Peter Bryant
Red Alert
For JOHNNY and JOE
Foreword
This is the story of a battle. A battle fought in the skies over the Arctic and over Russia, on an American Strategic Air Command Base, and in the minds of men. Its duration was only two hours.
It is a chaotic story, because battles usually are chaotic. It is a pitiless, cruel story, because pitilessness and cruelty are inherent qualities of battle, and especially a battle fought out with modern nuclear weapons.
Most important of all, it is a story which could happen. It may even be happening as you read these words. And then it really will be two hours to doom. Yours and mine and every other living creature’s.
eForeword
An apocalyptic nightmare for the modern age, Peter Bryant’s Red Alert is the gripping thriller that inspired the nightmare comedy of director Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The novel was first published six years earlier, just after the Soviet Union entered the Space Age, and its tale of nuclear brinksmanship echoes the fresh fear and paranoia of an uncertain time.
The English writer Peter Bryant, né Peter George (1925-66), brought to Red Alert a strong personal antipathy to the nuclear arms race that had heated up between the world’s major powers. A former R.A.F. pilot who had become involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, George was deadly serious when he wrote the novel, which was originally published in the U.K., as Two Hours to Doom under his nom de plume Peter Bryant. The satirical tone that dominates the film was Kubrick’s innovation, a way to drive home the story even more clearly to an audience that, by 1964, had seen a number of apocalyptic nuclear thrillers. Bryant did not like the idea, though he collaborated on the screenplay and later wrote a novelization of the film, which he dedicated to Kubrick. A pessimist about the world who continued to write about the doomed outcome of a world with nuclear arms, Bryant committed suicide in 1966.
Chapter 1
The crew of Alabama Angel, fourteen hours out from a Strategic Air Command base just north of Sonora, Texas, were over the hump. They were approaching the last turning point, and the boring hours which had ground round the clock face with agonising slowness in the earlier stages of the mission, now seemed to be hurrying on, allowing them to anticipate hot food and a comfortable bed, at the British base where they would spend the next two months.
It had been a long flight, and a hard one. From Sonora they had struck due north, the hours and the miles slipping away from them until, over Baffin Island, they had made their first rendezvous with a tanker. Alabama Angel, a B-52 type inter-continental bomber, had drunk deeply from the tanker, then hastened on to a second rendezvous over the frozen wastes between the Northeast Foreland of Greenland, and Spitzbergen.
There again a KC-135 Stratotanker had been waiting patiently for them, ready to slake the thirst of the eight great engines. Now, as the bomber approached her final turning point, she was fully topped up with fuel. There was enough in the tanks to take her on to any target assigned to her inside Russia, and still leave enough to get back to a base in the States without further refuelling.
But that was on a war mission. Today was peace, and Alabama Angel would merely reach her final turning point — called in Strategic Air Command jargon the X point — and turn her sleek, arrow shape away from the vitals of Russia and towards the British base where the wing of which she formed a part was being rotated on normal overseas temporary duty.
In all, thirty-two bombers of the 843rd Wing had left Sonora fourteen hours before. Like Alabama Angel, all of them were now a hundred miles or so from their X points. In the case of Alabama Angel, the X point was Bear Island, a small dot in the Barents Sea roughly midway between the northern tip of Norway and Spitzbergen. The X points of the other bombers of the wing were as widely separated as Schmidt Island in the Arctic Sea, and Bahrein in the Persian Gulf. They had only one geographical factor in common. They were all approximately two hours flying time from a Russian target of prime importance.
As the bomber approached the X point the crew began to brighten up. For hours past, conversation had been confined to the technicalities strictly necessary between crew members to keep an eight jet bomber flying. Now it became more general. The navigator was busily plotting the final course. Soon they would be on the last leg, and the boredom of the preceding hours would be forgotten in the anticipation of what was to come. Their last visit to England was still fresh in their minds.
As a matter of policy, all SAC wings were regularly rotated between their own home base in the Continental United States and bases overseas. It accustomed the crews to operating in all kinds of climate and airfield conditions. It was tough on the married men, of course, but that was the price of belonging to an élite organisation. The single men were unanimous in thinking it a great idea.
Alabama Angel’s crew were all single, and they were the youngest crew on the wing, with an average age of only twenty-three. In the States they were usually kept more than busy flying simulated missions, and participating in exercises which helped to illuminate weak points in various defence organisations. Then every three or four months the wing was rotated to a SAC base overseas. It didn’t leave a lot of time for the serious business of courtship and marriage. The majority of Alabama Angel’s crew, happy with their visits to European countries, and their vivid short passes to Fort Worth, and occasionally Dallas, were not too worried about it. Captain Clint Brown, the command pilot, saw it differently. He was heavily engaged.
Brown was the daddy of the crew, at the ripe old age of twenty-six. He was a tall, heavy-set man, fair-haired, slow in speech and movement, slow to anger. The steady type. Which explained why he had been given the command of a three-million-dollar, one-hundred-and-eighty-ton bomber at an age three years less than the average age of B-52 pilots. He came from Dothan, Alabama, but he had spent most of his life before joining the Air Force in Cincinnati, which accounted for his lack of Southern accent.
Brown glanced at his watch. Before take-off he had set it to Greenwich Mean Time. When you can travel one way about as fast as the world can rotate the other, time becomes confusing. Greenwich Mean Time, besides being vital for navigational purposes, gave an established central reference point against which you could deduct or add hours to give you local time. "Time to turn, Stan?" he asked.
Lieutenant Stanley F. Andersen, twenty-three years old and Alabama Angel’s navigator, laid his pencil down on his chart. "Thirteen minutes from now. New course will be two two zero. Estimate Lakenheath twelve thirty hours. Give or take a few minutes, natch."
Brown said: "Natch. Or a few hours maybe? How about that, men?"
"Nuts," Andersen broke in, before the chorus from the crew that sometimes greeted his estimated times of arrival could howl derisively through the intercom. "You guys tell me one time I slipped up more than five minutes." It was his invariable comeback, the one he knew they could not reasonably answer. But nevertheless they did. Earlier in the mission he would not have invited comment; earlier, the crew would not have made it. But always, just before the final turn, the holiday spirit came on them. Perhaps it was because right up to the time they reached the X point the awful fear was riding in the pressurised cabin along with them.