Free Brown, Dale - Independent 04 by Storming Heaven (v1.1)

driven
off—unfortunately, after the exercise, one operator forgot to turn off the
simulation. An hour later, the “second wave” of Soviet bombers “appeared” on
radar, and the panicked operator scrambled dozens of very real, very expensive
American, West German, Belgian, Norwegian, and Danish fighters against the
phantom bombers before someone realized it was not happening.
                 Those
were the good of days, Berrell thought. Before the sweeping world political
changes in 1991 and 1992, air defense units were the spearhead of national
defense and deterrence. Radar constantly sweeping the horizon, young faces
staring at green cathode ray tube radarscopes, picking out the enemy from
within the friendly targets; determined, daring men sitting by their planes
ready to launch at a moment’s notice to track down and destroy any intruder.
Before 1992, before the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the threat was deadly
real. A Soviet Backfire bomber that appeared on radar five hundred miles off
the coast was already in position to launch a large AS-12 nuclear cruise
missile—one such missile could destroy Washington , D.C. , or any major city on the eastern seaboard.
                 Now,
in 1994, the Soviet
Union was gone;
the Russian long-range bomber threat was nonexistent. The Russians were still
flying their heavy bombers, but now they were selling rides to wealthy Westerners in mock bomb runs out in Nevada , for God’s sake! The air defense forces of
the United States had been cut down to only eighteen
locations across the contiguous United States , Alaska , Hawaii , and Puerto Rico . With only two alert aircraft per location,
that meant a total of thirty-six aircraft were defending approximately forty million cubic miles of airspace. True,
many countries, including Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, still had
bombers and cruise missiles aimed at the United States, but the real day-to-day
threat had all but disappeared. Air defense had all but gone away as a mission.
                 America still had a need to protect and patrol its
borders and maintain the capability to hunt down and identify intruders, but
now the intruders were terrorists, hijackers, criminals, drug smugglers, and
lawbreakers. In order to prove to the world that the United States was not becoming lax about national defense
and readiness, it was important for America to demonstrate its capability to patrol its
frontiers. The remaining air defense units were clustered in the south and the
southeast instead of the north so that the fighters could better cover the
Mexican and Caribbean regions, where drug smugglers, illegal
alien movements, and fugitive flights were clustered.
                 Berrell
was busy reviewing the postexercise checklist cleanup and working on the
after-action critique when the deputy sector commander, Navy Captain Francine
Tell man, came over and sat beside him. As part of NORAD, the North American
Air Defense Command, the individual air defense sectors were under joint
services command, representing all the branches of the U.S. military as well as the air defense forces
of Canada . Tellman, a twenty-year Navy veteran of air traffic control and air
defense operations, was the Navy’s representative at the Southwest sector. The
fifty-two-year-old Navy veteran was not due to come on duty for another three
or four hours, but it was typical of her to come in early when a big exercise
or some other unusual event was underway. Divorced twice and currently
unattached, the sector was the big part of her life now. “Evening, John,” she
said to Berrell. “How did the Ham- merheads-7 surge exercise go?”
                 “It
went fine, Francine. I need to schedule George on WCT three for a refresher on
checklist discipline—he missed a couple coordination calls. Other than that. .
.” The phone rang at Berrell’s console—the flashing button was the direct line
between the