Red Hammer 1994

Colonel Harcourt walked up to Alexander and interrupted. He whispered a short message. Alexander’s expression collapsed.

“What is it?” Genser asked softly. The secretary of state hadn’t spoken since departing the helo. He correctly sensed he had no role at this point.

“Air Force Two,” said Alexander, “Air Force Two has gone down. The vice president is dead.”

CHAPTER 24

“Three seconds to mark. Mark,” Buck said evenly.

Joe punched a GPS satellite-provided latitude and longitude into the plane’s autopilot. They had made landfall at the southern tip of Banks Island, over seventeen hundred miles north of the US/Canadian border. The sleek bomber rocketed straight for the North Pole, the point of no return, the line in the ice. An emergency recall would have to be received in short order, or they’d hurl their nuclear-armed bomber directly at the thicket of Russian air defen-ses, primed for a nasty reception.

“Right on track,” stated Joe. It was his first verbal expression in over an hour.

Their flight had been flawless ever since decoupling from the tanker over Canada. On signal, they had turned north, skirting the rugged edge of the Canadian Rockies and then dropping to the plains of Alberta. Two hours over miles of pancake-flat terrain preceded a splendid journey into the Northwest Territories, the last pristine wilds on the North American continent. Among the highlights were the magnificent Great Slave and Great Bear Lakes. The intensely beautiful and peaceful landscape, which flashed below, accentuated their fatigue and troubled thoughts. How could such a lovely world breed such a monstrosity as nuclear war? The forthcoming jab into the Russian heartland would reverse the geography of the trip through Canada—farmland and prairie, to tundra, to ice. Only they wouldn’t be admiring the scenery.

Buck grabbed and unfolded the appropriate aeronautical chart and scanned the northern latitudes. They’d pass one more major landmass, Prince Patrick Island, before traversing twelve hundred miles of frozen wasteland. Then they’d slide down the other side of the globe toward hostile Russian territory. Given their advanced position at the starting gun, they had been guaranteed the honor of being one of the first to broach the stiff Russian air defenses.

Buck mulled over their mission so matter-of-factly that he feared he had been purged of all emotion. Hard facts rolled around in his head, tempered by two years of instructor duty in North Dakota, putting planes and crews through grueling paces. He knew only too well what the bombers and the men who flew them could realistically be expected to do. Their training was good, no question, but the real thing, an actual penetration of Russian airspace, would transport them beyond anything they could ever imagine. He wasn’t sure if the younger guys really understood. They would learn together, on-the-job training, with no room for error.

Buck instinctively glanced at his black chronometer, but realized the local time was meaningless. Approaching eighty degrees north, the multicolor time zones depicted on the maps drastically constricted, squeezing the cadence of life into a flatness that rendered the senses useless. Night all but disappeared in the summer, with only an ephemeral flicker of darkness visible from the ground. At altitude, Buck and his crew would never lose sight of the sun’s soft glow on the horizon. But during the winter, the top of the world was plunged into eternal blackness. It was always one extreme or the other at this polar wasteland.

The far-northern environment was further degraded by ever-shifting magnetic anomalies, which debilitated radar and high-frequency communications, twisting and bending the RF energy along unintelligible paths. And only the sturdiest higher-frequency satellite line-of-sight communication links could penetrate the strange atmospherics. Bomber crews became isolated in a bizarre yet pacific world of overwhelming whiteness. The electro-magnetic permutations did, however, provide a temporary haven for those in harm’s way. The same forces rendered the Russians’ probing search radars impotent. But in three short hours, Buck and his bomber would become vulnerable to detection, triggering Russian defenders like an owner releasing a vicious attack dog straining at the leash.