‘I know what it means, General. It means the fucking North Koreans can now deliver a nuclear payload to the west coast of mainland America.’
Office of the Associate Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Langley, Virginia
‘I don’t believe it,’ Walter Hicks said. In front of him lay a series of photographs of the aftermath of the nuclear detonation in the Pacific, taken from surveillance satellites, and a hastily prepared schematic showing the path the North Korean missile had followed. This did, Hicks had to admit, suggest that the warhead had been responsible for the detonation.
But if that hypothesis was correct, it left a whole raft of unanswered questions, starting with how and finishing with why.
‘What have we got from Ok’pyong?’ he asked.
Richard Muldoon leant forward and placed three more photographs on Hicks’s desk. ‘These,’ he said, ‘are from the pass immediately before the North Koreans hit the starter button. They show a large, probably three-stage, missile on one of the pads at Ok’pyong. Based on the shadow and the angle of the sun, and making an allowance for the thickness of the launch platform, N-PIC has calculated the height at between one hundred forty and one hundred fifty feet, with a diameter of just over six feet. That means it’s a lot bigger than a Scud or a Taep’o-dong 1, so their analysis is that it was almost certainly a Taep’o-dong 2. It had probably been fitted with an elongated nose-cone, as the one they launched back in July zero six from Musudan-ri was only about one hundred twenty-four feet tall.’
‘Do you believe North Korea’s developed a missile-capable nuclear weapon, and that’s what they’ve just test-fired?’
‘I don’t know, but it is the logical conclusion. There’s no doubt that they fired a missile, and there’s also no doubt a nuclear weapon was detonated at about the time and at the same place the missile landed. I’m just not certain the two events are linked, not least because all our previous estimates suggested that the Taep’o-dong 2 had a likely maximum range of about four thousand miles. The distance this missile travelled was closer to six thousand. That’s a hell of a jump – a massive improvement if it was carrying a nuclear warhead as well. Empty, maybe it could have made the distance – with a weapon on board, I doubt it.’
‘How big was the nuke?’
‘Think Hiroshima. Ten, maybe fifteen, kilotons, an absolute maximum of twenty. We’ll have a better idea when we get the results of the atmospheric sampling.’
‘An air-burst?’
‘N-PIC doesn’t think so. The Keyhole birds recorded two small merchant ships in the area shortly before the launch from Ok’pyong. Early images showed them sailing south-east in company, but a few hours before the explosion one of them turned north-west towards Polynesia, and the other stopped moving altogether. If the missile was the real deal, the stationary ship probably had a homing device on it – the Taep’o-dong is very inaccurate – and the second vessel then embarked the crew and sailed out of the danger area. Personally, I think we’re looking at a redundant merchantman with a bomb in the hold triggered by a timing device. N-PIC’s tracking the second ship, and we’ll confirm its identity pretty soon, but it looks as if both were flying North Korean flags.’
Hicks leant back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. ‘This is fucking serious, Richard. If the North Koreans have developed a missile that can travel six thousand miles, that puts a hefty chunk of mainland America within range. Whatever the truth about the missile, we now know for sure that Pyongyang’s capable of detonating a nuclear weapon outside a hole in the ground in North Korea, and that significantly alters the balance of power in the region.
‘It also alters things here in the States. We haven’t got an effective anti-missile shield working yet, so if the North Koreans did decide to launch a nuclear attack, there wouldn’t be a lot we could do to stop them. I know we could easily turn their country into a radioactive wasteland – and I’m sure Washington would be happy to do just that – but we’d also be looking at a serious death toll over here. Meanwhile, I know the Pentagon has just hiked the DEFCON state to Three, but is there anything else we can do?’
Chapter Sixteen
Sunday
HMS Illustrious, Yellow Sea
‘What are you going to do now?’ Roger Black asked Richter.
They were sitting over the remains of a late breakfast in the Wardroom dining room. During the night, the Illustrious had moved further north, and deeper into the Yellow Sea. The Air Group was still flying continuous sorties, the Harriers carrying out Combat Air Patrols with live weapons, and the Merlin squadron doing ASW operations – for real. The North Koreans possessed nearly a hundred submarines, ranging from Yugo midget subs to twenty or so Romeo-class patrol boats, locally constructed vessels based on a 1950s Russian submarine. Most of them were armed with torpedo tubes, and just because the Romeos were of an old design, that didn’t mean they weren’t a threat.
The ship had secured from Action Stations when it became clear that the missile launch from Ok’pyong was an isolated occurrence, but it was still operating at Yellow Alert, the second-highest state, as a precaution. Moving around was difficult, as most of the watertight bulkhead doors in the main fore-and-aft port and starboard passageways were currently being kept closed.
‘Frankly, Blackie, I don’t know,’ Richter replied. ‘My boss sent me here to brief the captain, which I’ve done, and that’s the limit of my instructions at the moment. There’s no point in flying me back to Seoul, because there’s nothing useful I can do there. Anyway, if the North Koreans do launch an invasion attempt, South Korea’s one place I definitely don’t want to be.’
There was a roar from above as a Sea Harrier accelerated along the flight deck, followed a few seconds later by the second aircraft of the pair.
‘But I can take a turn in a Harrier, if that would be any help. If the squadron’s going to be flying CAP sorties round the clock, you’re going to need all the pilots you can get. I’m still technically in the Royal Naval Reserve, and I’ve got about four hundred hours on FA2s, so I think I can probably drive a GR9.’
Roger Black stared at him across the table. ‘The trappers would have a field day with that! But these are exceptional circumstances, and it might be useful,’ he said. ‘The squadron’s a man short already, after one of the junior pilots went down with a stomach bug. An extra driver would be no bad thing in the meantime, so I’ll talk to the CO, see if he’ll bend the rules and have you.’
As the two men stood up, the Tannoy burst into life. ‘Commander (Air) and Lieutenant Commander Richter are requested to report to the bridge.’
‘They’re playing our tune,’ Black remarked.
‘Yeah,’ Richter concurred. ‘I’m just not sure I want to stay for the dance.’
Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) Complex, Malmstrom Air Force Base, Great Falls, Cascade County, Montana
The missile control compound was a three-acre fenced-off area out on the perimeter of Malmstrom Air Force Base, but the casual visitor might be forgiven for assuming that he’d been sent to the wrong location.
The entire area was virtually featureless scrubland, surrounded by an eight-foot-high chain-link fence, within which were a handful of pole-mounted floodlights, two wooden huts and six vehicles. On the fence next to the gates was a sign that read ‘US Government Property: No Trespassing. Use of Deadly Force Authorized’, and beside that a single telephone handset labelled ‘Security’.
After approaching the compound at a steady twenty-five miles an hour, the Ford compact braked to a halt. Captain Dave Fredericks climbed out, strode over to the gate and picked up the telephone. He identified himself, quoted his official number, and waited until the electric lock buzzed and the gate swung open. Then he got back into the Ford and drove through the gates towards the first of the two huts. Behind him, the gate swung shut and its lock clicked home.
As Fredericks and his passenger, Major Richard Whitman, entered the wooden hut, they were greeted by two
armed guards who then checked their identification cards with extreme thoroughness, despite the fact that both men were known to the guards almost as well as their own families. The two officers were finally ushered towards a small elevator, whose control panel contained two unmarked buttons. After Whitman pressed the lower one, the lift door closed and the elevator descended just over fifty feet.
When the door slid open again, they were facing a short corridor, at the far end of which was a four-ton blast door that could be opened only from the other side. That meant from within the missile control capsule itself. Whitman and Fredericks stood together in front of a closed-circuit television camera, permitting the staff inside the capsule to identify them visually while Fredericks read out their military identification numbers into another telephone handset. A warning bell sounded and the blast door slowly swung open.
The first ICBM silo complexes, constructed in the tense and uncertain years immediately following the end of the Second World War, were fairly small and self-contained, and almost inevitably subterranean. Most of these complexes comprised three launch silos, where the missiles resided vertically below solid concrete half-moon doors, a control centre, living area, and utility sections. Each launch silo contained an ICBM, usually an Atlas, with an equipment and maintenance room to one side and the propellant store on the other. The Atlas was a liquid-fuelled rocket, and the transition from an inactive state to firing readiness was a prolonged and hazardous process, due to the highly volatile fuel.
And there were other dangers, too. The Atlas was an excellent delivery vehicle when it worked, but during an extensive series of test-firings carried out in the early 1960s, launch failures had been both common and spectacular. A missile that detonated its fuel load in or close to its silo was quite capable of destroying the entire launch complex. The introduction of the Minuteman, with its solid-fuel motor, had considerably reduced the inherent risks. As a result, five hundred units of this missile, now in its Minuteman III version, provided the backbone of the American ICBM force.
Unlike the early silos, the current Minuteman launch complexes are huge. Radiating from the central missile control capsule, like the spokes of an immense wheel, are narrow tunnels through which run the communication links to ten Minuteman silos in all. Each is separated from its neighbouring missile, and from the control capsule itself, by a distance of at least three miles, and the hardened silos themselves extend ninety feet deep and are constructed of reinforced concrete designed to withstand the blast effects of a nearby nuclear detonation.
Inside each silo a single LGM-30 Minuteman Three sits on huge coiled springs designed to act as shock absorbers in the event of a nuclear strike. A one-hundred-ton concrete hatch protects each missile from above, and this lid is blown off the silo immediately prior to launch. Sixty feet tall and weighing well over thirty tons, the missile is accelerated by its three-stage solid-fuelled motor to a velocity at burnout of fifteen thousand miles an hour, about Mach 23 at altitude, has a ceiling of around seven hundred miles, and a maximum range that’s still classified but is in excess of eight thousand miles. It normally carries three W62, W78 or W87 warheads, each inside a Mark 12A reentry vehicle contained within the nose-cone, giving a total yield of between one and two megatons, or between sixty times and one hundred and twenty times the explosive power of the Hiroshima weapon.
Usually, the change-over of watch in the control capsule is the occasion for light-hearted banter. All the officers know each other, and frequently meet socially as well as professionally. But not this time. They’d all now been briefed on the detonation of the North Korean nuclear weapon in the Pacific and were well aware that a shooting war was at the very least a strong possibility.
‘What’s the state of play, Jim?’ Whitman asked the outgoing senior officer, Major James Keeble.
‘Pretty much what you’d expect. We’ve been ordered to retarget all missiles at coordinates north of the Demilitarized Zone. Most of the targets are airfields, known missile sites and command centres, but a couple of missiles are aimed at Pyongyang itself. We’ve run operational readiness and diagnostic checks on all the Minutemen, and the numbers are in the green. We completed that about ten minutes ago.’
‘The message folder’s over there beside the teletype machine,’ Keeble completed his handover briefing. ‘Good luck, and look sharp. Today could be real bad news.’
USS Enterprise, North Pacific Ocean
CVN-65, the USS Enterprise – often referred to as the ‘Big E’, ‘Mobile Chernobyl’, or even ‘Starship’ or ‘Starbase’ because it shares the name of the spacecraft in the Star Trek television series – is the longest naval vessel in the world, at eleven hundred and twenty-three feet. Commissioned in November 1961, it was the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, equipped with eight reactors, four propellers and four rudders, and even today, nearly half a century after the vessel was launched, it’s still an impressive sight. Displacing nearly ninety-four thousand tons, but still capable of speeds in excess of thirty knots, the ship has a flight deck that extends over almost four and a half acres, and it carries ten squadrons of aircraft that are launched from four steam catapults. The ship’s company numbers three and a half thousand, and the air wing adds an additional fifteen hundred personnel. The ship is, by any standards, a massively impressive expression of American military might.
The Enterprise was the capital ship of Carrier Strike Group Twelve, and in company with her were the guided-missile frigate USS Nicholas, the two Aegis-system guided-missile destroyers USS Leyte and USS McFaul, and the Fast Combat Support Ship USNS Supply. Somewhere in the same stretch of ocean, but invisible to all, was the last vessel in the group, the USS Alexandria, a Los Angeles-class nuclear-powered hunter-killer that, like all submarines, remained completely unaffected by the weather on the surface.
The problem faced by the Enterprise’s captain was simple enough. He’d been ordered by his controlling authority to divert to the Korean Peninsula, but currently between the ship’s position and his destination was a large tropical storm that showed no particular inclination to move anywhere in a hurry.
Steaming right through the middle of this weather system wasn’t an option. No competent mariner in his right mind would venture anywhere near a tropical storm, irrespective of the size and power of his vessel, and William ‘Buck’ Rodgers was extremely competent, for the small handful of naval officers selected to command America’s capital ships are the absolute cream of their profession. And even if Rodgers had been prepared to risk such a dangerous passage with the Enterprise, there was no way he would expose the other, much smaller, Group Twelve vessels to the same danger. One way or another, they would have to go around it.
He’d summoned his senior meteorological officer and instructed him to calculate the storm’s likely track and speed and, once he had the met man’s best guess to hand, he had then spent twenty minutes discussing the problem with his ops officer, and deciding the optimum course for the battle group to take.
Only now, twelve hours later, did Rodgers finally leave the bridge and head for his cabin. On his way down, he stuck his head into the met office and congratulated the staff there for their judgement, because they’d been right. The senior met officer had predicted that the depression causing the storm would deepen and head south-east, a movement that would take the worst of the weather away from the Enterprise’s direct track towards the Korean Peninsula. And the picture on the weather radar now showed that trend clearly.
The group would just clip the northern edge of the storm, and the sea was already rough, with white horses everywhere and a long swell running. The navigator had told Rodgers that they would be clear of the storm within about five hours, and then they could turn south-west, crank up the engines and head straight for Korea.
They had a long way to go but, at least for the Super Hornets, they should be within flying distance of the peninsula within twenty-four hours.
HMS Illustrious, Yellow Sea
When
Richter and Black stepped onto the bridge, they found Alexander Davidson waiting for them. He took a last look through the windows, had a short word with the Officer of the Watch, then motioned for them to follow him down to the Bridge Mess.
‘CINCFLEET has finally replied,’ the captain announced, as Richter slid the door closed. ‘Our American cousins are not entirely certain what happened to the missile launched from Ok’pyong yesterday, but they do know that a nuclear device with a yield between fifteen and twenty kilotons was detonated in the North Pacific ocean on that missile’s extended flight-path. The obvious conclusions are that the North Koreans have manufactured a nuclear weapon small enough to be carried by a Taep’o-dong, and that this missile’s range has been significantly increased by the addition of a bigger third stage. If those deductions are correct, about a third of mainland America is now under direct threat from the Pyongyang regime.
‘And that, I suspect, is why CINCFLEET didn’t get back to us sooner. They’ve been waiting for the Americans to confirm exactly what happened, but they still don’t know for sure. Meanwhile, two North Korean merchant ships are known to have been in the area of the Pacific where the detonation occurred, so it’s also possible that one of those was carrying the weapon, which was detonated using a timer or radio signal. But, whatever the truth, the Americans now know that Pyongyang definitely has a missile that can reach the US West Coast, and that they possess working nuclear weapons.’
‘So what does CINCFLEET want us to do now?’ Black asked.
‘I’ve received no further tasking orders,’ Davidson admitted, ‘so we carry on. That means CAP and ASW patrols, and a permanent AEW Sea King presence. We stay for the moment at Yellow Alert and just hope this whole situation blows over.’
‘Rather than blows up?’ Black suggested.
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