America jg-9

by Stephen Coonts

  She certainly didn't have time to think about it as she streaked across the city, trying to keep the pipper on the missile and not smear herself across half of Long Island. They sent her to shoot down missiles — that was the mission when she and Schottenheimer manned the alert fighters. "Intercept and shoot down."

  Someone else had made the decision. Someone who was paid a lot more than an 0–3 fighter jock.

  She squeezed the trigger, held it down. A stream of twenty-millimeter shells vomited from the six-barreled cannon. For some reason, the stream was a few inches low, going under the Tomahawk. Instinctively Rebecca Allison moved the stick back a tiny fraction of an inch. . and the river of cannon shells slammed into the missile.

  The missile exploded in a blinding flash. A trillion watts of electromagnetic energy raced away at the speed of light.

  Even though the electronics in Allison's fighter were hardened against the electromagnetic pulse from nuclear blasts, the close proximity of this one burned through the protection and fried every circuit in the airplane. Then the airplane overran the cloud of decelerating bits and pieces of the missile and swallowed a hatful. The pieces went through the various stages of the spinning compressor in a thousandth of a second. Blades ripped loose and were flung through the skin of the airplane, fuel lines were severed, the unbalanced engine began tearing itself apart. All this happened in the third of a second after the missile exploded.

  Before Rebecca Allison even realized what was happening, her fighter exploded. The fireball of fuel and pieces splashed into the buildings of Brooklyn with devastating effect. In a dozen seconds twenty city blocks were on fire. A giant column of black smoke formed as the raging fire sucked in air from every direction. Soon the fire became so intense that the asphalt in the streets caught fire. The inferno blazed without sirens or alarms of any kind, because every electrical circuit within three miles of the blast was destroyed.

  The other two Tomahawks, the one that Schottenheimer had died trying to shoot down and the one that had not been intercepted, crossed the East River and exploded over Manhattan. One detonated over the New York Stock Exchange, the other over Rockefeller Center. The missile that Allison destroyed had been targeted to detonate over the Empire State Building. The fact that it didn't get there made almost no difference to the damage caused by the attack: Almost every electrical switch, circuit, and microchip on the island of Manhattan was destroyed by the two stupendous pulses of electromagnetic radiation.

  Kolnikov fully appreciated how the presence of the Los Angeles-cass attack submarine La Jolla complicated the search problem for the P-3 overhead. No doubt before long other P-3s would be arriving. If La Jolla weren't there, the P-3s would go active, echo ranging or pinging with their sonobuoys. They had little chance of finding America if they listened passively, he suspected.

  And that was a wonder. As quiet as La Jolla was — and it was quieter underway than a Soviet boomer tied to a pier — the Revelation sonar could still detect it. There it was on the bulkhead-mounted vertical displays—he could see it! It was a ghostly form in the gloom, illuminated by the sound of its hull moving through the water.

  And La Jolla couldn't see him. His boat was too quiet for her sonar to detect passively. America was the ultimate stealth ship, so silent it was invisible to anyone without Revelation's ability to make sense of the massive data flows from the hydrophones.

  Well, he reflected, America was invisible until someone went active, began radiating noise into the water and listening for echoes. She was deep, perhaps so deep that the radiating beams would be deflected before or after they echoed off her hull. Then again. .

  If he sank La Jolla, removed her from the problem, the P-3s would be free to ping. Still, finding a deep-running boat this quiet under the thermal layers would be very difficult. With luck, they might pull it off. And Kolnikov and Turchak and their colleagues would be dead. Of course, with La Jolla out of the problem, Kolnikov would be free to maneuver America to the extent of her capabilities and use the built-in tricks, such as the noisemakers and decoys.

  La Jolla was much shallower than America, perhaps eight hundred feet deep. She was making four knots, hadn't altered course. She was, Kolnikov concluded, running up a bearing line that she had established when she heard the Tomahawk launches. She undoubtedly had her towed array deployed, maximizing her listening capability, although of course he couldn't see the array on the sonar displays. Perhaps if he were closer…

  Or went active.

  What if…?

  "Let's find out how quiet this boat really is," he said to Georgi Turchak. "Ahead one-third, begin an ascent, then turn in behind La Jolla, staying at least a hundred feet below her wake so we won't get tangled in her array."

  "Are you crazy?" Turchak hissed.

  "Sooner or later this guy may go active. He won't see us unless he does. If he does, we want to be below and slightly behind him. And we want to stay there. Now let's do it."

  "Why don't you just torpedo him now?" Heydrich asked conversationally, "before he knows we are here. Escaping this P-3 afterward should not be difficult."

  "I signed on for the money, not to kill sailors."

  Turchak looked at him askance. "Vladimir Ivanovich…"

  "I have to sleep nights, goddamn it! Ahead one-third."

  Without another word Turchak pushed the power lever to the one-third-ahead setting and began the process of ascending as the boat accelerated. La Jolla was at one o'clock, crossing from left to right at a forty-five-degree angle, so he should be able to rendezvous without exceeding La Jolla's speed. Apparently she had not detected the beat of America's prop. If he had to speed up to catch her, the frequency would change, and detection might follow.

  Let's be realistic, Turchak thought. America was going to be right behind her! He didn't know whether to laugh or cry. In all the years he had known Kolnikov he hadn't realized that the man was willing to bet everything in one wild, suicidal gamble.

  Both men were watching the computer presentation in front of Turchak, and the forward-looking sonar display, so they didn't see Rothberg staring unblinkingly at their backs.

  The explosion of the two Flashlight E-bomb warheads over Manhattan caused a complete, total, massive power failure in the heart of the most wired city on the planet. At the NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchanges the indexes had already fallen the maximum amount allowed in one day and the authorities had suspended trading minutes before the trillion-watt electromagnetic pulses destroyed the computers and communications equipment that made trading possible. The television and radio broadcasting network nerve centers in Manhattan were destroyed, leaving people all over the globe wondering why the video and audio of their program had suddenly disappeared.

  Telephone switching units, Internet servers, mobile telephone transmission towers, heat and air-conditioning units, office equipment — the devastation was as total as that which had struck Washington, but affected more people since New York was a larger, denser city and the hub of so many of the world's networks.

  Of course the power grid in the affected area failed. The fused switches and massive short circuits dragged down the power grid throughout the northeastern United States. All of New England temporarily lost power, as well as upstate New York, New Jersey, and much of Pennsylvania.

  Electric trains all over the area coasted to a stop. Within a three-mile radius of the blasts, the electric motors in subway trains and regular locomotives were destroyed.

  Fortunately the FAA administrator had grounded non-emergency private and commercial flights east of the Mississippi River — visiting a financial disaster upon the airlines and their employees and stranding and outraging a large portion of the traveling public — so no airliners packed with people fell from the sky. The electrical systems and navigation gear in the airplanes parked at Newark and JFK were totaled by the E-warhead blasts. The electromagnetic pulses from the blasts were sufficiently weak by the time they hit the aircraft parked at LaGuardia that they only d
amaged them, destroyed some delicate avionics, and left better-grounded or — shielded boxes unharmed.

  Two police helicopters, airborne when the warheads detonated, went into uncontrolled autorotations, killing all aboard when they screwed themselves into the ground; a medevac helicopter transporting a heart attack victim crashed on final approach to a hospital landing pad; and a private jet descending into the New York area with a cargo of human organs for transplant went nose-first into the Hudson River.

  In the minutes following the blast, millions of Manhattan office workers waited impatiently for power to be restored. Of course, the recent attack on Washington was common knowledge, so many immediately assumed the worst. As people discovered that even battery-operated devices no longer worked, the realization that New York had been attacked by E-warheads from USS America spread like wildfire.

  When emergency generators failed to restore any level of electrical service — the emergency generators' were themselves dead — the dimensions of the disaster began making themselves felt as people tried to exit their buildings. Elevators were stuck where they had been when the pulses arrived. Those in transit were hung up between floors. Emergency crews began working to extract the passengers, a task that would take as long as twenty-four hours in some cases. The vast bulk of the people trapped in the office towers of Manhattan began trekking down endless dark staircases.

  On the street they found that the sound of the city had completely changed. Not a single gasoline or diesel engine was running. The sounds of the streets were voices, angry, unhappy, some panicked, as everyone stared at streets crammed with dead vehicles. The gridlock nightmare extended from the Battery to Central Park and beyond. Many vehicles contained people trapped by electronic door locks that wouldn't open. Policemen used gun butts to shatter the safety glass of vehicles with people trapped inside. Since there were not enough police, volunteers attacked windows with anything handy.

  Times Square, the beating heart of the city of New York, that pop-art cathedral to tacky outdoor advertising, was dark and strangely quiet. Theater and movie marquees and the giant electronic billboards were blank, the human energy gone. Under an overcast sky, New Yorkers and pilgrims alike stood stunned amid the ominously dead buildings, unsure what to think or do.

  Endless columns of frightened, claustrophobic people trudged through Stygian subway tunnels to escape stalled trains and climbed the stairs from dark stations. They formed unmoving crowds at the subway exits, trapping those still underground, as they stared dis-believingly at the traffic jam from hell that blocked the streets.

  Reports trickled in via messengers to police stations and City Hall. An absolute electrical failure — even water had ceased to flow through many of the city's supply pipes since the pumps that moved it were disabled. Without water, the sewage system would stop carrying away waste products.

  The authorities quickly realized that they faced a catastrophic disaster of the first order of magnitude. Approximately eight million people were trapped in the affected parts of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Manhattan, and New Jersey, unable to escape from a city that in one terrible moment had been rendered incapable of sustaining human life. Worse, getting outside help to the people who would need it would be extremely difficult; in fact, in many places, getting food and water in would be impossible for days to come — perhaps even weeks. Eight million people would need a lot of help. The usual disaster assistance organizations were going to be totally inadequate.

  Gradually the authorities came to the realization that New York City, the beating heart of high-tech America, had become a death trap.

  The warehouse in Newark that housed Hudson Security Services was far enough away from the epicenter of the two Tomahawk blasts over Manhattan that most of the computers inside escaped damage. Surge protectors and backup batteries worked as advertised, soaking up excess voltage. Two hard drives crashed, only two. Zelda grabbed the telephone, felt relief wash over her when she got a dial tone. Then the power failed. Although the Hudson employees feared the worst, seven minutes later the electricity came back on.

  As the crew divided their attention between diagnostic efforts and the television monitors, Zip Vance told Zelda, "That was too damned close."

  Indeed, had they known when the Tomahawks were coming, Vance could have had all the equipment shut down and grounded. And immediately inflamed the suspicions of everyone in the room. Coincidences like that don't just happen. So it worked out for the best, Zelda thought. She picked up the telephone, checked again for the dial tone. Still there, although the switches would soon be overwhelmed with people calling relatives.

  It took several hours to verify that the main storage units were unaffected, with their files intact. Only when that was done did Zelda shoo out the employees. They charged for the elevator, anxious to go to their homes and ascertain the damage there.

  When the last elevator load was out the front door, Zip brought the elevator back up and killed the power switch. "So far so good," he said and dropped into a chair.

  "I thought we were going to have to use the rope," he added. "Always wondered if Freda could make it down." Freda was forty pounds overweight, the heaviest woman in the crew. "She always said she wouldn't try. Guess you would have had a roommate for the duration."

  Zelda didn't want to talk about Freda or the rope.

  "With incentives, Jouany owes us more than four hundred million," she said lightly. "Or did before those Tomahawk missiles hit. By tomorrow the number will be over five. Think of it! A half a billion dollars!"

  "Money? Is that all you think about?"

  "In America money is how you keep score. We're winning big, baby."

  "There's more to life than money," her partner shot back, meeting her eyes.

  "Zip, we've been through all this before. I just never thought of you that way."

  Vance got out of his chair and headed for the elevator. He talked as he walked. "In two or three weeks this will be all over, one way or the other. We'll be in jail or filthy rich."

  He threw the switch to power up the elevator, opened the door, and climbed in. "What are you going to do with the rest of your life, Zelda? Have you even thought about it?"

  He didn't wait for an answer. The elevator hummed, and down he went.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The wide road ran on and on toward the distant blue mountains, until it rounded a far curve or topped a rise and disappeared from view. Even then the road was still there, even if out of sight. It would faithfully reappear when you rounded the curve or crested the hill. That was the promise of America. In America there was always the road.

  Jake Grafton was thinking of the road as he drove along in the government sedan with Janos Ilin in the passenger seat. Neither man had much to say. Ilin had readily agreed with Jake's suggestion of a drive for lunch when he intercepted him on the fifth-floor landing of the office building stairs. He looked almost relieved as he spun around and descended the stairs that he had just trudged up.

  Jake headed west on Interstate 66. They were passing the Beltway exit when Ilin asked their destination.

  "I thought we might have lunch in Strasburg," Jake said, "the hotel there."

  "Fine," Ilin replied and asked no more.

  They drove with the radio off. They had no audio cassettes or disks, so the only sounds were the hum of the engine and tires and the snore of truck diesels. As they passed Manassas the interstate narrowed to two lanes in each direction, the traffic thinned, and they were left with the September day, with its dissipating overcast and mild breeze, and the road. Always the road.

  Jake knew what he wanted from Janos Ilin. He wanted to know what the Russian knew about the theft of USS America. He wanted to know who was behind the theft and what they hoped to accomplish. If they were Russians, he wanted to know. If they weren't, he was even more curious. Alas, he didn't know how to go about getting what he wanted.

  The guy was so foreign! Oh, he spoke decent English, could understand and
be understood, but Jake Grafton had been to Moscow and seen the place. Ugly, inhospitable, polluted, filled with people speaking an incomprehensible language and fighting like rats for the bare necessities, Moscow was as foreign to Jake Grafton as any spot he had ever been. Thinking about Moscow as he drove this morning, he remembered that sense of hopelessness that he had felt when he visited there years ago, immediately after the collapse of communism. At that time the population was still living in the shadow of the absolute dictatorship, an oppressive tyranny from which humanity and common sense had long ago been squeezed, if indeed there had ever been any. A more cheerless place he couldn't imagine.

  And Moscow was Ilin's home, his national capital, the place where he had spent his life learning and pulling and climbing the ropes.

  What, exactly, did he and Ilin have in common? Explain that, please.

  "Your embassy," Jake said, breaking the silence, "does it have electrical power?"

  "Oh, yes," Ilin said, grinning ruefully. "We Russians have worried for years about American intercept methods, so we hardened the wiring inside the building and installed extra generators. The lights will be on there even if the sun burns out."

  "One assumes that contingency is extremely unlikely."

  "No doubt, but if it happens, we will be ready. The ambassador will be able to see to write his report to Moscow: 'Today in America the sun burned out.' That is the way of a bureaucracy. When someone somewhere predicts a possible crisis, that prediction assumes a life of its own. Regardless of the likelihood of that crisis occurring, regardless of the cost in effort or money to guard against it, someone will build a career minimizing the damage that crisis could cause, if it ever happens."

  I see.

  "The bureaucracy rules."

  "And the microphone in your belt buckle? Was that hardened against electromagnetic pulses?"

  "Alas, no. It is history, as you Americans say."