Ride of the Valkyries Read online

  RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES

  Previous Books In This Series

  The Big One--(1947)

  Anvil of Necessity--(1948)

  The Great Game--(1959)

  Crusade--(1965)

  Ride of The Valkyries--(1972)

  Coming Shortly: Winter Warriors--(1945)

  Stuart Slade

  Dedication

  This book is respectfully dedicated to the memory of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Harris

  Acknowledgements

  The Ride of the Valkyries could not have been written without the very generous help of a large number of people who contributed their time, input and efforts into confirming the technical details of the story. Some of these generous souls I know personally and we discussed the conduct and probable results of the actions described in this novel in depth. Others I know only via the internet as the collective membership of the History, Politics and Current Affairs Forum yet their communal wisdom and vast store of knowledge, freely contributed, has been truly irreplaceable.

  I must also express a particular debt of gratitude to my wife Josefa a for without her kind forbearance, patient support and unstintingly generous assistance, this novel would have remained nothing more than a vague idea floating in the back of my mind.

  Caveat

  The Ride of the Valkyries is a work of fiction, set in an alternate universe. All the characters appearing in this book are fictional and any resemblance to any person, living or dead is purely coincidental. Although some names of historical characters appear, they do not necessarily represent the same people we know in our reality.

  Copyright © 2009 Stuart Slade.

  ISBN 978-0-557-10347-8

  CHAPTER ONE: REVEILLE

  Three miles short of Exit 15, Interstate 90, Massachusetts, USA

  "What the blazes is going on?" The traffic on the Interstate highway was slowing down. It had been thin before but now it was congealing quickly as the vehicles' red brake lights came on and they started to stop. Up ahead, flashing blue and red lights told of an incident or something. "Damn, I hope nobody's blocked the road with an accident."

  "I think you mean you hope nobody's been hurt in an accident."

  "Errr, yes." That hadn't been what Colin Dole had meant at all and his wife knew it. "I can see now, there are two state police cars up there, across the road. That's odd, they've blocked both carriageways. Whatever it is must be big. Perhaps a truck's jack-knifed." The traffic had come to a complete stop now, forming up on all three lanes. Strange, Dole thought, the police cars had stopped the traffic just where the road widened out, the two carriageways splitting apart for the long straight run up to the exit ramps.

  "There's somebody coming." Fran Dole had seen a group of men moving through the stopped cars, pausing briefly to speak with the occupants in each. Men in light blue, not the darker uniforms of the State Police. Air Force? A suspicion about what was going on started to form in her mind.

  "Sir, Ma'am. Lieutenant Jones, Air Force Police. We have an emergency deployment exercise using this section of highway and it will be closed for the next 45 minutes or so. We have portable comfort stations set up down by the state police cars if you need them. On behalf of Strategic Aerospace Command, I would like to apologize for any inconvenience or delays. Please accept a small gift from SAC in partial compensation." It was a routine speech, learned by heart and recited almost on autopilot. The young lieutenant reached into a bag slung over his shoulder and handed in a small pouch containing a box of mints with the SAC logo on the cover and a few other items, a courtesy pack familiar to anybody who'd traveled on an airliner.

  "Sir, which bombers are coming in?" Mikey Dole's voice piped up from the back seat of the car.

  "Sigrun and Skalma, Sir. 100th Bomb Group out of Kozlowski." There was no trace of sarcasm in the officer's use of ‘sir' speaking to an eight year old. Training for Air Force Police on this duty was strict; everybody gets treated with courtesy and respect. Especially children.

  "I know Sigrun, Sir. I have her nose-art card."

  Jones smiled. "Well, sir, how would you like this to go with it?" He dug into the bag and brought out a box containing a small die-cast model of a B-70 Valkyrie.

  "Ohhhhhh. Thank you Sir."

  "Don't think they should give the bombers German names." Dole's voice was grumpy, not least because he had a hunch he knew what was coming as soon as the officer left.

  "We don't, sir. The names are the old Norse names for the Valkyries. The 100th names most of its bombers that way. The 35th uses English translations of the same names. The other groups forming up on the B-70s have their own traditions." Jones smiled, saluted and moved on to the next car to repeat the performance.

  "See Colin. An emergency deployment exercise. They announce those in advance on Radio AM-1560. That's why all those cars were peeling off at the last exit. There must have been a diversion set up. I said we should have listened to the highway news service." It was as Dole had feared; he was in the doghouse.

  "But I wanted to listen to some music." It sounded even more petulant than the words suggested.

  "Well, now you can, undisturbed for 45 minutes. While we get to be late for my mother's birthday party." Fran Dole leaned back with the distinct message ‘If you thought you'd be getting some tonight, you're wrong."

  Colin Dole leaned back in the driving seat. Then, he saw two long streamers of black smoke in his driving mirror and knew that on one point at least his wife was mistaken. He wasn't going to get to listen to the music undisturbed.

  Cockpit, B-70C Sigrun Final Approach to Emergency Deployment Strip Zebra"

  "Altitude 400 feet, power nominal, all temperatures in safe range. Automated Landing Signal pathway active. We are in the groove, centered for both horizontal and vertical. Outer wing surfaces raised for slow-speed flight. Nose ramp retracted."

  "Flaps, fifteen degrees, lower main and nose wheels. Drop power ten."

  "Elevons down fifteen degrees. Main and nosewheels down and locked. All lights green. Control van confirms elevons down, wheels down, all down, cleared for landing. Still centered on landing path."

  "Electronics Pit. How's the new equipment behaving? Any problems back, there?" Sigrun had been one of the original B-7OAs and had all the electronic problems associated with the new aircraft. Problems that had taken almost three years to fix. Finally they'd been sorted out and the new production B-7OBs had worked much better. Sigrun had spent three months over at the North American Aviation plant at Palmdale being modified to the new B-70C standard, one that marked some advances even on the B-70B. Perhaps the most important of them was that the B-70C had the full implementation of the Defensive Anti-Missile System.

  "No, Seejay. Everything's fine. New gear just HIJMS."

  "Stand by. On finals now. Flaps twenty." The traffic parked on the interstate was racing beneath them now and Major C.J O'Seven imagined himself seeing the cars being pushed down as the shock wave from the aircraft hit them. It was the driver's fault, there'd been warnings all morning that the exercise was taking place but some people just never listened. Apparently the National Transportation Board was discussing an emergency message system using lighted signs but that would take years to design and build.

  "Speed 225 Seejay. Altitude 350 feet. Still in the groove. Skalma twenty seconds behind us reports minor turbulence."

  "That'll change when she hits our wake. She's above it now." Skalma was Major Daniel Ben's bird, a new-build B-70C.

  "220, altitude 300, 750 feet short of touchdown point. Nose up, speed 215, altitude 250. Still in the groove."

  "Whoa, Skalma reports a hell of a bump back there. Must have hit our wake at last." That was one characteristic of the B-70, i
ts huge size and the close grouping of the six J-93 engines gave it a wake effect that was akin to a solid battering ram. One XB-70 had been lost that way, near Palmdale. An F-104 got too close and the wake flipped it out of control, causing a mid-air collision.

  "Speed 190, altitude 100 feet, 250 short of touchdown. Start flapping the wings!" There was a burst of laughter on the flight deck. It was a standing Valkyrie pilot's joke that they flapped the downward-folding outer sections of the wings as the aircraft landed. A surprising number of people believed it.

  "Speed 175 altitude.." There was a thump and a squeal as the tires hit the runway. "Zero, distance to touchdown zero. Full reverse thrust on all engines, bang the chutes!." As Sigrun raced down the Interstate carriageway, three braking parachutes erupted behind her while the engines roared in reverse thrust. In front of her, the interstate exit flyover appeared to be rising and falling as the nose porpoised up and down. Another B-70 quirk; the cockpit was so far in front of the nosewheel that the movement caused by landing was greatly exaggerated. It made a lot of people ill. "Speed 160, 140, 120. OK guys we're legal, no need to watch for the state troopers."

  "That's a relief. Turn around coming up." The flyover was approaching fast. O'Seven could see the two trucks on top, one the flight control van, the other the ALS cabin. The rest of the Emergency Deployment Convoy would be waiting under the bridge. Coming up fast was a large sweeping turn, one that the State Police found very useful for speed traps and emergency service turns. Its real purpose was to allow B-70s - and B-52s before them - to turn around in front of the bridge. That bridge doubled as an emergency shelter in a number of ways, not all of which were public knowledge. It was not for nothing that the full name of this road system was the Curtis E. LeMay Interstate Highway System.

  Sigrun turned elegantly onto the taxiway then stopped on the other carriageway, facing the way she had come. There was a dull thump from the rear as the parachutes were dropped off, collected by one of the jeeps. Already six fuel bowsers and two pump trucks were racing out from under the bridge towards her, ready to pour the vital JP-6 fuel into her tanks. O'Seven and his crew felt Sigrun lurch as the high-pressure pumps blasted fuel into her. Another truck came up from behind as soon as the blast from her engines had died down and was installing a new set of braking chutes while another part of the same vehicle pumped water into the aft tanks. Two more jeeps roared up under the nose, towing liquid nitrogen trailers that would be hooked up to that part of the aircraft's systems.

  There were more whines and thumps as Sigrun ‘s bomb bay doors opened so the two big munitions trucks could position their loads in her belly. She could lift 65,000 pounds of weapons in that bay and she was being loaded to the max. Two 550 kiloton nuclear gravity bombs, a battery of AGM-76 anti-radar missiles and the B-7OCs new weapon, the Pyewacket multirole air defense missile. Or, as the less reverential crews called it, the Frisbee. The 100th Bomb Group had spent almost twenty years at Nellis AFB in Nevada before returning to Kozlowski and they still had some west coast ways about them.

  More trucks joined the circle surrounding Sigrun. The scramble around her only looked like chaos. In fact, this was a well-honed drill to get the bomber airborne again with the minimum possible delay. Twenty minutes to fully arm and fuel the aircraft was the formal target and fifteen earned the ground crews a commendation. Taking twenty five would earn them something that was only mentioned in fearful whispers but was a fate in which the Aleutian Islands featured prominently. Behind Sigrun, Skalma was sitting on the turn-around, surrounded by her own circle of courtiers, also working frantically.

  One last job to be done. A heavily-sealed brown envelope was passed up to the flight deck. The terms of the exercise were that Kozlowski was under nuclear attack and her bombers had dispersed to emergency landing strips like this so they could be armed and fueled then sent to their targets. The crews wouldn't know where they were going until they opened that brown envelope.

  "Ready for engine start!" There was another thump from the rear of the aircraft as the Ground Support Equipment Alert Pod was craned into place. That pod could get the whole aircraft's systems up and running in three minutes, according to the manufacturer at any rate. They were right; three minutes later Sigrun was running down the Interstate carriageway, her nose lifting as her engines roared. Then, she rotated and was back where she belonged.

  "Where we going Seejay?"

  ‘‘Moscow. Russians have asked us to do a profile mission against the city. They want to see how their new MiG-25s can perform against us. We'll be touching down at Sheremetevo as soon as we've finished. If it's anything like our last visit, it should be a real good party."

  Three miles short of Exit 15, Interstate 90, Massachusetts, USA

  "WHOOOOO, look at them GO!" Mikey's voice was an excited squeak as the two Valkyries swept a thousand feet over their heads, the car shaking with the power of their engines as they climbed skywards.

  "‘Thank heavens for that." His father almost snarled as he reached down to restart the car engine.

  "Don't do that Dad. They'll have to move the trucks off the road and clean up any fuel they've spilled. It'll be some time yet."

  "‘Huh? And you know so much about it?" His father scoffed at the advice. "What are you, SAC's advisor?"

  There was a tap on the window. "I'd turn your engine off sir. We have to shift the trucks off the road and clean up any fuel and lubricant spills. You don't want that stuff on your tires. Be another 20 minutes at least."

  There was a long, hostile silence in the car. Eventually, Fran Dole turned around to speak to her son. "Don't worry Mikey, one day your dad will be as smart as you. If he ever grows up."

  Admiral's Quarters, INS Mysore, First Division, The Flying Squadron, Trincomalee, India.

  She was only ten years old yet already she was obsolescent. It was a depressing realization but the truth was that she'd been built at just the wrong time. Her construction had taken place just before the anti-aircraft missile had changed the whole definition of air defense. Mysore had been built with a very heavy battery of Sagarika surface-to-surface missiles but her air defenses were weak.

  Originally she'd had just her eight 4.5 inch guns and four 37mm quads. She'd just rejoined the Flying Squadron after a refit that had replaced the 37mms with four quadruple MOG missile launchers and four 35mm BOER guns but that left her still equipped only for point defense. Her successor, the Karnataka had already been launched; when she was completed, Mysore would go back to the shipyard to lose her heavy quadruple Sagarika launchers and be equipped with classrooms and living accommodation for cadets.

  Until then, Mysore was the flagship of First Division, The Flying Squadron. Air defense of the squadron was provided by a pair of Project 21 destroyers, the Ghurka and the Ghauri. The force was rounded out by the three surviving Project 18 class destroyers, Rana, Ranjit and Rajput.

  Admiral Kanali Dahm tapped his pencil on those names. Those three made the First Division the fastest of the three that made up the Flying Squadron. The other two divisions each had a trio of the slower Project 19 ships. The catch was that the Project 18 class were structurally suspect, the fourth ship of the class had broken up in a storm shortly after her commissioning. The shipyard management, whose corruption had been responsible for the disaster, had been hanged but a cloud of suspicion still hung over the Project 18s. The truth was, none of the Indian ships were that well built. Quality control was a serious problem, they just weren't as solidly constructed as their Australian or American equivalents.

  The Flying Squadron was primarily a surface action group, heavily optimized for anti-ship work with a secondary land-attack mission. In that, they showed the Squadron's descent from the old British battlecruisers, inherited as part of the Imperial Gift. They, like the rest of those ships were long gone now but their heritage was carried on by the new battlecruisers. Dahm had seen the preliminary design of those 27,500 ton monsters; they were already being called the "Splendid Cats". Eventually each
division of the Flying Squadron would have one of the new battlecruisers, two cruisers and six destroyers. But, for now, they had one cruiser and five destroyers each. That would have to do.

  The Indian Navy had two carriers, old American Essex class ships that were worn out, far past the end of their effective lives and spent more time in the dockyard than out of it. There were new carriers on the drawing boards as well but who knew when they would appear, if they ever did. Vikrant and Viraat would have to do, deficiencies and weaknesses notwithstanding.

  First Division had its orders, to sail for the Paracel Islands. The documents on Admiral Dahm's desk gave a quick background to the problem. The Paracels were one of those areas which everybody seemed to have a claim to. It hadn't mattered too much; for years the only people who had gone there were fishermen and they'd made their own arrangements. The problem was that times had changed. The islands now had strategic value; they were perfectly placed anchorages and fueling stations to cover the South China Sea, a function made necessary by the steady increase of piracy in those waters. They had tactical value, they controlled some of the key shipping routes in the area. Above all, they had economic value; they sat on top of what promised to be some interesting oil and gas reserves while their very existence gave economic sea exploitation rights over a vast area.

  Most international legal authorities agreed that the strongest claims to the islands had been held by Vietnam and China with the claims of Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines being weaker. However, Vietnam and China had been forcibly conquered by Japan and their rights hadn't, or rather shouldn't, transfer with that conquest. Japan of course disagreed with that opinion and claimed that it had a double-barreled claim to the island that trumped everybody else's. They'd even suggested that the geography of the seabed meant that the Paracel Islands were just the southern extension of the underwater ridge that started with the Pescadores. That was why the Japanese now adamantly referred to the Paracels as the "Southern Pescadores".