answer. I am a Byelorussian soldier. I will not—”
“These missiles are going to launch in about forty seconds, Gunny,” one of the Marines said. “I can’t stop the countdown.”
“Captain, you understand that if these missiles launch your country will have started a nuclear war,” Lobato said. “You must help us stop the launch.”
“Gunny, I got the target file. It’s locked and I can’t change it, but here’s the target coordinates… hey! One of the missiles is heading south! These bastards are launching a missile south… no, southeast of here. The only thing within range is—”
“Minsk,” Lobato said to Kramko. “One of those missiles has been targeted for Minsk. Do you understand, sir? You’re about to fire a missile off at your own people.”
Kramko was confused, and now frightened. “I am Byelorussian soldier … my orders come from headquarters…
“Call off your security troops,” Lobato told him. “We can stop the missiles from launching.”
“No one can stop them!”
“We can stop it!” Lobato said. “A bomber is on station — it is ready to attack. But we need to mark the target. Call off your security forces. Let us get close enough to mark the target!”
Kramko hesitated. These American Marines could have killed him, but they didn’t. They seemed as if they truly wanted to help. Could this be the help he was looking for? Could this be the way he could stop this madness?
“I will do what you ask,” Kramko finally said. He motioned at his hands, and the handcuffs were cut off and his walkie-talkie returned to him.
“All units, all units, this is Alpha,” Kramko shouted into the radio. Then, twisting away from the Marines that held him, he shouted, “Repel! American Marines on the perimeter! Repel!” Lobato snatched the radio away, and his hands were bound behind his back once again.
“You stupid fuck,” Lobato said. “You just condemned millions of innocent people to death.” His breathing was labored, as if he had just run a marathon. He reached into his ALICE vest pocket and withdrew a tiny transmitter.
The members of COBRA VENOM standing with Lobato were helpless — all their training, all their experience, were useless if they couldn’t get near enough to the missiles. “What do we do now, Gunny?” one of them asked.
“Tsehrkahf,” Lobato said in Russian, glaring angrily at Kramko.
He raised the transmitter to his lips. “Pray … that the Air Force can find those fucking missiles down here.” On his walkie-talkie, he said, “All units. Blanket the area. Flares and HE. If you get a position on those missile units, mark it. You got about twenty seconds. Do it!”
“Coming up on launch point,” navigator Captain Alicia Kellerman reported. “Thirty seconds. Ready with final release check.”
The pilot, Major Kelvin Carter, the senior project officer of the EB-52 Megafortress program from the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center, looked at his copilot and frowned in his oxygen mask. In his unmistakable Louisiana bayou accent, he asked, “We get a confirmation message from those jarheads yet?”
“Nothing,” his copilot, Captain Nancy Cheshire, replied. General Brad Elliott’s classified-research group at HAWC was not a real combat outfit, so that many of its crew members were women — but the four women on board the upgraded Old Dog strategic-escort “battleship” aircraft were prime examples of the success of women in combat; they were highly intelligent engineers and scientists as well as fully qualified aviators. “We punch these puppies out anyway.”
“Checks,” Carter said.
“Final release check,” Kellerman announced.
Step by step, Kellerman and radar-navigator bombardier Captain Paul Scott ran down the eight-step checklist in preparation for launching the AGM-145 missile at the target. The AGM-145, also called MSOW (Modular Standoff Weapon), was a small, turbojet-powered missile with a five-hundred-pound warhead and an imaging infrared (IIR) seeker that transmitted pictures of the intended target back to its launching aircraft. Like its predecessor, the AGM-65 Maverick missile, MSOW was a “fireand-forget” weapon that allowed the EB-52 to attack from long range with pinpoint accuracy; but unlike Maverick, MSOW could actually hunt for targets. Its infrared scanner, combined with a high-speed artificial-intelligence computer, compared pictures of targets it found with a catalog of desired targets, and it would identify each target it discovered and report its findings to crew members on board its own plane, on another aircraft, or even to troops on the ground. It could select its own target based on a target-priority list, or humans could override the selection and choose the proper target. The EB-52 could “ripple-fire” several MSOW missiles at a selected area, and each would find its own target and report to the carrier aircraft what target it found; then it would pick the highest-priority targets and attack.
MSOW was perfect for this mission because Kelvin Carter’s crew was not given a specific target. As one of the “flying spares” on this mission, it and another modified B-52H were not sent into Lithuanian airspace until well after the four other EB-52s used on the late-night raids into Lithuania and Byelorussia were safely out. But since there were still American Marines involved, Carter and his crew were sent back into Lithuania and Byelorussia. After they were airborne, they were ordered to attack a small airfield between Minsk and Vilnius-not Smorgon, which had been their original target, but a smaller airfield suspected of being a short-range-missile launch site. The order had come not from Washington, but directly from a female CIA agent in Latvia.