by Joe Buff
“The point is, sir,” Nyurba continued, “we control the parameters of physical outcomes. The Germans, if they did perform this raid, would have no compunctions framing some ethnic group or splinter political faction in Russia. Outwardly, that’s how we make it look. . . . That’s why our ammo propellant is Russian. To use German powder would be too obvious an error.”
“With the chaos you induce, who’s to make these complex lab analyses of bullets and blood? And where do the baseline comparison samples come from for the forensics match?”
“Vladivostok will be unaffected by the raid. They own state-of-the-art facilities to study the metals and blood chemistry. They’ll have a potent need to do so, to find out and prove to the U.S. who perpetrated it, since Russia’s president will know it wasn’t something he authorized himself. . . . The Kremlin’s elite appointees take these fancy German drugs, too. They know their own medical system and public health stink. Rank-and-file troops, even Spetsnaz, don’t get them. . . . Russia buys spare parts made from the same Polish sheet metal and rod stock that were used to make our ammo. . . . If they don’t put it all together on their own, you can nudge them.”
“Then what about DNA, speaking of matching and blood? And fingerprints. You’re all in the Pentagon databases.” He was referring to stored information used for identifying remains of men and women killed in action. “The Germans could hack their way in, then prove that you’re all U.S. military.”
Nyurba smiled. “Our records were quietly changed. Genome profiles that fit our outward body characteristics, to avoid drawing suspicion from any overambitious moles. But the data’s made up. It won’t correspond to real people, living or dead.”
“All right. Let’s step way back. One much harder question is, what’s Berlin’s motivation for this raid supposed to be?”
“You mean, for breaking into a Russian missile-silo control bunker and shooting off a handful of ICBMs at America?”
“Yeah.”
“Keep in mind from the start that this is purely hypothetical, the German rationales and points of view.”
“It still needs to make sense, to me and to the Russians.”
“Granted. Then consider this. Few live warheads would get through the U.S. terminal defenses out of the very small number launched. They’ll be aimed at military targets in sparsely populated areas, but significant targets. Nuclear theorists call that a limited counterforce strike.”
“I know.”
“America would be damaged using Russian missiles as proxies, frightening the U.S. public half to death, which directly helps the Germans. America would not be damaged fatally, by any means, except in an extremely powerful emotional sense, which fits perfectly with Berlin’s psychological-warfare grand strategy.”
“Keep going.”
“The U.S. government would then have to decide how to react, respond. The worst case that’s deemed likely by think-tank thinkers is called lex talionis, a tooth for a tooth. Speaking again hypothetically, this is what planners in Berlin would wargame. The U.S. retaliates against Russia in kind, tit for tat, despite Moscow’s profuse apologies and instant denial of government culpability. This retaliation hurts Russia, but if the exchange is proportional, say three live H-bomb warheads launched in return for the three that get launched out of Russia, then Russia isn’t harmed fatally either. It’s weakened, presenting less of a future threat to German world supremacy, but Russia would still be able to provide a lot of natural resources and arms support to Germany. A deep wedge would have been driven between Moscow and Washington, irrecoverably. Good insurance for Berlin. After that, Russia would never, ever join the Allies and could conceivably be driven straight into the Axis camp.”
“What if things do escalate, and more and more missiles start flying back and forth?”
“Germany would assume that those in charge in Moscow and Washington would not be so insane.”
“That sounds awfully risky, from Germany’s point of view.”
“They know that the concept that nuclear war could never stay limited is not valid military science but a myth planted in many civilian minds. A myth, by the way, that traces its roots to Soviet propaganda and KGB agitators in the nineteen-fifties, when their atomic arsenal was weak compared to ours.”
“I’m aware of that. Still. Myths sometimes come true.”
“Returning to the hypothetical, specifically German concern about escalation, this is exactly the sort of risk that we, and Russia, have seen them take in different ways repeatedly.”
“So your presumption is that if the Germans really did what you’re going to pretend they do, then they wouldn’t target Washington, or some other major city, or U.S. strategic command-and-control, to make sure that what’s limited stays limited? Avoid mass deaths, not go for a leadership decapitation strike?”
“Not unless the Germans were insane, which they aren’t. They’re extreme risk-takers, yes, but the calculated risks always make sense, and the consequences of losing are never fatal to them. The proof of this being that even though their gambles collapsed upon them several times, they’re still very much in the war. That’s why we need to perform this mission, take back the global initiative. And that’s why it’s plausible that the Germans would push the envelope even more, hit America by using Russian weaponry, exploit the Kremlin as patsies, and set up an innocent Russia to take all the blame.”
“Lord,” Jeffrey said, “this gets complicated.”
“It certainly does,” Kurzin said. “Concentrate on the view from sixty thousand feet for now. Just get a basic sense of all the moving parts and how they interact. See for yourself the rigor of the logic that went into this. If you start to feel overwhelmed today, just stick to the highlights. Greater clarity will come, with time and with the unfolding of events.”
Jeffrey nodded. “So these alleged Russian separatists, or warmongers, or whatever . . . The Germans would have gamed out this part too. . . . What’s the motivation of the supposed Russian perpetrators that the Kampfschwimmer go disguised as? . . . Before, that is, your men masquerading as pseudo-Russian Kampfschwimmer get unmasked by our deceptions as being genuine Germans. We hope.”
Nyurba answered that one. “The faked perps’ motivation is to discredit the regime in charge in the Kremlin, because it’s too repressive or because it’s not repressive enough. Or because it’s too neutral toward the U.S., or not in alliance enough with Germany. Sacrifice some American and Russian lives for the good of the Motherland, at least as the made-up fanatics see it. These imaginary rebels would want to force Russia to take a firmer side in the Allies-versus-Axis conflict, or force a regime change in Moscow, or even both.”
“They’re internal terrorists?”
“Not in their own minds,” Kurzin said. “They’d be heroes, martyrs. They’d see the mainstream Russian government as the terrorists, and maybe the U.S. too. Their actions against both would be justifiable retribution. Or, they’d see the Moscow crowd in office now as being much too moderate. . . . Chechens, modern anarchists, pro-German Russian FSB agents, or military megahawks, we want to leave ambiguity in Kremlin heads as to who were the bad actors, in the first few crucial minutes after the SS-Twenty-sevens launch. Ambiguity you will play off of, Commodore, as and when suspicion starts getting cast on Germany.”
“But—”
“The team that gamed out the German approach said they’d want ambiguity too, leave Moscow confused and unfocused so they’re more likely to come over and cling to Berlin in the face of American ire while the handful of mushroom clouds bloomed on two continents. Even our Red and Blue Teams concluded that real rogues, if they existed, wouldn’t claim credit initially, to sow more seeds of doubt and then surge into the power vacuum.”
Jeffrey fiddled with his ear. “I don’t know about this.”
“Sir,” Nyurba told him, “there’s important precedent. It’s what gave our commander in chief the idea to begin with.”
“Continue. Please.”
“The Golf-class diesel boat that sank in the Pacific in nineteen-sixty-eight? The one that Howard Hughes with CIA backing tried to salvage off the ocean floor with the Glomar Explorer?”
“Aw, not that boondoggle.”
“Sir, it’s been in the open literature since the late nineteen-nineties that the U.S. concluded almost immediately that it was virtually certain the Golf sank because a rogue faction in her crew took over the ship and tried to nuke Hawaii with one of the three ballistic missiles in their vertical launch tubes at the rear of the conning tower.”
Jeffrey nodded. “I read about that. Nixon used it behind the scenes to threaten, blackmail Russia. It’s how he forced Brezhnev to come to the arms reduction table at some summit meeting. Then Nixon took credit for terrific statesmanship. What a charade. I forget the details.”
“But this is real-life stuff, Commodore. And it was declassified, or leaked, or whatever, in documents, books, available to the public since before the Global War on Terror began. And Russia and Germany know it too.”
“Granted.”
The motivation of those rogues in 1968 was to trigger nuclear war between the USSR and the U.S., perhaps because they felt the Kremlin at that time wasn’t hawkish enough. It couldn’t be known positively, since they all died. The U.S. was pretty sure they died because they failed to bypass all the range-safety devices—the booby traps installed to prevent an unauthorized launch. American intelligence did know that Moscow was often more afraid of an in-country splinter group hijacking a missile and aiming it their way than they were ever afraid of a sneak attack by America. The liquid fuel in one of those ballistic missiles exploded thanks to the booby traps, and the Golf sank with all hands in three-plus miles of the Pacific Ocean, with a big hole gaping in her side.
“Some of this is beginning to come together for me,” Jeffrey said. “The Russians are aware they had a rogue faction attempt a nuclear launch once before.”
“At least once before that we know of,” Kurzin interjected.
“There might have been others?”
“Our intelligence services have their suspicions. Some of the Soviet accidents with rockets, that blew up on the launchpad or went off course and were self-destructed or crashed. Traces of plutonium that might have come from a nuke warhead destroyed on the ground or in midair.”
What other Cold War secret history has yet to be revealed? “So the plan is that the Kremlin will believe it plausible that some other rogue faction tries the same thing now, except with a land-based silo missile instead of using a submarine.”
“Precisely, sir,” Nyurba said. “And the Germans are aware of all these things, so a scenario of them using their commandos to launch missiles and blame it on Russian rogues is also plausible. Russian governmental and military insiders are most likely to have the knowledge and resources to plan and then conduct the raid. They’re far more obvious culprits than Chechens or anarchists.”
Jeffrey held his head for a minute. “God, who dreamed this stuff up?”
“Some of our best and brightest, Commodore,” Kurzin said.
Jeffrey turned to Bell and Harley. “What do both of you make of this?”
Bell deferred to Harley. “It’s as we discussed among ourselves before, sir,” Harley said. “Our country has three choices. Apocalypse Soon, Apocalypse Later, and this mission if we can pull it off.”
“Which is still one hell of an ‘if,’ ” Jeffrey said. “Let me get to the other part that’s bothering me. Or an other part, because all sorts of things are bothering me. This bluff mentioned in my orders about a next-generation missile shield. Using supposed stealth satellites, ones that the Russians don’t know about and also can’t detect, so they have no way to judge their capabilities.”
“Stealth satellites are nothing new, sir,” Nyurba said. “The idea, and their actual existence, got leaked to the press ten years ago. Leaked, or officially announced.”
Jeffrey stared at the overhead, talking to himself. “A magical, mystical missile shield that can detonate an armed nuclear warhead outside the atmosphere, over the country that launched the ICBM. That part sounds great. I wish we really had something like that. But you and whoever planned this mission know damned well that we don’t. I want to go over again how we get the Russians to believe it.”
“We’ll program the warheads to go off exoatmospherically, over the European part of Russia. With trajectory mechanics as they are, given the Earth’s rotation and the Coriolis force and all of that, it’s why we need to launch from one of their new bases in Siberia. It puts the missiles beyond effective reach of the old ABM system that still rings Moscow, so the Russians can’t shoot their own rogue missiles down.” Nyurba was referring to the antiballistic missile system allowed by a 1970s treaty.
“And the exoatmospheric detonation is what causes the massive electromagnetic pulse that does a lot of damage between Moscow and the Urals. That part I get. Russia is really hurting, and it looks like she’s been deservedly punished for trying to nuke the U.S. Punished by this magical, mystical, mysterious missile shield. I remain extremely skeptical.”
“Remember, sir,” Nyurba answered, “the shield doesn’t need to exist. The Russians simply need to believe, or be convinced, that it exists.”
“But it has to be plausible. I can guarantee you, no matter how badly computers and communications are degraded in western Russia, there’ll be enough engineers and academicians in fine shape in other places to put together whatever the Russians call a tiger team. They’ll look really hard at how anything could make two or three separate SS-Twenty-seven warheads all go off simultaneously after third-stage booster separation, in the vacuum of space. Assuming you even manage to get the missiles to launch properly, with the proper programming. If you, like those Russkie rogues back in sixty-eight, goof and a booby trap goes off, this mission is a flop. What if you do manage somehow to actually achieve an unauthorized launch of several armed ICBMs, but your reprogramming is flawed and they do, for real, target the U.S. homeland?”
“In real life this launch won’t be a surprise. Commander, U.S. Strategic Command will be expecting it. He’ll know exactly where and when the missiles will launch, and he’ll be very well prepared to target and destroy them using our conventional ground- and sea-based missile shields.”
“Assuming they work reliably at the time.”
“Yes. But they only have to work if our reprogramming of the live warheads doesn’t work.”
“That’s one hell of a ‘but’!”
“That’s why we’re only launching three missiles.”
“That’s one hell of an ‘only’!”
“Allow me to address your other concern or question,” Kurzin interrupted. “Achieving successful launch of Russian ICBMs at all. Without going into details that you don’t need to know, suffice it to say that we have both human and electronic intelligence that provides us with a good deal of critical information about the SS-Twenty-seven missile and warhead-bus design. Including methods of arming the warhead and triggering detonation, and of bypassing range-safety devices.”
“Sorry, Colonel, I do need to know. If I’m not convinced this whole thing from A to Z makes total sense, there’s no way I’ll ever convince the Russians in a no-holds-barred confrontation somewhere in Siberia while they have every home-field advantage.”
Nyurba looked to Kurzin for direction. Kurzin reluctantly nodded, and Nyurba responded for both of them.
“It’s no secret that the U.S. recovered intact nuclear ballistic missiles from a Soviet Yankee-class SSBN that sank in the Atlantic a few hundred miles from Bermuda in nineteen-eighty-six.”
“I know. K-Two-nineteen.”
“Specialists, aware of the earlier loss of the Golf-class, dissected the range safety devices carefully.”
“That’s twenty-five-year-old technology!”
“And the basis for all further Soviet and Russian thinking.”
“They know we grabbed some missiles. They’ll have chang
ed everything!”
“Seeing how they thought at one time gives hints at what they’d change and how they’d change it. And we know that, to save money, some parts in the SS-Twenty-sevens are identical to those in earlier land-based missiles which because of arms reduction treaties were dismantled and destroyed in public. For many of these parts we gained illicit actual samples, or very good intel about their specs.”
“That’s still too much of a stretch.”
“On its own, yes. But we also have expatriate Russian missile engineers and nuclear scientists who worked on their weapons programs more recently. They emigrated to the U.S. over the years after the Berlin Wall fell. They were discreetly interviewed.”
“They might have been sleeper agents, giving you disinformation. That’s a favorite Russian gimmick.”
“Which of course the CIA and the Pentagon realize. There were methods to cross-validate what they told us.”
“Such as?”
“Other Russians with similar expertise, after the USSR collapsed and they found themselves unemployed, were less enthralled at the prospects of coming to America to wash dishes or drive a taxi. They put themselves up for grabs on the world underground arms market. During the Global War on Terror, some of them were captured. Let’s just say they were thoroughly interrogated.”
“This part, I truly don’t want to know.”
“You see, Commodore, we’re not entirely in the dark on what we’ll be trying to do. And before you ask, in this context it’s perfectly believable that the raiders were sent by Berlin. Germany had its own ample share of arrested rogue weapons scientists, and honest Russian emigrés too, especially ones with key technical skills. Germany was Russia’s largest import-export partner even before this war. Since the communist state imploded two decades ago, many Russians having the ways and means abandoned the dreary place with lasting bitterness. Some moved to Germany. Some are German citizens now. As we already covered once, immigrants can be passionately patriotic to their new homes.” Kurzin’s men nodded.
“Fine,” Jeffrey said. “But there’ll be computer passwords, now, today. Ones that are frequently altered, if their procedures are anything like ours. You won’t have those passwords, will you?”