USS Towers Box Set

by Jeff Edwards

  DuBrul held the map over the bed, within easy reach of the patient. The lines of latitude and longitude were clearly marked, and the place names had oversized labels, Russian above English.

  The old man raised a shaky hand, and pointed one trembling finger toward a spot on the map, in the northeastern quadrant of the Sea of Okhotsk. DuBrul recognized the location from which K-506 had launched the first missile attack. He drew a small circle on the map using a felt tipped pen.

  “Zdes’,” Grigoriev whispered. “Here. Zashishennaja pozicija.”

  Agent DuBrul recognized the term. Zashishennaja pozicija translated loosely into ‘protected position.’ It was the Russian equivalent of the word defilade: a position fortified against attack by geographic barriers. Hills, ravines, that sort of thing.

  DuBrul repeated the words. “Zashishennaja pozicija. I think I understand. These are the coordinates the submarine can shoot from, is that right? These are the places where explosives have been set to blow holes in the ice pack?”

  “Da,” the old man whispered. “Strelyat. To shoot from …”

  “How many zashishennaja pozicija are there?” DuBrul asked. “How many places can K-506 shoot through the ice?”

  The old man’s hand dropped back to the sheets. He closed his eyes and breathed heavily for nearly a minute. At last, his eyelids fluttered open again. “Pyat,” he hissed.

  DuBrul nodded again. Five.

  Grigoriev lifted his finger to the chart again. His hand shook so badly that it took a few seconds to settle down. “Zdes’,” he breathed.

  DuBrul circled the spot on the map.

  Grigoriev’s palsied finger moved a few inches and touched the map again. “Zdes’.”

  DuBrul marked the new spot with another circle. Again the finger moved, and DuBrul drew a fourth circle.

  A shudder passed through the old man’s body and his hand fell away from the chart. The heart monitor mounted to the wall near his bed began beeping rapidly. The cardiac trace on the screen blinked from green to red.

  DuBrul turned away from the patient. “Doctor?”

  He raised his voice. “Doctor? Get in here!”

  The door flew open, and Dr. Hogan covered the distance to the bed in two quick strides. He glanced at the monitor, and then looked over his shoulder. “Get a crash cart in here, now!”

  Another shudder wracked Oleg Grigoriev’s body. His eyes seemed to roll back in their sockets, and a ribbon of foamy saliva rolled from the corner of his mouth.

  A nurse and a pair of Hospital Corpsmen rushed in, pushing a cart full of medical equipment.

  DuBrul backed away, to give them room to work, but the patient’s eyes suddenly locked on his face. “Here,” the old man croaked. “Come … here …”

  Agent DuBrul edged past the nurse to the side of the bed. “I’m here.”

  The nurse started to object, but Dr. Hogan shook his head.

  Grigoriev wheezed. “Karta …”

  “Right here,” DuBrul said. He held up the map.

  Grigoriev’s finger rose with agonizing slowness. It brushed a spot near the southern end of the sea. “Zashishennaja … ,” he muttered. “… pozicijaaaa …”

  A final spasm contorted the man’s body, and then he lay still. The heart monitor emitted a continuous whine.

  DuBrul marked the last spot, and backed away from the bed. He stood with the map clutched in his hand, watching the medical team work feverishly over their patient. He made no move to interfere, but he could see that they were wasting their time. The tough old Sergeant was gone.

  Long minutes later, as the frantic resuscitation attempts began to wind down, DuBrul looked at the map. His five hastily-drawn circles marked the places that Grigoriev had indicated. The locations from which K-506 could detonate pre-positioned explosives, and blow shooting holes in the ice cover.

  The northeastern position had already been used; DuBrul was sure of that, leaving four spots from which the submarine could shower its targets with nuclear weapons.

  The circles he had scrawled were inexact. He knew that. The old Russian had been too weak and too shaky to indicate the positions with precision. And if—by some miracle—he had managed to identify precisely the correct points, the area enclosed by each circle would still encompass many square miles of ice.

  DuBrul and Ross had understood in advance that using the map would yield imprecise results. But after the Russian’s previous collapse, it had seemed unlikely that Grigoriev would recover enough strength to pass detailed verbal information, like map coordinates. So they had agreed on a setup that would permit the patient to communicate by pointing.

  Instead of precise navigational coordinates, they had approximate locations, with built-in margins of error. Not exactly ideal, but—outside of James Bond movies—intelligence information was rarely absolute.

  With a few jabs of his finger, Grigoriev had reduced the search area from over a half a million square miles, to a few hundred square miles. The area of uncertainty had just shrunk by a factor of two thousand, or maybe even three thousand. As far as DuBrul was concerned, that was pretty damned good work. It was a lot better than they usually managed.

  He tucked the map under his arm and walked to the door, signaling to the Marine guard to follow him. The medical team had abandoned their attempt to revive the patient. They were taking last minute readings and making final chart entries—following the procedures required to certify the time of death.

  Agent DuBrul paused to look back at Oleg Grigoriev one last time. “Spaciba,” he said softly. “Thank you, old warrior. Go with God.”

  CHAPTER 44

  WHITE HOUSE

  WASHINGTON, DC

  TUESDAY; 05 MARCH

  9:46 AM EST

  President Chandler leaned against the railing of the Truman Balcony, and looked across the south lawn to the crowd of protesters gathered on the Ellipse. The District of Columbia was experiencing its last hard cold snap of the year. The temperature was hovering just above freezing, and there were two inches of snow on the ground. But the protesters didn’t care. Their shoes had trampled the Ellipse so thoroughly that the snow had been churned into muddy brown slush.

  The Secret Service was now estimating the head count at thirty-thousand, and the mob was still growing. Or—more correctly—the mobs were still growing. There were several groups down there. The Peace-At-All-Costs lobby was rubbing shoulders with the Nuke-the-Bastards-Now gang, and the fundamentalist This-is-the-Wrath-of-God faction was marching beside the America-Must-Rule-the-World-for-its-Own-Good cult.

  Those weren’t the real names of the organizations represented here, of course, but their platforms were nearly all that silly, and that simplistic. Most of them couldn’t find Kamchatka on a map, and probably fewer than one out of twenty could spell the name of the country that had suddenly inflamed their passions. But they all knew exactly where the president had gone wrong in managing this crisis, and they all knew exactly how to fix it.

  The answer is simple—lay down our arms and live in peace with other nations. The answer is simple—blow those sons-of-bitches to kingdom come. The answer is simple—outlaw all foreign trade and shut off all foreign aid. Let the commies and the ragheads try to get along without American dollars. The answer is simple—fill in the blank here …

  Except that the answers were all different, and none of them were simple. The protesters down on the Ellipse disagreed with each other about nearly everything, but they were united on one point. They all wanted Francis Benjamin Chandler to get the hell out of the White House, and make room for the kind of leader who could save the nation in its moment of peril. Of course, depending on which group you talked to, the next person in the Oval Office should either be a Democrat, a Republican, a Libertarian, an unaligned independent, or a pair of Wiccan Siamese Twins with the secret communications frequency of the alien mother ship.

  The president snorted, and the exhalation turned to steam in the cold morning air.

  “Uh,
Mr. President?” The voice belonged to National Security Advisor Gregory Brenthoven.

  The president turned to see the man standing at the open door leading to the yellow room.

  He beckoned with his fingers. “Come on out, Greg. I’m just having a look at the newest members of the Frank Chandler Fan Club.”

  Brenthoven stepped out onto the balcony and closed the door. He looked out at the roiling crowd on the Ellipse. “What do you think they want, sir?”

  “That’s easy,” the president said. “They want world peace, unrestricted warfare, a global economy, utter severance of all foreign trading agreements, open borders, and strict isolationism.”

  Brenthoven grinned. “So it’s business as usual, sir?”

  The president raised his hands and let them drop. “Pretty much.”

  He sighed. “What have you got, Greg?”

  Brenthoven walked over to the railing. “The Russian courier, Oleg Grigoriev, is dead, sir. Medical complications from the gunshot wounds.”

  The president nodded gravely, and looked back out toward the growing mob of his detractors. “That puts me in a bit of an emotional conflict,” he said. “On the one hand, a man has lost his life. As a human being, my first thought should focus on the tragedy of that loss. But I’m also the Commander-in-Chief of a nation under siege. And I have to confess that I’m more concerned about losing a possible source of critical intelligence. Because some of the secrets that Mr. Grigoriev took to the grave could drastically affect the future of this country, and the world.”

  “I understand, sir,” the national security advisor said. “But he didn’t take quite everything to the grave.”

  The president turned and met Brenthoven’s eyes.

  “Mr. Grigoriev confirmed the CNO’s theory that the submarine is shooting from prepared positions, where explosives have been planted in the ice cover. There were five positions. Governor Zhukov apparently called them …” Brenthoven paused, reading the unfamiliar words from his notebook. “… zashishennaja pozicija.”

  He sounded the words out clumsily. “That appears to be the Russian term for a protected position, or a hidden place to shoot from.”

  “I see,” the president said. “And did Mr. Grigoriev happen to provide us with the coordinates of any of these protected positions?”

  “He gave us approximate locations, Mr. President,” Brenthoven said. “One of them corresponded pretty closely with the first position that the submarine launched from. If the other four are in the same ballpark, accuracy-wise, we’ve got the remaining launch positions narrowed down fairly well.”

  The president frowned. “Why didn’t he just feed us the latitudes and longitudes? That’s what he did the first time, right?”

  “He was too weak, sir,” Brenthoven said. “The DIA agent in the hospital room reported that Mr. Grigoriev literally used his dying breath to pass this information to us.”

  “It’s pretty tough to complain about that,” the president said. He paused for nearly a minute. “Are we getting this information to our Navy ships?”

  The national security advisor nodded. “COMPACFLEET is sending the message out now, sir. And the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is putting together a tactical proposal for your consideration.”

  “What’s he got in mind?”

  “I haven’t seen the details yet, sir,” Brenthoven said. “But the general plan is to send Explosive Ordnance Disposal teams onto the ice pack to locate and disarm Zhukov’s explosives. If the submarine can’t blow holes in the ice, it can’t launch missiles.”

  “That could give us the opening we need to finish this,” the president said. “If that sub can’t launch, Zhukov’s nuclear threat goes down the drain.”

  The national security advisor nodded. “That’s the idea, Mr. President.”

  “The upside is obvious,” the president said. “What’s the downside?”

  “Our positional information is only approximate, sir. The EOD teams are probably going to have trouble finding the explosives. And they’ll be exposed out on the ice. The longer they have to work out there, the greater the chance that they’ll be discovered by Zhukov’s people.”

  The president frowned at this thought. “If Zhukov catches us trying to pull his fangs, he’s going to want to punish us.”

  “Do you think he’ll launch another attack, sir?”

  The president sighed. “I don’t know, Greg. He’s certainly crazy enough.”

  “Maybe our EOD people can get the job done without getting caught.”

  “Maybe,” the president said. “We’re due for a bit of luck.”

  “Yes, sir,” the national security advisor said.

  Neither man made the obvious comment. So far, every lucky break they’d gotten had arrived too late to do any good.

  CHAPTER 45

  USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

  WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN

  WEDNESDAY; 06 MARCH

  0603 hours (6:03 AM)

  TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

  Ann watched the screen of her laptop computer, waiting for the small green icon that would appear when Mouse reported his position.

  The robot was operating autonomously, following his mission program without human supervision or input. Because communications signals might reveal his presence to the enemy submarine’s acoustic sensors, he was not sending any updates back to the Towers. He would not report in until his mission was complete and he was clear of the ice pack, either because he had located the target submarine, or because the allotted search period had expired and he had transited to the rendezvous coordinates.

  Ann glanced at the digital time readout in the lower right hand corner of her computer screen. Mouse’s search program wasn’t scheduled to end for another ten minutes yet, so she really didn’t expect to see anything yet.

  There was no need to hover over the computer, but she couldn’t tear herself away. Every time she walked away from it for thirty seconds, she found herself drawn back to the little screen by an irresistible force. She felt like an overprotective mother, hanging around the bus stop a half hour before the school bus was due to bring her child home.

  Ann had reason to be nervous. There were plenty of things that could go wrong. Mouse was designed to navigate safely beneath ice cover, but he’d never been under the ice for this long before. Until now, it had only been for a couple of hours at a time, for testing purposes. The conditions had been controlled then, with divers waiting to go after the robot if anything went wrong. There were no controls here. There were no divers, and there was no backup plan.

  Also, several of the program modules Mouse was using now had never been put through their paces before. Ann was confident that the software code was pretty stable, but bugs were still cropping up now and then. There was no telling what the robot might do if his software crashed while he was deep under the ice. He could ram himself into an ice keel, or take a wild excursion out of the operating area, to wind up in parts unknown when the power in his battery cells ran down.

  The robot might already be lying in pieces on the bottom of the sea, destroyed by an unrecognized technical defect, or some flaw in his program code. The mission could have failed ten minutes after it had started, and Ann wouldn’t find out until the robot failed to report at the end of its search patterns.

  Someone leaned over Ann’s left shoulder. “Has the prodigal robot returned?” It was the red headed Sonar Chief. Her name was Mc-something-or-other.

  Ann shook her head. “Not yet. He’s not due to report in for another few minutes.”

  The other woman tilted her head. “The way your eyes are welded to that computer screen, I figured that he must be overdue.”

  Ann felt the corners of her mouth come up just a little—that strange half-smile thing she always found herself doing when strangers tried to engage her in polite conversation. “No,” she said. “Mouse isn’t late. I’m just a little … nervous.”

  “I can understand that,” the chief said. “But don’t let
it worry you if your robot comes home empty-handed the first few times. Anti-Submarine Warfare is slow. The search part is, anyway. After you find the target, things can heat up pretty damned fast. But until then, it’s mostly a waiting game.”

  Ann nodded. “Thanks.”

  “My sonar gang is back in TACTASS, pulling in the towed array,” the Navy woman said. “We didn’t get anything either.” She shrugged. “I didn’t really think we would. Even the old Delta boats can be pretty quiet when they’re running slow and dark. But it was worth a shot. We could still get lucky. Maybe we’ll catch a sniff tomorrow night. Or maybe your Mouse unit will.”

  “I hope so,” Ann said.

  The Navy woman extended her hand. “Theresa McPherson. Around the CPO Mess, they call me Teri, or Mac. Everybody else just calls me Chief.”

  Ann shook the woman’s hand. “Ann Roark,” she said. “Or just Ann. I don’t have any idea what they call me around the CPO Mess. And I probably don’t want to know.”

  Chief McPherson laughed and started to say something, but she was interrupted by a short burst of static from an overhead speaker box, followed instantly by a man’s voice.

  “TAO—EW, I’m tracking four I-band emitters, bearing zero-three-seven. Zaslon S-800 series phased array radars. Looks like MiG-31s. Probably two flights of two.”

  A half-second later, a woman’s voice came out of the speaker in response. “EW—TAO, four I-band emitters bearing zero-three-seven, aye. Which way are the Bogies tracking?”

  “EW—TAO, Bogies have very slight left bearing drift with rapidly-increasing signal strength. The CPA is going to be right over the top of us, ma’am.”

  From the forward end of Combat Information Center, Ann heard a woman say, “Damn it!”

  The words didn’t come through the speaker. The woman hadn’t spoken them over the communications net.

  Ann turned to the chief. “What was all that about?”

  “The Electronic Warfare techs are reporting to the Tactical Action Officer that Russian aircraft are coming our way. From the radar transmissions, the planes appear to be MiG-31 fighter jets. If they don’t change course in the next couple of minutes, they’re going to fly right over us.”