by Tom Clancy
“Perfect,” he said after three hours of work. It had to be perfect. Now it was. Under each table was a full meter of reinforced concrete footings. Once leveled, the legs were bolted into place so that each was a solid part of the earth.
“The tools must be so rigid?” Ghosn asked. Fromm shook his head.
“Quite the reverse. The tools float on a cushion of air.”
“But you said they weigh over a ton each!” Qati objected.
“Floating them on an air cushion is trivial—you’ve seen photographs of hovercraft weighing a hundred tons. Floating them is necessary to dampen out vibrations from the earth.”
“What tolerances are we seeking?” Ghosn asked.
“Roughly what one needs for an astronomical telescope,” the German replied.
“But the original bombs—”
Fromm cut Ghosn off. “The original American bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were crude embarrassments. They wasted almost all of their reaction mass, especially the Hiroshima weapon—you would not manufacture so crude a weapon any more than you would design a bomb with a burning gunpowder fuse, eh?
“In any case, you cannot use such a wasteful design,” Fromm went on. “After the first bombs, the American engineers had to face the problem that they had limited supplies of fissile material. That few kilos of plutonium over there is the most expensive material in the world. The plant needed to make it though nuclear bombardment costs billions, then comes the additional cost of separation, another plant, and another billion. Only America had the money to do the initial project. Everyone in the world knew about nuclear fission—it was no secret, what real secrets are there in physics, eh?—but only America had the money and resources to make the attempt. And the people,” Fromm added. “What people they had! So the first bombs—they made three, by the way—were designed to use all the available material, and because the main criterion was reliability, they were made to be crude but effective. And they required the largest aircraft in the world to carry them.
“Also ... then the war was won, and bomb-design became a professional study and not a frantic wartime project, ja? The plutonium reactor they have at Hanford turned out only a few tens of kilos of plutonium per year at the time, and the Americans had to learn to use the material more efficiently. The Mark-12 bomb was one of the first really advanced designs, and the Israelis improved it somewhat. That bomb has five times the yield of the Hiroshima device for less than a fifth of the reaction mass—twenty—fivefold improvement in efficiency, ja? And we can improve that by almost a factor of ten.
“Now a really expert design team with the proper facilities could advance that by another factor of ... perhaps four. Modern warheads are the most elegant, the most fascinating—”
“Two megatons?” Ghosn asked. Was it possible?
“We cannot do it here,” Fromm said, the sorrow manifest in his voice. “The available information is insufficient. The physics are straightforward, but there are engineering concerns, and there are no published articles to aid us in the bomb-design process. Remember that warhead tests are being carried out even today to make the bombs smaller and yet more efficient. One must experiment in this field as with any other, and we cannot experiment. Nor do we have the time or money to train technicians to execute the design. I could come up with a theoretical design for a megaton-plus device, but in truth it would have only a fifty-percent likelihood of success. Perhaps a little more, but it would not be a practical undertaking without a proper experimental-test program.”
“What can you do?” Qati asked.
“I can make this into a weapon with a nominal yield of between four hundred and five hundred kilotons. It will be roughly a cubic meter in size and weigh roughly five hundred kilos.” Fromm paused to read the looks on their faces. “It will not be an elegant device, and it will be overly bulky and heavy. It will also be quite powerful.” It would be far more clever in design than anything American or Russian technicians had managed in the first fifteen years of the nuclear age, and that, Fromm thought, wasn’t bad at all.
“Explosive containment?” Ghosn asked.
“Yes.” This young Arab was very clever, Fromm thought. “The first bombs used massive steel cases. Ours will use explosives—bulky but light, and just as effective. We will squirt tritium into the core at the moment of ignition. As in the original Israeli design, that will generate large quantities of neutrons to boost the fission reaction; that reaction in turn will blast additional neutrons into another tritium supply, causing a fusion reaction. The energy budget is roughly fifty kilotons from the primary and four hundred from the secondary.”
“How much tritium?” While not a difficult substance to obtain in small amounts—watchmakers and gunsight manufacturers used it, but only in microscopic quantities—Ghosn knew supplies over ten milligrams were virtually unobtainable, as he had just discovered himself. Tritium—not plutonium despite what Fromm had said—was the most expensive commercially available material on the planet. You could get tritium, but not plutonium.
“I have fifty grams,” Fromm announced smugly. “Far more than we can actually use.”
“Fifty grams!” Ghosn exclaimed. “Fifty?”
“Our reactor complex was manufacturing special nuclear material for our own bomb project. When the socialist government fell, it was decided to give the plutonium to the Soviets—loyalty to the world socialist cause, you see. The Soviets didn’t see things that way. Their reaction”—Fromm paused—“they called it ... well, I will leave that to your imagination. Their reaction was so strong that I decided to hide our tritium production. As you know it is very valuable commercially—my insurance policy, you might call it.”
“Where?”
“In the basement of my home, concealed in some nickel-hydrogen batteries.”
Qati didn’t like that, not one small bit. The Arab chieftain was not a well man, the German could see, and that did not help him conceal his feelings.
“I need to return to Germany in any case to get the machine tools,” he said.
“You have them?”
“Five kilometers from my home is the Karl Marx Astrophysical Institute. We were supposed to manufacture astronomical telescopes there, visual and X-ray telescopes. Alas, it never opened. Such a fine ‘cover’ wasted, eh? In the machine shop, in crates marked Astrophysical Instruments, are six high-precision, five-axis machines—the finest sort,” Fromm observed with a wolfish grin. “Cincinnati Milacron, from the United States of America. Precisely what the Americans use at their Oak Ridge, Rocky Flats, and Pantex fabrication plants.”
“What about operators?” Ghosn asked.
“We were training twenty of them, sixteen men and four women, each with a university degree.... No, that would be too dangerous. It is not really necessary in any case. The machines are ‘user-friendly,’ as they say. We could do the work ourselves, but that would take too much time. Any skilled lensmaker—even a master gunsmith, as a matter of fact—can operate them. What was the business of Nobel Prize winners fifty years ago is now the work of a competent machinist,” Fromm said. “Such is the nature of progress, ja?”
“It could be, then again it could not,” Yevgeniy said. He’d been on duty for twenty hours straight, and only six hours of fitful sleep separated that from yet another, longer stint.
Finding it, if that indeed was what they’d done, had taken all of Dubinin’s skill. He’d guessed that the American missile sub had headed south, and that her cruising speed was on the order of five knots. Next came environmental considerations. He’d had to stay close, within direct-path range, not allowing himself to come into a sonar convergence zone. The CZs were annular—donut—shaped areas around a vessel. Sound that went downward from a point within the convergence zone was refracted by the water temperature and pressure, traveling back and forth to the surface on a helical path at semiregular intervals that in turn depended on environmental conditions. By staying out of them, relative to where he thought his target was, h
e could evade one means of detection. To do that meant that he had to stay within theoretical direct-path distance, the area in which sound simply traveled radially from its source. To accomplish that without detection, he had to remain on the top side of the thermocline layer—he figured that the American would remain under it—while allowing his towed-array sonar to hang below it. In this way his own engine-plant noises would probably be deflected away from the American submarine.
Dubinin’s tactical problem lay in his disadvantages. The American submarine was quieter than his, and possessed both better sonars and better sonar-operators. Senior Lieutenant Yevgeniy Nikolayevich Rykov was a very bright young officer, but he was the only sonar expert aboard who might fairly be matched against his American counterparts, and the boy was burning himself out. Captain Dubinin’s only advantage lay in himself. He was a fine tactician, and knew it. And his American counterpart was not, Dubinin thought, and didn’t know it. There was a final disadvantage. By staying on top of the layer, he made counterdetection by an American patrol aircraft easier, but Dubinin was willing to run that risk. What lay before him was a prize such as no Russian submarine commander had ever grasped.
Both Captain and Lieutenant stared at a “waterfall” display, looking not at a strobe of light, but instead a disjointed, barely visible vertical line that wasn’t as bright as it should have been. The American Ohio-class was quieter than the background noise of the ocean, and both men wondered if somehow environmental conditions were showing them the acoustical shadow of that most sophisticated of missile submarines. It was just as likely, Dubinin thought, that fatigue was playing hallucinatory games with both of their minds.
“We need a transient,” Rykov said, reaching for his tea. “A dropped tool, a slammed hatch ... a mistake, a mistake....”
I could ping him ... I could duck below the layer and hit him with a blast of active sonar energy and find out ... NO! Dubinin turned away and nearly swore at himself. Patience, Valentin. They are patient, we must be patient.
“Yevgeniy Nikolay’ch, you look weary.”
“I can rest in Petropavlovsk, Captain. I will sleep for a week, and see my wife—well, I will not sleep entirely for that week,” he said with an exhausted grin. The Lieutenant’s face was illuminated by the yellow glow of the screen. “But I will not turn away from a chance like this one!”
“There will be no accidental transients.”
“I know, Captain. Those damned American crews ... I know it’s him, I know it’s an Ohio! What else could it be?”
“Imagination, Yevgeniy, imagination and too large a wish on our part.”
Lieutenant Rykov turned. “I think my captain knows better than that!”
“I think my lieutenant is right.” Such a game this is! Ship against ship, mind against mind. Chess in three dimensions, played in an ever-changing physical environment. And the Americans were the masters of the game. Dubinin knew that. Better equipment, better crews, better training. Of course the Americans knew that too, and two generations of advantage had generated arrogance rather than innovation ... not in all, but certainly in some. A clever commander in the missile submarine would be doing things differently.... If I had such a submarine, not all the world could find me!
“Twelve more hours, then we must break contact and turn for home.”
“Too bad,” Rykov observed, not meaning it. Six weeks at sea was enough for him.
“Make your depth six-zero feet,” the Officer of the Deck said.
“Make my depth six-zero feet, aye,” the Diving Officer replied. “Ten degrees up on the fairwater planes.”
The missile-firing drill had just begun. A regular occurrence, it was intended both to ensure the competence of the crew and desensitize them to their primary war-fighting mission, the launch of twenty-four UGM-93 Trident-II D-5 missiles, each with ten Mark 5 re-entry vehicles of 400 kilotons nominal yield. A total of two hundred forty warheads with a total net yield of 96 megatons. But there was more to it than that, since nuclear weapons depended on the interlocking logic of several physical laws. Small weapons employed their yield with greater efficiencies than larger ones. Most important of all, the Mark 5 RV had a demonstrated accuracy of ± 50 meters CEP (“Circular Error Probable”), meaning that after a flight of over four thousand nautical miles, half the warheads would land within 164.041 feet of their targets, and nearly all the rest within 300 feet. The “miss” distance was far smaller than the crater to be expected from such a warhead, as a result of which the D-5 missile was the first sea-launched ballistic missile with counterforce capability. It was designed for a disarming first-strike. Given the normal two-at-one targeting, Maine could eliminate 120 Soviet missiles and/or missile-control bunkers, roughly ten percent of the current Soviet ICBM force, which was itself configured for a counterforce mission.
In the missile-control center—MCC—aft of the cavernous missile room, a senior chief petty officer lit up his panel. All twenty-four birds were on line. On-board navigation equipment fed data into each missile-guidance system. It would be updated in a few minutes from orbiting navigation satellites. To hit a target, the missile had to know not only where the target was, but also where the missile itself was starting from. The NAVSTAR Global Positioning System could do that with a tolerance of less than five meters. The senior chief watched status lights change as missiles were interrogated by his computers and reported their readiness.
Around the submarine, water pressure on the hull diminished at a rate of 2.2 tons per square foot for every 100 feet of rise toward the surface. Maine’s hull expanded slightly as the pressure was relieved, and there was a tiny amount of noise as steel relaxed from the compression.
It was only a groan, scarcely audible even over the sonar systems and seductively close to the call of a whale. Rykov was so drunk with fatigue that had it come a few minutes later he would have missed it, but though his daydreams were getting the best of him, his mind retained enough of its sharpness to take note of the sound.
“Captain ... hull-popping noise ... right there!” His finger stabbed the screen, just at the bottom of the shadow he and Dubinin had been examining. “He’s coming shallow.”
Dubinin raced into the control room. “Stand by to change depth.” He put on a headset that connected him to Lieutenant Rykov.
“Yevgeniy Nikolay’ch, this must be done well and done quickly. I will drop below the layer just as the American goes over it.”
“No, Captain, you can wait. His array will hang below briefly, as ours would do!”
“Damn!” Dubinin almost laughed. “Forgive me, Lieutenant. For that, a bottle of Starka.” Which was the best Russian-made vodka.
“My wife and I will drink your health ... I’m getting an angle reading.... Estimate target five degrees depression from our array.... Captain, if I can hold him, the moment we lose him through the layer—”
“Yes, a quick range estimate!” It would be crude, but it would be something. Dubinin rasped quick orders to his tracking officer.
“Two degrees ... hull noises are gone ... this is very hard to hold, but he’s occulting the background a little more now—GONE! He’s through the layer now!”
“One, two, three ...” Dubinin counted. The American must be doing a missile drill, or coming up to receive communications, in any case he’d go to twenty meters depth, and his towed array ... five hundred meters long ... speed five knots, and ... Now!
“Helm, down five degrees on the bow planes. We’re going just below the layer. Starpom, make note of outside water temperature. Gently, helm, gently ...”
Admiral Lunin dipped her bow and slid below the undulating border that marked the difference between relatively warm surface water and colder deep water.
“Range?” Dubinin asked his tracking officer.
“Estimate between five and nine thousand meters, Captain! Best I can do with the data.”
“Well done, Kolya! Splendid.”
“We’re below the layer now, water temperature
down five degrees!” the Starpom called.
“Bow planes to zero, level out.”
“Planes to zero, Captain ... zero angle on the boat.”
Had there been enough overhead room, Dubinin would have leaped off his feet. He’d just done what no other Soviet submarine commander—and if his intelligence information was right, only a handful of Americans—had ever done. He’d established contact with and tracked an American Ohio-class fleet ballistic-missile submarine. In a war situation he’d be able to fire off ranging pings with his active sonar and launch torpedoes. He’d stalked the world’s most elusive game, and was close enough for a killing shot. His skin tingled from the excitement of the moment. Nothing in the world could match this feeling. Nothing at all.
“Ryl nepravo,” he said next. “Right rudder, new course three-zero-zero. Increase speed slowly to ten knots.”
“But, Captain ...” his Starpom—executive officer—said.
“We’re breaking contact. He’ll continue this drill for at least thirty minutes. It is very unlikely that we can evade counterdetection when he concludes it. Better to leave now. We do not want him to know what we have done. We will meet this one again. In any case our mission is accomplished. We have tracked him, and we got close enough to launch our attack. At Petropavlovsk, men, there will be much drinking, and your captain will do the buying! Now let’s clear the area quietly so that he will not know that we were ever here.”
Captain Robert Jefferson Jackson wished he was younger, wished that his hair was still completely black, that he could again be a young “nugget” fresh from Pensacola, ready to take his first hop in one of the forbidding fighter aircraft that sat like enormous birds of prey along the flight line at Oceana Naval Air Station. That all twenty-four of the F-14D Tomcats in the immediate area were his was not as satisfying as the knowledge that one was his and his alone. Instead, as Commander Air Group, he “owned” two Tomcat squadrons, two more of F/A- 18 Hornets, one of A-6E Intruder medium-attack aircraft, another of S-3 submarine hunters, and finally the less glamorous tankers, electronic-warfare Prowlers, and rescue/ASW helicopters. A total of seventy-eight birds with an aggregate value of ... what? A billion dollars? Much more if you considered replacement cost. Then there were the three thousand men who flew and serviced the aircraft, each of whom was beyond price, of course. He was responsible for all of it. It was much more fun to be a new fighter pilot who drove his personal airplane and left the worrying to management. Robby was now management, the guy the kids talked about in their cabins on the ship. They didn’t want to be called into his office, because that was like going to see the Principal. They didn’t really like flying with him, because (A) he was too old to be good at it anymore (they thought), and (B) he’d tell them whatever he thought they were doing wrong (fighter pilots do not often admit mistakes, except among themselves).
