World in Flames wi-3

by Ian Slater

  * * *

  Within five minutes of the Roosevelt’s surfacing, her VLF aerial was receiving the message from the E-6A TACAMO aircraft out of Reykjavik, Iceland, informing her that limited chemical and nuclear war had broken out in Korea and that “nuclear engagement” might soon occur on the European front. With this in mind, the president had authorized retaliatory strikes should the Russians… The message broke off, then resumed a few seconds later as Murmansk launched three ICBMs on North American trajectories despite the fact that Murmansk HQ, as they had seen clearly on their radar screens and as the TACAMO aircraft had advised them, knew that the Roosevelt’s ICBMs had not gone into intercontinental trajectory, had clearly been disarmed, and had been tracked to destruction on the ice cap. The TACAMO aircraft also advised the Roosevelt there was reason to suspect the Soviet leadership was in “disarray,” which, Zeldman pointed out, meant that no one knew who the hell was in charge of Moscow.

  As suddenly as they had picked up the TACAMO message, it ended, the aircraft disappearing from Roosevelt’s sail-mounted radar. Instead, what they did pick up were the trajectories of the Russian ICBMs. Brentwood did not hesitate and ordered two of the remaining missiles, the mid pair — three and four — launched. Firing Control, however, could not get number three to launch, the tube’s humidity control having gone haywire during the severe vibrations. Number four, however, was fired successfully, its launch flame buckling the fairings about the tube hatches, increasing the temperature inside the sub by ten degrees in less than four seconds.

  Soon the second of its three-stage boosters took over, the missile streaking into the stratosphere, its seven 330-kiloton warheads independently targeted on seven of Kola Peninsula’s major submarine and military bases. Even given a CEP— circular error probability — of plus or minus two thousand yards, the military targets, including the superhardened sub pens in Murmansk, chosen by Brentwood in retaliation for the Russian launch of the three SS-19 model 3s, were all certain to be destroyed.

  * * *

  Most of the Roosevelt’s crew had been evacuated to the ice through “charge-blown” exits through the hull. Their escape was so quick after the long, tension-filled hours behind them that for many, it had not yet sunk in. Yet leaving their submarine, despite the fact they had no choice, was an emotional affair. It was, had been, their home. They had made it so in a thousand little ways that, though conforming to regulation, permitted them to mark it with their singular and collective humanity. And now, in the gray darkness of the Arctic night, rugging up as best they could in their winter issue, they wondered if their fate on the ice cap would be any better than if they had gone down with the sub. For many submariners the sudden implosion of water was a better death than a lingering approximation of life.

  It was a torpedoman’s mate who, assigned as one of the lookouts while the rest of the crew — first those who had been wounded during the Alfa attack — were taken off, first noticed what he thought were “ice piles” jutting up on the endlessly depressing horizon. He was reinforced in this interpretation by the fact that the ice was moving in all about them and locking Roosevelt in. But after several minutes he realized that what he had thought were four dots, moving too low for a radar pickup, were heading ominously toward Roosevelt. Shivering in the Arctic cold, the bridge knuckled with ice, the torpedoman’s mate was struck by the ultimate irony that the most powerful warship ever made now sat as helpless as a beached whale, the black dots no longer four but five.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  As the Russian ICBMs, SS-19s, Model 3s — eighteen warheads in all — were being tracked on the big blue screens deep in Cheyenne Mountain, the mountain itself one of their targets, another being SAC HQ below Omaha, President Mayne stepped from the presidential helicopter at Andrews and boarded “Kneecap.” The 425-ton, 331-foot-long national emergency airborne command post aircraft, or “Doomsday” plane — piloted by Maj. Frank Shirer — was capable of staying airborne for seventy-two hours with refueling and with a ceiling of forty-five thousand feet.

  As the 747 rose above the blue hills of Virginia, mobile microwave relay and booster stations were being aligned, while the phone network into which signals from the plane’s five-mile-long, 5/8-inch cable could be fed into the silos and other elements of the triad were being repaired.

  From the line of twenty-eight stern-faced computer operators in Kneecap came the information that the targets of the seventeen missiles almost certainly included Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, Omaha, Nebraska, the Trident SLBM sub bases at Bangor, Washington, Kings Bay, and the Trident tracking facilities at Point Magu in California and Cape Canaveral. The remaining eleven 550-kiloton warheads were expected to zero in on the MX silos in the Midwest.

  The situation, bad as it was, became more terrible because of what General Carlisle, SAC’s commander, who had already launched Stealth fighter intercepts to fire “spoiler” rockets and B-1 bombers with cruise missiles, told the president in the last phone call he would ever make — that they were faced with the “old north/south problem.”

  President Mayne and Paul Trainor, sitting before the banks of small TV screens in the presidential command room aboard Kneecap, knew Carlisle wasn’t talking about the Civil War. The old north/south problem was the fact, not generally known among either the public at large or the military, that all tests of Soviet ICBMs had, for no other reason than the geography of the country, been carried out on east/west axes and not on north/south axes, which, in any hostile launch, such as the one now on the way, would be the axis used in attacking the United States.

  To the man in the street, a missile, like a bullet, presumably operated the same way, no matter in what direction it was fired. But, as the president’s aides explained, missiles, due to the necessity of accurately predicting trajectories that would leave the earth’s atmosphere and then reenter it, were not only subject to wind and weather in general but were particularly dependent upon the shifts in the earth’s magnetic field. It was the reason why, even under the most favorable atmospheric circumstances, a missile still had a circular error probability.

  This rather esoteric mathematical consideration translated into a monumental decision for the president because of the fact that, unlike the Soviet Union, many U.S. missiles, such as the Tridents deployed in nuclear sub storage areas such as Bangor, near Seattle, were close to, if not part of, American cities. How could the president know, given the vicissitudes of missiles’ circular error probability, whether the Russians were in fact engaging in “counterforce”—antimilitary — or “countervalue”—anticity — attacks, when so many American bases, unlike many in the Soviet Union, were often part of an American city?

  On one level the question seemed purely academic — even, as the president acknowledged, cold-blooded — but it was nevertheless one he had to entertain, for he would not have much time to decide what the Russian strategy was. And if he made the wrong decision — to go countervalue rather than counterforce in any retaliatory strike — it could mean an escalation that could result in utter annihilation for both countries’ industries and most of their people. Could he confine retaliatory strikes to military targets like those selected by the Roosevelt’s captain when he had fired an SLBM in retaliation for the Russians’ multiple ICBM launch?

  Then Kneecap received a flash message that one of the SS-19s had exploded in a nonnuclear detonation during reentry, its warheads tumbling down harmlessly before they could explode.

  “An intercept?” asked the president.

  “No, sir. Mechanical malfunction.”

  “Pray God the other two will malfunction.”

  They didn’t.

  Intercepts took out three of the remaining twelve warheads of the other two rockets during reentry, but that left nine incoming.

  * * *

  The SAC B-1 bombers were disappearing quickly, the screens full of swarms of intercept fighters from both sides. Trainor was shouting, “Mr. President! Goddamn it — we’re down to the wire
here. If we don’t strike back now—”

  Mayne raised his hand to steady him. He felt strangely calm. It was now down to a Hobbesian simplicity: “If you use your sword, I must use mine,” and the life of man did indeed appear to be “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Accordingly, he wanted to alert General Carlisle to the possibility of all-out countervalue, city-for-city attack. But Carlisle was already dead, Omaha no more. The last thing Rick Stacy saw was the incoming trajectory, the computers’ cold neutrality announcing the incoming missile’s CEP was plus or minus three miles.

  “Way off,” someone in Cheyenne Mountain said. It was, but the air burst of the SS-19’s 550 kilotons at four thousand feet above Omaha produced a multilevel but quickly flattening mushroom cloud, its coronas, like enormous smokers’ rings, transforming the merely colorful sunset of Nebraska into an explosion of astonishing beauty, the stunningly vibrant orange core of the mushroom turning the vast, undulating snowfields to watermelon pink, the circles now rising about the mushroom’s stalk vermilion-tinted, thinning as the red stalk rose through them, the circles now fading to purest white, like a host heaven-bound.

  The overpressure of six pounds per square inch produced winds in excess of 130 miles per hour over an MDZ— maximum danger zone — of fourteen square miles, flattening every house in the area, pressures on them in excess of 115 tons, the supercyclonic winds blowing people out of office towers and buildings not already destroyed by the wind.

  Three-quarters of the four hundred thousand people of Omaha were killed in a hurtling cyclone of debris as it rose higher and higher, obscuring the lower rings of the air burst, turning the atmosphere a reddish brown. Much of this “shrapnel” swirl consisted of thousands of bodies, superheated, many vaporized — the number of outright fatalities estimated by the superhardened-domed sensors to be 67 percent, the remainder fatally injured.

  There were no survivors in a sixteen-square-mile area directly below the air burst’s center, and while, beyond the maximum danger zone of fourteen square miles, the survival rate climbed from 10 percent to 90 percent, at two hundred miles from the zone, these “survivors” were the unlucky ones— faces melted, all body hair gone, and for many, no visible injury, but all of them, particularly given the flatness of the terrain, walking receptacles of huge doses of radiation, doomed to agonizing deaths caused by radiation sickness and multiple cancers, those in SAC HQ dying through suffocation, trapped by the millions of tons of rubble over the venting systems and air intakes, the fireballs having raised the temperature so high that emergency oxygen-generating plants either exploded or were too warped to operate.

  The first priority of outside rescuers, for whom not nearly enough anticontamination suits were available, was to get to the children of the outlying districts. For many of these, a half hour delay in reaching them meant death.

  * * *

  As the first tremors of the Omaha “strike” registered on the silo cluster known as Romeo, 750 miles away in Montana. Melissa Lange, deep in Romeo 5A on her last shift before her vacation had been due to begin, knew that Rick Stacy was either dead or dying. Immediately she informed both her crew partner, Shirley Cochrane, and Romeo’s MLC — master launch control — that she was “in violation of WESSR — weapons systems safety rules.”

  “Reason?” inquired the duty officer in Romeo’s MLC.

  “Emotional stress, sir.” Her voice was thin, all but inaudible. She paused. “My fiancé is — was — in SAC HQ.”

  “Hold on.” There was a two-second delay, Shirley Cochrane tense in her chair, already buckled up, fully expecting the launch code to come chattering in at any moment, her seat pulled forward on the guide rails, her hands checking the belt for the third time. The Romeo MLC duty officer was back on the line. “Lange, you able to carry on?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Very good. Your WESSR violation duly noted and negated by circumstances. Override command issued by Colonel Beaton. You are still on shift. Repeat, you are still on shift. Go to prelaunch status.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Melissa turned back to her console gratefully, for the console was now the real world. She was allowed — had been ordered—to shut everything else out. “Hands on keys,” she instructed Cochrane. “Keys—” Her voice gave out. She coughed. “Key them on my mark. Three, two, one — mark!”

  “Light on,” confirmed Cochrane. “Light off.”

  There was the ten-second delay before Melissa could instruct, “Hands on keys.”

  “Hands on keys,” came Cochrane’s confirmation.

  “Initiate on my mark. Five, four, three, two, one. Now. I’ll watch the clock.”

  “I’ve got the light,” said Shirley Cochrane. “Light on. Light off.”

  “Release key,” said Melissa.

  “Key released.”

  Even now Shirley Cochrane half expected that the launch code would not come in, that the vote required from another LCC — launch control center — which was required before they could go to “strategic alert” would never come and that instead an ILC — inhibit launch command — would come in its place.

  But the launch code did come, as the yellow lights turned to white into the waiting mode for “launch-fire-release”—the alert’s arrival announced by a high-pitched electronic ringing and then the voice of the man they had never seen, only heard, delivering the sixteen-word, four-numeral mixed sequence in clear, calm, modulated tones: “Sierra… Papa… Foxtrot… Hotel… Tango… Lima… Acknowledge.”

  “Copied,” said Cochrane, advising Melissa, “I see a valid message.”

  “I agree,” confirmed Melissa. “Go to step one checklist. Launch keys inserted.” Both women unbuckled and went to the midpoint red box, each of them taking out her red-tagged brass key and returning to her console, flipping up the clear safety cover and inserting the key, then buckling up again.

  “Ready?” said Melissa.

  “Ready.”

  “Function select key, “ordered Melissa. “Switch to off.’ “

  “It is.”

  “MRTCEP to MRT,” instructed Melissa.

  “MRT.”

  “Sixty-five select.”

  “Sixty-five.”

  “Initiate activator clockwise.”

  “Activator clockwise,” confirmed Cochrane, her delicate hand turning the black knob hard right.

  “Take up alarm,” instructed Melissa. A deep buzzer sounded. Melissa then reached forward to the progress control panel, turning the knob clockwise to the fourteen-hundred-watts position.

  Soon, after the launch code was checked, the keys were moved from “set code used” to “launch.”

  “One mark!” commanded Melissa.

  Both keys were turned.

  “Got my print?” asked Melissa. “You armed?”

  A bell started ringing, but above the sound was another, like a waterfall growing in crescendo, the concrete-muffled sound of cold-gas-forced launch.

  “Mark your process,” said Melissa. “… Out of inner security… outer security… missiles gone. All gone.”

  With that, two MX ICBMs with twenty MARVed warheads, each of 335 kilotons per warhead, were en route to their military targets in the USSR. Three targets, ICBM complexes in Kamchatka Peninsula, were allotted two warheads apiece against superhardened silos. The first of the two warheads allotted each of these three targets was set to explode in high air burst in order to prevent “fratricide”—in which one bomb’s electromagnetic pulse, combining with airborne debris, could rise as high as sixty-two thousand feet, interfering with the second warhead’s trajectory.

  Every one of the MX warheads, unlike those of the Soviets, had been tested in the United States on a north/south trajectory in the Pacific, their circular error of probability reduced to only plus or minus three hundred feet. They were ideal for counterforce attacks — against military targets.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  In Moscow, General Marchenko, already in shock over the news that his son’s Ful
crum had been shot down over North Korea, and Admiral Smernov sat whey-faced, having just scrambled for safety with the rest of the twenty-six Politburo and STAVKA members through one of the tunnels once used by Rasputin to see the czarina when he was out of favor with the czar. The superhardened concrete bunkers below the Council of Ministers had been ruled out, the VIPs fearing that explosives set by the enemy commando raid in progress would entomb them under rubble.

  Inside the Lenin Library, where the secret tunnel exited, Marchenko found himself sitting close to the admiral. He couldn’t stand Smernov’s breath. Though he had wanted to broach the subject, albeit diplomatically, several times in his career, Marchenko had resisted, and he did so now, for he neither had the courage nor the instincts for political suicide. It was a small thing, he knew, and perhaps with the blood of Suzlov still fresh on their hands, his preoccupation with the admiral’s breath was a kind of petty escape, an avoidance of the terrible responsibility in which they were now all involved. But what other choice had they? Even before the meeting had begun, it was obvious President Suzlov had been chafing at the bit to order chemical and nuclear artillery weapons used against the NATO front. He had been waving reports from Beijing of American nuclear aggression and announcing with growing hysteria that he was ready to unleash the entire Soviet arsenal against the Americans, that he wouldn’t go down in history as the leader of his nation’s greatest defeat. Marchenko and Chernko had argued with him, but they could see no way out. He was set on his course and said he would use his power of veto. But above all else, it was the SAS commando raid, still in progress inside the Kremlin, and not Suzlov’s ranting that had persuaded Chernko, the natural leader among the rest, that drastic action was called for — the SAS attack a clear sign that if the enemy’s conventional forces could reach so far into the Soviet Union, then it was indeed the beginning of the end. Chernko was a man of unfettered ambition, but he was always the realist. He knew that they must quickly come to some “arrangement.”