Very quickly, he outlined what was going on, what he had done. While he was talking he was interrupted twice. Once to say it was impossible to raise Sonora by radio or teletype. No response to signals. Again to inform him Sonora PBX was not accepting inward calls.
The deputy commander was a two star general. He could go way further than a colonel. And did. Two more wings were ordered off, with instructions to head north. Later orders would reach them by the time they got to one of the tanker rendezvous areas. All overseas SAC bases were brought to immediate readiness. Ent Air Force Base at Colorado Springs was contacted, and the NORAD headquarters there alerted to the possibility of enemy air attack. NORAD took the alert in its stride. A major air exercise was already in progress. SAC called off the attacking forces. NORAD brought in all its fighters for refuelling and arming, and ordered the Distant Early warning stations from Cape Lisburne to Baffin Island to warning red.
General Franklin, the SAC commander, was located in Washington. The general had attended a long and boring dinner the previous evening. He had a slight hangover and he was not in the best of moods. He demanded to know why the hell he’d been dragged out of bed at that hour.
The deputy commander told him. The two generals spoke for perhaps forty seconds, and then the deputy commander turned to the duty operations officer. "General Franklin wants to hear from you just what Quinten said. Try to remember his exact words."
The colonel took the phone. "Sir, I asked General Quinten if he knew about the orders received and acknowledged by the eight forty-third wing. As near as I can get to his words, he replied, ‘Sure, the orders came from me. They’re on their way in, and I advise you to get the rest of SAC in after them. My boys will give you the best kind of start. And you sure as hell won’t stop them now.’"
Chapter 5
"… how the enemy will come or when. Maybe as a missile from a submarine lying off coast. Because of our geographical position I doubt that, but we can’t ignore the possibility. Maybe it will be a four-jet Bison or a turbo-prop Bear, with the same kind of weapons we carry in our fifty-two. Well, the NORAD boys are no slouches. I hate to say it as a SAC man, but I wouldn’t be too happy if we were assigned the task of breaking through the NORAD defence lines in time of war. They’re that good.
"Some of you men listening to me are probably saying about now — sure, that’s great, so we stop the bombers. How do we stop the inter-continental ballistic missiles? Well, I want to assure you all, and especially those of you who have homes maybe, or friends, in the big cities. You don’t have to worry about the I.C.B.M. It won’t be hitting us. I can’t reveal just how we know it, but you have my promise we do.
"There is another form of attack, though, which I think might be the most dangerous one for us here. I mean a conventional attack, whether by individual saboteurs or large armed parties. That’s the reason I’ve doubled up on the defence combat teams. Men, I want to impress on you the need for watchfulness. The enemy will try any tricks to fool you into letting him on the base. He may come individually, or he may come in strength. He may well come in the uniform of our own combat troops. But however he comes, we have to stop him.
"I’m going to give you three simple rules. The first is to trust no one, whatever his uniform, whatever his rank, who is not known to you personally. The second is anyone or anything that approaches within two hundred yards of the perimeter is fired on. And the third — if in doubt, fire anyway. I would sooner accept a few casualties through accident than lose a whole base and its personnel through over-caution.
"That’s about all I have to say except for two small points. Any variation on the rules I have given you must come from me. Personally. I want that clearly understood. There are no exceptions to it, whatever the circumstances. And last of all, I know you are all worried about your families both on the base here and all over our country. Well, let’s make sure we defend the families here on the base. Because you can depend on it that other Americans are defending your families elsewhere with the same unyielding spirit we’re going to show here at Sonora. Good luck to you all."
Quinten flicked off the tab of the address system. He had stood up to speak, and now he sank wearily into the chair behind his desk. He lit a cigarette. Well, he thought, it was done now. The attack was launched. The base was tightly sealed. He felt that he could pillow his head on his hands and sleep right there at his desk for a week. But his tautly strung nerves would not let him relax. His weary brain, against his conscious will, began once more to review the plan and its implementation, seeking for any flaw in its conception or execution.
The plan was founded on two well-established concepts. The first was that a military force which is poised for attack, can often be knocked off balance by an opponent who himself attacks without warning.
The Russians’ main strength lay in the fact they could select at their leisure the time and place of the attack. They could launch the attack with their defences fully prepared for the American, counter-punch. Quinten reasoned that if the Americans, instead of counter-punching after a Russian attack, launched their own attack first, the Russian guard would be down. The American attack would catch them off balance, because their war plan called for instant readiness of defences only after they themselves had struck the first, devastating blow.
The Russian war plan, indeed, visualised no great threat to their own defences, for its essence was the destruction at a first blow, of almost the entire offensive power of the free world. To achieve this, the plan divided the targets to be hit into two distinct classes.
The first of these classes comprised all targets within fifteen hundred miles of Russia, or the satellite countries. That meant within intermediate missile and supersonic fighter-bomber range. The Russians had plenty of both types of weapon. The targets included all SAC bases in the Mediterranean, the Sixth Fleet, and the air forces of all European and Middle East NATO countries. The Russian missile and fighter-bomber strength was so great that their planners had decided a complete kill of such targets was as certain as anything in war ever can be. With the strictly military targets would go such cities as London, Paris, and Rome. The destruction of the cities was not regarded as essential, except in one case. They would be destroyed to assist in the general disruption of communications. The exception was London. The Russians were under no illusion about the fighting qualities of the British. A considerable proportion of their missile and fighter-bomber strength would be devoted to London, and to the offensive bases of all kinds in Britain.
For a long time it had been within the capability of Russia to destroy the first class of targets, all of them short to medium range. But their destruction was meaningless without the simultaneous destruction of the second class of targets.
These were primarily the SAC bases in the Continental United States, the SAC bases on distant islands like Okinawa, and Washington, New York, and Chicago. The weapons selected by the Russians for these targets included a fleet of submarines equipped to launch rocket missiles while still submerged, two specially trained air regiments of Bison four-jet bombers, and a minimum of thirty-six I.C.B.M.’s. At the time Quinten launched the 843rd against its targets, the Russians were only a matter of weeks from having the required total of I.C.B.M.’s operational and aimed. The American inter-continental missile, though coming along fast, was not yet operational.