General Wilbur Curtis surveyed his Chiefs of Staff with a look of concern — the information Captain Rodgers had just conveyed had silenced them all. He had heard a lot of bad news during the past six years that he’d chaired the Joint Chiefs. He had learned to quickly decipher between isolated incidents and incidents that had a broader, far more serious impact if left untended. He knew the implications of what Rodgers was saying could be far more serious than any of them had previously thought.
“I think we all wanted to believe this was just another skirmish. But with the United States out of the Philippines, there is a large power vacuum in the area. We knew there’d be that danger. Still, I don’t think anyone believed the Chinese would consider moving so soon — if they really are.” Curtis turned to Captain Rodgers again and asked, “Are the Chinese likely to attempt an invasion?”
“Sir, if the Joint Chiefs would like a detailed briefing, I should get Central Intelligence involved,” Rodgers said. “I had been concentrating on the military aspects and hadn’t prepared a full briefing on the political situation. But J-2 does feel that the Philippines are ripe for the picking.” Curtis waited for additional thoughts from the Joint Chiefs; when there appeared to be no concrete suggestions, he said, “I’d like to review the current OPLANS for dealing with a possible Chinese action in the Philippines, then. I need to know what plans we have built already, and if they need to be updated. Captain Rodgers, I’d like Central Intelligence to get involved, and I’d like Current Operations to draft a response plan that I can present to the Secretary of Defense for his review. Include a Philippines update in the daily briefings, including satellite passes and a rundown on naval activity in the Spratlys and in the Chinese South China Sea fleet. Let’s get on top of this thing and have a plan of action before it threatens to blow up in our faces.”
The phone line crackled. “Brad! How the hell are you?”
Lieutenant General Brad Elliott leaned back in his chair and smiled broadly as he recognized the caller. “I was expecting you to send young Andy Wyatt out here to harass me again, sir, but I’m glad to hear from you.”
“Can the ‘sir’ stuff with me, you old warhorse,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Wilbur Curtis said over the snaps and crackles in the scrambled phone fine. “You know better. Besides, it’s been a long time since we’ve spoken. When are we going to get together?”
“I have a feeling it’ll be soon, my friend. I’ve been getting calls from half the J-staff, a bunch of calls from Space Command — you had to be the next caller. Let me guess — you want some air time on some satellites of mine.”
“Now how the hell did you know that?”
“Every time I build a new toy, you want it, that’s how I know it.”
“That’s why you’re out there, you stupid bastard. You’re supposed to be developing toys for us to play with, not polishing your three stars. Stop whining.”
“I’m not, believe me.” Elliott chuckled. “I assume you want to use the new Masters NIRTSats, the ones that can downlink radar, infrared, and visual imagery all in one pass in real-time both to the ground stations and aircraft. Right?”
“You’re not telepathic are you?” Curtis joked. “They tell me you can receive satellite images on your B-2 bomber as well as your B-52 Megafortress?”
“We flight-test PACER SKY at the Strategic Warfare Center in a couple weeks,” Elliott said, “but ground tests have gone really well. Let me guess some more: you want pictures of a certain area, but don’t want to use DSP or LACROSSE satellites because you don’t want certain superpower countries to know you’re interested. Am I close?”
“Frightfully close,” Curtis said. “We’re watching a Chinese naval buildup in the South China Sea. We think they might be getting ready to plug away at either the Spratlys or the Philippines. If we send a DSP or KH-series bird over the area, we risk discovery.”
“The Philippines? You mean the Chinese might try an invasion?”
“Well, let’s hope not,” Curtis said. “The President is a big fan of President Mikaso’s. We’ve been expecting something like this for years, ever since we realized there was a good possibility we were going to get kicked out of the Philippines — now it might actually happen. We’ve got our pants pretty much down around the ankles as far as Southeast Asia goes right now. What with the buildup in the Persian Gulf and the closing of a bunch of bases overseas, we’ve got zilch out there…
“Well, if you need the pictures, you got ’em,” Elliott said, running his hand across the top of his hair. “We can transmit the digitized data to J-2, or Jon Masters can set up one of his terminals right on your desk there — providing you don’t keep stretching your secretary out over it all the time.”
“My secretary is a fifty-year-old Marine Corps gunnery sergeant that could grind us both down into little nubs, you old lech.” Curtis laughed. “No, transmit it to J-2 and J-3 out here at the Pentagon soonest. They’ll give you a call and tell you exactly what they want…”
“I know what you want, sir,” Elliott said.
“Hey, don’t be so sure, big shot,” Curtis said. “Man, some guys — they get on the fast track, tool around the White House for a few months, and it goes right to their heads. And stop calling me sir. You’d have four stars, too, if you’d climb up out of that black hole you’ve built for yourself out there and join the real world again.”
“What? Leave Dreamland and miss the opportunity for some first-class, four-star abuse? No way.” Elliott gave his old friend a loud laugh and hung up.
“Room, ten-HUT!”
Two hundred men and women in olive drab flight suits moved smartly to their feet as Air Force Brigadier General Calvin Jarrel and his staff entered the auditorium briefing room. The scene could have been right out of Patton except for the ten-foot-square electronic liquid-crystal screen onstage with the Strategic Air Command emblem in full color, showing an armored fist clutching an olive branch and three lightning bolts. Otherwise it looked like the setting for countless other combat-mission briefings from years past — except these men and women, all SAC warriors, weren’t going to war… at least not yet.
It was easy to mistake General Cal Jarrel for just another one of the four hundred or so crew dogs at the Air Force Strategic Warfare Center, and that was just fine with him. Jarrel was an unimposing five foot eleven, one-hundred-sixty-pound man, with boyish brown hair and brown eyes hidden behind standard-issue aluminum-framed aviator’s spectacles. Many of those close to the General thought that he was uncomfortable with the trappings of a general officer, and everyone on the base agreed that at the very least he was the most visible one-star anyone had ever known. On the flight line or on the indoor track in the base gym, he could be seen jogging early each morning with a crowd of several dozen staffers and visitors, which was how he kept his slight frame lean and trim despite an ever-increasing amount of time flying a desk instead of a B-52 Stratofortress, B-1B Excalibur, or F-111G Super ’Vark bomber. He was married to an environmental-law attorney from Georgia and was the harried father of two teenage boys.
Like many of the men and women in the Strategic Air Command of the mid-1990s, Jarrel appeared studious, introspective, unobtrusive, and soft-spoken — unlike their hotshot fighter-pilot colleagues, it was as if they understood that the awesome responsibility of carrying two-thirds of the nation’s nuclear deterrent force was something that was not to be advertised or bragged about.