by Jeff Edwards
The incoming message was double encrypted in the same manner that the outgoing message had been. It was routed from the phone’s message queue to the adjoining microprocessor, which unraveled both layers of encryption, before shooting it back down the Kevlar cable toward the hanging titanium cylinder.
The process continued in reverse, and ended when the transducer injected a stream of white noise into the water, 100 meters below the ice. The transmission sounded a great deal like the ordinary noises of feeding krill, and not at all like tactical instructions to a nuclear missile submarine.
A kilometer away the K-506 received its updated orders. With slow but deliberate speed, the submarine turned and began to move north.
CHAPTER 35
WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM
WASHINGTON, DC
SUNDAY; 03 MARCH
2:40 PM EST
National Security Advisor Gregory Brenthoven walked into the empty room. The high-backed leather chairs were all pushed against the long mahogany table. The air was still, and quiet.
Brenthoven closed the door, and stood alone on the heavy wine-colored carpet.
Something was tugging at his mind, a tiny prickle at the fringes of his subconscious. He couldn’t put a finger on it, but knew that he had missed something. Some little detail that had slipped past his conscious mind without making an impression. He didn’t know what it was, but he had a feeling that it was something important.
He walked the length of the table, stopping behind the chair where he usually sat. At the far end of the room, the projection screen was retracted into its recess in the ceiling. The remote control lay in the middle of the table.
Without knowing why, Brenthoven picked up the remote, and pressed the button that raised and lowered the screen. Electric motors whispered, and the screen descended, hanging at the end of the table like a blank tableau.
He pulled his chair out from the table and sat down, his eyes studying the empty display screen. Something in his mind stirred. He almost had something, flickering just out of sight at the edge of his memory.
What was it? Something he had watched on this screen, maybe?
He pressed another button, calling the hidden projector to life. The default image appeared on the screen: the presidential seal, set against a blue background.
Another series of buttons called up a menu of available presentation files. Admiral Casey’s Sea of Okhotsk brief was at the top of the recent files list. Again without knowing why he did so, Brenthoven called up the CNO’s briefing package.
He paged through the images slowly, studying each in turn. The map of the Sea of Okhotsk. The circle representing the launch point. The photograph of the Russian submarine. The map of the Pacific. The curving lines of the incoming warheads. The converging arcs of the interceptor missiles.
He reached the end of the presentation. Nothing
With a sigh, he dropped the remote on the table. The clatter of plastic against wood seemed to echo in the quiet of the empty room.
He’d been hoping that one of the images might jar something in his memory. But nothing was coming to him.
He leaned back in the chair and rubbed his eyes. Nothing. Damn it.
He’d go back to his office. Maybe it would come to him if he stopped thinking about it so much.
Or maybe there was no ‘it.’ Maybe the ‘it’ was nothing more than wishful thinking. Maybe he wanted so badly to find an answer, that his brain was conjuring phantoms.
He didn’t know. He reached for the remote, and pointed the device toward the screen to shut off the projector.
On the screen, the map of the Sea of Okhotsk was showing. In the northeastern corner was the red circle that represented the submarine’s launch position. The adjoining label showed the latitude and longitude of the circle: 58.29N / 155.20E.
Brenthoven’s finger reached toward the power button. It paused, hovering above the button. He studied the numbers … 58.29N / 155.20E.
Why did they seem familiar? Because he’d seen them during the admiral’s brief?
No, that wasn’t it. Now that he thought about it, they’d seemed familiar then too. He’d seen that same sequence of digits somewhere else, in a different context.
He read them aloud. “Five … eight … two … nine … one … five … five … two … zero …”
Damn it! Where had he seen them before? He almost had it now …
The answer hit him, and he sat up straight in the chair. He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket for his little leather-bound notebook. His fingers fumbled it, and he nearly dropped it.
He rifled through the pages until he found his notes from a recent intelligence brief. There it was. The same sequence of numbers. Five—eight—two—nine—one—five—five— two—zero.
The unidentified numbers that the Russian courier, Oleg Grigoriev, had given to the DIA agents from his hospital bed in Japan. And that had been the day before Zhukov’s submarine had launched the first missile.
Grigoriev had given them the position for the first missile launch, before the launch had occurred. He’d known ahead of time. He might very well know the rest of the planned launch positions as well.
Up to this point, that bastard, Zhukov, had been five steps ahead of them at every turn. If Grigoriev knew the rest of the launch points, they could get ahead of Zhukov for the first time. They could finally move from defense to offense. They could end this thing.
Brenthoven pulled out his cell phone and speed-dialed the White House chief of staff. The instant she picked up the phone, Brenthoven said, “I don’t care what he’s doing. I need to speak to the president. Now.”
CHAPTER 36
USS TOWERS (DDG-103)
WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN
MONDAY; 04 MARCH
2218 hours (10:18 PM)
TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’
Ann Roark stumbled climbing the aluminum stairs to the USS Towers wardroom. She would have fallen if Sheldon hadn’t grabbed the sleeve of her jacket and steadied her.
The young Sailor who had led them here from the flight deck looked back down from the head of the stairs. “These ladders are sort of steep, Ma’am. You’ve got to watch your footing.”
Ann rolled her eyes. Like she needed a teenager to tell her how to walk. And they weren’t ladders; they were stairs. Any idiot could see that. Why did the Navy have to use a different word for everything? Why couldn’t they say floors, and walls, instead of decks, and bulkheads? It was like they went out of their way to make things as complicated as possible.
Ann started climbing again. She was so tired that she had trouble lifting her feet enough to make it up the steep incline of the stairs. And the rolling of the ship wasn’t doing anything to steady her.
Even Sheldon, Mr. Perpetual Happy-face, was showing signs of wear and tear. He didn’t look quite as bad as Ann felt, but the fatigue was visible in his face. They’d been travelling for fifteen or sixteen hours since Narita. First the van ride to the Air Force base, and then three helicopter flights, with stops to refuel the aircraft on two ships along the way. They’d probably crossed a couple of time zones in there somewhere, but Ann’s brain was too tired to do the math.
Her ears still felt numb from a very long day spent listening to the shriek of poorly-insulated aircraft engines. Little creature comforts, like soundproofing, were evidently not a priority to the U.S. military.
It was after ten o’clock, and the lighting in the ship’s hallways had been dimmed from bright white, to soft red. In Navy lingo, it was after Taps. Couldn’t they just call it lights out, like everybody else on the planet?
They reached the top of the stairs, and Sailor Boy led them through a short passageway toward a door that Ann recognized as the entrance to the ship’s wardroom.
She stopped, and lowered her bags to the floor. “Wait a second,” she said. “Can’t you take us to our staterooms first? I’d like to drop off my bags.”
What she really wanted was to get a few hours o
f sleep. Her brain felt like it was stuffed full of cotton. Did the Navy boneheads really think they could drag her out of bed at three in the morning, jerk her all over the Pacific for sixteen hours, and then put her straight to work?
The young Sailor smiled. “Just leave your bags here in the passageway. I’ll take them down to your staterooms. The captain wants to see you right away, Ma’am.”
The kid’s tone of voice pushed Ann’s annoyance up another notch. She resisted the temptation to parrot his words right back in his face. ‘The captain wants to see you right away, Ma’am.’
The kid was probably only nineteen years old—twenty at the outside—and the Navy already had him mentally conditioned. He honestly could not conceive of someone not giving the exalted ‘captain’ exactly what he wanted.
Automatic obedience was dangerous. Couldn’t these people see that? Couldn’t they see what it could lead to? Ann wondered what Sailor Boy would say, if she told him that his almighty captain could go to hell.
Sheldon lowered his bags to the floor and nudged Ann gently with his elbow. “Come on, let’s go save the world.”
Ann didn’t budge.
Sheldon cocked his head and showed Ann his most elaborately pitiful puppy-dog face. “Am I going to have to sing the ‘Kitty Paw’ song?”
Against her will, Ann felt herself smile a little. “Alright, asshole,” she said. She nodded toward the young Sailor. “Let’s go, Popeye. The excitement has arrived.”
The Sailor knocked on the wardroom door, and opened it, but didn’t enter. He stepped to one side, holding the door for Ann and Sheldon.
Sheldon muttered a thank you as he stepped past the Sailor. Ann followed Sheldon into the wardroom without comment.
Captain Bowie stood when they entered the room. He smiled, and motioned for them to sit.
“Welcome aboard Towers,” he said. “It’s good to have you back.”
He nodded, and a young Sailor in a blue smock jacket and white paper hat stepped forward to place cups of steaming coffee in front of the only two empty chairs at the table.
By the looks of it, nearly every officer on the ship was present. At least Ann thought they were all officers. She had never bothered to learn to distinguish military rank insignias, but they all wore khaki uniforms.
Ann took the chair on the right. She skipped the preliminaries, and reached straight for the sugar and cream.
Sheldon returned the captain’s smile as he settled into the chair to Ann’s left. “Thank you for inviting us back, Captain. We’re glad to be here.”
Ann raised her eyebrows, but didn’t comment. They hadn’t been invited. They’d been freaking summoned. And she was, most assuredly, not glad to be here.
She sipped at her coffee, and was mildly surprised to find that it wasn’t horrible. Not as good as coffee in the real world, but better than the acrid glop they usually served aboard ship. No doubt the improvement had something to do with the presence of the captain. When the big boss was in the house, the cooks probably put in a little extra effort.
Ann took a larger swallow. Well, maybe not too much extra effort.
Captain Bowie took his seat and pulled his own coffee cup across the table toward himself. “I realize that we got you up before the roosters,” he said. “And I know you’ve been in the air most of the day. I’m sure you’re both exhausted, so we’ll try to keep this as short as possible.”
“Thank you, sir,” Sheldon said.
“We’ll sketch out the basic tactical situation tonight,” the captain said. “Then we can sleep on it, and get into the details tomorrow morning.”
Sheldon fought off a yawn. “Works for me.”
The captain faced one of his people, a redheaded woman with a rounded face that seemed out of proportion to her trim build. “Chief McPherson, can you get us started?”
Chief McPherson stood up. “Aye-aye, sir.”
She laid a navigational chart on the table top, and unrolled it, weighting the corners with coffee mugs so that the curled paper didn’t roll itself back into a tube. A series of lines and symbols had been drawn on the chart using colored pencils. “Before we jump into the tactical situation,” she said, “how covert is your Mouse unit’s underwater transponder system?”
Ann shrugged. “We don’t really know yet.”
“What do you mean?” the chief asked.
“The Navy contract requires Mouse to be capable of covert operations,” Ann said. “So the transmissions from his acoustic modems are designed to mimic natural ocean sounds. Wave action, biologics, stuff like that. In theory, his communications should be really difficult to detect or identify.”
“How difficult?” Chief McPherson asked.
“We’re still in the development process,” Ann said. “The system has only been tested against a handful of underwater sensors. We won’t have hard data until the detection vulnerability surveys are complete, and they’re not scheduled to start until the end of the year.”
Captain Bowie spoke up. “So you think it’s covert, but you’re not certain?”
“That’s right,” Ann said. “I can’t give you a better answer until we finish the testing.”
The captain rubbed his chin. “I don’t think we can risk an unknown that large. The plan we have in mind depends on keeping your Mouse unit hidden from the submarine.”
Ann shifted in her chair. “What submarine?”
The chief turned her eyes toward Ann, and then to Sheldon. “How much do you know about what’s been going on in Kamchatka?”
“A little bit,” Sheldon said. “We caught some of it from the TV news in Japan, but that was in Japanese. Our hotel rooms had CNN on cable, so we got some follow-up in English. We know that there’s been some kind of military revolution in one of the Russian territories. And the rebels launched several nuclear missiles toward California, but they were intercepted. We know there’s pandemonium on the West Coast, and all of the flights are canceled.” He raised his hands and dropped them. “I guess that’s about it.”
The chief nodded. “Actually, it was only one missile,” she said. “But it was armed with three nuclear warheads.”
“CNN is claiming seven warheads,” Ann said.
“There were seven reentry vehicles,” Chief McPherson said. “Three of them were nuclear warheads. The other four were decoys, designed to tie up our resources, and force us to expend interceptor missiles.”
She pointed to a small symbol on the chart, a red downward-pointing arrow enclosed in a red circle. “The missile was launched from a nuclear submarine at this position, in the northeastern Sea of Okhotsk, about thirty-seven hours ago. The sub in question is hull number K-506, a Delta III class, built in the nineteen-seventies. It carries sixteen ballistic missiles, each of which is armed with three nuclear warheads and four decoys. It’s already fired one missile, so it’s still got fifteen missiles left in the launch tubes. That’s the submarine we’re talking about: the one that launched nukes at the West Coast.”
“And we can’t take a chance on spooking it,” the captain said. “If we use your acoustic communications system and the sub intercepts one of your signals, it’s going to kick up to flank speed and run like hell. It’ll hide so far up under the ice that we’ll never get close to it.”
“I agree, sir,” Chief McPherson said. “We may just have to settle for cueing. Send the Mouse unit under the ice to do the job in full auto mode, with no external comms. If it finds anything, it comes back out, drives to the surface, and calls us on low-power UHF.”
“That’s detectable too,” one of the officers pointed out.
“True,” the chief said. “But only at short range line-of-sight, and not by the sub. The UHF signal might get intercepted by an aircraft, but a submerged submarine will never pick it up. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s probably the best we can do.”
“You’re probably right,” the captain said. “Can anyone suggest an alternative?”
No one spoke up.
; “Alright,” he said. “We go with the UHF, and stay away from underwater comms. If Mouse gets a hit, it comes to the surface and calls us on low-power UHF.”
He looked at Chief McPherson. “Continue, please.”
The chief leaned over the chart and the red symbol with her fingertip. “This is ‘datum.’ It’s the last known position of the submarine.”
She waved a hand in a big loop over the chart. “The maximum submerged speed of a Delta III is about 25 knots. If the sub is running pedal-to-the-metal, it could be 900 nautical miles from datum by now. In other words, it could be anywhere in the Sea of Okhotsk.”
Sheldon craned his neck to get a better view of the chart. “Why are you assuming that the sub is going to stay in the Sea of …” He paused. “How do you pronounce it again?”
The chief smiled. “The Sea of Okhotsk. We call it the Sea of O, for short.”
“Thanks,” Sheldon said. “So why are you assuming that the submarine is going to keep to the Sea of O? If it can run 900 miles in 36 hours, it could be through those islands and out into the Pacific right now.”
“We don’t think he’s going to come out,” Captain Bowie said. “As long as that sub skipper stays in there, he’s got the tactical advantage.”
“How so?” Sheldon asked.
“The Sea of Okhotsk is covered by the Siberian ice pack,” said Chief McPherson. “Ships can only get into the very southern end of the sea, because of the ice. As long as it stays in there, the sub can hide under the ice, where it’s protected. If he comes out into the open ocean, we’re going to eat his lunch, and he knows it.”
Ann set her coffee cup on the table. “Where do we fit into this? I assume you dragged us out here for a reason.”
“That submarine still has forty-five nuclear weapons on board,” Captain Bowie said. “We’ve been assigned to engage it before it launches another nuclear attack. Unfortunately, our options are extremely limited. Guns and missiles are no good against a submerged target, and we can’t use ASROC missiles because of the ice cover. That leaves torpedoes.”
