Red Hammer 1994

Ledermeyer had read his mind. “Missiles armed,” he announced.

The sweat streamed down Buck’s forehead. His flight suit was soaked. He tightened his grip on the stick with two hands, settling back in the ejection seat, guiding the broken bomber. He summoned his last ounces of strength. Every breath brought more pain.

“This is it, Russ. Let’s cream those bastards.” His earlier hesitancy was gone. This attack had become personal.

Ledermeyer hugged the console, his right forefinger resting on the first launch switch. He watched a counter decrement inches from his face. It was all he could do to stay conscious.

Directly ahead, the afternoon sky lit up with fireworks. Mobile antiaircraft guns pumped out hundreds of 30mm rounds. Handheld missiles flashed skyward, only to be deflected by the red-hot flares popping outward every ten seconds. Fragmentation rounds ripped holes in the fuselage and wings, shattering equipment and spraying the interior with shrapnel. More SAMs arced upward but passed harmlessly overhead. The furious barrage was more than anyone could possibly survive.

“God damn, Buck. We’ve hit the jackpot. They’re throwing everything at us,” Ledermeyer yelled. “Must be something big down there.”

“Ten seconds…” A handheld SAM slammed into the starboard wing, blasting away the outboard nacelle, leaving the engine dangling and in flames. The mortally wounded bomber pitched violently upward, presenting a fat target to the defenders. Buck fought to keep her in the air.

On cue, the B-1B’s three missiles dropped and ignited, one after the other. The rotary launcher’s whine was drowned out by the intense racket from exploding shells. As the third bird disappeared in the distance, a stream of tracers tore through the forward fuselage, disintegrating Ledermeyer’s station and blowing out the windscreen. Buck groaned, struck by shrapnel, the rushing wind tearing at his face. He struggled to reach back, gently touching Ledermeyer’s leg.

“We did it, man. We did it.” The starboard wing snapped upward, tearing away, leaving an ugly scar of broken structure and dangling hydraulic lines. The B-1B bomber nosed into the trees, disappearing in a tremendous fireball fueled by thousands of gallons of JP5.

Seconds later, the SRAM trio detonated in sequence. The farthest warhead went first, the blast wave rolling outward, flattening concentric circles of trees. The relentless wave caught the command train parked on a spur with the full fury of twenty psi overpressure and five-hundred-mile-an-hour winds. The train, crushed by the overpressure, splintered into chunks, which bounced across the landscape, leaving a trail of debris and rubble for hundreds of yards. Not a living soul was left alive within three miles.

CHAPTER 27

At 0420, Jackson rang up all stop and pulled the plug. Michigan settled to the bottom, resting mid-channel, splitting the distance between Port Townsend to port and Whidbey Island Naval Air Station to starboard. They had observed only an occasional flickering light on shore—possibly headlights from some terror-stricken civilian—and no surface craft whatsoever. Normally the choppy waters of the Puget Sound would be thick with vessels of all flavors, but not now. It was unsettling, as if everyone and everything had mysteriously dissolved into the ether. The boat’s sonar hydrophone arrays had detected intermittent screw noises tentatively classified as possible bulk carriers or container ships, but the acoustics were worthless for pinpointing the source. As the ops officer had predicted, their sonar performance stunk. The shallow, muddy bottom sucked up any man-made noise like a vacuum cleaner. God help them if the Russian Akula had crept farther east than they had estimated. In the meantime, Sonar would be working overtime to weed out any buried acoustical emissions from the background biologics that fouled the sensors.