the Sum Of All Fears (1991)

by Tom - Jack Ryan 05 Clancy

  The track commander moved immediately. One does not linger where one has killed. Two minutes later they found another surveillance spot. Police cars were racing down the streets, their blue lights flashing. One of them stopped a few hundred meters from the Bradley, backed up and raced off, the track commander saw. Well, he'd always known German cops were smart.

  Five minutes after the Bradley departed for another block, the first Berliner, an exceedingly courageous physician, came out his front door and went to the staff car. Both men were dead, each torso ripped to shreds by the cannon shells, though both faces were intact except for the splashed blood. The truck was an even greater mess. One of the men there might have survived for a few minutes, but by the time the doctor got there, it was far too late. He found it odd that they all wore Russian officers' uniforms. Not knowing what else to do, he called the police. Only later did he realize how disproportionate his understanding of the events outside his home had been.

  "They weren't kidding about the infrared signature. This must have been some bomb," the S&T guy observed. "Damage is a little funny, though ... hmph."

  "What do you mean, Ted?" Ryan asked.

  "I mean the ground damage ought to be worse than this ... must be shadows and reflections." He looked up. "Sorry. Shockwaves don't go through things--like a hill, I mean. There must have been reflections and shadows here, that's all. These houses here ought not to be there anymore."

  "I still don't know what you mean," Ryan said.

  "There are always anomalies in cases like this. I'll get back to you when I have this figured out, okay?" Ted Ayres asked.

  Walter Hoskins sat in his office because he didn't know what else to do, and as most senior man present, he had to answer the phones. All he needed to do was turn to see what the stadium was. The pall of smoke was only five miles away through his windows, one of which was cracked. Part of him wondered if he should send a team down there, but he had no such orders. He turned his chair to look that way again, amazed that the window was almost intact. After all, it was supposed to have been a nuclear bomb, and it was only five miles. The remains of the cloud were now over the front range of the Rockies, still intact enough that you could tell what it had been, and behind it like a wake was another black plume of fires from the bomb area, The destruction must be ... ... not enough. Not enough? What a crazy thought. With nothing else to do, Hoskins lifted the phone and dialed up Washington. "Give me Murray."

  "Yeah, Walt."

  "How busy are you?"

  "Not very, as a matter of fact. How is it at your end?"

  "We have the TV stations and phones shut down. I hope the President will be there when I have to explain that one to the judge."

  "Walt, this isn't the time--"

  "Not why I called."

  "Well, then you want to tell me?"

  "I can see it from here, Dan," Hoskins said in a voice that was almost dreamy.

  "How bad is it?"

  "All I see is the smoke, really. The mushroom cloud is over the mountains now, all orange, like. Sunset, it's high enough to catch the sunset, I guess. I can see lots of little fires. They're lighting up the smoke from the stadium area. Dan?"

  "Yeah, Walt?" Dan responded. The man seemed to be in shock, Murray thought.

  "Something odd."

  "What's that?"

  "My windows aren't broken. I'm only like five miles from there, and only one of my windows is cracked, even. Odd, isn't it?" Hoskins paused. "I have some stuff here that you said you wanted, pictures and stuff." Hoskins leafed through the documents that had been set in his In basket. "Marvin Russell sure picked a busy day to die. Anyway, I have the passport stuff you wanted. Important?"

  "It can wait."

  "Okay." Hoskins hung up.

  "Walt's losing it, Pat," Murray observed.

  "You blame him?" O'Day asked.

  Dan shook his head. "No."

  "If this gets worse ..." Pat observed.

  "How far out is your family?"

  "Not far enough."

  "Five miles," Murray said quietly.

  "What?"

  "Walt said that his office is just five miles away, he can see it from there. His windows aren't broken, even."

  "Bullshit," O'Day replied. "He must really be out of it. Five miles, that's less than nine thousand yards."

  "What do you mean?"

  "NORAD said the bomb was a hundred-kiloton range. That'll break windows over a hell of a long distance. Only takes half a pound or so of overpressure to do a window."

  "How do you know?"

  "Used to be in the Navy--intelligence, remember? I had to evaluate the damage distances for Russian tactical nukes once. A hundred-kiloton bomb at nine thousand yards won't sink you, but it'll wreck everything topside, scorch paint, start small fires. Bad news, man."

  "Curtains, like?"

  "Ought to," O'Day thought aloud. "Yeah, regular curtains would light up, especially if they're dark ones."

  "Walt's not so far out of it that he'd miss a fire in his office. ..." Murray lifted his phone to Langley.

  "Yeah, what is it, Dan?" Jack said into the speaker.

  "What number do you have on the size of the explosion?"

  "According to NORAD, one-fifty, maybe two hundred kilotons, size of a big tactical weapon or a small strategic one," Ryan said. "Why?" On the other side of the table, the S&T officer looked up from the photos.

  "I just talked to my ASAC Denver. He can see the stadium area from his office--five miles, Jack. He's only got one cracked window."

  "Bull," S&T noted.

  "What do you mean?" Ryan asked.

  "Five miles, that's eight thousand meters," Ted Ayres pointed out. "The thermal pulse alone should fry the place, and the shock wave would sure as hell blow a plate-glass window out."

  Murray heard that. "Yeah, that's what a guy here just said. Hey, my guy might be a little out of it--shock, I mean--but he'd notice a fire next to his desk, don't you think?"

  "Do we have anything from people on the scene yet?" Jack asked Ayres.

  "No, the NEST team is on the way, but the imagery tells us a lot, Jack."

  "Dan, how quick can you get somebody to the scene?" Ryan asked.

  "I'll find out."

  "Hoskins."

  "Dan Murray, Walt. Get some people down there fast as you can. You stay put to coordinate."

  "Okay."

  Hoskins gave the proper orders, wondering just how badly he might be endangering his people. Then, with nothing else to do, he looked over the file on his desk. Marvin Russell, he thought, yet another criminal who died of dumb. Drug dealers. Didn't they ever learn?

  Roger Durling was grateful when the Kneecap aircraft disengaged from the tanker. The converted 747 had the usual pussycat ride, but not when in close proximity to a KC-10 tanker. It was something only his son enjoyed. Aboard in the conference room were an Air Force brigadier, a Navy captain, a Marine major, and four other field- and staff-grade officers. All the data the President got came to Kneecap automatically, including the Hot Line transcripts.

  "You know, what they're saying is okay, but it sure as hell would be nice to know what everyone's thinking."

  "What if this really is a Russian attack?" the General asked.

  "Why would they do it?"

  "You've heard the chatter between the President and CIA, sir."

  "Yeah, but that Ryan guy's right," Durling said. "None of this makes any sense."

  "So who ever said the world had to make sense? What about the contact in the Med and Berlin?"

  "Forward-deployed forces. We go on alert, and they go on alert, and they're close to each other, and someone goofs. You know, like Gavrilo Prinzip shooting the Archduke. An accident happens and then things just slide down the chute."

  "That's why we have the Hot Line, Mr. Vice President."

  "True," Durling conceded. "And so far it seems to be working."

  They made the first fifty yards easily, but then it got harder, and soon it
went from hard to impossible. Callaghan had a total of fifty firefighters trying to fight their way on, with a hundred more in support. On reflection, he had a continuous water spray over every man and woman. If nothing else, he reasoned, it would wash whatever fallout or dust or whatever the hell was out here off his people and into the sewer drains--that which didn't freeze first, that is. The men in front were coated with ice that made a translucent layer on their turn-out coats.

  The biggest problem was the cars. They'd been tossed about like toys, lying on their sides or tops, leaking gasoline that collected into burning puddles that were being supplied faster than they burned off. Callaghan ordered a truck in. One at a time, his men ran cables to the frames of the wrecked cars, and the truck dragged them clear, but this was horribly time-consuming. It would take forever to get into the stadium. And there were people in there. He was sure of it. There had to be. Callaghan just stood there, out of the water spray, guilty that he was warmer than his people. He turned when he heard the roar of a large diesel engine.

  "Hello." It was a man wearing the uniform of a U.S. Army colonel. The name tag on his parka read Lyle. "I hear you need heavy equipment."

  "What you got?"

  "I have three engineer tanks, M728s, just rolling in now. Got something else, too."

  "What's that?"

  "A hundred MOPP suits, you know, chemical warfare gear. It ain't perfect, but it's better than what your people got on. Warmer, too. Why don't you pull your people off and get them outfitted. Truck's over there." The Colonel pointed.

  Callaghan hesitated for a moment, but decided that he couldn't turn this offer down. He called his people off and pulled them back to don the military gear. Colonel Lyle tossed him an outfit.

  "The water fog's a good idea, ought to keep dust and stuff down. So, what do you want us to do?"

  "You can't tell from here, but there is still some structure in there. I think there might be survivors. I have to find out. Can you help us get through these cars?"

  "Sure." The Colonel lifted his own radio and ordered the first vehicle in. The M728, Callaghan saw, was essentially a tank with a dozer blade on the front, and a big A-frame and winch on the back of the turret. There was even an odd-looking short-barreled gun.

  "This isn't going to be very neat. Can you live with that?"

  "Screw neat--get in there!"

  "Okay." Lyle picked up the interphone at the left rear of the vehicle. "Make a hole," he ordered.

  The driver revved up the diesel just as the first firemen returned. He made a sincere effort to avoid the fire hoses--even so he split eight two-and-a-half-inch lines. The blade dropped and the tank crashed into the mass of burning cars at twenty miles per hour. It made a hole, all right, about thirty feet deep. Then the tank backed off and started widening it.

  "Jesus," Callaghan observed. "What do you know about radiation stuff?"

  "Not much. I checked with the NEST guys before I drove down. They ought to be here any time. Until then ..." Lyle shrugged. "You really think there's live ones in there?"

  "Part of the structure is still there. I saw it from the chopper."

  "No shit?"

  "Yeah, I saw it."

  "But that's crazy. The NORAD guys say it was a big one."

  "What?" Callaghan shouted over the noise of the tank.

  "The bomb, it was supposed to be a big one. There shouldn't even be a parking lot here."

  "You mean this was a little one?" Callaghan looked at the man as though he were crazy.

  "Hell, yes!" Lyle stopped for a moment. "If there's people in there ..." He ran to the back of the tank and grabbed the phone. A moment later the M728 stopped.

  "What's the matter?"

  "If there are survivors, hell, we might squash one this way. I just told him to take it easier. Goddamn, you're right. And I thought you were crazy."

  "What do you mean?" Callaghan shouted again, waving his firefighters to put their spray on the tank also.

  "There may be survivors in there. This bomb was a hell of a lot smaller than they told me on the phone."

  "Maine, this is Sea Devil One-Three," the P-3C Orion called. "We're about forty minutes out from your position. What seems to be the problem?"

  "We have screw and shaft damage, and we have an Akula in the neighborhood, last fix five-zero thousand yards southwest," Ricks answered.

  "Roger that. We'll see if we can drive him off for you. We'll report when we get on station. Out."

  "Captain, we can do three knots, let's do that, north, open as much as we can," Claggett said.

  Ricks shook his head. "No, we'll stay quiet."

  "Sir, our friend out there must have copied the collision transient. He will be coming this way. We've lost our best sonar. Smart move is to evade as best we can."

  "No, the smart move is to stay covert."

  "Then at least launch a MOSS."

  "That makes sense, sir," the weapons officer thought.

  "Okay, program it to sound like we are now, and give it a southerly course."

  "Right." Maine's number-three torpedo tube was loaded with a MOSS, a Mobile Submarine Simulator. Essentially a modified torpedo itself, the MOSS contained a sonar transducer connected to a noise generator, instead of a warhead. It would radiate the sound of an Ohio-class submarine, and was designed to simulate a damaged one. Since shaft damage was one of the few reasons that an Ohio might make noise, that option was already programmed in. The weapons officer selected the proper noise track, and launched the weapon a few minutes later. The MOSS sped off to the south, and two thousand yards away, it began radiating.

  The skies had cleared over Charleston, South Carolina. What had fallen as snow in Virginia and Maryland had been mainly sleet here. The afternoon sun had removed most of that, returning the antebellum city to its normally pristine state. As the Admiral commanding Submarine Group Six watched from the tender, two of his ballistic-missile submarines started down the Cooper River for the sea and safety. He wasn't the only one to watch. One hundred ninety miles over his head, a Soviet reconnaissance satellite made its pass, continuing up the coast to Norfolk, where the sky was also clearing. The satellite downlinked its pictures to the Russian intelligence center on Cuba's western tip. From there it was immediately relayed by communications satellite. Most of the Russian satellites used high-polar orbits, and had not been affected by the EMP. The imagery was in Moscow in a matter of seconds.

  "Yes?" the Defense Minister asked.

  "We have imagery of three American naval bases. Missile submarines at Charleston and King's Bay are putting to sea."

  "Thank you." The Defense Minister replaced the phone. Another threat. He relayed it at once to President Narmonov.

  "What does that mean?"

  "It means that the military action taken by the Americans is not merely defensive. Some of the submarines in question carry the Trident D-5 missile, which has first-strike capability. You'll recall how interested the Americans were in forcing us to eliminate our SS-18s?"

  "Yes, and they are removing a large number of their Minute-men," Narmonov said. "So?"

  "So they don't need land-based missiles to make a first strike. They can do it from submarines. We cannot. We depend on our land-based ICBMs for that."

  "And what of our SS-18s?"

  "We're removing the warheads from some of them even as we speak, and if they ever get that damned deactivation facility working, we'll be in full compliance with the treaty--we are now, in fact, just the damned Americans don't admit it." The Defense Minister paused. Narmonov wasn't getting it. "In other words, while we have eliminated some of our most accurate missiles, the Americans still have theirs. We are at a strategic disadvantage."

  "I have not had much sleep, and my thinking is not at its best," Narmonov said testily. "You agreed to this treaty document only a year ago, and now you're telling me that we are threatened by it?"

  They're all the same, the Defense Minister thought. They never listen, they never really pay attenti
on. Tell them something a hundred times and they just don't hear you!

  "The elimination of so many missiles and warheads changes the correlation of forces--"

  "Rubbish! We're still equal in every way!" President Narmonov objected.

  "That is not the question. The important factor is the relationship between the number of launchers--and their relative vulnerability--and the number of warheads available to both sides. We can still strike first and eliminate the American land-based missile force with our land-based missiles. That is why they were so willing to remove half of theirs. But the majority of their warheads are at sea, and now, for the first time, such sea-based missiles are totally adequate for a disarming first strike."

  "Kuropatkin," Narmonov said, "are you hearing this?"

  "Yes, I am. The Defense Minister is correct. The additional dimension, if I may say it, is that the reduction in the number of launchers has changed the overall ratio of launchers-to-warheads. For the first time in a generation, a truly disarming first-strike is possible, especially if the Americans are able to decapitate our government with their first strike."

  "And they could do that with the Stealth fighters they put in Germany," Defense concluded the statement.

  "Wait a minute. Are you telling me that Fowler blew up his own city as an excuse to attack us? What madness is this?" Now the Soviet President began to understand fear.

  The Defense Minister spoke slowly and clearly. "Whoever detonated that weapon is beside the point. If Fowler begins to think that it was our doing, he has the ability to act against us. Comrade President, you must understand this: technically speaking, our country is on the edge of annihilation. Less than thirty minutes separate their land-based missiles from us. Twenty minutes for their sea-based ones, and as little as two hours from those goddamned invisible tactical bombers, which would be the most advantageous opening move. All that separates us from destruction is the mental state of President Fowler."