Chapter Two Thousand Six Hundred Ninety-Five
5th July 1978
Over the North Atlantic
Oxcart remembered when he was a child he had once seen what happened when a hawk got too close to a water tower where a number of sparrows had nests. The sparrows were tiny, hardly a match for the larger and presumably far more formidable hawk. That wasn’t the case though as they had mobbed the hawk, being faster and nimbler. The hawk had come under ferocious attack that it couldn’t counter as it had fled.
The way that the fighter planes from the US Navy were coming at the Gänsegeier reminded Oxcart of that. It wasn’t as if there was any place to hide, so their main tactic in situations like this was to outpace the interceptors. While the interceptors had difficulty keeping with the Gänsegeier at extreme altitudes, they didn’t need to. The search radar they used was like shining a spotlight on them and JoJo had her hands full with them trailing fifty or so kilometers behind them as she was monitoring them and employing countermeasures.
“Shit” JoJo muttered over the intercom.
“What?” Oxcart asked.
“Our friends have friends, inbound” JoJo replied.
With an exasperated sigh, Oxcart switched the intercom to speak to Poldi, “See if you can get Operations on the line. Request instructions.”
Looking out through the canopy, Oxcart saw two tiny dots in the distance that were on an intercept course. As they grew closer, he could see that they were Lockheed Lancers with the large rudder and cuneiform wings. Intelligence said that they had become the interceptor of choice by the US Airforce since the Patagonian War had revealed how deeply flawed their previous doctrine had been until Curtis and the USAF worked out the teething problems they were having with the heavily publicized Falcon. The Lancer had been developed as a relatively low-cost replacement for the older Starfire Interceptors with the intention of selling them on the International market until fate had intervened. That didn't mean much to Oxcart, he could see two planes approaching his and as they slowed to match speed he instantly saw the danger that they couldn’t possibly know about. One that the Luftwaffe had learned about though bitter experience.
“Interceptor, please be advised not to approach this plane from low four to five o’clock” Oxcart said into the microphone and was ignored. The Lancer was close enough that he could see the pilot in the cockpit and the camera in his hand. With sickening dread, Oxcart knew what was going to happen before it did. The Lancer entered one of the vortices generated by the wingtip of the Gänsegeier and was flipped into an uncontrollable spin, right into the aft fuselage of the Gänsegeier itself. The grinding of metal on metal reached Oxcart’s ears, the airframe shuttered, and he saw the Lancer spiral away already starting to break apart.
Oxcart felt the controls turn to mush as he yanked back the throttle quadrant as the plane shuttered and alarms went off. Gerstle was trying to see out the back to the extent of the damage while Oxcart had other concerns.
“Are you okay back there JoJo, Poldi!” Oxcart yelled over the intercom, over a dozen alarms going off, and got a whole lot of swearing in reply.
“How bad does it look back there?” Oxcart asked.
“I hope you know how to swim” JoJo replied.
Balderschwang, Bavaria
Marie Alexandra could hardly think of a time when she had endured a ruder awakening. Armed men storming into her bedroom in the middle of the night, telling her that her name was on the list. They had refused to say what list they were talking about, shoving her onto a waiting helicopter like a sack of potatoes instead. As the helicopter lifted off, she had time to think about how she was still wearing her nightgown, not being given a chance to change into anything more practical, and how Eli, Kiki’s little girl was screaming her head off despite Kiki trying to calm her. Nina and Lutz were in the care of the Irish nanny. Looking out the door at the mountains rushing past in the starlight, Marie could only shiver in the cold and wait.
A very short time later the helicopter set down at an unfamiliar airport and everyone was shuffled into a building.
“Would you mind telling me where we are?” Marie asked and was ignored. She was supposed to catch a train in a few hours to go to her mother’s house in the East Frisian Islands. Not this, whatever this was.
Washington DC
This latest crisis had come at a time when Nixon didn’t need one. Speculation about a German spy plane getting shot down over International Waters had leaked to the press almost as soon as it had happened. The recent development of a dedicated cable news network in Atlanta had really thrown fuel onto the fire as the News Anchors had filled the dearth of information with their own speculation, compounding the mess.
“As near as we can tell a pilot from Andrews was trying to get a photograph and caused a midair collision” Frank Church said, “The pilot of the German plane kept his plane steady long enough for his crew to eject, then started a timer on a self-destruct system before ejecting himself.”
“The German reaction?” Nixon asked.
“They are playing their cards close to the vest” Church replied, “But they reacted much like we figured they would in a crisis.”
Nixon had been briefed about how the German Army would scatter, not wanting there to be concentrations of troops in the event of a nuclear attack. Their Airforce and Navy had similar plans. The other service branches were geared towards trying to salvage whatever was left. At least they had a plan. The United States seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis and while there were contingency plans, anything too comprehensive was met with the sort of good old-fashioned paranoia that was as American as Baseball and apple pie.
“We were able to fish the crew of the German plane out of the Atlantic” Church said, “They were not happy, but they were able to fill in the blanks.”
Yeah, no one was happy, Nixon thought to himself.