Helen Kaddiri entered the flight deck. “What is it, Jon?”
“We lost contact with the satellite.”
She looked at him as if to say, I’m not surprised. Instead, she said, “Same problem we had before?”
“That was a loose plug, Helen, this” — he scratched his head in an uncharacteristic moment of confusion — “has got to be something else. But what, I don’t know.”
McLanahan began programming the final launch instructions on his Super Multi Function Display so they could take out the last few sortie targets in General Jarrel’s setup and then head home.
The display shimmered and abruptly changed.
“What the—” McLanahan muttered.
Instead of the gently rolling hills and dry gullies of southeastern Montana, the SMFD showed a confusing pattern of light spots in a blank, featureless background. It did have one very prominent terrain feature — a mountain nearly twenty thousand feet high and sixty miles wide. It was as if Mount Everest had just been transplanted into the middle of the Great Plains.
“I don’t believe this…” McLanahan said, staring at the SMFD.
“What is it?” Ormack asked. “That doesn’t look like the target area.”
“The computer must be decoding the signal wrong,” McLanahan guessed.
Amazingly, the computer began plotting a recommended course on the erroneous computer display, with sharp changes in heading away from the larger moving spots but fairly close to the smaller, non-moving ones. The computer even made weapon selections, although with only two weapons on board the choice was relatively simple — the longer-range SLAM missile for the large moving spots that were to be circumnavigated, and the STRIKER glide-bomb for the smaller, stationary ones.
The strike computer began the arming and countdown procedures to attack these “targets,” and that’s when McLanahan got tired of this. “There’s some glitch in the system and it’s not clearing. I’ll reset the system and go manually until I get a usable display back.” But he did not simply reset the computers — he used the on-board computer memory to save the last few seconds of images first before clearing the bogus display.
“What do you think is the problem?” Ormack asked.
“I don’t know,” McLanahan replied. “I’ll check switches — the system will report on any switches out of position in the post-mission computer dump. Maybe there was a glitch in the satellite. Who knows?” He bent toward the screen and began identifying radar aimpoints, getting ready for the “bomb” releases. “Probably something minor…”
But that new satellite image did not look like something minor, McLanahan thought uneasily. It was more than a glitch. The computer was processing the data it received from NIRTSat as if it were real, uncorrupted data, and he knew enough about the NIRTSat system to know that the computer would reject false data.
No, whatever that twenty-thousand-foot-high “mountain” was, McLanahan thought, it was real. Something very serious had just happened somewhere in the world.
“What the hell happened?” Colonel Wyatt exclaimed. They were looking in stunned amazement at the high-definition TV monitor, and at the monstrosity that the computer was showing them: a mountain thousands and thousands of feet high and dozens of miles wide, engulfing ships in its path with devastating power.
“Must be a sensor glitch… a solar flare or a power spike,” Major Kelvin Carter tried. He spoke with the technicians, but none of those present could understand the display. “Whatever it is, it killed the satellite,” Carter said. “This is the last image received; the satellite is off the air.”
“Too bad,” Wyatt said. “McLanahan’s run was looking real good, too.”
Captain Ken James’ attention was riveted on the display frozen on the screen. “It’s a weird picture, but the computer is displaying valid data on it,” he said. “Look: height, width, speed, density, course — the thing is moving and growing all at once.”
“But it’s showing it as terrain, Ken,” Carter said. “That can’t be right. We were looking at the Philippines first, then at Montana. There’s no mountain in either place.”
Wyatt shrugged, then began packing up his notebook. “It was still a spectacular display, gents,” he said, “but I—”
“Sir, phone call for you,” one of the technicians said. “Urgent from NMCC.”
As Wyatt trotted to the phone, James turned to Carter and asked, “Nimic? What’s that?”
“National Military Command Center,” Carter replied. “The War Room at the Pentagon.”
James nodded, making a mental note.
5
General Larry T. Tyler, commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command, was getting ready to make his first serve of the tennis match between members of the headquarters staff when the beeper on his portable radio went off. But, like a baseball pitcher halfway into his windup, he completed the serve and managed to hit his Reserve Forces Advisor, Colonel Hartmann, in the left leg. Hartmann was distracted and didn’t expect his boss to finish his serve.
“Cheap shot, General,” Hartmann shouted.
Tyler raised his racket to offer an apology to Hartmann, who politely waved it off, then trotted over to the bench, where his radio was sitting. Tyler’s driver, a young buck sergeant named Meers, heard the beeper and immediately started up the General’s staff car, which was waiting just a few dozen yards away. In Tyler’s footsteps was his doubles partner, the former commander of Pacific Air Force’s Philip-pine-based Thirteenth Air Force, Major General Richard “Rat Killer” Stone, who was to become Tyler’s Deputy Chief of Staff of Pacific Operations in a few weeks.
It had been said that CINCSAC — the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command — was a prisoner of his job, and to a certain extent it was true — the radio, the car, and the driver were his constant companions. But the fifty-six-year-old ex-Notre Dame football quarterback was determined not to let the awesome responsibility of his position disrupt his life — and that responsibility was truly awesome.
Tyler was in charge of the United States’ smaller but still potent nuclear combat force of ninety B-1B Excalibur bombers, two hundred B-52G and H-model Stratofortress bombers, ten B-2A Black Knight stealth bombers, six hundred Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles, one hundred rail-garrison Peacekeeper ICMBs, fifty MGM-134A Mustang road-mobile ICBMs, eight hundred AGM-129A advanced cruise missiles, and one thousand AGM-131A Short-Range Attack Missiles.
In addition he commanded several hundred aerial refueling tankers, strategic reconnaissance aircraft, airborne command posts, and communications aircraft, and a total of about eighty thousand men and women, civilians as well as military, all around the globe — and his job was to stay within moments-notice contact with each and every one of his sixty active and reserve units at all times.
Although he was at the very pinnacle of his Air Force career, he was determined not to get jabbed in the ass by its sharp point.
As Tyler made his way to the bench where his radio sat, he noticed the amber rotating lights at the street intersection nearby — the SAC command post was recalling the alert crews, and the amber warning lights told other drivers to be aware of alert crews heading toward the flight line. Offutt Air Force Base had an alert force of four KC-135 aerial refueling tankers that would prepare for takeoff to support airborne command post aircraft at Offutt, as well as other strike and communications aircraft.