38
FIRST CONTACTS
The various communications-satellite operators were fiercely independent companies and very often ruthless competitors, but they were not enemies. Between them were agreements informally called treaties. There was always the possibility that one satellite or another could go down, whether from an internal breakdown or collision with space debris that was becoming a real worry for them. Accordingly, there were mutual-assistance agreements specifying that in the event one operator lost a bird, his associates would take up the slack, just as newspapers in the same city traditionally agreed to share printing facilities in the event of a fire or natural disaster. To back up these agreements, there were open phone lines between the various corporate headquarters. Intelsat was the first to call Telstar.
“Bert, we just had two birds go down,” Intelsat’s duty engineer reported in a slightly shaken voice. “What gives?”
“Shit, we just lost three, and Westar 4 and Teleglobe are down, too. We’ve had complete system failures here. Running checks now—you?”
“Same here, Bert. Any ideas?”
“None. We’re talking like nine birds down, Stacy. Fuck!” The man paused. “Ideas? Wait a minute, getting something ... okay, it’s software. We’re interrogating 301 now ... they got spiked ... Jesus! 301 got spiked on over a hundred freqs! Somebody just tried to zorch us.”
“That’s how it looks here, too. But who?”
“Sure as hell wasn’t a hacker ... this would take megawatts to do that on just one channel.”
“Bert, that’s exactly what I’m getting. Phone links, everything spiked at once. You in any hurry to light them back up?”
“You kidding me? I got a billion worth of hardware up there. Till I find out what the hell clobbered them, they stay down. I’ve got my senior VP on the way in now. The Pres was out in Denver,” Bert added.
“Mine, too, but my chief engineer is snowed in. Damned if I’m going to put my ass on the line. I think we should cooperate on this, Bert.”
“No arguments with me, Stace. I’ll whistle up Fred Kent at Hughes and see what he thinks. It’ll take awhile for us to review everything and do full systems checks. I’m staying down until I know—and I mean know—what happened here. We got an industry to protect, man.”
“Agreed. I won’t light back up without talking to you.”
“Keep me posted on anything you find out?”
“You got it, Bert. I’ll be back to you in an hour one way or another.”
The Soviet Union is a vast country, by far the largest in the world both in area and in the expanse of its borders. All of those borders are guarded, since both the current country and all its precursors have been invaded many times. Border defenses include the obvious—troop concentrations, airfields, and radar posts—and the subtle, like radio reception antennas. The latter were designed to listen in on radio and other electronic emissions. The information was passed on by landline or microwave links to Moscow Center, the headquarters of the Committee for State Security, the KGB, at #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square. The KGB’s Eighth Chief Directorate is tasked to communications intelligence and communications security. It has a long and distinguished history that has benefited from another traditional Russian strength, a fascination with theoretical mathematics. The relationship between ciphers and mathematics is a logical one, and the most recent manifestation of this was the work of a bearded, thirtyish gnome of a man who was fascinated with the work of Benoit Mandelbrot at Harvard University, the man who had effectively invented fractal geometry. Uniting this work with that of MacKenzie’s work on Chaos Theory at Cambridge University in England, the young Russian genius had invented a genuinely new theoretical way of looking at mathematical formulae. It was generally conceded by that handful of people who understood what he was talking about that his work was easily worth a Planck Medal. It was an historical accident that his father happened to be a General in the KGB’s Chief Border Guards Directorate, and that as a result the Committee for State Security had taken immediate note of his work. The mathematician now had everything a grateful Motherland could offer, and someday he’d probably have that Planck Medal also.
He’d needed two years to make his theoretical breakthrough into something practical, but fifteen months earlier he’d made his first “recovery” from the U.S. State Department’s most secure cipher, called STRIPE. Six months after that he’d proven conclusively that it was similar in structure to everything the U.S. military used. Cross-checking with another team of crypt-analysts who had access to the work of the Walker spy ring, and the even more serious work done by Pelton, what had resulted only six months earlier was a systematic penetration of American encryption systems. It was still not perfect. Daily keying procedures occasionally proved impossible to break. Sometimes they went as much as a week without recovering one message, but they’d gone as many as three days recovering over half of what they received, and their results were improving by the month. Indeed, the main problem seemed to be that they didn’t have the computer hardware to do all the work they should have been able to do, and the Eighth Directorate was busily training more linguists to handle the message traffic they were receiving.
Sergey Nikolayevich Golovko had been awakened from a sound sleep and driven to his office to add his name to the people all over the world shocked into frightened sobriety. A First Chief Directorate man all of his life, his job was to examine the collective American mind and advise his President on what was going on. The decrypts flooding onto his desk were the most useful tool.
He had no less than thirty such messages which bore one of two messages. All strategic forces were being ordered to Defense Condition Two, and all conventional forces were coming to Defense Condition Three. The American President was panicking, KGB’s First Deputy Chairman thought. There was no other explanation. Was it possible that he thought the Soviet Union had committed this infamy? That was the most frightening thought of his life.
“Another one, naval one.” The messenger dropped it on his desk.
Golovko needed only one look. “Flash this to the Navy immediately.” He had to call his President with the rest. Golovko lifted the phone.
For once the Soviet bureaucracy worked quickly. Minutes later, an extremely low-frequency signal went out, and the submarine Admiral Lunin went to the surface to copy the full message. Captain Dubinin read it as the printer generated it.
AMERICAN SUBMARINE USS MAINE REPORTS LOCATION AS 50D-55M-09sN 153D-01M-23sW. PROPELLER DISABLED BY COLLISION OF UNKNOWN CAUSE. Dubinin left the communications room and made for the chart table.
“Where were we when we copied that transient?”
“Here, Captain, and the bearing was here.” The navigator traced the line with his pencil.
Dubinin just shook his head. He handed the message over. “Look at this.”
“What do you suppose he’s doing?”
“He’ll be close to the surface. So ... we’ll go up, just under the layer, and we’ll move quickly. Surface noise will play hell with his sonar. Fifteen knots.”
“You suppose he was following us?”
“Took you long enough to realize that, didn’t it?” Dubinin measured the distance to the target. “Very proud, this one. We’ll see about that. You know how the Americans boast of taking hull photographs? Now, my young lieutenant, now it will be our turn!”
“What does this mean?” Narmonov asked the First Deputy Chairman.
“The Americans have been attacked by forces unknown, and the attack was serious, causing major loss of life. It is to be expected that they will increase their military readiness. A major consideration will be the maintenance of public order,” Golovko replied over the secure phone line.
“And?”
“And, unfortunately, all their strategic weapons happen to be aimed at the Rodina. ”
“But we had no part in this!” the Soviet President objected.
“Correct. You see, such responses are automatic. They are planned in advance and become almost reflexive moves. Once attacked, you become highly cautious. Countermoves are planned in advance so that you may act rapidly while applying your intellectual capacities to an analysis of the problem without additional and unnecessary distractions.”
The Soviet President turned to his Defense Minister. “So, what should we do?”
“I advise an increase in our alert status. Defensive-only, of course. Whoever conducted this attack might, after all, attempt to strike us also.”
“Approved,” Narmonov said bluntly. “Highest peacetime alert.”
Golovko frowned at his telephone receiver. His choice of words had been exquisitely correct: reflexive. “May I make a suggestion?”
“Yes,” the Defense Minister said.
“If it is possible, perhaps it would be well to tell our forces the reason for the alert. It might lessen the shock of the order.”
“It’s a needless complication,” Defense thought.
“The Americans have not done this,” Golovko said urgently, “and that was almost certainly a mistake. Please consider the state of mind of people suddenly taken from ordinary peacetime operations to an elevated state of alert. It will only require a few additional words. Those few words could be important.”
“Good idea,” Narmonov thought. “Make it so,” he ordered Defense.
“We will soon hear from the Americans on the Hot Line,” Narmonov said. “What will they say?”
“That is hard to guess, but whatever it is, we should have a reply ready for them, just to settle things down, to make sure they know we had nothing to do with it.”
Narmonov nodded. That made good sense. “Start working on it.”
The Soviet defense-communications agency operators grumbled at the signal they’d been ordered to dispatch. For ease of transmission, the meat of the signal should have been contained in a single five-letter code group that could be transmitted, decrypted, and comprehended instantly by all recipients, but that was not possible now. The additional sentences had to be edited down to keep the transmission from being too long. A major did this, got it approved by his boss, a major general, and sent it out over no less than thirty communications links. The message was further altered to apply to specific military services.
The Admiral Lunin had only been on her new course for five minutes when a second ELF signal arrived. The communications officer fairly ran into the control room with it.
GENERAL ALERT LEVEL TWO. THERE HAS BEEN A NUCLEAR DETONATION OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN IN THE UNITED STATES. AMERICAN STRATEGIC AND CONVENTIONAL FORCES HAVE BEEN ALERTED FOR POSSIBLE WAR. ALL NAVAL FORCES WILL SORTIE AT ONCE. TAKE ALL NECESSARY PROTECTIVE MEASURES.
“Has the world gone mad?” the Captain asked the message. He got no reply. “That’s all?”
“That is all, no cueing to put the antenna up.”
“These are not proper instructions,” Dubinin objected. “‘All necessary protective measures’? What do they mean by that? Protecting ourselves, protecting the Motherland—what the hell do they mean?”
“Captain,” the Starpom said, “General Alert Two carries its own rules of action.”
“I know that,” Dubinin said, “but do they apply here?”
“Why else would the signal have been sent?”
A Level Two General Alert was something unprecedented for the Soviet Military. It meant that the rules of action were not those of a war, but not those of peace either. Though Dubinin, like every other Soviet ship captain, fully understood his duties, the implications of the order seemed far too frightening. The thought passed, however. He was a naval officer. He had his orders. Whoever had given those orders must have understood the situation better than he. The commanding officer of the Admiral Lunin stood erect and turned to his second in command.
“Increase speed to twenty-five knots. Battle stations.”
It happened just as fast as men could move. The New York FBI office, set in the Jacob Javits Federal Office Building on the southern end of Manhattan, dispatched its men north, and the light Sunday traffic made it easy. The unmarked but powerful cars screamed uptown to the various network headquarters buildings. The same thing happened in Atlanta, where agents left the Martin Luther King Building for CNN Headquarters. In each case, no fewer than three agents marched into the master control rooms and laid down the law: Nothing from Denver would go out. In no case did the network employees know why this was so, so busy were they trying to reestablish contact. The same thing happened in Colorado, where, under the direction of Assistant Special-Agent-in-Charge Walter Hoskins, the local field division’s agents invaded all the network affiliates, and the local phone company, where they cut all long-distance lines over the furious objections of the Bell employees. But Hoskins had made one mistake. It came from the fact that he didn’t watch much television.
KOLD was an independent station that was also trying to become a superstation. Like TBS, WWOR, and a few others, it had its own satellite link to cover a wide viewing area. A daring financial gamble, it had not yet paid off for the investors who were running the station on a highly leveraged shoestring out of an old and almost windowless building northeast of the city. The station used one of the Anik-series Canadian satellites and reached Alaska, Canada, and the North-Central U.S. reasonably well with its programming, which was mainly old network shows.
The KOLD building had once been Denver’s first network television station, and was constructed in the pattern originally required by the Federal Communications Commission in the 1930s: monolithic reinforced concrete, fit to survive an enemy bomb attack—the specifications predated nuclear weapons. The only windows were in the executive offices on the south side of the building. It was ten minutes after the event that someone passed by the open door of the program manager. He stopped cold, turned and ran back to the newsroom. In another minute a cameraman entered onto the freight elevator that ran all the way to the roof. The picture, hard-wired into the control room and then sent out on a Ku-band transmitter to the Anik satellite, which was untouched by earlier events, broke into the reruns of The Adventures of Dobie Gillis across Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, Idaho, and three Canadian provinces. In Calgary, Alberta, a reporter for a local paper who’d never got over her crush on Dwayne Hickman was startled by the picture and the voice-over, and called her city desk. Her breathless report went out at once on the Reuters wire. Soon thereafter, CBC uplinked the video to Europe on one of their unaffected Anik satellites.
By that time the Denver FBI had a pair of men entering the KOLD building. They laid down the law to a news crew that protested about the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which argument carried less weight than the men with guns who shut the power down to their transmitter. The FBI agents at least apologized as they did so. They needn’t have bothered. What had been a fool’s errand from the beginning was already an exercise in futility.
“So, what the hell is going on?” Richards asked his staff.
“We have no idea, sir. No reason was given for the alert,” the communications officer said lamely.
“Well, it leaves us between two chairs, doesn’t it?” This was a rhetorical question. The TR battle group was just passing Malta, and was now in range of targets in the Soviet Union. That required “The Stick’s” A-6E Intruders to take off, climb rapidly to cruising altitude, and top off their tanks soon thereafter, but at that point they had the gas to make it all the way to their targets on or near the Kerch Peninsula. Only a year before, U.S. Navy carriers, though carrying a sizable complement of thermonuclear bombs, had not been part of the SIOP. This acronym, pronounced “Sy-Op,” stood for “Single Integrated Operations Plan,” and was the master blueprint for dismantling the Soviet Union. The drawdown of strategic missiles—mostly land-based ones for the United States—had radically reduced the number of available warheads, and, like planners everywhere, the Joint Strategic Targeting Staff, co-located with headquarters SAC, tried to make up for the shortfall in any way they could. As a result, whenever an aircraft carrier was in range of Soviet targets, it assumed its SIOP tasking. In the case of USS Theodore Roosevelt, it meant that about the time the ship passed east of Malta, she became not a conventional-theater force, but a nuclear-strategic force. To fulfill this mission, TR carried fifty B-61-Mod-8 nuclear gravity bombs in a special, heavily-guarded magazine. The B-61 had FUFO—for “full fusing option,” more commonly called “dial-a-yield”—that selected an explosive power ranging from ten to five hundred kilotons. The bombs were twelve feet long, less than a foot in diameter, weighed a mere seven hundred pounds, and were nicely streamlined to cut air resistance. Each A-6E could carry two of them, with all of its other hard-points occupied by auxiliary fuel tanks to allow a combat radius of more than a thousand miles. Ten of them were the explosive equivalent of a whole squadron of Minuteman missiles. Their assigned targets were naval, on the principle that people most often kill friends, or at least associates, rather than total strangers. One assigned SIOP mission, for example, was to reduce the Nikolayev Shipyard on the Dniepr River to a radioactive puddle. Which was, incidentally, where the Soviet carrier Kuznetzov had been built.
The Captain’s additional problem was that his battle group commander, an admiral, had taken the chance to fly into Naples for a conference with the Commander of the United States Sixth Fleet. Richards was on his own.
“Where’s our friend?” Roosevelt’s CO asked.
“About two hundred fifty miles back,” the operations officer said. “Close.”
“Let’s get the plus-fives right up, skipper,” Jackson said. “I’ll take two and orbit right about here to watch the back door.” He tapped the chart.
“Play it cool, Rob.”
“No sweat, Ernie.” Jackson walked to a phone. “Who’s up?” he asked the VF-1 ready room. “Good.” Jackson went off to get his flight suit and helmet.
“Gentlemen,” Richards said as Jackson left, “since we are now east of Malta, we are now part of the SIOP, therefore a strategic and not a conventional asset, and DEFCON-TWO applies to us. If anyone here needs a refresher on the DEFCON-TWO Rules of Engagement, you’d better do it fast. Anything that might be construed as a threat to us may be engaged and destroyed on my authority as battle group commander. Questions?”
“Sir, we don’t know what is happening,” the ops officer pointed out.
“Yeah. We’ll try to think first, but, people, let’s get our collective act together. Something bad is happening, and we’re at DEFCON-TWO.”
It was a fine, clear night on the flight deck. Jackson briefed Commander Sanchez and their respective RIOs, then the plane captains for the two Tomcats sitting on the waist cats walked the flight crews out to them. Jackson and Walters got aboard. The plane captain helped strap both in, then disappeared downward and removed the ladder. Captain Jackson ran through the start-up sequence, watching his engine instruments come into normal idle. The F-14D was currently armed with four radar-homing Phoenix missiles and four infrared Sidewinders.
“Ready back there, Shredder?” Jackson asked.
“Let’s do it, Spade,” Walter replied.
Robby pushed his throttles to the stops, then jerked them around the detent and into afterburner, and signaled his readiness to the catapult officer, who looked down the deck to make sure it was clear. The officer fired off a salute to the aircraft.
Jackson blinked his flying lights in reply, dropping his hand to the stick and pulling his head back against the rest. A second later the cat officer’s lighted wand touched the deck. A petty officer hit the firing button, and steam jetted into the catapult machinery.
For all his years at this business, his senses never quite seemed to be fast enough. The acceleration of the catapult nearly jerked his eyeballs around inside their sockets. The dim glow lights of the deck vanished behind him. The back of the aircraft settled and they were off. Jackson made sure he was actually flying before taking the aircraft out of burner, then he retracted his gear and flaps and started a slow climb to altitude. He was just through a thousand feet when “Bud” Sanchez and “Lobo” Alexander pulled alongside.
“There go the radars,” Shredder said, taking note of his instruments. The entire TR battle group shut down every emission in a matter of seconds. Now no one would be able to track them from their own electronic noise.
Jackson settled down. Whatever this was, he told himself, it couldn’t be all that bad, could it? It was a beautifully clear night, and the higher he got, the clearer it became through the panoramic canopy of his fighter. The stars were discrete pin-pricks of light, and their twinkling ceased almost entirely as they reached thirty thousand feet. He could see the distant strobes of commercial aircraft, and the coastlines of half a dozen countries. A night like this, he thought, could make a poet of a peasant. It was for moments like these that he’d become a pilot. He turned west, with Sanchez on his wing. There were some clouds that way, he realized at once. He couldn’t see all that many stars.
“Okay,” Jackson ordered, “let’s get a quick picture.”
The Radar Intercept Officer activated his systems. The F-14D had just been fitted with a new Hughes-built radar called an LPI, for “low probability of intercept.” Though using less power than the AWG-9 system it had replaced, the LPI combined greater sensitivity with a far lower chance of being picked up by another aircraft’s threat receiver. It also had vastly improved look-down performance.
“There they are,” Walters reported. “Nice circular formation.”
“They have anything up?”
“Everything I see has a transponder on.”
“‘Kay—we’ll be on station in another few minutes.”
Fifty miles behind them, an E-2C Hawkeye airborne-early-warning bird was coming off the number-two catapult. Behind it, two KA-6 tankers were firing up, along with more fighters. The tankers would soon arrive at Jackson’s station to top off his fuel tanks, enabling the CAG to stay aloft for four more hours. The E-2C was the most important. It climbed out at full military power, turning south to take station fifty miles from its mother ship. As soon as it reached twenty-five thousand, its surveillance radar switched on, and the onboard crew of three operators began cataloging their contacts. Their data was sent by digital link back to the carrier and also to the group air-warfare officer aboard the Aegis cruiser, USS Thomas Gates, whose call sign was “Stetson.”
“Nothing much, skipper.”
“Okay, we’re on station. Let’s orbit and searchlight around.” Jackson turned his aircraft into a shallow right turn, with Sanchez in close formation.
The Hawkeye spotted them first. They were almost directly under Jackson and his two Tomcats, and out of the detection cone of their radars for the moment.
“Stetson, this is Falcon-Two, we have four bogies on the deck, bearing two-eight-one, one hundred miles out.” The reference was for TR’s position.
“IFF?”
“Negative, their speed is four hundred, altitude seven hundred, course one-three-five.”
“Amplify,” the AWO said.
“They’re in a loose finger-four, Stetson,” the Hawkeye controller said. “Estimate we have tactical fighters here.”
“I got something,” Shredder reported to Jackson a moment later. “On the deck, looks like two—no, four aircraft, heading southeast.”
“Whose?”
“Not ours.”
In TR’s combat information center, no one as yet had a clue what was going on, but the group intelligence staff was doing its best to find out. What they had learned to this point was that most satellite news channels seemed to be down, though all military satellite links were up and running. A further electronic sweep of the satellite spectrum showed that a lot of video circuits were unaccountably inactive, as were the satellite phone links. So addicted were the communications people to the high-tech channels, that it required the services of a third-class radioman to suggest sweeping shortwave bands. The first they found was BBC. The news flash was recorded and raced into CIC. The voice spoke with the quiet assurance that the British Broadcasting Corporation was known for:
“Reuters reports a nuclear detonation in the Central United States. The Denver, Coloraydo”—the Brits have trouble pronouncing some American state names—“television station, KOLD, broadcast via satellite a picture of a mushroom cloud over Denver, along with a voice report of a massive explosion. Station KOLD is now off the air, and attempts to reach Denver by telephone have not yet been successful. There has as yet been no official comment whatever on this incident.”
“Holy Christ,” someone said for all of them. Captain Richards looked around the room at his staff.
“Well, now we know why we’re at DEFCON-TWO. Let’s get some more fighters up. F-18s forward of us, -14s aft. I want four A-6s loaded with B-61s and briefed on SIOP targets. One squadron of-18s loaded with antiship missiles, and start planning an Alpha Strike on the Kuznetzov battle group.”
“Captain,” a talker called. “Falcon reports four inbound tactical aircraft.”
Richards had only to turn around to see the main tactical display, a radarscope fully three feet across. The four new contacts showed up as inverted V-shapes with course vectors. Closest point of approach was less than twenty miles, easily within range of air-to-surface missiles.
“Have Spade ID those bandits right now!”
“... close and identify,” was the order from the Hawkeye control aircraft.
“Roger,” Jackson acknowledged. “Bud, go loose.”
“Roger.” Commander Sanchez eased his stick to the left to open the distance between his fighter and Jackson’s. Called the “Loose Deuce,” the formation enabled the aircraft to be mutually supporting and also impossible to attack simultaneously. As he split off, both aircraft tipped down and dove at full dry power. In a few seconds they were through Mach-One.
“Boresighted,” Shredder told his driver. “I’m activating the TV system.”
The Tomcat was built with a simple identification device. It was a television camera with a ten-power telescopic lens that worked equally well in daylight and darkness. Lieutenant Walters was able to slave the TV into the radar system, and in a few seconds he had four dots that grew rapidly as the Tomcats overtook them. “Twin rudder configuration.”
“Falcon, this is Spade. Inform Stick we have visual but no ID, and we are closing.”
Major Pyotr Arabov was no tenser than usual. An instructor pilot, he was teaching three Libyans the intricacies of night overwater navigation. They had turned over the Italian island of Pantelleria thirty minutes earlier, and were now inbound for Tripoli and home. Formation flying at night was difficult for the three Libyans, though each had over three hundred hours in type, and overwater flying was the most dangerous of all. Fortunately they had picked a good night for it. The star-filled sky gave them a good horizon reference. Better to learn the easy way first, Arabov thought, and at this altitude. A true tactical profile, at one hundred meters and higher speed on a cloudy night could be exceedingly dangerous. He was not any more impressed with the airmanship of these Libyans than the U.S. Navy had been on several occasions, but they did seem willing to learn, and that was something. Besides, their oil-rich country, having learned its own lessons from the Iraqis, had decided that if it were to have an air force at all, it had better have a properly trained one. That meant the Soviet Union could sell a lot more of its MiG-29s, despite the fact that sales in the Israel area were now severely curtailed. It also meant that Major Arabov was being paid partly in hard currency.
The instructor pilot looked left and right to see that the formation was—well, not exactly tight, but close enough. The aircraft were behaving sluggishly with two fuel tanks under each wing. Each fuel tank had stabilizing fins, and looked rather like bombs, actually.
“They’re carrying something, skipper. MiG-29s, for sure.”
“Right.” Jackson checked the display himself, then keyed his radio. “Stick, this is Spade, over.”
“Go ahead.” The digital radio circuit allowed Jackson to recognize Captain Richards’ voice.
“Stick, we have ID on the bogies. Four MiG-two-niners. They appear to have underwing cargo. Course, speed, and altitude unchanged.” There was a brief pause.
“Splash the bandits.”
Jackson’s head snapped up. “Say again, Stick.”
“Spade, this is Stick: Splash the bandits. Acknowledge.”
He called them “bandits, ” Jackson thought. And he knows more than I do.
“Roger, engaging now. Out.” Jackson keyed his radio again. “Bud, follow me in.”
“Shit!” Shredder observed. “Recommend we target two Phoenix, left pair and right pair.”
“Do it,” Jackson replied, setting the weapons switch on the top of his stick to the AIM-54 setting. Lieutenant Walters programmed the missiles to keep their radars quiet until they were merely a mile out.
“Ready. Range is sixteen-thousand. Birds are in acquisition.”
Jackson’s heads-up display showed the correct symbology. A beeping tone in his headset told him that the first missile was ready to fire. He squeezed the trigger once, waited a second, then squeezed again.
“Shit!” Michael “Lobo” Alexander observed, half a mile away.
“You know better than that!” Sanchez snarled back at him.
“Sky is clear. I don’t see anything else around us.”
Jackson closed his eyes to save as much of his vision as possible from the yellow-white exhaust flames of the missiles. They rapidly pulled away, accelerating to over three thousand miles per hour, almost a mile per second. Jackson watched them home in as he positioned his aircraft for another shot if the Phoenixes failed to function properly.
Arabov made another instrument check. There was nothing unusual. His threat receivers showed only air-search radars, though one reading had disappeared a few minutes earlier. Other than that, this was an exceedingly routine training mission, proceeding straight and level on a direct course toward a fixed point. His threat receivers had not detected the LPI radar which had been tracking him and his flight of four over the past five minutes. It was able, however, to detect the powerful homing radar in a Phoenix missile.
A bright red warning light flashed on, and a screeching sound abused his hearing. Arabov looked down to check his instruments. They seemed to be functioning, but this wasn’t—his next move was to turn his head. He just had time to see a half-moon of yellow light and a ghostly, starlit smoke trail, then a flash.
The Phoenix targeted on the right-hand pair exploded just a few feet from them. The one-hundred-thirty-five-pound warhead filled their air with high-speed fragments which shredded both MiGs. The same happened to the left-hand pair. The air was filled with an incandescent cloud of exploding jet fuel and airplane parts. Three pilots were killed directly by the explosion. Arabov was rocketed out of the disintegrating fighter by his ejection seat, whose parachute opened a scant two hundred feet over the water. Already unconscious from the unexpected shock of ejection, the Russian Major was saved by systems that anticipated his injuries. An inflatable collar held his head above water, a UHF radio began screaming for the nearest rescue helicopter, and a powerful blue-white strobe light started flashing in the darkness. Around him were a few thin patches of burning fuel and nothing else.
Jackson watched the entire process. He’d probably set an all-time one-shot record. Four aircraft on one missile salvo. But there had been no skill involved. As with his Iraqi victim, they hadn’t known he was there. Any new nugget right out of the RAG could have done this. It was murder, not war—what war? he asked, was there a war?—and he didn’t even know why.
“Splash four MiGs,” he said over the radio. “Stick, this is Spade, splash four. Returning to CAP station, we need some gas.”
“Roger, Spade, tankers are overhead now. We copy you splashed four.”
“Uh, Spade, what the fuck is going on?” Lieutenant Walters asked.
“I wish I knew, Shredder.” Did I just fire the first shot in a war? What war?
Despite his earlier screaming, the Guards tank regiment was about as sharp a Russian unit as Keitel had ever seen. Their T-80 main battle tanks looked slightly toylike with their reactive armor panels festooned on turret and hull, but they were also low-slung dangerous-looking vehicles whose enormously long 125mm guns left no doubt as to their identity and purpose. The supposed inspection team was moving about in groups of three. Keitel had the most dangerous mission, as he was with the regimental commander. Keitel—“Colonel Ivanenko” —checked his watch as he walked behind the real Colonel.
Just two hundred meters away, Günther Bock and two other ex-Stasi officers approached a tank crew. They were boarding their vehicle as the officers approached.
“Stop!” one ordered.
“Yes, Colonel,” the junior sergeant who commanded the tank replied.
“Step down. We are going to inspect your vehicle.”
The commander, gunner, and driver assembled in front of their vehicle while the other crews boarded theirs. Bock waited for the neighboring tanks to button up, then shot all three Russians with his silenced automatic. The three bodies were tossed under the tank. Bock took the gunner’s seat and looked around for the controls he’d been briefed on. Not twelve hundred meters away, parked at right angles to his tank, were over fifty American M1A1 tanks whose crews were also boarding their vehicles.
“Power coming on,” the driver reported over the intercom. The diesel engine roared to life along with all the others.
Bock flipped the loading switch to Armor-Piercing Fin-Stabilized Discarding-Sabot round and punched the load button. Automatically, the breech to the tank’s main gun dropped open, and first the shell, then the propellant charge were rammed home, and the breech shut by itself. That, Bock thought, was easy enough. Next he depressed the gunsight and selected an American tank. It was easy to spot. The American tank park was lit up like any parking lot so that trespassers might easily be spotted. The laser gave him a range display, and Bock elevated the gun to the proper stadimeter line. The wind he estimated as zero. It was a calm night. Bock checked his watch and waited for the sweep hand to reach the twelve. Then he squeezed the triggers. Bock’s T-80 rocked backwards, along with three others. Two-thirds of a second later, the shell struck the turret of the American tank. The results were impressive. He’d struck the ammo compartment in the rear of the turret. The forty rounds of ammunition ignited at once. Blowout panels vented most of it straight up, but the protective fire-doors inside the vehicle had already been blown out by the shell, and the crew incinerated in their seats as their two-million-dollar tank turned into a mottled green-and-brown volcano, along with two others.
One hundred meters to the north, the regimental commander froze in midsentence, turning toward the noise in disbelief.
“What’s going on?” he managed to shout before Keitel shot him in the back of the head.
Bock had already fired his second round into the engine box of another tank, and was loading a third. Seven M1A1s were burning before the first American gunner got a round loaded. The huge turret swung around while tank commanders screamed orders at their drivers and gunners. Bock saw the operating turret and swung toward it. His round missed wide to the left, but struck another Abrams behind the first. The American shot also missed high because the gunner was excited. His second round was instantly loaded, and the American exploded a T-80 two down from Bock’s. Günther decided to leave this American alone.
“We’re under attack—commence firing commence firing!” the “Soviet” tank commanders screamed into their own command circuits.
Keitel ran to the command vehicle. “I am Colonel Ivanenko. Your commander is dead—get moving! Take those crazy bastards out while we still have a regiment left!”
The operations officer hesitated, having not the slightest idea what was happening, only able to hear the gunfire. But the orders came from a colonel. He lifted his radio, dialed up the battalion command circuit, and relayed the instruction.
There was the expected moment’s hesitation. At least ten American tanks were now burning, but four were shooting back. Then the entire Soviet line opened fire, and three of the active American tanks were blown apart. Those shielded by the front row began firing off smoke and maneuvering, mainly backwards, as the Soviet tanks started to roll. Keitel watched in admiration as the Soviet T-80s moved out. Seven of them remained still, of which four were burning. Two more blew up before they crossed the line where once a wall had stood.
It was worth it, Keitel thought, just for this moment. Whatever Günther had in mind, it was worth it to see the Russians and Americans killing each other.
Admiral Joshua Painter arrived at CINCLANT headquarters just in time to catch the dispatch from Theodore Roosevelt.
“Who’s in command there?”
“Sir, the battle group commander flew into Naples. Senior officer in the group is Captain Richards,” Fleet Intelligence replied. “He said he had four MiGs inbound and armed, and since we’re at DEFCON-TWO, he splashed them as a potential threat to the group.”
“Whose MiGs?”
“Could be from the Kuznetzov group, sir.”
“Wait a minute—you said DEFCON-TWO?”
“TR’s east of Malta now, sir, SIOP applies,” Fleet Operations pointed out.
“Does anybody know what’s going on?”
“I sure as hell don’t,” the Fleet Intelligence Officer replied honestly.
“Get me Richards on a voice line.” Painter stopped. “What’s the fleet status?”
“Everything alongside has orders to prepare to get under way, sir. That’s automatic.”
“But why are we at DEFCON-THREE here?”
“Sir, they haven’t told us that.”
“Fabulous.” Painter pulled the sweater over his head and yelled for coffee.
“Roosevelt on line two, sir,” the intercom called. Painter punched the button and put the phone on speaker.
“This is CINCLANT.”
“Richards here, sir.”
“What’s going on?”
“Sir, we’re fifteen minutes into a DEFCON-TWO alert here. We had a flight of MiG-29s inbound and I ordered them splashed.”
“Why?”
“They appeared to be armed, sir, and we copied a radio transmission about the explosion.”
Painter went instantly cold. “What explosion?”
“Sir, BBC reports a nuclear detonation in Denver. The local TV station that originated the report, they say, is now off the air. With that kind of information, I took the shot. I’m senior officer present. It’s my battle group here. Sir, unless you have some more questions, I have things to do here.”
Painter knew he had to get out of the man’s way. “Use your head, Ernie. Use your goddamned head.”
“Aye aye, sir. Out.” The line went dead.
“Nuclear explosion?” Fleet Intelligence asked.
Painter had a hot line to the National Military Command Center. He activated it. “This is CINCLANT.”
“Captain Rosselli, sir.”
“Have we had a nuclear explosion?”
“That’s affirmative, sir. In the Denver area, NORAD estimates yield in the low hundreds and high casualties. That’s all we know. We haven’t got the word out to everyone yet.”
“Well, here’s something else for you to know: Theodore Roosevelt just intercepted and splashed four MiG-29s inbound. Keep me posted. Unless otherwise directed, I’m putting everything to sea.”
Bob Fowler was into his third cup of coffee already. He was cursing himself for having drunk those four strong German beers like he was Archie Bunker or something, and one of his fears was that the people here would notice the alcohol on his breath. Intellect told him that his thought processes might be somewhat affected by the alcohol intake, but he’d had the drinks over a period of hours, and natural processes plus the coffee either already had or soon would purge it from his system entirely.
For the first time, he was grateful for the death of his wife, Marian. He’d been there at the bedside, had watched his beloved wife die. He knew what grief and tragedy were, and however dreadful the deaths of all those people in Denver might be, he told himself, he had to step back from it, had to set it aside, had to concentrate on preventing the death of anyone else.
So far, Fowler told himself, things had gone well. He had moved quickly to cut off the spread of the news. A nationwide panic was something that he didn’t need. His military services were at a higher level of alert that would either prevent or deter an additional attack for some indefinite period of time.
“Okay,” he said on the conference line to NORAD and SAC. “Let’s summarize what has happened to this point.”
NORAD answered: “Sir, we’ve had a single nuclear detonation in the hundred-kiloton range. There has as yet been no report from the scene. Our forces are moving to a high state of alert. Satellite communications are down—”
“Why?” Elizabeth Elliot asked in a voice more brittle than Fowler’s. “What could have done that?”
“We don’t know. A nuclear detonation in space might, from EMP effects—that’s electromagnetic pulse. When a nuclear device explodes at high altitude, most of its energy is released in the form of electromagnetic radiation. The Russians know more about the practical effects of such explosions than we do; they have more empirical data from their tests at Novaya Zemlya back in the 1960s. But we have no evidence of such an explosion, and we should have noticed it. Therefore a nuclear attack on satellites is most unlikely. Next possibility is a massive blast of electromagnetic energy from a ground source. Now, the Russians have pumped a lot of money into microwave weapons-research. They have a ship in the Eastern Pacific with lots of antennas aboard. It’s the Yuri Gagarin. She’s classed as a space-event-support ship, and she has four enormous high-gain antennas. That ship is currently three hundred miles off the coast of Peru, well within sight of the injured satellites. Supposedly the ship is supporting operations for the Mir space station. Aside from that, we’re out of guesses. I have an officer talking with Hughes Aerospace right now to see what their thinking is.
“Okay, we’re still trying to get ATC tapes from Stapleton to see if an aircraft might have delivered the bomb, and we are awaiting word from rescue and other teams dispatched to the site of the explosion. That’s all I have.”
“We have two wings fully in the air and more coming on line as we speak,” CINC-SAC said next. “All my missile wings are alerted. My Vice-CINC is in the air in Looking Glass Auxiliary West, and another Kneecap is about to take off for where you are, sir.”
“Anything happening in the Soviet Union?”
“Their air-defense people are increasing their alert level, as we have already discussed,” General Borstein replied. “We’re getting other radio activity, but nothing we can classify yet. There is no indication of an attack on the United States.”
“Okay.” The President let out a breath. Things were bad, but not out of control. All he had to do was get things settled down, and then he could go forward. “I’m going to open the direct line to Moscow.”
“Very well, sir,” NORAD replied.
A Navy chief yeoman was two seats away from President Fowler. His computer terminal was already lit up. “You want to slide down here, Mr. President,” the chief said. “I can’t cross-deck my display to your screen.”
Fowler crab-walked his swivel chair the eight feet to the chiefs place.
“Sir, the way this works is, I type in what you say here, and it’s relayed directly through the NMCC computers in the Pentagon—all they do is encipher it—but when the Russians reply, it arrives in the Hot Line room in Russian, is translated there, and then sent here from the Pentagon. There’s a backup at Fort Ritchie in case something goes wrong in D.C. We have landline and two separate satellite links. Sir, I can type about as fast as you can speak.” The chief yeoman’s name tag read Orontia, and Fowler couldn’t decide what his ancestry was. He was a good twenty pounds overweight, but he sounded relaxed and competent. Fowler would settle for that. Chief Orontia also had a pack of cigarettes sitting next to his keyboard. The President stole one, ignoring the no-smoking signs that hung on every wall. Orontia lit it with a Zippo.
“All ready, sir.” Chief Pablo Orontia looked sideways at his Commander-in-Chief. His gaze didn’t betray the fact that he’d been born in Pueblo, Colorado, and still had family there. The President would settle things down, that was his job. Orontia’s job, he reasoned, was to do his best to help the man. Orontia had served his country in two wars and many other crises, mainly as an admiral’s yeoman on carriers, and now he turned off his feelings as he had trained himself to do.
“Dear President Narmonov ...”
Captain Rosselli watched the first for-real transmission of the Hot Line since his arrival in Washington. The message was put up on the IBM-PC/AT and encrypted, then the computer operator hit the return button to transmit it. He really should be back at his desk, Jim thought, but what went through here might be vital to what he was doing.
AS YOU HAVE PROBABLY BEEN TOLD, THERE HAS BEEN A MAJOR EXPLOSION IN THE CENTRAL PART OF MY COUNTRY. I HAVE BEEN TOLD THAT IT WAS A NUCLEAR EXPLOSION, AND THAT THE LOSS OF LIFE IS SEVERE.
President Narmonov read, with his advisers at his side.
“About what one would expect,” Narmonov said. “Send our reply.”
“Jesus, that was fast!” the Army Colonel on duty remarked and began his translation. A Marine sergeant typed the English version, which was automatically linked to Camp David, Fort Ritchie, and the State Department. The computers printed out hard copy that was sent almost as fast to SAC, NORAD, and the intelligence agencies via facsimile printer.
AUTHENTICATOR: TIMETABLE TIMETABLE TIMETABLE
REPLY FROM MOSCOW
PRESIDENT FOWLER:
WE HAVE NOTED THE EVENT. PLEASE ACCEPT OUR DEEPEST SYMPATHY AND THAT OF THE SOVIET PEOPLE. How IS SUCH AN ACCIDENT POSSIBLE?
“Accident?” Fowler asked.
“That was awfully fast, Robert,” Elliot observed at once. “Too damned fast. His English isn’t very good. The message had to be translated, and you take time to read things like this. Their reply must have been canned-made up in advance ... what does that mean?” Liz asked, almost talking to herself, as Fowler formulated his next message. What’s going on here? Who is doing this, and why ... ?
PRESIDENT NARMONOV:
I REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT THIS WAS NOT AN ACCIDENT. THERE IS NO AMERICAN NUCLEAR DEVICE WITHIN A HUNDRED MILES, NOR WERE ANY US WEAPONS IN TRANSIT IN THE AREA. THIS WAS A DELIBERATE ACT BY UNKNOWN FORCES.
“Well, that’s no surprise,” Narmonov said. He congratulated himself for correctly predicting the first message from America. “Send the next reply,” he told the communicator. To his advisers: “Fowler is an arrogant man, with the weaknesses of arrogance, but he is no fool. He will be very emotional about this. We must settle him down, calm him. If he can keep control of himself, his intelligence will allow him to maintain control of the matter.”
“My President,” said Golovko, who had just arrived in the command center. “I think this is a mistake.”
“What do you mean?” Narmonov asked in some surprise.
“It is a mistake to tailor your words to what you think of the man, his character, and his mental state. People change under stress. The man at the other end of that telephone line may not be the same man whom you met in Rome.”
The Soviet President dismissed that idea. “Nonsense. People like that never change. We have enough of them here. I’ve been dealing with people like Fowler all my life.”
PRESIDENT FOWLER:
IF THIS IS IN FACT A DELIBERATE ACT THEN IT IS A CRIME WHOLLY WITHOUT PRECEDENT IN HUMAN HISTORY. WHAT MADMAN WOULD DO SUCH A THING, AND TO WHAT PURPOSE? SUCH ACTION MIGHT ALL TOO EASILY LEAD TO GLOBAL CATASTROPHE. YOU MUST BELIEVE THAT THE SOVIET UNION HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS INFAMOUS ACT.
“Too fast, Robert,” Elliot said. “‘You must believe’? What is this guy trying to say?”
“Elizabeth, you’re reading too much into this,” Fowler replied.
“These responses are canned, Robert! Canned. He’s answering too fast. He had them prepared in advance. That means something.”
“Like what?”
“Like we were supposed to be at the game, Robert! It looks to me like these were tailored for somebody else—like Durling. What if the bomb was supposed to get you, too, along with Brent and Dennis?”
“I have to set that aside, I told you that!” Fowler said angrily. He paused and took a deep breath. He could not allow himself to get angry. He had to stay calm. “Look, Elizabeth—”
“You can’t set that aside! You have to consider that possibility, because if it was planned, that tells us something about what is going on.”
“Dr. Elliot is right,” NORAD said over the open phone line. “Mr. President, you are entirely correct to distance yourself from this event in an emotional sense, but you have to consider all possible aspects of the operational concept that may be at work here.”
“I am compelled to agree with that,” CINC-SAC added.
“So, what do I do?” Fowler asked.
“Sir,” NORAD said, “I don’t like this ‘you must believe’ stuff either. It might be a good idea to let him know that we’re ready to defend ourselves.”
“Yeah,” General Fremont agreed. “He knows that, anyway, if his people are doing their job right.”
“But what if he takes our alert level as a threat?”
“They won’t, sir,” NORAD assured him. “It’s just how anybody would do business in a case like this. Their senior military leadership is very professional.”
Dr. Elliot stirred at that remark, Fowler noted. “Okay, I’ll tell him we’ve alerted our forces, but that we don’t have any evil intentions.”
PRESIDENT NARMONOV:
WE HAVE NO REASON TO SUSPECT SOVIET INVOLVEMENT IN THIS INCIDENT. HOWEVER, WE MUST ACT PRUDENTLY. WE HAVE BEEN THE VICTIM OF A VICIOUS ATTACK, AND MUST TAKE ACTION TO PROTECT OURSELVES AGAINST ANOTHER. ACCORDINGLY I HAVE PLACED OUR ARMED FORCES ON A PRECAUTIONARY ALERT. THIS IS ALSO NECESSARY FOR THE MAINTENANCE OF PUBLIC ORDER, AND TO ASSIST IN RESCUE OPERATIONS. YOU HAVE MY PERSONAL ASSURANCE THAT WE WILL TAKE NO OFFENSIVE ACTION WITHOUT JUST CAUSE.
“That’s reassuring,” Narmonov said dryly. “Nice of him to let us know about the alert.”
“We know,” Golovko said, “and he must know that we already know.”
“He does not know that we know the extent of his alert,” the Defense Minister said. “He cannot know that we are reading their codes. The alert level of their forces is more than precautionary. The American strategic forces have not been at this readiness status since 1962.”
“Really?” Narmonov asked.
“General, that is not technically true,” Golovko said urgently. “Their ordinary level of readiness is very high for American strategic forces, even when their military posture is Defense Condition Five. The change to which you refer is inconsequential.”
“Is this true?” Narmonov asked.
The Defense Minister shrugged. “It depends on how you look at it. Their land-based rocket force is always at a higher level of alert than ours because of the lower maintenance requirements of their rockets. The same is true of their submarines, which spend far more time at sea than ours do. The technical difference may be small, but the psychological difference is not. The increased level of alert tells their people that something horrible is under way. I think that is significant.”
“I do not,” Golovko shot back.
Marvelous, Narmonov thought, two of my most important advisers cannot agree on something this important....
“We need to reply,” the Foreign Minister said.
PRESIDENT FOWLER:
WE HAVE NOTED YOUR INCREASED ALERT STATUS. SINCE MOST OF YOUR WEAPONS ARE IN FACT POINTED AT THE SOVIET UNION WE MUST ALSO TAKE PRECAUTIONS. I SUGGEST THAT IT IS VITAL THAT NEITHER OF OUR TWO COUNTRIES TAKE ANY ACTION THAT MIGHT SEEM PROVOCATIVE.
“That’s the first time he didn’t have it canned,” Elliot said. “First he says ‘I didn’t do it,’ now he says we better not provoke him. What’s he really thinking?”
Ryan looked over the faxes of all six messages. He handed them to Goodley. “Tell me what you think.”
“Pure vanilla. Looks like everyone is playing a very cautious game, and that’s what they should be doing. We alert our forces as a precaution and they do the same. Fowler’s said that we have no reason to think they did it—that’s good. Narmonov says both sides should play it cool on provoking the other side—that’s good, too. So far, so good,” Ben Goodley thought.
“I agree,” the Senior Duty Officer said.
“That makes it unanimous,” Jack said. Thank God, Bob, I didn’t know you had it in you.
Rosselli walked back to his desk. Okay, things appeared to be more or less under control.
“Where the hell have you been?” Rocky Barnes asked.
“Hot Line room, things appear to be fairly cool.”
“Not anymore, Jim.”
General Paul Wilkes was almost there. It had taken nearly twenty minutes to get from his house onto I-295 and from there to I-395, a total distance of less than five miles. Snow-plows had barely touched this road, and now it was cold enough that what had been salted was freezing to ice anyway. Worst of all, those few D.C. drivers who were venturing out were showing their customary driving skill. Even those with four-wheel-drives were acting as though the additional traction made them immune to the laws of physics. Wilkes had just passed over South Capitol Street, and was now heading downhill toward the Maine Avenue exit. To his left, some maniac in a Toyota was passing him, and then came right, to head for the exit into downtown D.C. The Toyota skidded sideways on a patch of ice that front-wheel drive didn’t master. There was no chance to avoid it. Wilkes broadsided the car at about fifteen miles per hour.
“The hell with it,” he said aloud. He didn’t have time for this. The General backed up a few feet and started to maneuver around before the driver even got out. He didn’t check his mirror. As he changed lanes, he was rear-ended by a tractor-trailer doing about twenty-five. It was enough to drive the General’s car over the concrete divider and into the face of another car. Wilkes was killed instantly.