The Americans’ greatest fear had been of an all-out Russian air assault to break through and shoot down the unarmed AWACS. But with seventeen AWACS aircraft waiting in England to take the defeated one’s place, General Yovanovich had spotted a far simpler solution. All the Russians had to do was demolish the two locations on the ground where the plane’s data entered the American strategic communication system. With the ground stations destroyed, a fully coordinated AirLand Battle plan couldn’t be implemented.
Schoenfeld and Mildenhall had to be eliminated.
Without the ground stations, the AWACS team would still see the MiGs the moment they left their runways. But the AWACS computers would be greatly hampered in providing the detailed data and maps of the battlefield to anyone on the ground.
Without a completely operational AWACS, a tremendous blow to American command and control would be struck.
• • •
At Mildenhall, it was almost too easy. Well inside the protective fences of the air base, the communication facility had no fences of its own. It sat on a peaceful side street near the center of the base. There was no guard.
With satchel charges and machine pistols in hand, the killing team ran through the gray morning toward their target. Two stood guard while the third placed the plastic explosives onto the AWACS ground-station equipment. When that task was completed, they moved on to the base’s communication tower and building.
With the explosives in place, the team leader checked his watch. Their mission was on a precise schedule. They couldn’t destroy their target too soon and alert the ground station in Germany that the AWACS was the next sabotage target. He set the timers. The commandos ran back across the road. They crawled under the abandoned building to wait. Their machine pistols were at the ready.
The trio lay hidden, watching from beneath the old building’s decomposing floor. In three minutes, the electronic timers would set off the powerful detonations. At that moment, the airmen at Schoenfeld cried out about the commando attack. The Mildenhall shift supervisor decided that prudence called for a quick check of the area around his site. Through the fog, the Spetsnaz team saw the facility’s door open. The shift leader took two steps down the rain slick steps and tumbled to the ground. Thinking their supervisor had fallen, the pair of airmen following him out the door burst into laughter. In an instant, they lay dead next to him. A single bullet to the head had taken each life.
A short time later, a tremendous explosion demolished Mildenhall’s AWACS ground-station equipment. A second blast soon followed. The tower toppled sideways. Its twisted wreckage crashed into the exploding communication control building. With the loss of the communication center, the ability to coordinate their air base’s efforts with the outside world disappeared.
Beneath the abandoned barracks, at shortly before seven on a dismal English morning, the leader tapped out the message in Morse code . . . “m-i-s-s-i-o-n-a-c-c-o-m-p-l-i-s-h-e-d.”
The commandos crawled from beneath the rotting building and joined the growing group of curious airmen who’d gathered at the site of the explosions. As the air police dispersed the crowd, the saboteurs disappeared into the mist.
• • •
It hadn’t been as simple at Schoenfeld. Yet the task was nearly completed. The explosives were all in place. The commandos disappeared into the woods. Their leader remained behind. He set the timers to go off in thirty seconds. If the fuses were any longer, he ran the risk, however slight, of the Americans inside figuring out what was happening and rushing out to disconnect the charges. No matter how remote the possibility, he couldn’t afford to take such a chance.
The final timer set, the leader ran for the gate as fast as his strong legs would carry him. In the difficult conditions, however, the distance was far too great to cover in such a brief time. He never had a chance. The force of the blasts caught him just as he reached the gate. His crushed body was tossed thirty feet into the air. The mountaintop was leveled. While he lay dying, a wide smile spread across his broken face. The mission had been a complete success. Schoenfeld was no more.
A second victory signal was sent to General Yovanovich.
Five minutes away from reaching the hilltop, the Black Hawks saw the massive explosions in the darkness ahead. They knew they were too late to save the communication facility.
But the Americans would soon exact their revenge for the slaughter at Schoenfeld. During the next three hours, the helicopters would mercilessly hunt down every member of the deadly commando team. By ten o’clock on a beautiful winter morning, the last black figure had been identified and killed.
• • •
Within minutes of receipt of the second message, the MiGs rose from their bases. From all over Eastern Europe, they took to the skies and roared west. In the first quarter hour, over one thousand Warsaw Pact fighters soared into the heavens. Thirty minutes later, from deep within the Ukraine, seventeen hundred transports and three hundred fighter escorts left the ground. Inside the transports were five divisions of Russian airborne soldiers.
The AWACS battle team saw every plane as it left the runway, but was nearly helpless to do anything about it. They could still guide the Allied pilots once they were airborne. There was little way, however, for the AWACS computers to precisely communicate with the widespread ground forces and air defenses to provide the detailed coordination so necessary to an integrated, highly complex AirLand Battle plan.
• • •
Forty-five minutes later, the C-17 carrying George O’Neill touched down at Upper Heyford, England. As O’Neill plodded down the ramp, his outlook was as dreary as the cold, damp, English morning that greeted him.
The outmanned Americans, their command and control crippled, were in deep trouble.
CHAPTER 26
January 29—7:15 a.m.
Charlie Battery, 1st “Cobra Strike” Battalion, 43rd Air Defense Artillery Regiment
A Deserted Parking Lot on the Eastern Edge of Stuttgart
The majority of the Patriot convoy had arrived at a few minutes after six. It had taken five interminable hours for the battery to complete the treacherous journey south. Fowler’s arms ached from the strain of their icy autobahn adventure.
Eventually, they were all present. And they were more or less in one piece as the soldiers worked in the darkness to prepare the deadly Patriot battery for combat. The mangled fenders on a number of the huge tractors showed the results of their constant battle with the storm. The battery’s drivers had experienced far too many frightening entanglements with unforgiving guardrails. The wrecker had been so busy pulling vehicles out of snowbanks that the convoy had stopped waiting for those who needed such help. As it was, the last of the eight launchers, being pulled by the wrecker, hadn’t arrived until fifteen minutes before seven.
“All set back there?” Fowler asked.
He turned in his chair to look down the narrow aisle. A few feet behind him, between the rows of electronic equipment on both his left and right, Jeffery Paul stood with his head pressed against the low ceiling in the Engagement Control Station.
Paul spoke into his headset. He looked up at Fowler a few seconds later.
“The communication van says everything’s ready. The final launcher’s been hooked up and is set to go. All thirty-two missiles are online. The last regiment report said no enemy aircraft have been sighted, but we need to stay alert because there’s some kind of trouble with the AWACS.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“They didn’t know for sure. All they said was that for some reason they’d stopped receiving data from it a few minutes ago.”
Fowler turned to look at the pretty lieutenant sitting next to him in the front of the cramped compartment. In the confined space, the pair was so close that he could feel the warmth of her body next to his.
“Okay, Lieutenant Morgan, we’re ready to engage the en
emy anytime you are.”
Even though his hands were quivering at the thought of the challenges that might lie ahead, Fowler smiled a reassuring smile. She smiled a nervous smile in return.
“Let’s do it, then,” Morgan said.
Nineteen months ago she’d walked across the stage at Ohio State University to receive her bachelor’s degree. The last thing that would have entered Barbara Morgan’s mind on her graduation day was the possibility she’d be involved in a fight to the death in Germany less than two years later.