by Tom Clancy
“Kinda thin, aren’t they?” Dutch Claggett observed.
Maine had to stay near the surface. At this alert level, she had to be ready to launch in minutes. Ordinarily they could have gone to a deeper depth, if for no other reason than to reduce the horrible motion the ship was taking right now from surface turbulence, but her reduced speed made coming up too time-consuming.
“How close is Omaha?” the chief engineer asked.
“Probably within a hundred miles, and there’s P-3s at Kodiak—but we still have that Akula out there to worry about,”
Claggett said. “Sir, we can hang tough right here and wait it out.”
“No, we have a hurt boomer. We need some kind of support.”
“That means radiating,” the XO pointed out.
“We’ll use a SLOT buoy.”
“At two knots through the water, that doesn’t buy us much, sir. Captain, radiating is a mistake.”
Ricks looked at his chief engineer, who said, “I like the idea of having a friend around.”
“So do I,” the Captain said. It didn’t take long. The buoy was on the surface in seconds and immediately began broadcasting a short message in UHF. It was programmed to continue broadcasting for hours.
“We’re going to have a nationwide panic on our hands,” Fowler said. That was not his most penetrating observation. He had a growing panic in his own command center, and knew it. “Is there anything coming out of Denver?”
“Nothing on any commercial TV or radio channel that I know of,” a voice at NORAD replied.
“Okay, you people stand by.” Fowler searched his panel for another button.
“FBI Command Center. Inspector O’Day speaking.”
“This is the President,” Fowler said unnecessarily. It was a direct line and the light on the FBI panel was neatly labeled. “Who’s in charge down there?”
“I am Deputy Assistant Director Murray, Mr. President. I’m the senior man at the moment.”
“How are your communications?”
“They’re okay, sir. We have access to the military commsats.”
“One thing we have to worry about is a nationwide panic. To prevent that, I want you to send people to all the TV network headquarters. I want your people to explain to them that they may not broadcast anything about this. If necessary, you are directed to use force to prevent it.”
Murray didn’t like that. “Mr. President, that is against—”
“I know the law, okay? I used to be a prosecutor. This is necessary to preserve life and order, and it will be done, Mr. Murray. That is a Presidential Order. Get to it.”
“Yes, sir.”
38
FIRST CONTACTS
The various communications-satellite operators were fiercely independent companies and very often ruthless competitors, but they were not enemies. Between them were agreements informally called treaties. There was always the possibility that one satellite or another could go down, whether from an internal breakdown or collision with space debris that was becoming a real worry for them. Accordingly, there were mutual-assistance agreements specifying that in the event one operator lost a bird, his associates would take up the slack, just as newspapers in the same city traditionally agreed to share printing facilities in the event of a fire or natural disaster. To back up these agreements, there were open phone lines between the various corporate headquarters. Intelsat was the first to call Telstar.
“Bert, we just had two birds go down,” Intelsat’s duty engineer reported in a slightly shaken voice. “What gives?”
“Shit, we just lost three, and Westar 4 and Teleglobe are down, too. We’ve had complete system failures here. Running checks now—you?”
“Same here, Bert. Any ideas?”
“None. We’re talking like nine birds down, Stacy. Fuck!” The man paused. “Ideas? Wait a minute, getting something ... okay, it’s software. We’re interrogating 301 now ... they got spiked ... Jesus! 301 got spiked on over a hundred freqs! Somebody just tried to zorch us.”
“That’s how it looks here, too. But who?”
“Sure as hell wasn’t a hacker ... this would take megawatts to do that on just one channel.”
“Bert, that’s exactly what I’m getting. Phone links, everything spiked at once. You in any hurry to light them back up?”
“You kidding me? I got a billion worth of hardware up there. Till I find out what the hell clobbered them, they stay down. I’ve got my senior VP on the way in now. The Pres was out in Denver,” Bert added.
“Mine, too, but my chief engineer is snowed in. Damned if I’m going to put my ass on the line. I think we should cooperate on this, Bert.”
“No arguments with me, Stace. I’ll whistle up Fred Kent at Hughes and see what he thinks. It’ll take awhile for us to review everything and do full systems checks. I’m staying down until I know—and I mean know—what happened here. We got an industry to protect, man.”
“Agreed. I won’t light back up without talking to you.”
“Keep me posted on anything you find out?”
“You got it, Bert. I’ll be back to you in an hour one way or another.”
The Soviet Union is a vast country, by far the largest in the world both in area and in the expanse of its borders. All of those borders are guarded, since both the current country and all its precursors have been invaded many times. Border defenses include the obvious—troop concentrations, airfields, and radar posts—and the subtle, like radio reception antennas. The latter were designed to listen in on radio and other electronic emissions. The information was passed on by landline or microwave links to Moscow Center, the headquarters of the Committee for State Security, the KGB, at #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square. The KGB’s Eighth Chief Directorate is tasked to communications intelligence and communications security. It has a long and distinguished history that has benefited from another traditional Russian strength, a fascination with theoretical mathematics. The relationship between ciphers and mathematics is a logical one, and the most recent manifestation of this was the work of a bearded, thirtyish gnome of a man who was fascinated with the work of Benoit Mandelbrot at Harvard University, the man who had effectively invented fractal geometry. Uniting this work with that of MacKenzie’s work on Chaos Theory at Cambridge University in England, the young Russian genius had invented a genuinely new theoretical way of looking at mathematical formulae. It was generally conceded by that handful of people who understood what he was talking about that his work was easily worth a Planck Medal. It was an historical accident that his father happened to be a General in the KGB’s Chief Border Guards Directorate, and that as a result the Committee for State Security had taken immediate note of his work. The mathematician now had everything a grateful Motherland could offer, and someday he’d probably have that Planck Medal also.
He’d needed two years to make his theoretical breakthrough into something practical, but fifteen months earlier he’d made his first “recovery” from the U.S. State Department’s most secure cipher, called STRIPE. Six months after that he’d proven conclusively that it was similar in structure to everything the U.S. military used. Cross-checking with another team of crypt-analysts who had access to the work of the Walker spy ring, and the even more serious work done by Pelton, what had resulted only six months earlier was a systematic penetration of American encryption systems. It was still not perfect. Daily keying procedures occasionally proved impossible to break. Sometimes they went as much as a week without recovering one message, but they’d gone as many as three days recovering over half of what they received, and their results were improving by the month. Indeed, the main problem seemed to be that they didn’t have the computer hardware to do all the work they should have been able to do, and the Eighth Directorate was busily training more linguists to handle the message traffic they were receiving.
Sergey Nikolayevich Golovko had been awakened from a sound sleep and driven to his office to add his name to the people all over the world shocked into frighte
ned sobriety. A First Chief Directorate man all of his life, his job was to examine the collective American mind and advise his President on what was going on. The decrypts flooding onto his desk were the most useful tool.
He had no less than thirty such messages which bore one of two messages. All strategic forces were being ordered to Defense Condition Two, and all conventional forces were coming to Defense Condition Three. The American President was panicking, KGB’s First Deputy Chairman thought. There was no other explanation. Was it possible that he thought the Soviet Union had committed this infamy? That was the most frightening thought of his life.
“Another one, naval one.” The messenger dropped it on his desk.
Golovko needed only one look. “Flash this to the Navy immediately.” He had to call his President with the rest. Golovko lifted the phone.
For once the Soviet bureaucracy worked quickly. Minutes later, an extremely low-frequency signal went out, and the submarine Admiral Lunin went to the surface to copy the full message. Captain Dubinin read it as the printer generated it.
AMERICAN SUBMARINE USS MAINE REPORTS LOCATION AS 50D-55M-09sN 153D-01M-23sW. PROPELLER DISABLED BY COLLISION OF UNKNOWN CAUSE. Dubinin left the communications room and made for the chart table.
“Where were we when we copied that transient?”
“Here, Captain, and the bearing was here.” The navigator traced the line with his pencil.
Dubinin just shook his head. He handed the message over. “Look at this.”
“What do you suppose he’s doing?”
“He’ll be close to the surface. So ... we’ll go up, just under the layer, and we’ll move quickly. Surface noise will play hell with his sonar. Fifteen knots.”
“You suppose he was following us?”
“Took you long enough to realize that, didn’t it?” Dubinin measured the distance to the target. “Very proud, this one. We’ll see about that. You know how the Americans boast of taking hull photographs? Now, my young lieutenant, now it will be our turn!”
“What does this mean?” Narmonov asked the First Deputy Chairman.
“The Americans have been attacked by forces unknown, and the attack was serious, causing major loss of life. It is to be expected that they will increase their military readiness. A major consideration will be the maintenance of public order,” Golovko replied over the secure phone line.
“And?”
“And, unfortunately, all their strategic weapons happen to be aimed at the Rodina. ”
“But we had no part in this!” the Soviet President objected.
“Correct. You see, such responses are automatic. They are planned in advance and become almost reflexive moves. Once attacked, you become highly cautious. Countermoves are planned in advance so that you may act rapidly while applying your intellectual capacities to an analysis of the problem without additional and unnecessary distractions.”
The Soviet President turned to his Defense Minister. “So, what should we do?”
“I advise an increase in our alert status. Defensive-only, of course. Whoever conducted this attack might, after all, attempt to strike us also.”
“Approved,” Narmonov said bluntly. “Highest peacetime alert.”
Golovko frowned at his telephone receiver. His choice of words had been exquisitely correct: reflexive. “May I make a suggestion?”
“Yes,” the Defense Minister said.
“If it is possible, perhaps it would be well to tell our forces the reason for the alert. It might lessen the shock of the order.”
“It’s a needless complication,” Defense thought.
“The Americans have not done this,” Golovko said urgently, “and that was almost certainly a mistake. Please consider the state of mind of people suddenly taken from ordinary peacetime operations to an elevated state of alert. It will only require a few additional words. Those few words could be important.”
“Good idea,” Narmonov thought. “Make it so,” he ordered Defense.
“We will soon hear from the Americans on the Hot Line,” Narmonov said. “What will they say?”
“That is hard to guess, but whatever it is, we should have a reply ready for them, just to settle things down, to make sure they know we had nothing to do with it.”
Narmonov nodded. That made good sense. “Start working on it.”
The Soviet defense-communications agency operators grumbled at the signal they’d been ordered to dispatch. For ease of transmission, the meat of the signal should have been contained in a single five-letter code group that could be transmitted, decrypted, and comprehended instantly by all recipients, but that was not possible now. The additional sentences had to be edited down to keep the transmission from being too long. A major did this, got it approved by his boss, a major general, and sent it out over no less than thirty communications links. The message was further altered to apply to specific military services.
The Admiral Lunin had only been on her new course for five minutes when a second ELF signal arrived. The communications officer fairly ran into the control room with it.
GENERAL ALERT LEVEL TWO. THERE HAS BEEN A NUCLEAR DETONATION OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN IN THE UNITED STATES. AMERICAN STRATEGIC AND CONVENTIONAL FORCES HAVE BEEN ALERTED FOR POSSIBLE WAR. ALL NAVAL FORCES WILL SORTIE AT ONCE. TAKE ALL NECESSARY PROTECTIVE MEASURES.
“Has the world gone mad?” the Captain asked the message. He got no reply. “That’s all?”
“That is all, no cueing to put the antenna up.”
“These are not proper instructions,” Dubinin objected. “‘All necessary protective measures’? What do they mean by that? Protecting ourselves, protecting the Motherland—what the hell do they mean?”
“Captain,” the Starpom said, “General Alert Two carries its own rules of action.”
“I know that,” Dubinin said, “but do they apply here?”
“Why else would the signal have been sent?”
A Level Two General Alert was something unprecedented for the Soviet Military. It meant that the rules of action were not those of a war, but not those of peace either. Though Dubinin, like every other Soviet ship captain, fully understood his duties, the implications of the order seemed far too frightening. The thought passed, however. He was a naval officer. He had his orders. Whoever had given those orders must have understood the situation better than he. The commanding officer of the Admiral Lunin stood erect and turned to his second in command.
“Increase speed to twenty-five knots. Battle stations.”
It happened just as fast as men could move. The New York FBI office, set in the Jacob Javits Federal Office Building on the southern end of Manhattan, dispatched its men north, and the light Sunday traffic made it easy. The unmarked but powerful cars screamed uptown to the various network headquarters buildings. The same thing happened in Atlanta, where agents left the Martin Luther King Building for CNN Headquarters. In each case, no fewer than three agents marched into the master control rooms and laid down the law: Nothing from Denver would go out. In no case did the network employees know why this was so, so busy were they trying to reestablish contact. The same thing happened in Colorado, where, under the direction of Assistant Special-Agent-in-Charge Walter Hoskins, the local field division’s agents invaded all the network affiliates, and the local phone company, where they cut all long-distance lines over the furious objections of the Bell employees. But Hoskins had made one mistake. It came from the fact that he didn’t watch much television.
KOLD was an independent station that was also trying to become a superstation. Like TBS, WWOR, and a few others, it had its own satellite link to cover a wide viewing area. A daring financial gamble, it had not yet paid off for the investors who were running the station on a highly leveraged shoestring out of an old and almost windowless building northeast of the city. The station used one of the Anik-series Canadian satellites and reached Alaska, Canada, and the North-Central U.S. reasonably well with its programming, which was mainly old network shows.
The KOLD building had once been Denver’s first network television station, and was constructed in the pattern originally required by the Federal Communications Commission in the 1930s: monolithic reinforced concrete, fit to survive an enemy bomb attack—the specifications predated nuclear weapons. The only windows were in the executive offices on the south side of the building. It was ten minutes after the event that someone passed by the open door of the program manager. He stopped cold, turned and ran back to the newsroom. In another minute a cameraman entered onto the freight elevator that ran all the way to the roof. The picture, hard-wired into the control room and then sent out on a Ku-band transmitter to the Anik satellite, which was untouched by earlier events, broke into the reruns of The Adventures of Dobie Gillis across Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, Idaho, and three Canadian provinces. In Calgary, Alberta, a reporter for a local paper who’d never got over her crush on Dwayne Hickman was startled by the picture and the voice-over, and called her city desk. Her breathless report went out at once on the Reuters wire. Soon thereafter, CBC uplinked the video to Europe on one of their unaffected Anik satellites.
By that time the Denver FBI had a pair of men entering the KOLD building. They laid down the law to a news crew that protested about the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which argument carried less weight than the men with guns who shut the power down to their transmitter. The FBI agents at least apologized as they did so. They needn’t have bothered. What had been a fool’s errand from the beginning was already an exercise in futility.
