USS DEVILFISH
“Firing-point procedures,” Pacino said, “tube two. Target One. Set for passive circler, range 15,000 yards. ASH disabled.”
“Ship ready,” from Stokes.
“Solution ready,” from Brayton.
“Weapon ready,” from Bahnhoff.
“Shoot on last sonar bearing!” Pacino ordered.
“Set!” Stokes said.
“Stand by” — Bahnhoff.
“Shoot” — Pacino.
“Shit” — Bahnhoff.
The Weapons Officer looked up from the fire-control console. “Loss of fire-control, sir.” Bahnhoff’s voice sounded dead. The three video screens of the Mark I fire-control system had winked out, their blind eyes staring back at Pacino. Suddenly the crowded room and the residual heat from back aft seemed to overcome the arctic cold on the outside of the hull. The room seemed to be baking at 200 degrees.
Pacino wiped sweat off his forehead. Rapier pulled off his headset. No sense worrying about the plots and sonar now. “Well, that’s it. Captain. Unless you want to restart the reactor.”
“Check the battery,” Pacino told him. Rapier picked up a phone. “Eng, how long on the battery?” Rapier listened, hung up, face grim. “Ten minutes, Captain. Not enough if we started her up right now.” Pacino stared into the distance.
“Well?” Rapier asked.
“Well what?” Pacino said quietly.
“Are you going to order a reactor-restart or not?”
Pacino shook his head. “Not yet, XO. Sit tight.”
Rapier started to say something, decided against it and shut his mouth.
ATLANTIC OCEAN
FORTY MILES EAST OF NORFOLK, VIRGINIA
The SSN-X-27 nuclear-tipped cruise missile flew on at a speed just under 800 clicks. The surface raced toward the missile, giving it the impression of even greater velocity due to the low altitude. The missile calculated. In a few minutes the sand of Virginia Beach would be slipping under the fuselage. Ahead, the horizon was lit with lights from the beach, hotels, restaurants, boardwalk illumination, even just after four in the morning, even on this off-season December Sunday.
The missile computed a navigation fix from the stars overhead and judged itself just a hair off course to the south. It rotated the engine nozzle to the right, then back amidships as the course was corrected. Now the flight path was perfect. Seven kilometers from the beach now. Time to begin the arming sequence. After a self-check of the detonator, the missile rotated a thick metal plate so that two holes lined up. Which put the central detonator in line with the main explosion train for the six specially shaped trinitrotoluene charges. The arming sequence complete, the missile settled into its ride. At ten meters altitude the missile screamed in over the sand of Virginia Beach, 35 kilometers from Norfolk Naval Station, 37 from COMSUBLANT and CINCLANTFLEET headquarters. The hotels and T-shirt shops zipped by beneath the missile’s fuselage. Minutes till detonation. Now the missile flew over the outer boundary of the Navy’s military complex, starting with the administrative buildings and supply depot area and flying on over the headquarters buildings of COMSUBLANT and CINCLANTFLEET. At the same time electromagnetic pulses were washing over its fuselage from the Navy EA-6B electronic warfare jet, now fifteen miles astern of it.
NORFOLK, VIRGINIA
COMSUBLANT HEADQUARTERS
Admiral Richard Donchez rubbed his bald head as he tried to focus on the surface of the desk. He felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Admiral? Sir, it’s an emergency, wake up, sir.” Donchez checked his watch. Just after four o’clock in the morning, Sunday. He had dozed off in Flag Plot after putting his head on the desk at two in the morning. Pain filled him, he hadn’t felt this way since commanding the Piranha years before. In spite of his own promise to himself he had not been able to stay away from Flag Plot. In fact, for the entire weekend he had decided to camp out in his headquarters, Christmas holiday notwithstanding. And as the sole flag officer in a duty station at this time on a Sunday morning he was also SOPA — Senior Officer Present Ashore. Which meant that, nominally, he spoke for COMAIRLANT, COMSURFLANT and CINCLANTFLEET. He was it. All of it.
He looked up and found himself surrounded. The watch officer. Lieutenant Commander Kodiak, the young Cherokee Indian, was in front. On his left, Lieutenant Vinny Bentson, an intelligence officer. On Kodiak’s right. Senior Chief Ron Carter, a communications specialist and the leading technician on the watchsection.
“What is it?” he asked Kodiak.
“Sir, we’ve got a flash OPREP-3 PINNACLE from the Billfish, 155 nautical miles due east. She sank an AKULA-class sub, after it fired a cruise missile. The AKULA is on the bottom but the missile is still incoming. Probable target is Norfolk, targeted for us, sir. And it’s an SSN-X-27. The warhead’s a one-megaton hydrogen bomb.”
Donchez struggled for control. The missile coming in was obviously a warshot, the Russians would never take risks like this to launch dummies. This was his fault. If he had been more persuasive, more forceful with Admiral McGee… His eyes refocused on Kodiak as thirty years of training began to take over. His actions became almost automatic.
“Kodiak,” he said quickly, “how many missiles did you say were coming in?”
“One, sir. Aim point, Norfork.”
“Does the White House have the word? And the Pentagon?”
“Yes and yes. Admiral. We’re confirming their receipt now.”
Donchez’s thoughts were racing. This was probably the leading edge of a time-on-target attack, or a miscoordinated attack. Or perhaps even a deliberately uncoordinated attack. Fire when ready. Donchez glanced quickly up at the plot-room wall, at the Atlantic chart with the flashing red X’s.
“Kodiak, get in touch with COMAIRLANT’s shack and scramble an EA-6 electronic warfare jet and a Hawkeye radar aircraft if they’ve got one. I don’t care if it’s land based or in the near Atlantic, we need radar surveillance for any more cruise missiles. Scramble as many attack aircraft as they can fuel and load out. The immediate threat is the missile coming in now. Get that one shot down, then let’s worry about any more. Go!”
Kodiak ran to the NESTOR secure voice phone.
“Bentson,” Donchez barked, “open the SAS safe. Get the operational authenticator for today. I want the military put on alert. DEFCON ONE”
Bentson ran off, grabbing an officer with the combination to the inner safe.
“Senior Chief,” Donchez said to Carter, “send a flash message to the submarine fleet offshore: Anyone in trail watch for any sign of launch transients. Any false moves, the trailing unit is to sink their contact. If a submarine is not in trail then by God get in trail. Get a flash message to the Allentown off Severomorsk. Tell them to stay at periscope depth and be in UHF satellite reception at all times. Second, prepare to fire a twelve-missile salvo of Javelin cruise missiles at targets on my order.”
Carter read back his notes, got a nod from Donchez and disappeared. Donchez reached for a secure phone, and ordered the operator to patch him into the White House Situation Room. He reeled off the OPREP-3 details, had them read it back to make sure the President got the straight story, hung up and dialed Admiral McGee. Thirty seconds later Donchez had a helicopter on the way to McGee’s house.
“How we doing on time, Kodiak?” Donchez asked.
“Four minutes since the launch, sir.”
“We got planes up yet?” Kodiak had a radiotelephone handset screwed into one ear.
“The Enterprise had an EA-6B on standby just in case. Admiral McGee’s orders, sir. The EA-6 is airborne, about two-hundred miles northeast, and should be reporting in on possible radar contact on the missile.”
“Well, that’s all just fine but it’s useless unless we can get an attack plane to shoot the bitch down.”
“Yes sir, we’ve got an F-14 that was doing night-landing quals at Oceana Naval Air Station just a few minutes ago.”
“Good.”
“But, sir, he needs a missi
le loadout. The F-14 is taxiing in now at the Oceana squadron hangar. The duty weapons crew is outfitting him with some Mongoose heatseeking missiles. He should be ready any minute.”
“Dammit, Kodiak, tell them to move. That missile is coming in at 650 miles an hour. We got nine, ten more minutes tops.”
“Yes sir, I’m in contact with Oceana’s tower now.” Chief Carter called to Donchez from across the room.
“Sir. Admiral. The President’s on Secure One.” As Donchez reached for the secure phone he gave Kodiak another order.
“Lieutenant, get that F-14 airborne. It’s the only game in town.” He put the phone to his ear. “Donchez here. Mister President…”
MOSCOW
THE KREMLIN
RUSSIAN PRESIDENT’S CONFERENCE ROOM
Colonel Dretzski had had a contingency plan in case Novskoyy’s plan failed. Now that the Novskoyy plan had stumbled, with one missile in the sky and the rest of the deployed ships apparently having decided not to fire, Dretzski decided to reveal his hand to the President. Now the emphasis should be on keeping Russia from getting hit with a retaliatory strike.
Dretzski wondered what had happened, why Novskoyy had decided to launch instead of strong-arming both superpowers as he had promised. Further, once he did elect to shoot, why had the fleet refused to fire, why did only one boat decide to launch? Was it a problem with the radios? Ironic if Novskoyy’s grand, ego-driven plan had ended up being undone by a faulty circuit chip.
Dretzski had been encamped at Yasenevo, headquarters of the photographic intelligence raw-data section, monitoring the photo-reconnaissance satellites. He had been there all weekend, napping a few hours between satellite passes, awake for the coverage of the U.S. east coast. He was exhausted. The conference room he was in now bore little resemblance to the Spartan qualities of the FED. The room was fit for an old-fashioned American Robber Baron: the huge hearth big enough to roast a pig in, logs crackling and warming the room, a table stretching on and on in mahogany splendor with deep leather chairs set about it, the high ceiling inlaid with gold, the walls panelled with hand carved wood, the furniture seemingly from the days of Catherine the Great.
Dretzski sat near the end of the table near the President.
On the other side were General Pallin, FED chief, who looked ready to kill Dretzski, and Maksoy, head of the KGB, who looked abstracted. Admiral Barisov was, strangely, on Dretzski’s side of the table, as well as Defense Minister Fasimov. Foreign Minister Kirova was absent. What a meeting to miss, Dretzski thought.
Dretzski began. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, turning to the President, “this is an emergency. Just moments ago, in our monitoring Admiral Novskoyy’s deployment exercise we detected on a satellite infrared scanner an actual cruise missile launch off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia, USA …” Dretzski paused. He had the room’s full attention.
“Dretzski,” the President said, his face suddenly tense, “are you saying there was an accident? That someone accidentally launched a missile?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Must be an exercise weapon,” Maksoy said, coming awake. “We destroyed our warshots, the U.N. monitored it.”
“That thought occurred to us also,” Dretzski said, and considered that they would know soon enough what Novskoyy had been up to, that his plan was falling apart… better for Ivan Ivanovich Dretzski if they heard it from him, as if he himself had been the hero who uncovered the conspiracy. He would not be popular but at least he should escape being imprisoned. “Just after our last meeting,” he continued, “I ordered an FED team to check the disposal sites of the SSN-X-27 missiles that had supposedly been dismantled by the U.N.—”
“And?” the President demanded.
“We found, sir, that the warheads destroyed, the presumably plutonium nuclear warheads, were not plutonium. They were clay, doped with alpha and gamma and neutron radiation sources. The solid rocket fuel turned out to be clay also, with special granules and coloring so it looked to be the real thing. The team leader personally put a match to some of the rocket fuel. It should have exploded and killed him. Instead… The word from the inspection team, unfortunately, just reached us moments ago, as the missile was launched.”
“So where did the warshots go?” Admiral Barisov put in.
“Aboard the Northern Fleet’s attack submarines. And they are, as we speak, cruising at hold positions less than two-hundred kilometers off the American Atlantic coast.”
“Does this mean what I think it does?” the President said, face not only tense but growing red.
“It means, sir, that Admiral Alexi Novskoyy’s fleet is armed with warshot SSN-X-27 nuclear land-attack cruise missiles, armed for an attack on the eastern United States…”
The President’s mouth opened and shut several times, and for a moment Dretzski wondered if he was having a heart attack. After a moment, he seemed to get hold of himself, at least to demand recommendations. Dretzski was ready. “Sir, I suggest getting on the hotline to the American President. Tell him you were deceived, which is the truth. Tell him what Novskoyy has. Suggest his navy blow the Northern Fleet to the bottom of the sea for all our sakes. I recommend you do not send our aircraft or ships in that direction — it would just seem an added threat. I would also, sir, recommend a radio message to the fleet telling them that Novskoyy has made himself an international criminal and that they are to reject any plan for hostilities, surface and head home.”
The President, without a word, motioned to Fasimov and Admiral Barisov to follow him and hurried out of the room, apparently headed for the Communication Center. They don’t always shoot the messenger, Dretzski thought.
BARENTS SEA
TEN NAUTICAL MILES OFF SEVEROMORSK NAVAL COMPLEX
USS ALLENTOWN
Commander Henry Duckett looked at the OPREP-3 message from COMSUBLANT ordering Allentown to prepare to fire, then handed it to the OOD, who read it and looked up in astonishment.
“Man silent battle stations,” Duckett said, wondering if this were for real and trying to suppress the thought.
OOD Lieutenant William Mills stepped to the firing panel and called up the firing-and-targeting-mode menu for launch-tube number one, paged down to tube two and on down the list to the last three tubes — ten, eleven and twelve. Ten miles off a major Russian naval base was the firing position. After the first missile a radar was bound to find them, a destroyer or cruiser bound to come and depth charge them into scrap metal. Mills thought. It seemed Allentown had just become a new word for expendable.
CHAPTER 19
SUNDAY, 19 DECEMBER, 0931 GREENWICH MEAN TIME
VIRGINIA BEACH, VIRGINIA
OCEANA NAVAL AIR STATION
Lieutenant Commander Todd Nikels fastened both latches of his oxygen mask to his flight helmet. The weapon-loading team had just completed the Mongoose missile-loadout. There had been only time to load two of the air-to-air heatseekers — both missiles were aboard, one below each wing of the F-14 supersonic fighter. Nikels waved to the Weapons Officer and keyed up the throttles. His engines had been idling during the loadout in violation of navy ordinance-loading procedures but this was an emergency.
“Oceana Tower, this is Valley Forge,” Nikels said into his radio set. ‘Taxiing to zero eight now. Request takeoff clearance and a vector to the northwest.”
“Valley Forge, roger, cleared for takeoff runway zero eight, climbout on three two five.” Nikels was almost reckless with the big jet fighter as he turned the taxiway corner. He had never taxied the aircraft this fast before, but he understood he had only minutes, maybe seconds.
Nikels’ backseater, the radar intercept officer, was Lieutenant Brad Tollson, a Virginia native. Tollson had just returned from a tour at Pax River’s Test Pilot School, a rival to Nikels’ own most recent school. Top Gun. The products of each school seemed to think they were God’s gift to aviation. Normally the crew of an F-14 Tomcat was the best two-man team in the Navy, but so far Nikels hadn’t been able to figure out the
stony Tollson.
The lights of the runway were lined up in front of Nikels’ canopy in the predawn darkness, the neat twin lines inviting him up to the heavens. He pushed the keys to the stops with full afterburners and the F-14 began its takeoff roll. As the jets came up to full thrust he felt the acceleration push him back into the seat, pull the flesh of his face back, every blood cell wanting to pool in his back and buttocks. The takeoff roll seemed to take forever, but at last the airspeed needle pointed to 170 knots. Nikels pulled the stick gently back, giving the wings just enough lift to pull the jet away from the concrete, retracted the wheels and flaps with one motion of his left hand. Now streamlined, the jet surged ahead, airspeed coming up to 300 knots. He turned left in a three-g turn and headed toward his intercept point with the cruise missile. In the background he could hear Tollson talking with the EA6B radar plane, calling a vector up to him to close the missile. At an altitude of 100 feet Nikels swept back the wings of the F-14 and went supersonic, and within two minutes it seemed that half of Virginia Beach’s glass windows were broken from the sonic booms. Nikels had no time to worry about a little glass.
ARCTIC OCEAN
BENEATH THE POLAR ICECAP
FS KALININGRAD
Captain 3rd Rank Dmitri Ivanov stared at Admiral Novskoyy, wishing Captain Vlasenko were in command instead of under arrest.
“Admiral,” Ivanov said. “We must continue to the east, we must not drive this ship into the blast radius of the Magnum.” Novskoyy suddenly felt a heavy fatigue. Unless he could get back to the polynya and somehow transmit the molniya, his plan would fail. It might already be failing. If an American submarine had come for him here, what had they already done to the ships of his fleet? And here this Ivanov wanted to run away like a woman.
“Men are dying right now, our fellow submariners,” Novskoyy told him. “The entire Northern Fleet is off the American east coast. I must warn them. I am certain they are being hunted down right now. Just as the American submarine was sent here to hunt us down. We must get back to the polynya, we must turn back to the west.”
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