by Jeff Edwards
Zhukov lifted his right hand and clenched it into a fist. “If you attempt to interfere, the will of the Russian people will rise up to crush you. And I, Sergiei Mikhailovich, will be the instrument of their anger.”
He slowly lowered his fist. “You have read your reports by now. You know what I have at my disposal. But what you do not know—what you cannot know—is that my resolve is stronger than you can imagine. If you test me, I will do that which you fear above all things. I will use the weapons at my disposal.”
His eyebrows came down until his eyes were nearly slits. “I do not bluff, and I will not negotiate. The revolution is now, and it is utterly unstoppable. Your choice is simple. Step aside, or die.”
The camera held on Zhukov’s face for a few seconds as the English interpretation wound down, then the scene cut to the CNN studio where a grim-faced news anchor began the inevitable follow-up commentary.
The national security advisor thumbed the remote again, and the screen froze. “That’s about it, Mr. President. The rest of the news cycle amounts to speculation and tail-chasing.”
President Chandler closed his eyes and rubbed his temples with the heels of his hands. He opened his eyes and let out a deep breath. “Somebody please tell me that this lunatic is bluffing.”
The secretary of defense nodded. “He may very well be bluffing, sir. The Russian Ministry of Defense says he’s full of hot air, at least with regard to his thinly-veiled threats about going nuclear. Our satellite imagery confirms that Zhukov’s rebels were only able to put one ballistic missile submarine to sea. The other two ballistic missile subs are still tied to the pier at Rybachiy naval station, possibly because he couldn’t find enough nutcases among the Russian sailors to crew more than one submarine. But whatever the reason, all of Zhukov’s eggs are in one basket. If the Russians can take out that one missile sub, Mr. Zhukov’s nuclear threat evaporates.”
The White House chief of staff leaned back in her chair. “Madame Secretary, how sure are we that the Russians can knock out that missile sub?”
“The Russians are pretty confident,” the secretary of defense said. “Their attack submarine, the Kuzbass, is in an excellent position to intercept and destroy Zhukov’s ballistic missile sub before it reaches the Sea of Okhotsk.”
The president made a steeple of his fingers. “So we’re waiting for one Russian submarine to destroy another Russian submarine? Do we have a fallback plan?”
“We don’t think we’re going to need one,” General Gilmore said. “Mr. President, the Kuzbass is an Akula class attack sub. Fast, quiet, and very very good at hunting other submarines. The missile sub, the Zelenograd, is an older Delta III class boat. Her missiles are deadly against land-based targets, but the Chief of Naval Operations assures me that she won’t last ten seconds in a shooting match with an Akula.”
Gregory Brenthoven smiled, “His missiles.”
The General frowned. “Pardon me, sir?”
“Russian ships and submarines are male,” Brenthoven said. “But never mind that. I didn’t mean to interrupt. Please continue, General.”
The general scratched his chin. “That’s about it, sir. The Kuzbass will sink the missile sub. If that doesn’t work, the Russian Navy chases the missile sub under the ice pack, where they can hunt it down and kill it at their leisure. I guess that’s our fallback plan: let the Russian Navy trap the missile sub if they can’t kill it outright.”
Veronica Doyle glanced at her palmtop computer. “And we’re absolutely certain that this submarine can’t launch missiles through the ice?”
Brenthoven nodded. “The Delta III has no ice penetration capability. Once that submarine is under the ice, it won’t be able to launch.”
“There could be millions of lives at stake here,” the president said. “I’m not comfortable with any plan that amounts to chasing the snake into a corner and tossing a blanket over it. And I’m not particularly crazy about leaving it up to the Russians to do the work.”
“Understood, sir.” the secretary of defense said. “But our options are fairly limited at the moment. Moscow has made it unmistakably clear that U.S. involvement is not welcome. Their diplomatic language is only about two notches short of outright threats. If we insert ourselves into what they regard as an internal situation, we may find that both sides are ready to shoot us in the head.”
“What you’re basically telling me,” the president said, “is that we sit on our hands and hope nobody decides to push the button?”
“We’re not happy about it either, sir,” General Gilmore said. “The Navy has ordered a pair of stealth destroyers into the area to keep an eye on things, and the Air Force and National Reconnaissance Office are getting us all the satellite coverage we need. We’d like to get one of our own subs up there, but—with Russia trying to kill Zhukov’s sub, and Zhukov's insurgents trying to kill Russian subs—that could easily blow the lid off the powder keg. Both sides in this conflict are ready to shoot first and ask questions later. Any direct involvement on our part is likely to provoke the kind of response we don’t even want to think about.”
“Which brings us back to sitting on our hands,” the president said.
The door opened and a young Marine lieutenant walked in, carrying a red and white striped folder. He went directly to General Gilmore, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and spoke softly to the general as he handed over the folder.
General Gilmore opened the folder and read the short document it contained. After a few seconds, he laid it on the table in front of him. “Mr. President, we’ve just received word from the Russian Ministry of Defense. The Kuzbass has been destroyed.”
The president’s eyebrows shot up. “What? How did an aging missile submarine manage to get the drop on an Akula class hunter-killer?”
“It wasn’t the missile sub,” General Gilmore said. “Apparently the Kuzbass was destroyed three days ago, during a scheduled training exercise with a TU-142 anti-submarine warfare aircraft based out of Yelizovo. The exercise was scheduled as a non-firing event, but early assessments suggest that the TU-142 dropped one or more torpedoes on the Kuzbass.” He looked down at the folder. “The timing of the exercise appears to correspond to an unidentified explosion recorded by our Navy’s acoustic surveillance arrays in the region.”
The White House chief of staff cocked her head to one side. “The Russians are just now finding out that one of their submarines was destroyed three days ago?”
The general nodded. “I’m not intimately familiar with the communication cycles for Russian submarines, but I know that our subs like to communicate as little as possible. They have to surface or come to periscope depth to raise an antenna above the water, and that makes them vulnerable. It makes them easier to detect acoustically, and their electronic transmissions can give away their position. Since their mission and their survival depend on remaining undetected, they communicate as little as possible.”
“There are technologies for letting a submerged submarine know that it needs to come shallow for communication,” the national security advisor said. “We call our methods bell-ringers. I don’t know what the Russians call theirs.”
“Neither do I,” the general said. “But the Russians have been trying to communicate with the Kuzbass since Wednesday morning, with no joy.”
The president frowned. “This anti-submarine warfare aircraft that attacked Kuzbass, where was it from?”
“It was based out of Yelizovo, Mr. President,” General Gilmore said.
“And this Yelizovo is on Kamchatka?”
The general nodded. “Yes, Mr. President.”
The president looked up at the television. The CNN news anchor was still frozen in mid-syllable. The words “Crisis in Russia” jittered slightly at the bottom of the screen, an artifact of the DVD player’s pause feature. “Anybody here think the timing of the attack on Kuzbass was a coincidence?”
No one spoke.
“This dovetails too neatly with the onset of hostilitie
s in Petropavlovsk,” President Chandler said. “Zhukov planned the attack on Kuzbass, and he set it up in advance. He needed to ensure that his missile submarine had a clear path into the Sea of Okhotsk.”
The secretary of defense pinched her lower lip. “The Russians are going to bottle that sub up. It’ll be trapped under the ice, and it won’t be able to launch its missiles.”
The president shook his head slowly, his eyes still locked on the motionless image of the television newscaster. “Zhukov is thinking farther ahead than we are. He’s planning farther ahead. He’s got it all laid out. He already knows how he’s going to launch those missiles, ice or no ice.”
The president sat up and looked at the secretary of defense. “Zhukov’s not bluffing. He can launch. He’s planning to launch. Count on it.”
CHAPTER 20
USS TOWERS (DDG-103)
NORTHERN PACIFIC OCEAN
SATURDAY; 02 MARCH
1835 hours (6:35 PM)
TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’
Ann Roark took a sip of her coffee and made a face. “Ugh! How do the Navy guys drink this crap?”
Sheldon Miggs finished pouring his own cup from the wardroom coffee urn, and carried it carefully to the chair next to Ann’s. “Are you kidding? This is good Navy java.” He made a face of mock machismo. “It’ll put hair on your chest, Sailor!”
Ann treated him to her best you-are-a-complete-idiot glare. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not a Sailor. And unlike certain middle aged wanna-bes, I don’t have any desire to be a Sailor.” She glanced down at her chest. “Nor do I want hair sprouting from my cleavage. That’s a waxing experience I don’t even want to think about.”
She lifted one eyebrow and stared pointedly at Sheldon’s receding hairline. “But if this stuff really grows hair, you should think about rubbing some on your head.”
Sheldon grinned. “Forty-thousand comedians out of work, and I have to get paired up with Donna Rickles.”
Ann took another sip of the acrid coffee and swallowed with another grimace. “Who?”
Sheldon sighed. “Never mind, little princess. I’ll explain when you’re older.”
Ann rubbed her nose with her middle finger, making certain that Sheldon could see that she was flipping him a covert bird.
After a few seconds, she let her hand drop and picked up her coffee cup, trying to decide whether or not to risk a third sip. Maybe if she downed two or three quick swallows, her taste buds would be too stunned to object. “So what’s the latest from Captain Bligh? Any word on when we’re getting off this floating madhouse?”
Sheldon took a big swallow of coffee. “His name is Captain Bowie. And they’re trying to arrange rendezvous with a replenishment ship so they can do an underway refueling. We’ll do a helo transfer to the replenishment ship, and then hopscotch from one ship to another until we get within helicopter range of Japan. They hop us over to one of the Japanese islands, and we catch a flight back to the States.”
Ann snorted. “We were practically in the States thirty hours ago. These boneheads should have dropped us off in Alaska before heading out for parts unknown.”
“The ship has immediate orders,” Sheldon said. “The captain can’t tell me what they’ve been ordered to do, but he did make it clear that it’s time critical—whatever it is. They didn’t have time to pull into port.”
“That’s not our problem,” Ann said. “It’s their problem. And it doesn’t give them license to drag us off to who-knows-where. We’re not members of the Secret Navy Club, and they can’t just take us wherever they want without our consent. That’s kidnapping.”
“It’s not kidnapping,” Sheldon said. “And we already gave our consent, when we signed the releases to come onboard the ship in the first place. Somewhere in all that paperwork was a paragraph to the effect that this is a warship, and it’s subject to no-notice changes of mission. There was also a line in there pointing out that the needs of the Navy come first, and the ship can’t guarantee the time and date of our return.” He sighed. “You signed it, Ann, and so did I. It’s a standard clause. Every civilian tech-rep signs the same thing.”
“And that gives them the right to treat us like cargo?”
“They’re not treating us like cargo. We’ve got good accommodations, they’re feeding us the same food that their senior officers eat, and we’re getting paid overtime and sea-bonuses for every extra day we have to spend on the ship. So get your fur down and try to enjoy the trip. We’re riding a stealth destroyer on a high-speed run to a secret location. How much cooler does it get than that?”
Ann took another swallow of the horrid Navy coffee. “You may be enjoying yourself, Sheldon, but I’m not. I came here to demonstrate the Mouse prototype; I didn’t sign on for secret missions. Why didn’t they get a helicopter to pick us up when we were still close to Alaska?” She deliberately avoided the stupid Navy-speak abbreviation. The word was helicopter, not helo. And Mouse was a robot, not an unmanned underwater vehicle. Who did these clowns think they were kidding, anyway?
“They tried to get us a helo,” Sheldon said. “But the flight deck on a destroyer is only rated for certain types of aircraft. Most civilian helicopters aren’t configured for landing on a small-decked ship. And there aren’t exactly a ton of Navy-configured helos in the Aleutian Island chain. The Ops Officer couldn’t get the right kind of aircraft lined up before we were out of flight range.”
Ann set her coffee cup on the table with a thump. “You believe everything the uniforms tell you, don’t you? Why are you always making excuses for them? They screwed up. Why can’t you just admit that?”
Sheldon set his own cup down gently. “Why do you hate them so much?”
Ann rolled her eyes. “Now we’re doing dialogue from A Few Good Men? This is the part where I’m supposed to ask why you like them so much? Well, newsflash, Sheldon—I don’t hate them. I can’t say I like them very much, but that’s not the same thing. And it isn’t even really them I dislike. As military guys go, Navy people are probably less offensive than most. But they make their living killing people, Sheldon. Did you ever stop to think about that? Worse than that, they signed up to kill people. They didn’t get drafted or forced into the job. It was a career decision for them. You chose customer relations; I chose electronics and robotics; and they selected war as their chosen profession.”
Ann picked up her coffee cup, but didn’t drink from it. Couldn’t Sheldon see it? At some point in their lives, every one of these military-drones made a conscious decision to make war for a living. They stood in line, took written tests, endured humiliating physical examinations under the guise of health care, and willingly submitted to training designed to program their minds for wholesale slaughter in the name of truth, justice, and the American way.
Sheldon shook his head. “It’s not like that, Ann. These guys aren’t itching for a fight. If you watched some of their training exercises, you’d know that. I’ve seen them at work for years, and you’d be amazed at how far they’ll go to prevent a fight. Their entire mindset is built around rules of engagement and safeguards to prevent escalation. Given the opportunity, they’ll do their very best to avoid pulling the trigger.”
“Don’t tell me about the military,” Ann said. “I was an Army brat, Sheldon. I grew up around people like this. I know what they’re like. They practice for war. They train for war, and they think about war, and they prepare for war. If you think about it, that’s a pretty sick thing to do for a living.”
“You don’t get it,” Sheldon said. “Firefighters prepare for fires every day. They train to fight fires, and they think about fighting fires, and they practice fighting fires all the time. But that’s just so they’ll be ready when the need arises. It doesn’t mean they hope your house is going to burn down. Being ready to fight fires is not the same as wanting to do it.”
Ann stood up. “No, Sheldon, you don’t get it. Firefighters don’t cause destruction; they stop it.” She pointed to a trio of pain
tings on the far wall: a young officer in an old-fashioned white uniform, flanked by paintings of two warships. “These guys blow stuff up. Buildings. Homes. People. These guys don’t put the fires out. They start the fires. That’s what they do.”
She turned and stalked out of the wardroom, letting the door slam behind her.
CHAPTER 21
NORTH PACIFIC OCEAN (SOUTH OF THE KAMCHATKA PENINSULA)
SATURDAY; 02 MARCH
2217 hours (10:17 PM)
TIME ZONE +12 ‘MIKE’
The first wave of the attack came from the south, a flight of five TU-160 bombers, cutting through the night sky 13,000 meters above the dark surface of the Pacific ocean. Code-named “Blackjack” by NATO, the dart-shaped supersonic jet aircraft were equipped with variable-geometry wings that made them capable of covert low-altitude flight profiles. But there was no need for deceptive maneuvers tonight. The launch point for their weapons was well outside the detection range of any radars or sensors based on the Kamchatka peninsula.
The mission plan called for the bombers to approach at altitude, make their attacks, and retreat at altitude—all without concern for stealth. And the Russian pilots followed their orders precisely.
The only hitch in the plan was minor, and easily corrected. The bombers caught a tailwind on the north-bound leg of the mission, and they reached the designated launch coordinates three minutes ahead of schedule. In accordance with the strike plan, the aircraft turned left and circled once before re-converging on the launch point three minutes later.
At exactly 0920 Zulu (10:20 PM local time), the bombers launched their weapons. Twenty Kh-555 cruise missiles, four from each of the bombers, dropped away from the planes and fell several hundred meters before their engines fired.
In unison, twenty pairs of stubby wings extended and snapped into place, and twenty Soyuz R95-300 turbojets flared to life, smearing translucent streaks of blue flame against the night sky.
