Seas of Crisis

by Joe Buff

  “Now? Are you sure?”

  “The message was repeated, sir. I checked the decryption myself.”

  “But it’s a day early.”

  “Something must have sped up their plans.”

  Jeffrey climbed out of bed, standing barefoot in his skivvies. He ran a hand over his face.

  “I guess something did. . . . All right. . . . Give me five minutes to use the head and get dressed. Have a messenger meet me in Control with coffee. You better prepare the ship for coming to periscope depth and raising the masts.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll have Meltzer start to calculate the relative bearing to watch for missiles rising above our horizon.” Bell turned to leave.

  “Wait.” Jeffrey’s thoughts were racing. “Do we know how the attack is going?”

  “They wouldn’t send us a code for that, due to overall mission security, sir, assuming even Washington knows.”

  “Oh, yeah, right. Sorry, my mind’s still fuzzy.”

  “No problem, Commodore.”

  Jeffrey read the XO stateroom situation display. Sonar held no threats, neither submerged nor on the surface nor airborne. He called up a navigational chart, as Sessions, also in his boxer shorts and undershirt, looked on. The ship was heading northwest, in the middle of the Laptev Sea, on a course to skirt north of the Svernaya Zemlya islands. The nearest land was Cape Dika, about one hundred fifty nautical miles southwest. The nearest naval base in Rear Admiral Meredov’s area of command was almost due south by three hundred miles: the port of Tiksu, on one edge of the Lena River’s huge delta. Challenger was under the pack ice, near the marginal ice zone, using the noise there to hide acoustically at Bell’s favorite depth, nine hundred feet, moving at a stealthy twelve knots. They were in six thousand feet of water—the continental shelf here dropped off much closer inshore than it did by the New Siberian Islands, far astern.

  Jeffrey started to figure the distances and timings.

  “Sir,” Bell said, smiling at his superior’s typical obsession with work. “Take care of your business first. There’s a polynya ideal for our purposes only three miles off.”

  With the blast door closed, it was oddly quiet in control bunker one. Nyurba realized he missed the constant pounding and vibrations that the surface battle had been causing through the air and through the ground. Given the tidy, high-tech appearance of the launch consoles—computer screens and keyboards, rows of switches and knobs and dozens of indicator lights, all labeled with strange abbreviations and acronyms—the bunker seemed surreal. Safes, electronic and power supply cabinets, communications and decoding equipment, printers, and storage lockers lined the walls in the low-ceilinged enclosure. It was antiseptic—a stark contrast to the absolute mess outside.

  The lack of any sensations from the violent life-and-death struggle being fought so close above his head brought home what he already knew as a civil engineer: the bunker he was standing in rode on a system of massive springs and torsion bars, powerful shock absorbers and vibration dampers, and suspension rods with high-friction universal joints. Such components surrounded the entryway blast interlock, the control bunker, the blast interlocks at both ends of the tunnels leading to each of the three missile silos, those long tunnels, and the missile silos themselves. Each of these major underground structures was a separate module made of steel and reinforced concrete, with massive rubber bumpers at the joints between them, so the whole system could flex and twist as independent pieces—and thus not build up added stresses or destructive harmonic resonances. Most of the shock-modulation components were installed in a “rattle space” between excavated bedrock and the exterior of the modules; that space was accessible through maintenance hatches. The modular design, including multiple blast interlocks, meant that if one section did fail, those around it would be isolated from any propagating fracture or collapse. American land-based ICBMs, the Upgraded Minuteman IIIs, were housed in a similar way. But the newer SS-27 complexes were built to withstand greater dynamic shear, strain, compression, torque, and shaking than were their older, lifetime-extended U.S. counterparts. Nyurba sent his Seabee chief to gather all the intel he could on the Russian construction methods and specs, using one of the Japanese digital cameras the team had brought to make permanent records. The espionage opportunities were priceless.

  “We have intercom communications with bunker two,” the Air Force major said. His name was Akhmed Ildarov, born in Russia’s restive Muslim region of Dagestan. Ildarov was stocky and swarthy, all business at all times; he’d been naturalized as a U.S. citizen during his childhood. “Our people have seized control in bunker two, sir. They report proceeding to obtain information and items required for armed missile launches.”

  “Very well,” Nyurba acknowledged. “Activate all surface TV cameras.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The silo crewmen must have turned them off because they found the combat scenes too disturbing.

  Display screens lit up to show views, in full color, from aboveground; the pictures weren’t very sharp, and the cameras had no zoom lenses. As the major’s men hurried around doing their jobs, Nyurba mostly studied these screens. Some of the cameras had failed even though they were armored—these, like the radio antennas, were expected to be lost in an attack, and reserve units hid behind armored shutters. Nyurba decided to save those cameras for right before bunker one’s missiles launched—assuming they ever did.

  The cameras that were working showed that the fight for the bunker entryways, so vicious while Nyurba was in the stairwell, had reached a stalemate. Before, he’d only been able to see what a pounding his men were taking. Now, he could see what they’d dished out.

  New funeral pyres of aircraft and vehicles threw flames and smoke into the sky. Dead Russians lay contorted where they fell. Charred corpses smoldered. Wounded crawled or clutched at entrails or raised their arms in pleading for help. Some of the figures that burned were moving, either because limbs drew into outreaching postures as muscles and tendons were cooked—or because they were still alive.

  The Russians had suffered heavy losses from the squadron’s supersonic SA-16 missiles, the shaped-charge and hyperbaric warheads of the RPG-27s, and the grenade launchers and flak-vest-piercing AN-94s. Surviving helicopters and armored cars and troops in the open were mostly keeping their distance. Individuals fired back and forth sporadically, but at longer range the AN-94 was much more accurate than the AK-47 or the AK-74. The camera displays showed that the triple chain-link fences had been knocked down in a number of spots, but the area be-

  tween them still held many unexploded mines. It was difficult to defuse these mines while under fire from the commandos—this was one factor working to the squadron’s advantage. It held the Russians at bay, even as it trapped the commandos.

  On one screen, Nyurba saw man-sized lumps moving on the ground by a gap in the fence. Russian minefield-clearing teams?

  The earth around them leaped into the air in many small clods. Hits from AN-94 rounds?

  Some lumps jerked or rolled over and stopped moving. The others kept advancing. There was a sudden bright flash on the screen, weird because the picture had no sound. Lumps, and parts of lumps, cartwheeled through the air and landed heavily.

  Scratch one more mine-clearing team.

  But small units, whether Mi-24s of different varieties, or BTR-70s—or the newer, diesel-powered BTR-80s that had shown up—or squads of soldiers, would make lunges and feints to get the commandos to waste their ammo. Realizing this, the commandos in the entryway dugouts held their fire, playing possum, until the lunges got too close for their weapons to miss. Then they’d fire a missile or a grenade, causing further Russian losses—but expending further ammo, and sometimes taking killed and wounded themselves.

  Nyurba saw another lunge, this one by a squad of twelve infantrymen each holding an RPG-27 or similar grenade launcher. They spread out wide to make harder targets, and ran right into the minefield through holes in the fence. Three of them set off
mines, and grabbed for legs that weren’t there until they set off more mines and lay dead. Nine men never broke stride, and now were on the asphalt. They were charging straight toward bunker two, from the direction facing its entryway. They obviously wanted to get within the two-hundred-yard range of their warheads and use them as bunker-buster grenades. They wore extra-thick body armor; sometimes they hesitated or staggered as if they’d been hit, but then kept coming. One man was hit in a leg—Nyurba saw a puff of pink vapor come out the back of his thigh. He hopped forward on the other leg. A commando in bunker two fired at one Russian using the grenade launcher under his rifle, but its range in a high lob from the launcher was no better than that of the RPG rockets with their flatter flights. A flash and a puff of smoke showed that the commando’s grenade fell short. That soldier broke ranks, knelt, and fired back. A rocket streaked toward the bunker, and a ball of fire above the asphalt showed that it too fell short—a hyperbaric warhead. The other Russian soldiers were still coming on. One by one they were picked off with shots to the head or neck, or crippling shots to the lower abdomen and groin—or raking full-auto fire that shredded their thighs or their calves. Nyurba was transfixed by this amazing show of courage. Only one Russian had to get within effective grenade range, out of the dozen who had started this death charge, to take out everyone on the stairs of bunker two.

  One last man got close enough.

  He knelt and aimed his rocket launcher.

  A shower of grenades landed all around him. Nyurba was impressed—the commandos had fired in advance as a group, anticipating where he’d be before he got there, so the arcing pop flies of their grenades impacted before he could shoot. Amid the flashes and smoke engulfing the Russian, there was a brighter, more prolonged eruption—a grenade fragment had set off the rocket warhead and its fuel while still in the barrel. All that was left were burning pieces of flesh.

  After this the battle went into another lull. It had become a slow and grinding attrition fight: each side wore the other down, bit by bit. The winner, at least of this phase of the larger contest, would be whoever ran out of resources last. The Russians could run low on aircraft and armored cars—or troops could run out of the willingness to advance in the next probe or feint, only to die horribly like those who’d gone before. The commandos could run out of men or ammunition. Based on the numbers on both sides, as Nyurba judged from the camera views and from reports he got over the intercom in the interlock—from which the bunkers’ defending squads were all within radio contact—the commandos would eventually lose. The real question was whether they’d be able to launch some SS-27s before Russian troops broke into bunker one and bunker two and stopped them. The Russians didn’t seem in any major hurry now, which implied that their commanders didn’t think the attackers—whoever they actually were—would be able to launch an ICBM.

  Are they underestimating the preparedness and skill of my squadron, or are we underestimating their preventives against an unauthorized launch?

  Do they realize we’re already inside two control bunkers?

  Nyurba tore his eyes from the screens and watched as the ten men with him continued their assigned tasks systematically and speedily. Some were digesting the normal launch procedures, using the manuals that provided explicit details and checklists. Others were busy hacking the computer systems, to learn the current arming and targeting passwords, and find out how to set the desired flight coordinates and detonation parameters.

  Two men kept bombarding their prisoners with questions. The six Russian silo crewmen had been blindfolded, then divided into two groups held out of earshot of each other, one in a corner on the upper level and one on the level below. By cross-examining the men, now deeply under the influence of truth serums, and then comparing answers to the same questions asked of both groups, the interrogators could confirm information and weed out any lies. The chemicals flooding their brain cells made it very hard for the Russians to lie. But these rigorously selected silo crewmen had a strong sense of duty—as two had shown right at the start, they’d rather die than help rogues launch armed nukes.

  For all they knew, Nyurba was targeting Moscow.

  One of the very first questions was about bunker voice or video recorders. These were located and smashed.

  What simplified the main work was that Nyurba didn’t care about procedures to verify that an incoming launch order was valid. This was a large part of silo crew training in any country, but today’s purpose was achieving unauthorized launch. A valid order would include directions for safing the complex’s antirogue traps—the team had to assume that all radio messages now were tricks meant to disable or destroy the ICBMs.

  A pair of warhead-bus and missile-system experts were in one silo, to complete an overall inspection making sure there’d been no gross damage done, and to verify that the electronic links to the support base command bunker had indeed been severed by the crewmen as Nyurba asked. Everything looked good on that front, so far. Nyurba hoped, as a result, that all passwords and codes in the launch console software matched those in the missiles and warheads—and that no instructions had been inserted secretly, deep within millions of lines of computer programming, to abort the launches or self-destruct the missiles or de-enable the warheads.

  A pair of men, Air Force Special Ops Squadron commandos by original background, were included in each bunker team as explosive ordnance detection-and-disposal experts. The warhead and missile specialists worked closely with them, searching with electronic sniffers, and their eyes, for any range-safety devices that amounted to hidden bombs or incendiaries. Their task was badly complicated by the fact that missiles did include explosive bolts and cords as part of their normal design, to assure separation of each booster stage, and to release the aerodynamic nose cone from over the missile bus—which had its own small liquid-fueled maneuvering rocket. The thermonuclear hydrogen-fusion warhead included high-explosives too, to set off its plutonium implosion-fission trigger.

  The two different types of experts were working hard to sanitize the first silo, making slow progress. When done with that, they’d go on to check the second and third silos as well; retractable platforms surrounding the missiles gave them access to maintenance hatches, but there were so many things that needed to be examined thoroughly.

  The special ops ordnance men, with surgical precision, had already blown open control-bunker safes whose combinations were unknown to the crews; to prevent an unauthorized launch, the combinations would arrive only with a valid launch order. The Kremlin’s premise was that with eight men in each control bunker crew, one or two who went berserk and tried to use brute force or guile would be stopped by the others—if the regimental command bunker didn’t stop everything first by remote control. And since one part of normal oncoming crew rotation procedures was a close bodily inspection of the new men for explosives, burglar tools, and other improper equipment or materials, what the commandos were about to do could supposedly never be done by regular crews.

  Via the intercom system, the major in charge of the efforts in bunker one kept tabs and compared notes with his counterpart in bunker two. A friendly competition had started. So far, bunker two was making slightly faster progress. This was fine by Nyurba. Competition brought better results, and he personally didn’t care which bunker launched the three desired missiles. The winning team, if they survived, could have all the bragging rights they wanted—though permanent security restrictions meant there was no one they could brag to afterward.

  The intercom from the blast interlock to the entryway made a warbling noise. Nyurba answered.

  “Sir,” an Army Ranger told him over the intercom mike, bypassing the phone talker, “we heard many heavy transport choppers landing a few miles away, out of range of our missiles. We also saw fixed-wing aircraft drop sticks of paratroopers. From the number of chutes, I’m guessing in company strength.” Company strength was a vague term, since many real Russian units were known to be undermanned, but it could mean two hundre
d paratroopers.

  Nyurba looked at his watch. It was more than three hours since the commando’s attack began. The Russians had had enough time to get organized. This military district’s commanding general, or even the Kremlin, might inject new backbone into another, more powerful counterattack.

  “Any heavy equipment with the paratroopers?”

  “You mean, like field artillery, sir?”

  “Yes, that’s what I mean.”

  “Negative, sir. At least not yet.”

  “What about mortars?”

  “We haven’t taken mortar rounds yet either, sir.”

  “Inform me at once if you do.”

  “Understood.”

  “Nyurba, out.” He replaced the handset.

  The concrete overhang of the entryways should stop direct hits from mortar or artillery shells. But near misses would throw blast and shrapnel, increasing the rate of attrition for Nyurba’s ever-dwindling squadron. His greatest dread was that Russian fighter-bombers might soon reach the scene, as distant as it was from any such bases, and drop napalm.

  “Sir,” Major Ildarov called Nyurba, “bunker two wants to speak to you. The guy sounds upset.”

  He grabbed the handset. “Nyurba.”

  “We missed a range-safety feature.” The man rattled off technical specifications that were gibberish to Nyurba.

  “Wait!” he shouted to the technicians around him, repeating the specifications. “They think they did something wrong. Do you understand what those specs mean?”

  The major’s people did. Now they knew one thing to not do, or an extra thing they should do . . . or something like that. Nyurba had to delegate the arcane technical work. But he grasped that this information was valuable. He told his men to keep working, then spoke into the intercom.