Arctic Gambit

by Larry Bond

  “Not to mention that the navy and air force are doing everything backwards,” added Joanna. “Many of the front-line units are down for maintenance, now, before the exercise. Normally the participating units go into a maintenance period after an exercise due to the higher wear and tear.”

  “So you’re suggesting they’re intentionally limiting the use of their ships and aircraft to keep them in prime operating condition? And that this was preplanned?” asked Hardy.

  Joanna nodded. “Yes, and there appears to be a higher than normal number of ships, especially the major units, and Backfire bombers undergoing some type of maintenance. But what’s just as important is that these assets aren’t the limiting factor if you’re planning an offensive, moving army units into position is.”

  “But what’s the motivation? What does Fedorin hope to achieve by starting a war?” challenged Hyland.

  “Take a close look at the map, Bill. If you fold the Baltics, Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova back into the Russian Federation, along with Belarus, you get…”

  “The Soviet Union!” Sellers almost shouted in surprise. “Well, at least the western end of it.”

  “That’s a pretty ugly picture you’re painting, my dear,” concluded Hardy. “What I don’t get is why you think Russia would even consider risking a war with NATO?”

  Joanna smiled and motioned toward Hyland. “Dwight touched on this a moment ago. Bill’s group has been banging the rocks together on the Russian economy; it’s anemic and appears to be deteriorating more each year. What if the situation is worse than we think? Our information is limited; Fedorin’s isn’t. What if the Russian economy is in a nosedive and the government either can’t, or doesn’t know how to stop it before it plows into the dirt?”

  Lowell’s eyes popped open. “It’s the collapse of the Soviet Union, all over again!”

  “Precisely, but only this time it would be the collapse of the Russian Federation. Fedorin’s motivation is rooted in fear. If he seriously believes the existence of the Russian state is at risk, that NATO would be in a position to pick off fractured republics in a piecemeal fashion, then this would be sufficient justification for him to consider striking first. He said as much last year.”

  “I can see Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, but even Fedorin has to know NATO wouldn’t allow him to invade the Baltics.” Hyland’s voice had a desperate edge to it, as if he was looking for something that would disprove her theory, but didn’t expect to find it.

  “Agreed. But without us, NATO doesn’t have a chance.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but that’s absurd! Why would we not be involved?” protested Hyland.

  “Oh, we would eventually get our act together and support our NATO allies, but by the time we did, it would be too late.”

  “I’m sorry, Joanna, but I don’t understand why you think we wouldn’t stand with our allies,” replied Hardy. His demeanor reflected both confusion and annoyance.

  “Because all of us here in this room would likely be dead, or struggling desperately to find some path out from under Russia’s nuclear blackmail.” The stunned look on their faces and complete silence told Joanna they hadn’t made the linkage yet.

  “Lowell, this is what the Dragon torpedo is all about. Fedorin knows that a war with NATO will very likely include the use of nuclear weapons, and therefore, he would want to find a way to strike first. The Dragon is a covert first-strike weapon. And, if the weapon itself could be kept completely secret, as was their plan, then the surviving national command authority would have to prove it was a Russian nuke. It would be extremely difficult to justify the damage a full-scale nuclear exchange would cause based solely on a hunch, even a good one.

  “By then the Baltic States will have been overrun, and the rest of our NATO allies will be asking the question if Tallinn, Riga, or Vilnius is worth Paris, London, or Berlin. The ultimate goal of this new weapon being built at Bolshevik Island, Mr. President, is scaring us or knocking us out of NATO. Demonstrating that the Article V mutual security guarantee is meaningless dissolves the glue that holds NATO together. Without it, the alliance would fall apart.”

  Hardy’s expression was a mix of astonishment and anger.

  Sellers was tight-lipped and shaking his head. Hyland was dumbfounded; he just couldn’t believe what he had heard. “That’s insane, Dr. Patterson,” he howled. “No nation, regardless of their economic situation, could ever view war as a preferred path. The damage from a nuclear exchange would be catastrophic!”

  “Wrong, Bill!” snapped Hardy. “Japan, 1941. Many of that country’s leaders believed it was preferable to go to war than lose face. As disturbing as my wife’s conclusion is, she’s put together a strong argument supporting it. And…” He paused as he looked toward Joanna and smiled. “She has an annoying habit of being right most of the time.”

  “Dwight, Bill, this is your top priority. Pitch the theory to the intel community, get them to give it a thorough scrub, take it apart if they can. But do not, I repeat, do not, say whose theory it is. I need some good, old-fashioned, impartial analysis of this assessment, not a bunch of ‘yes sir, brilliant theory,’ understood?”

  18 July 2021

  1830 Eastern Daylight Time

  Naval Submarine Base New London

  Groton, CT

  * * *

  USS Jimmy Carter rested high and dry on the keel blocks inside the floating dry dock. Out of the water, its true bulk was revealed—and Carter was a big boat. The Electric Boat dry dock supervisor made it a habit to inspect all submarines in his dry dock at least three times a day, but this was his fourth walkabout in as many hours. The U.S. Navy may own Shippingport, but it was Chad Sheridan’s people that did the actual work. The problem was, he had no idea what work had to be done. There was nothing in the work breakdown section of the contract. Zip. Nil. Nada.

  The submarine had been in the dry dock for twenty-four hours, and no one had a clue as to what had to be repaired, replaced, patched up, or painted. Sheridan had spent most of the day wandering from one senior executive to another at the Electric Boat shipyard main office only to get the same response, a shrug along with an aggravated “I don’t know.” It wasn’t until Sheridan caught up with the vice president for Groton Operations that he got any useful information.

  “Look, Chad, it’s the Navy’s dry dock. They can put anything they want in there. We just do the work.”

  “Which is backing up very nicely right now, sir. I don’t have a problem with the Navy shifting priorities; I just need to know what work is required.”

  The executive was sympathetic to Sheridan’s frustration, but this was outside his purview. Sighing, he said, “Why don’t you find the boat’s commanding officer? He has to know what repairs are needed.”

  * * *

  It took a couple of hours to find Carter’s skipper and get on his schedule, but he was right on time. Walking toward the EB engineer along the wing wall, he was quick to introduce himself.

  “Lou Weiss,” he said while extending his hand. Sheridan accepted the handshake but got straight to business.

  “Chad Sheridan, Captain, EB dry dock supervisor. I’m a little puzzled as to what your boat needs. The contract is woefully lacking in any specifics. I’ve checked your main propulsion shaft bearings and they’re just fine, thank you. So what am I supposed to be doing?”

  Weiss was visibly uncomfortable discussing his boat in the open. Looking around to see if anyone was watching, he asked, “Do you have a quiet place where we can discuss this, Mr. Sheridan?”

  Bewildered, he replied, “Sure, my office is right over there.” Sheridan turned and started walking over to the building when Weiss shouted, “Would you like to get some coffee first?”

  “Coffee? Whose coffee?”

  “My culinary specialists make a fine brew. I can have two mugs up here in a minute.”

  “Bilge water,” declared Sheridan.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said ‘bilge water.’ If y
ou want a real cup of coffee, then come with me.” Sheridan spun about and resumed his steady pace. Confused, Weiss followed the stocky engineer. Once inside the foreman’s office, Weiss was offered a large mug.

  “This is my personal stock, Captain. I purchase green coffee beans and roast them myself; these are from Sumatra.”

  While Sheridan filled the mug, Weiss scanned the office. It was small, but neat and well organized. The wall behind Sheridan’s desk was covered with a large Oakland Raiders flag. On the desk was a parrot figurine with a similar eye patch. Once Weiss’s mug was full, he thanked his host and raised it to take his first sip. The aroma was amazing, heady; the taste was rich, earthy, with just a hint of sweetness. It went down smooth, with no trace of bitterness or an acidic bite. He’d never had a cup of coffee like this before. “This is incredible!” praised Weiss.

  “I thought you’d like it. Have a seat, Captain.”

  Once both men were comfortable, and after another sip or two, Sheridan got back to the issue at hand. “Captain, I don’t know why the Navy had your boat put in the dry dock. Your shaft bearings are in perfect order, your hull is very clean, and I can’t find any evidence of grease leakage from your torpedo tubes, control surfaces, or masts. So what the hell am I supposed to be looking for? I really don’t mind a blank check, but a blank work order is very troubling. I have a lot of work to do on other submarines, and that’s not a parking garage out there!”

  Weiss took a deep breath; he had been equally surprised by the order to put Carter into the dry dock, but understood completely after he was told why. The problem was the EB engineer wasn’t cleared to know why.

  “I understand your frustration, Mr. Sheridan, but I’m not authorized to say why my boat was placed in the dock. But let’s just say that this is more of a show than an honest-to-God maintenance period.”

  “I see. So you want it to appear that repairs are being done, when in reality we’re to do nothing.”

  Weiss nodded, “Basically, yes.”

  “Well, Captain, the show would be more convincing if we had something real to work on. I just can’t have welders cutting scrap metal in the basin; it would raise a lot of questions. And workers like to talk about strange occurrences at the bar after their shift.”

  Weiss sighed; the man had a point, a good one. “Okay, get with my chief engineer and see what small jobs we can have your people do. Oh, and you could give the ocean interface doors a thorough check. I have a hunch I’ll be needing them.”

  “So besides making sure HAL can open the pod bay doors, you really don’t have any exterior work?”

  “That’s correct. But whatever you can do to make it look like a lot of work is going on would be greatly appreciated.”

  Sheridan closed his eyes and took a deep breath; it wasn’t much, but he could at least work with it. “All right, I’ll get my folks busy. Maybe I can come up with a few odd jobs that we need to do on the dry dock itself.”

  Weiss thanked Sheridan for his understanding, and the coffee. As the Carter’s CO rose and headed for the door, Sheridan called out to him. Weiss turned just in time to catch a small bag that Sheridan had thrown at him. “A little of my special roast. No man should go into harm’s way without a good cup of joe to sustain him.”

  10

  READINESS

  19 July 2021

  1330 Eastern Daylight Time

  Office of the Director of National Intelligence

  McLean, Virginia

  * * *

  A commission formed after the 9/11 attacks found that the numerous U.S. intelligence agencies and organizations really didn’t talk to each other in a useful way. Legal barriers, turf rivalries, and the demands of day-to-day operations all prevented effective sharing of information. Technically, the director of central intelligence, the “DCI,” was supposed to collect information from everyone else and keep the president informed. In practice, it rarely happened.

  The 9/11 commission recommended a new über agency, the Director of National Intelligence, whose sole purpose would be to collect intelligence information from other agencies and centers and present the president with an integrated intelligence picture. The “Office of the Director of National Intelligence” had no collection resources, and no ability to gather information itself.

  More important than providing the chief executive with better information was the ability to produce “actionable” intelligence on a day-to-day basis. A huge intelligence center just inside the Washington, D.C. beltway not only gathered information, it then analyzed it and passed the finished products to those who needed it to protect U.S. citizens and territory.

  * * *

  “We don’t know what they’re calling it, but there’s definitely something planned around the last week in August,” Harry Mathias announced confidently from the podium.

  “You make it sound like a state fair or a vacation.” Ray Peakes was the director of national intelligence and Harry’s immediate boss.

  Mathias raised his eyebrows, a little surprised. “You could call it a road trip,” he admitted, “and the late summer date is part of it. Still, there is a lot of—”

  “Sorry for interrupting,” Peakes apologized, “but this is still a discussion, not a formal brief.” He tried to make eye contact with each of the dozen-plus people in the room. They were seated at a half circle of tables, all facing the obligatory flat-screen display on one wall. Smaller screens hung on the walls to either side. All three displayed the seal of the agency, an eagle with outstretched wings in a blue circle. One claw held an olive branch, the other a bundle of arrows. Not by accident, it was almost identical to the presidential seal. Brightly colored security warnings announced that the room was cleared for sensitive compartmented information.

  “This is high-priority, but Harry is only going to summarize what we’ve learned so far. We need each of you to go back to your respective agencies with what you’ll learn here”—he shrugged—“which is scary enough.” Looking at his senior analyst, he said, “All right, Harry. What have you found so far?”

  “I’ll start with their overt moves. We all know about the Russian Army’s movements in Belarus and on the borders of the Baltic States, but now we have units heading toward Ukraine and Georgia.” Nodding toward the Defense Intelligence Agency team, he reported, “DIA has seen increased activity at all the European army garrisons. Traditionally, late summer is the end of their training cycle, but their judgment is the level of activity is higher than in previous years. The Russian units are staying in the field longer, and exercising in larger formations, battalion and brigade, not just company and battalion. Leo, just before this brief you said Ms. Miller has more to share.”

  Leo Odom, the DIA’s chief rep, introduced, “Donna Miller, our senior naval analyst.” She didn’t stand but did fiddle with her tablet for a moment, and a graph appeared. It looked like something generated by an application, and had not been polished. The title was “Planned Northern Fleet Maintenance Schedule.” Colored lines wandered across the chart’s face, labeled “submarine, cruiser, destroyer,” and so on; they represented the collective activity of Russian shipyards. A fair number of the lines took a sudden nosedive in late August.

  She spoke quickly, as if she’d rushed to finish and hadn’t slowed down yet. “This shows the ships being refitted. About three months ago, the Russian Navy began refitting and modernizing many of its first-line units. Also, instead of giving the shipyards a steady stream of contracts, they brought in a bunch of ships all at once, and we’re not seeing any new contracts being let.

  “Surprisingly, many Russian shipyard contracts can be found online, and normally they’re awarded several months ahead of time. As of this morning, the amount of refit work scheduled for this coming fall drops by a factor of six.” That got a reaction from the others, and she added, “And it’s not for lack of work that needs to be done.”

  “It may be money,” a CIA rep replied from three seats to her right. Young for his job, he spor
ted a fashionable haircut, but still looked like an accountant. “Using National Security Advisor Hyland’s hypothesis as a starting point, we looked for atypical spending patterns, and there is one. Russian defense spending is up almost everywhere, to support operations and maintenance, as well as procurement. It’s at least twenty percent higher than last year. We’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out where the money is coming from. We hadn’t found it yet, but assumed we just weren’t looking in the right places.” The analyst turned from Miller to look at Peakes. “What if their income hasn’t increased, but instead they’re just spending what they have?”

  The DNI answered, “I’ll ask the obvious question: When would they run out?”

  The accounting analyst shrugged. “Governments rarely just ‘run out,’ but at the estimated spending levels, they’ll be hard-pressed to pay their people or buy fuel for their tanks in three, maybe four months.”

  Ray Peaks agreed. “And you figured that having suffered an economic collapse once from overspending on defense, the Russian government, not being stupid, wasn’t planning to do it again.”

  Odom cut in, “Our logistics people have been making the same predictions. Their conclusions didn’t seem to make much sense and they’ve been pushed to triple check their work to see if the math is right. So far, the analysis has been hanging together. The Russians can only run at this increased level for another four months. After that—pffft.”

  “Or less than four months if they increase their operational tempo,” Peakes continued. “This is good, but I think Harry’s still feeding grist into our mill.”