The Red Horseman Read Online Free PDF Page B

some weird military
mind-bender until he was handed his first target the day
after the ship sailed from Pearl Harbor on his
first cruise to Vietnam.
    Shanghai.
    He was assigned to drop a nuclear weapon on
the military district headquarters in Shanghai.
It wasn’t exactly downtown, but it was on the edge
of it.
    Actually he was not going to drop the bomb: he was
going to toss it, throw it about forty-three thousand
feet, as he recalled. That was how far away from the
target the pull-up point was. He would cross the
initial point at five hundred knots,
exactly five hundred feet above the ground, and
push the pickle on the stick, which would start the timer
on the nuclear ordnance panel. The timer would tick
off the preset number of seconds until he
reached the calculated pull-up point-that point
forty-three thousand feet from the target. Then a tone
would sound in his ears. He was to apply smooth, steady
back-pressure on the stick so that one second after
the tone began he would have four Gs on the
aircraft. At about thirty-eight degrees
nose-up the tone would cease and the weapon would come off
the bomb rack and he would keep pulling, up and over
the top, then do a half roll going down the back
side and scoot out the way he had come in.
    He had practiced the delivery on the navy’s
bombing range in Oregon.
    With little, blue, twenty-eight-pound practice
bombs. The delivery method was inherently
inaccurate and the bombs were sprinkled liberally over the
countryside, sometimes a couple miles from the intended
target.
    A good delivery was one in which the bomb impacted
within a half mile of where you wanted it. With a
six-hundredkiloton nuke, a miss by a mile
or two wouldn’t matter much.
    “Close enough for government work,” he and his
bombardier assured each other.
    Months later on an aircraft carrier
crossing the Pacific with a magazine full of
nuclear weapons, the insanity of nuclear war got
very personal.
    Figuring the fuel consumption on each leg of the
run-in, working the leg times backward from the hard
target time-necessary so he and his bombardier wouldn’t be
incinerated by the blast of somebody else’s
weapon-plotting antiaircraft defenses,
examining the streets and buildings of Shanghai
while planning to incinerate every last Chinese man,
woman and child In them, he had to pinch himself.
This was like trying to figure out how to shoot your way
into hell.
    But orders were orders, so he drew the lines and
cut and pasted the charts and tried to envision what it would
feel like to hurt a thermonuclear weapon
into Shanghai. The emotions he would feel as he
flew through the flak and SAM’S on the run-in,
performed the G6 turn alley-oop over a city of
ten million people, and tried to keep the airplane
upright and flying as the shock wave from the detonation
smashed the aircraft like the fist of God as he
exited tail-on to the blast–emotions were not on the
navy’s agenda.
    Could he nuke Shanghai? Would he do it if
ordered to?
    He didn’t know, which troubled him.
    Fretting about it didn’t help. The problem was
too big, the numbers of human lives
incomprehensible, the A’s and B’s and C’s of the
equation all unknown. He had no answers.
Worse, he suspected no one did.
    So he finished his planning and went back to more
mundane concerns, like wondering how he was going to stay
alive in the night skies over Vietnam.
    That was twenty-three years ago.
    Today listening to the experts discuss the possibility
that nuclear weapons might be seeping southward from the
Soviet republics into the Middle East, the
memories of pi arming the annihilation of half the
population of Shanghai made Jake Grafton
slightly nauseated.
    The voice of the three-star army general who headed
the Defense Intelligence Agency jolted his
unpleasant reverie.
    The general wanted hard intelligence and he was a
bit peeved that none seemed to be available,
“Rumor, surmises, theories … haven’t you
experts got one single fact?” he demanded