Admiral Huntington Hardisty, U.S. Navy, Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Command, from Asia-Pacific Defense. Forum, U.S. Pacific Command, winter 1989-1990
Date: 11/6/90
MELEE MARS INAUGURATION OF AUTONOMY IN SOUTHERN PHILIPPINES
COTABATO (NOV 6) REUTER — Police punched and clubbed 17 Moslem students before dragging them off by their hair on Tuesday after they disrupted President Corazon Aquino’s inauguration of an autonomous government in the southern Philippines, witnesses said.
The students, members of an organization supporting Moslem rebels demanding a separate state on Mindanao island, chanted slogans against the autonomous government about 20 meters from where Aquino was speaking.
Manila has set up the autonomous government, dominated by Moslems, as a way to end separatist violence on Mindanao, the second-largest island in the Philippines.
The government, headed by former Moslem rebel commander Zacaria Candao, can pass its own laws, collect taxes and license fees, and set up a regional police force in the four predominantly Moslem provinces on Mindanao island it controls.
Manila would retain control of defense and foreign policy. — from U.S. Naval Institute Military Database Defense News.
Date: 14 January 1991
AIR FORCE TO CREATE TWO NEW COMPOSITE AIR WINGS BY 1993
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force will develop by 1993 two composite tactical air wings that combine different types of aircraft in the same unit. The new wings will serve as prototypes for the possible reorganization of the service’s tactical force structure along more mission-oriented lines… [The composite air wings] would include aircraft that could perform attack, defensive, standoff jamming, and precision-strike missions. — from Aviation Week and Space
Technology magazine, p.26
Author Note
Although the B-1B bomber is now officially called “Lancer,” the author will still use “Excalibur.”
Every effort has been made to present realistic situations, but all of the persons and situations presented here are products of my imagination and should not be considered reflections of actual persons, products, policy, or practice. Any similarity of any organization, device, weapons system, policy, person, or place to any real-world counterpart is strictly coincidental. The author makes no attempt to present the actual military or civil policies of any organization or government.
The author hopes readers will note the chronological setting of this novel in regards to some of his previous books, most notably Day of the Cheetah. While certain characters and backdrops in that book appear here, the events described in this book come a full two years earlier than those in Day of the Cheetah. Moreover, this book, like that one, stands completely on its own — neither a prequel nor sequel.
Maps
Prologue
“T minus two minutes and counting… mark.”
Lieutenant Colonel Patrick McLanahan glanced up at his mission data display just as the time-to-go clock clicked over to 00:01:59. Dead on time. He clicked open the command radio channel with the switch near his left foot. “Vapor Two-One copies,” he reported. “CROWBAR, Vapor Two-One requesting final range clearance.”
“Stand by, Two-One.”
Stand by, he thought to himself — not likely. McLanahan and his partner, Major Henry Cobb, were flying in an FB-111B “Super Aardvark” bomber, skimming two hundred feet above the hot deserts of southern Nevada at the speed of sound — every five seconds they waited put them a mile closer to the target. The FB-111B was the “stretched” version of the venerable F-111 supersonic swing-wing bomber, an experimental model that was the proposed interim supersonic bomber when the B-1 Excalibur bomber program was canceled back in the late 1970s. Only a few remained, and the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center (HAWC) — the Defense Department’s secret test complex for weapons and aircraft, hidden in the restricted desert ranges north of Las Vegas — had them. Most F-111 aircraft were seeing their last few years of service, and more and more were popping up in Reserve units or sitting in museums or base airparks — but HAWC always made use of their airframes until they fell apart or crashed.
But the “Super Vark” was not the subject of today’s sortie. Although an FB-111B could carry a twenty-five-thousand-pound payload, McLanahan and Cobb were carrying only one twenty-six-hundred-pound bomb that morning — but what a bomb it was.
Officially the bomb was called the BLU-96, but its nickname was HADES — and for its size it was the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in existence. HADES was filled with two hundred gallons of a thin, gasoline-like liquid that was dispersed over a target, then ignited by remote control. Because the weapon does not need to carry its own oxidizer but uses oxygen in the atmosphere to ignite the fuel, the resulting explosion had all the characteristics of a nuclear explosion — it created a mushroom cloud several hundred feet high, a fireball nearly a mile in diameter, and a shock wave that could knock down buildings and trees within two miles. Oddly enough, the BLU-96 had not been used since the Vietnam War, so HAWC was conducting experiments on the feasibility of using the awesome weapon again for some future conflict.
HADES had been designed as a weapon to quickly clear very large minefields, but against troops it would be utterly devastating. That fact, of course, would go into HAWC’s report to the Department of Defense.
“Vapor, this is CROWBAR, you are cleared to enter R-4808N and R-4806W routes and altitudes, remain this frequency. Acknowledge.”
McLanahan checked his watch. “Vapor acknowledges, cleared to enter Romeo 4808 north and Romeo 4806 west routes and altitudes at zero-six, 1514 Zulu, remain with CROWBAR. Out.” He turned to Cobb, checking engine instruments and the fuel totalizer as his eyes swept across the center instrument panel. “We’re cleared in, Henry.” Cobb clicked the mike twice in response. Cobb never said much during missions — his job was to fly the plane, which he always did in stony silence.
Romeo 4808N — that was its official name, although its unclassified nickname was “Dreamland” — was a piece of airspace in south-central Nevada designated by the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Defense as a “restricted” area, which meant all aircraft — civilian, commercial, other military flights, even diplomatic — were prohibited to fly over it at any altitude without permission from HAWC. Even FAA Air Traffic Control could not clear aircraft to enter that airspace unless in extreme emergency, and even then the violating aircraft could expect to get intercepted by Air Force fighters and the air-traffic controller responsible could expect a long and serious scrutiny of his actions. R-4808N was surrounded by four other restricted areas that were meant to act as a buffer zone to give pilots ample warning time to change course if they were — accidentally or purposely — straying toward R-4808N.
If one entered R-4808N without permission, military aircrew members would at best lose their wings, and commercial and civilian pilots would lose their licenses — and both would be in for an intense multiday “debriefing” conducted by teams of military and CIA interrogators, who would discard most articles of the Bill of Rights to find out why someone was stupid enough to stray into Dreamland. At worst, one would come face-to-face with McLanahan and Cobb’s FB-111B racing across the desert floor at the speed of heat — or nose-to-nose with a BLU-96 fuel-air explosive bomb or some other strange and certainly far deadlier weapon.