The Red Line

O’Neill went by his office and threw off his jacket, scarf, hat, and gloves. He returned to the hallway and headed toward the operations center. Other than a few lights being on that normally wouldn’t have been at this time of night, things appeared quite normal. Maybe this really was nothing more than a dream.

At the end of the hallway, he entered the code into the cipher lock and threw open the door to the Defense Information Systems Agency’s European Division Operations Center. In the middle of the white windowless room, four metal desks were pushed together. Next to each was an assortment of communication equipment—printers, computers, telephones, microphones, and speakers. From this room, all American strategic communication from Iceland to Turkey was managed.

Around the clock every day of the year, the operations center was manned by a shift of four. The four—an officer and three NCOs—controlled three hundred communication facilities, three satellite systems, and a trio of huge, computerized message centers. As the agency’s members knew, you couldn’t get a pencil to Europe without the communication system they controlled.

Rather than finding four people when he entered the operations center, O’Neill found fifteen. All but two were members of the agency. The strangers—a three-star general and a captain who was most likely the general’s aide—stood at the far end of the modest room beneath a large map of the European communication system. The general was talking with the agency’s director, Air Force Colonel John Cossette. Standing at the edge of the group was the agency’s deputy, Marine Colonel Charles Hoerner. O’Neill was too far away from their conversation to hear what was being discussed.

George O’Neill was one of the specialists assigned to the Defense Information Systems Agency’s European Division. The organization was manned by seventy handpicked soldiers, airmen, sailors, Marines, and Department of Defense civilian employees. In theory, the assignment of each service’s top communication specialists to the agency sounded good. In practice, however, the agency was bound to struggle in the coming days while trying to find a way to let the generals control the conduct of this war. For political reasons, it was staffed by people from each service. Yet the vast majority of the worldwide military communication network was operated by the Air Force and Army.

The sailors assigned to the agency were excellent electronic technicians. They were far superior to their Army counterparts, but they were trained for shipboard and ship-to-shore communication, a vastly different system than was used on the ground in Europe. The agency’s twenty-eight sailors and Marines would be of little help in the days to come. Much of the remainder of the staff were officers or civilian electronics engineers whose sole purpose was to design orders in response to new circuit requests. In neither the Air Force nor the Army did the officers play any active role in running the communication facilities. Since the development of the worldwide communication net in the 1950s, the system had been under the total control of the NCOs of both services.

As O’Neill stood in the operations center, he counted the number of people within the agency with enough on-site experience to keep the system going in a crisis. There were six. Six NCOs to direct all strategic communication within Europe and from Europe to America. Besides O’Neill, there were two Army Sergeants First Class, Rojas and Mitchell. There were three Air Force NCOs—his coworker in the quality-control section Senior Master Sergeant Denny Doyle, and Technical Sergeants Goldsmith and Becker, both of whom worked on operations-center shifts not presently on duty. While he looked around the room, he realized of the six people who would lead the fight against the chaos that was bound to follow, he was the only one present.

The other five NCOs lived in the military housing complex at Ludwigsburg, twenty-five miles north. With the autobahn essentially shut down by the blizzard, it would be some time before any of them would arrive.

Next to the four controllers’ desks, the communication equipment was chattering wildly. The shift, consisting of an inexperienced Navy lieutenant, a petty officer first class, and two Air Force NCOs, looked overwhelmed. Other than the general’s animated conversation with Colonel Cossette, everyone in the room was just standing around.

Marine Major Michael Siebman, O’Neill’s lunchtime jogging partner on those rare occasions when college classes weren’t in session, spotted him standing by the door. Siebman wandered over.

“When’d you get here?” Siebman asked.

“Just a minute ago, Major. How long have you been here?”

“About twenty minutes, I guess.”

“What in the world’s going on?”

“Word is the Russians attacked a little over an hour ago. Full-scale assault, from what I’ve overheard.”

“I . . . I . . . Major, I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I. But there’s no doubt about it, Russian tanks have crossed the border. From the looks of things, their war games were apparently just a ruse to hide their true intentions.”

“Who’s the general talking with Colonel Cossette?” O’Neill asked.

“General Oliver, Chief of Operations for European Command Headquarters.”

“What’s he doing over here?”

“EUCOM’s mad as hell. Their circuits to the Pentagon and many of the major European commands were knocked out when we lost Langerkopf. The entire system’s in disarray.”

“Lost Langerkopf?”

“Yeah, we lost Langerkopf a few minutes after the Russians attacked. No one seems to know for sure what happened, but we do know that sappers hit Donnersberg and Feldberg at about the same time that Langerkopf went off the air. Donnersberg’s fine. Feldberg survived, but they lost one of their two supergroups to Martlesham Heath and their satellite ground station. Almost everything between Germany and England’s been knocked out. And apparently there’s little communication going into and out of the air bases at Ramstein and Spangdahlem.”

O’Neill didn’t have to look at the map behind the general’s head to know what it all meant. No one in Europe knew the American communication system better than he did.

“What have they done about it so far?” O’Neill asked.

“I don’t know. I guess that’s why the general’s over here. From what little I’ve overheard, no one seems to know what to do.”

“Aw shit!”

O’Neill brushed past the major and headed for the Navy lieutenant sitting in the lead controller’s chair.

CHAPTER 19

January 29—1:22 a.m.

Defense Information Systems Agency, United States European Command Headquarters

Patch Barracks, Stuttgart

“Lieutenant Templeton, have you ordered the sites to start rerouting the highest-priority circuits?” O’Neill asked.

“What?”

“What have you guys done to reroute the highest-priority users we lost when Langerkopf went down and we lost a supergroup between Feldberg and Martlesham Heath, and the Feldberg and Langerkopf satellites, sir?”

“I’m sorry, Sergeant. I don’t understand.”

“What I mean, sir, is that we should’ve started determining an hour ago who the highest-priority users are and rerouting them onto the remaining sixty channels to England. We then need to see which of the most critical circuits going to our air bases at Ramstein and Spangdahlem went through Langerkopf so we can reroute the really important ones through Donnersberg.”

The general and the colonels stopped their conversation in midsentence. General Oliver rushed across the room to where O’Neill was standing. The others followed in his wake.

“Sergeant,” the general said, “are you saying we can do something to restore our communications with England and the States?”

It certainly wasn’t every day that a staff sergeant had a conversation with a general. But O’Neill understood, despite his uneasiness, that the situation called for him to ignore the stars on the general’s uniform and do

what needed to be done.

“Yes, sir. The 20 percent of our communications on the fiber-optics system is still safe and will likely remain that way. Of the rest, we’re not going to be able to restore everything. But we can give you some of it. We’ve still got sixty channels on the microwave system into Martlesham Heath. We’ve lost our two major satellite terminals, but we’ve still got twelve channels on the old satellite from Landstuhl to Arlington, Virginia. We can also give you forty-eight more channels to the States through Coltano, Italy, and onto an undersea cable there. After that, or whenever you want if you need them sooner, we can give you a few circuits into the air bases at Ramstein and Spangdahlem.”

“Why wasn’t this done before now?”

“It should’ve been, sir. Forty years ago, the entire process was supposed to be computerized so that it would automatically happen in this kind of situation. Unfortunately, Congress cut the project from the budget when the phasedown in Europe began, so it never got started. I’ve been told back then our communications was almost as good as anything AT&T could’ve provided. But without the funds, there has not been any real change to the system in all that time. So we’ll have to do the rerouting and restoration manually.”

“How long will that take, Sergeant?”

“Sir, you tell us what you want, and we’ll get you a circuit back online about every five minutes. All that’s necessary is for you and your staff to let us know what you need and when you need it, within the limits I just gave you, and we’ll take care of the rest from here.”

The general scooped up the nearest phone and dialed the European Command Operations Center in the middle of the base.

“This is General Oliver. Give me Colonel Morrison immediately.”

“Yes, sir,” Colonel Morrison said a few moments later.

“Charlie, look I’m still over here at DISA. They tell me that if we let them know what our priorities for circuits are, they can handle it for us. Get the staff on it right away. I’ll be over in a few minutes to give you the details.”