En route to the Office of Naval Research (ONR)
Washington, D.C.
Tuesday, April 9
0812 local time
Katie loved everything about her Jeep Grand Cherokee—the styling, the comfy leather seats, the four-wheel drive—everything except for the color. She’d picked white because that day on the dealer’s lot it had looked so striking and beautiful. Her dad had told her to buy a darker color, but she’d not listened. Listening had never been one of her strengths. As usual, her dad had been right, and now every time she passed a car wash, she could practically hear it whispering to her:
Hey, you, in the dirty Jeep. Yeah, I’m talking to you, Ryan. For twenty bucks, I’ll get you looking good as new. C’mon, pull over and get wet.
Her phone chimed, alerting her to an incoming text message.
“Siri, read me my newest message,” she said.
“Would you like me to read your newest text message?” Siri asked with an Irish accent.
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, please.”
Unlike most people, Katie was nice to Siri.
“Pete Miller says you’re not going to find any parking on the street, but the office has a garage you can use. Access is on the west side via Randolph Street,” Irish Siri dictated. “Would you like to reply?”
She thanked Pete for the heads-up and Siri sent her text back “hands free.”
Katie had changed Siri’s default voice to an Irish accent one day to amuse herself, but she’d ended up keeping it because the Irish Siri just seemed cooler than the American one. This current incarnation of Siri was a simple AI and not nearly as capable as a lot of others, but it was proof positive that AI was everywhere now. It wasn’t clear to her—in a way that made her think of their older brother, Jack Junior—just what her brother Kyle did, but the Task Force 59 team in Bahrain worked with what she could only imagine was an immensely powerful AI, crunching and managing terabytes of data. Like submariners, she supposed, Kyle was very tight-lipped about his role in whatever TF59 was doing in the Middle East, but she knew that artificial intelligence was going to be a sea change in how wars were waged over the next decade. The speed and asymmetric impact of that sea change was what had her concerned. Would America lead the vanguard as it had always done? Or would it cede advantage to China, which was plowing forward without any regard for the unintended consequences of rolling out unproven AI systems too quickly?
Save that worry for another day, she told herself. You’ve got enough on your plate.
Her GPS navigation app delivered her safely to Randolph Street and she parked in the garage, as her contact had advised her to do. She got badged at security, checked her iPhone into a locker, and waited for Pete. He arrived in the lobby a few minutes later and greeted her with a handshake and a smile.
“Hi, I’m Pete,” he said with a firm but not too firm grip, smiling at her with a handsome and weathered face that said it had seen the world.
“Katie,” she said, flashing him her pearly whites.
His business casual attire, laid-back manner, plain eyeglasses, and comfy Rockport shoes told her everything she needed to know about him. Pete was here because of the work, not to build his résumé or pad his ego.
We’re going to get along like two peas in a pod, she decided.
“Have you ever been here before?” he asked, holding the security door open for her like a gentleman.
“Nope,” she said.
“In that case, welcome to the Office of Naval Research.”
“You must be busy, with the pace of technology accelerating daily.”
He smiled, and gestured with a hand toward the elevator bank down the hall.
“Well, certainly busier than when ONR was founded in 1946,” he said. “Our work is primarily funded with grants, so we get to contract research scientists, engineers, and academics in several spheres: basic research, intellectual property development, applied science applications, and prototyping.”
“Do you do all the research here?”
“No,” he said. “This building is basically a giant project-management facility. We contract and collaborate with universities, NGOs, the national laboratories, and defense contractors, but the vast majority of our work is overseen by the Naval Research Laboratory.”
“Sounds like a lot to manage.”
“It is, but that’s the nature of the beast. Turns out, the world’s smartest people don’t all work at the same place.” He pressed the button for the elevator.
“Ain’t that the truth,” she said. “Juggernaut said you’re the guru of the Undersea Weapons Program.”
“Guru, huh? I guess I’ve been promoted. I’m going to have to add that to my business card,” he said with a charming smile as they stepped into an elevator. “I work in the Weapons and Payloads Division, or Code 333, and I have the coolest job in the ONR.”
“Why is that?”
He fixed her with a crooked grin. “Because I get to blow stuff up, Lieutenant, duh.”
“You sound like my brother.”
“Which one?” When she hesitated to answer, he said, “Yeah, I did my homework. Sorry, I’m thorough. That’s the nature of nuclear-engineer-trained retired submarine officers like me.”
“In that case, the answer is both brothers,” she said. “And I can’t fault you for being thorough, that’s why I’m here. Juggernaut said if anybody could help me, it would be you.”
“Jackie Guevara is a force of nature, that one. Her nickname suits her perfectly. She’s on the Washington these days, right?”
Katie nodded. “She’s the WEPS.”
“Of course she is.”
The elevator chimed and they exited on the seventh floor.
She followed him through a warren of offices and cubes. “When Juggernaut worked here, what type of project was she working on? . . . That is, if you can tell me.”
“I ran your clearance before you arrived. Looks like somebody somewhere high up on the food chain gave you a big fat rubber stamp of approval to look at anything your heart desires, and that includes the highly compartmentalized stuff.”
She shrugged. “What we’re investigating is important,” she said, wondering if it had been her dad and hoping not. Unless it was her dad just being President—God, it was so exhausting.
“Roger that,” he said. “My group is focused on next-generation torpedo and UUV propulsion technology, maneuverability, and stealth. But 333 is also tasked with increasing kill and counter-kill probabilities, engagement tactics, warhead lethality, sensor performance, and autonomy,” he said as he gestured for her to enter a vacant breakout room with a round table and four chairs. “Juggernaut was working on counter-kill applications for the Mk 48 ADCAP torpedo. She had some real outside-the-box, cutting-edge ideas while she was here.”
“That’s cool,” she said and took a seat.
He sat down opposite her, fixed her with an easy smile, and said, “So, what would you like to talk about?”
“Do you have a laptop computer we can use? I have a photo on my encrypted file vault at ONI that I want to get your opinion on.”
“Sure do, I’ll be right back,” he said and popped to his feet. At the threshold, he stopped and turned back to her. “I’ve forgotten my manners. Can I get you something to drink—we have coffee, soda, water?”
“No, thank you, I’m good,” she said.
While he was gone, she stared out the room’s lone window, which faced the facade of the building across the street. I wonder what they do over there, she mused. A weird, Twilight Zone thought flashed before her mind’s eye of her mirror image staring back at this building pondering the same question. She squinted to see if she could see—
“I’m back,” Pete said, snapping her out of her rumination as he dropped into the chair beside her.
He opened the laptop, logged in, and slid it in front of her.
“Thanks.” She clicked into the secure web interface, logged into the encrypted cloud server, and opened the file folder she’d prepared for this meeting. Using the touch pad, she selected and opened the picture of the Belgorod that had been taken inside the covered dry dock at the Sevmash Shipyard in Severodvinsk. “Do you know this submarine?”
“Of course, that’s the Belgorod—K-329,” he said.
She pointed at the bow of the sub. “These six large openings here—they look too large to be torpedo tubes. What do you think they are? Could they be horizontal ICBM launchers?”
“No,” he said. “Those are large-diameter torpedo tubes. Two meters, to be precise. We’re pretty sure they’re designed to launch Status-6 UUVs.”
“Status-6 . . . What’s that?”
“That’s the Russian code name for one of the Kremlin’s new strategic WMDs designed to terrorize the civilian world. They call it Status-6; we call it Poseidon.”
She swallowed, not sure whether she should be relieved or not. “So it’s not some kind of new super torpedo, is that what you’re saying?”
“Oh, it’s definitely some kind of a new super torpedo.”
“But I thought you said it was a UUV?”
“A ‘torpedo’ is what we called UUVs before people made up the term UUV,” the former submariner said. “If you think about it, the only real difference between a torpedo and a UUV is that the former has a warhead slapped on the front.”
“Oh,” she said, deflating. “Do we need to be worried about this?”
“Most definitely,” he said, scooting his chair back and turning it so he could look at her. “The Poseidon is a nuclear-powered, nuclear-payload-carrying vehicle. It’s fast, stealthy, and designed to travel long distances autonomously.”
“When you say long distances, how far are we talking?”
He fixed her with a tight smile. “It’s nuclear-powered, Katie. Just like our submarines. That means it has a virtually unlimited range.”
“Are you saying they could launch this weapon off the coast of Russia and it could patrol the entire Atlantic Ocean looking for a target?”
He nodded. “Or it could cross the Atlantic and target a city on the Eastern Seaboard.”
“What kind of yield are we talking about here? When you say nuclear payload, I assume you mean a tactical nuke.”
“This thing is huge, Katie. It’s six feet in diameter and we estimate sixty-five to eighty feet long. That’s bigger than our Trident ICBMs, which means it’s easily capable of carrying a warhead in the two- to ten-megaton range.”
“Dear God . . . If they sent one of these things into the Hudson River, they could take out New York City.”
“That’s right. But I have other concerns about this weapon.”
“What can possibly be worse than a ten-megaton stealth nuclear-tipped torpedo?” she said, crossing her arms.
“A ten-megaton nuke with a salted warhead.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“No problem, I’m going to walk you through Nuclear Weapons 101. Your typical nuke is a fission bomb. When it detonates, it creates a massive exothermic reaction—which is the fireball and shock wave combo they like to show in the movies—but it also releases a ton of radiation. And there are different types of radiation, at that. The bad ones are: gamma, which are like X-rays; alpha particles, which are basically helium atoms; and neutrons. If you’re not underground or in a shielded location when the bomb goes off, you’ll get bombarded with a lethal dose of radiation and die within days. But after that initial blast, the radiation levels drop pretty quickly. Sure, there are nasty radioactive fission products that linger, but the worst offenders decay away within a couple of months. A salted bomb, however, is an entirely different animal—a weapon designed with a single, malevolent purpose.”
Gooseflesh stood up on her neck at the timbre of his voice. “And what is that purpose?”
“To render the target uninhabitable for a generation.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“The way it works is, they put a jacket of cobalt 59 around the warhead so when it detonates the metal is transmuted into highly radioactive cobalt 60, the atoms of which get distributed for miles and miles around the blast sight. The half-life of cobalt 60 is five and a quarter years. Even after one half-life, a person who was unlucky enough to wander into the contamination zone would get a lethal dose of gamma radiation within an hour. It would take twenty half-lives, or a full century, before the radiation in the area reached livable levels, and even then those levels would be thirty times greater than typical background radiation levels. Do you see where I’m going with this?”
She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “A cobalt bomb is basically the mother of all WMDs. Not only does it destroy like a nuclear bomb, but it renders the target area uninhabitable in the aftermath.”
“Exactly. That’s why they call it a doomsday weapon, and the only people insane enough to actually build and threaten to use them are the Russians.”
She blew air through her teeth. “Do you think the Status-6 torpedoes have salted warheads?”
“I don’t know. The question is academic at this point.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because the Status-6 UUV is still in development. As far as dreaming up terrible weapons, the Russians win the gold medal every time, but when it comes to actually executing on those ideas, they have a pretty spotty track record. From what I understand, they’re still working on proof-of-concept testing with a prototype. And as you can see from your picture, the delivery platform is in dry dock. We’re several years out from Status-6 entering service, provided it works at all.”
She clicked on a new photo, this one a satellite image of K-329 leaving harbor. “Unfortunately, Pete, I’m concerned that the Russians are much further along than you think. This picture was taken yesterday. That’s the Belgorod departing Severodvinsk. We tracked it by satellite into the Barents Sea, but lost visual contact after it submerged.”
Pete took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Do you know if they loaded Status-6 torpedoes before they got underway?”
“No,” she said. “But if they did, it would have happened while K-329 was in the Sevmash covered dry dock and out of view from our prying eyes in the sky.”
“These weapons will be immensely heavy and, due to their size, impossible to load pierside. I suspect they are loaded tail-first into the tubes externally. And if that’s the case, because the shutter doors are below the waterline, loading the weapons in dry dock would be their standard operating procedure.”
She zoomed in on the image of the surfaced Belgorod to evaluate where the waterline fell on the hull. Then she clicked back to the previous image of the sub from the front and saw that he was right. “The tubes are definitely below the waterline.”
They sat for a moment in silence, both lost in thought.
Eventually, Pete spoke. “What can I do to help?”
“Send me everything you have on the Poseidon program and generate some spec sheets and diagrams for me that I can use in a presentation. I want to know your estimate of what the torpedo’s predicted and worst-case capabilities would be. I’m going to need to brief, well, probably everyone about this threat.”
“No problem, I’ll get on it straight away. I’ll email your high side a link to an encrypted file share.”
“Great,” she said and scooted her chair back from the table. “I probably should get going.”
“Let me walk you out,” he said, closing the laptop screen and pressing to his feet. “I just have one request going forward.”
“What’s that?”
“Promise me you’ll keep me in the loop on this one. If this weapon is legitimately operational, you’re going to need my help to devise the techniques and technology necessary to detect and destroy it.”
She took a page from her dad’s playbook and clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Pete, not only can I promise you that . . . I’m willing to guarantee it.”