by Joe Buff
“What’s the problem? You seem fine. Calm down.”
“You don’t understand, sir. The engines of all my missiles have ignited inside the silos.”
“What?” Nyurba examined the camera displays. “But the lids are still closed. The exhaust covers haven’t slid open.”
“I know. The heat and pressure are building up inside. Two of my men were trapped, cremated.”
“Jesus. . . . Okay. . . . Just stay where you are. You should be all right, with the blast interlocks between you and the silos.”
“What about the men at the entryway?”
Nyurba glanced at the TV displays again. There was still no sign of any trouble from bunker two.
Then movement caught his eye.
The Russians were making a human-wave assault. Four hundred men on foot, six BTR-70s or 80s, and five Mi-24s were attacking all at once. Armored car machine guns, and rockets and cannon on the helicopters, blasted lanes through the minefields for the ground troops.
The troops were through the fence perimeter in overwhelming force. Their concentrated fire drove the teams back from the entryways to all three bunkers.
“I—”
Nyurba didn’t have time to finish. In volcanic eruptions like nothing he’d ever seen before in his life, one after another of bunker two’s SS-27 silo lids blew off.
They’re hardened against attack from the outside, not tremendous overpressure and searing heat within.
Giant flaming chunks of solid missile fuel were flung into the air—each missile contained fifty tons of it. The shock waves from the lid eruptions were so powerful that Nyurba could see them as moving fronts of ghostly condensation spreading out at the speed of sound; he swayed on his feet, then realized it was the bunker that was swaying on its springs.
The shock waves mowed down the Russian troops as if they were blades of grass. Countless chunks of solid fuel, burning at thousands of degrees Fahrenheit, weighing anywhere from a pound to a ton, plunged out of the sky like rain from hell.
They landed everywhere, bright yellow, as blinding as pieces of the sun. Some of the surface cameras failed and their screens went blank. What Nyurba saw on the other screens was enough.
Helicopters were snapped in half in midair. Armored cars tumbled end over end along the ground until they exploded. The dirty yellow fumes from the missile fuel swirled crazily.
“Bunker two, have your outside team take cover!”
“I’ve lost contact, sir. The intercom failed, or the men are all dead. I can’t open the blast door for them anyway now.”
“Stay put. I need to get off.”
The intercom from the vestibule to his own bunker was warbling.
“Nyurba,” he snapped. On the TV screens, flames continued to blast forth from each of bunker two’s silos, like three blowtorches reaching hundreds of feet into the air. Near one camera, on a display, he saw a big chunk of burning fuel literally melt its way through solid concrete and the steel rebars underneath. Waves of heat rippled above the hole it made for itself, and more dirty yellow fumes belched out to mingle with the fog of fumes that was blanketing the complex. Then the chunk of fuel hit permafrost, and a gigantic steam explosion burst out of the hole. As more chunks burned through elsewhere, geyser after geyser of steam and scalding water and shattered concrete or asphalt was added to the flames and fumes. Even distorted hunks of metal from the missiles burned; magnesium flared a brilliant white. Nyurba felt as if he were watching a silent movie—except in color with modern special effects.
A horror movie. Dante’s Inferno has nothing on this.
“Sir,” someone gasped over the intercom, his voice so muffled by a gas mask that Nyurba couldn’t tell who it was. “The fumes are getting through our masks. We need respirators. Let us inside or we’ll die.”
“Get hold of yourself! Wait one.” Nyurba turned to Ildarov. “How many emergency respirators are in the bunker?”
Ildarov told the interrogators to find out, and learn where they were kept.
The answer came back: eight. One for each man in a silo crew.
Nyurba had an awful thought. Each incinerated missile had carried a one-megaton nuclear warhead. Radioactive plutonium and tritium, and other deadly isotopes, were drifting amid the smoke and fumes. He looked at the TV screens. Lumps of fuel that had landed on asphalt set the asphalt on fire before melting through. Big swaths of the defoliated strip were also burning, sometimes cooking off mines among what was left of the fence barrier. Parts of the forest around the complex had caught fire.
Ildarov’s men were carrying the eight respirator packs toward the door, that thick slab of steel which separated the bunker from the nightmarish scene outside. The Russian labeling said their pure oxygen supply was good for one hour. Then it would be back into gas masks, come what may, for the commandos on the surface—the respirators came with no spare tanks.
“Major, call bunker two and tell them to mimic our actions. Get their rear guard to contact bunker three’s medics via radio. Medics are to barricade bunker three’s stairs with backpacks and duct tape to keep out the fumes. Bunker three rear guard will have to make do with gas masks.” The Russian silo crew in bunker three was still taking cover within, laying low, not interfering.
“Understood, sir.” Ildarov called bunker two.
“Chief,” Nyurba ordered. “The environmental controls. Raise air pressure in the bunker to one point two atmospheres.”
The Seabee chief acknowledged. Nyurba’s ears crackled. He gave thanks that the emergency backup diesel generator, in its hardened containment with its filtered air supply, continued functioning. He knew the bunker had a large battery bank that would last several days if the generator broke down and couldn’t be fixed, or it ran out of fuel.
He spoke into the intercom. “Have your men come into the decontamination chamber. I’m going to give you all the respirators we have. Hold your breath before taking off your gas masks. Don’t inhale until you have the respirators on. The air around you is radioactive. If there aren’t enough of the packs to go around, you’ll have to share them and buddy-breathe.”
“Understood. We’re going in.”
“Call me on the intercom in there.”
In a second the intercom warbled.
“Nyurba.”
“We’re all by the door.”
“I’m going to crack the door and toss out the respirators, then reseal the door. Expect a gush of wind, I’ve overpressured the bunker to keep out contaminants. But I can’t let you in. I need you to stand guard just in case any Russian soldiers are still alive and in a mood to fight up there.”
“Understood. We’ll be ready for them.”
“Good man. Nyurba, out.” He hung up. “Major, crack the door.”
The gush of air almost sucked the respirators out on their own. Nyurba had to be careful not to be sucked out with them.
“Shut it!”
The door closed and locked.
“What’s interior pressure now?”
“One point zero five bars, sir,” the Seabee said. Bar was the metric equivalent of one atmosphere—all the Russian readouts were calibrated in the metric system.
“Keep it there, just in case. How’s the environment in our missile silos?”
“Temperature, pressure, humidity are nominal.”
“Major, how are the missiles?”
“Electronic checkouts of missiles and warheads all read as nominal,” Ildarov said, “safed against arming and launch.”
“How much longer until we’ll be able to do that last part?”
“The missiles use ring-laser gyros so there’s no time required to spool them up. A lot depends on what the silo inspection teams find, or don’t find, or miss finding, while they’re sanitizing the missiles and silo machinery. We have the targeting coordinates ready for the missile flight profiles we want, and we have the codes and procedures to set and prearm the warheads to go off exoatmospherically. We have both launch keys.”
&nbs
p; Chapter 25
Challenger hovered at periscope depth in an area of thin, flat annual ice that had begun to break up and melt. Both photonics masts were raised, one aimed toward where ICBMs from Srednekolymsk were expected to become visible if all went according to plan. Jeffrey stared at the screen display on his borrowed console in the rear of the control room. His concentration kept wandering, from worry and lack of results. The other photonics mast scanned constantly for airborne threats that might be maintaining radio and radar silence—Russian antisubmarine aircraft could rely on their observers alone, to seize the element of surprise by avoiding detection on an opponent’s electronic support measures equipment. Jeffrey had enough respect for Rear Admiral Meredov by now to expect that his planes sometimes did this. But both photonic displays showed only featureless ice and empty sky.
The ESM heads on Challenger’s photonics masts did pick up occasional weak signals from Tupolev 204s in the distance, to the east and the west, but none so far were approaching this part of the cap in mid–Laptev Sea. It was only a matter of time, though, before their standard search patterns brought them much too near.
Challenger had deployed her trailing wire antennas, unreeling them in a line downcurrent to float up against the underside of the pack ice. Her sonar towed array wasn’t deployed. When things started to happen, they’d happen fast—there’d be no time to retract the array, and Bell didn’t want to have to jettison it. Jeffrey concurred. The antenna masts were also raised, to grab what information they could in the meantime, and not waste a moment when the big show began.
He felt awfully exposed to Russian sensors while keeping this lookout post, but his orders required it. Soon, satellites would have to shut down to avoid being fried, and Jeffrey needed to be available as his President’s eyes and ears. World War III with Russia could break out if things went awry, and Challenger might well be the best, or only, operating early-warning platform America had.
If I see many more than three ICBMs, I’ll know that Armageddon has started. I’ll need to violate radio silence, so the U.S. knows what’s on the way, for all the good that would do.
Jeffrey dearly missed the information from Carter’s previous tap of the fiber-optic cable. What the NSA teams in Challenger’s radio room and ESM room were catching via signals intercepts didn’t tell him much. Meredov’s forces were being surprisingly quiet, now that the furor over Jeffrey’s decoy from days before had died down. Russia’s reaction to the commando raid was hard to gauge. Main command channels transmitted constantly, random numbers or gibberish between genuine messages, to prevent eavesdroppers from noticing alterations in the amount of traffic. Indications of heightened activity or raised alert levels could only be gained if the codes used on those channels had been broken. Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces changed their codes often. History taught that any encryption system, if used too long, could be cracked.
Hours had gone by since the ELF message came in telling Jeffrey that the commandos’ attack had started; the sun had moved a long way in its perpetual summertime waltz with the horizon since Challenger came shallow here. It now seemed probable, as intelligence analysts had predicted, that the Strategic Rocket Forces hadn’t even informed the Russian Navy that something was amiss. And they were being cagy in every way with communications about any response to a ground attack against one of their SS-27 complexes—that complex was a thousand miles distant from Challenger, which made overhearing anything useful all the more difficult.
And if caught dwelling here suspiciously, too soon, before Kurzin’s missiles took off, Jeffrey’s cover story—about a German sub purchased from Russia, far away—would be shot to pieces. The whole game plan would totally unravel after that.
The intercom from the ESM room blinked. Bell answered. “Commodore, they want to speak to you.”
Jeffrey’s chest tightened. “ESM, Fuller, what is it?”
“Sir,” the NSA technician said in a deep-South drawl, “we got peculiar traffic from our own spaceborne platforms, and neutrals. Huge fires raging at the complex near Srednekolymsk.”
“What sort of fires?”
“Near as we can tell, heat signatures of three SS-27s but they’re stationary, no launches. Assessing as in-silo explosions and ground-level burning of solid fuel.”
Before Jeffrey could react to this news, which seemed to imply that Kurzin’s team had failed disastrously, Bell called him again. “Sir, Radio wants you. I told them you were on the line with ESM, but my comms officer says he needs you, smartly.”
“Wait one,” Jeffrey told the ESM room. He switched circuits. “Radio, Fuller, what?”
“Sir, we just finished receiving an ELF three-letter block. Decoding confirmed as cipher for ‘To Commodore, Challenger Strike Group, personal. Hot Line in use. Remain on station.’ ”
“Let’s get this damn ball rolling!” Nyurba ordered. “We’ve got three missiles to launch!”
He fretted, because the time element was constantly becoming more and more critical. Every added hour that passed expanded by hundreds of miles the distance, and exponentially increased the area, from which stronger and stronger counterattacking forces could be staged, flown in, and ordered to make the next assault. Eventually the pieces of missile fuel from bunker two would burn themselves out, and the steam geysers they were causing would subside. The worst of the deadly fumes would disperse on the wind, and aircraft and airborne units wouldn’t be deterred by moderate forest fires. The commandos definitely couldn’t stand up to another, more massive counterattack.
The Air Force missile specialists did their thing, speaking in Russian terminology—as they’d been briefed by expatriates, and as they knew from the manuals and checklists.
Nyurba understood the basics from his own briefing materials. Explained in U.S. terminology, the launch crew had to first achieve a permissive action link unlock, enabling the nuclear warhead to be armed at a later date. Then they had to program into the missile and warhead electronics a correctly formatted safe-to-arm signal, which would be sent into the warhead just before the warhead bus separated from the third-stage booster. The signal would only be sent while in flight if the missile’s self-contained computers decided that everything was functioning properly, and the missile was on course toward its designated target. Then came warhead arming. For an exoatmospheric blast immediately after third-stage booster separation, this was relatively simple. It tied in with the fourth major event, actual warhead fusing and detonation.
It would have been much more complicated, and more difficult to achieve without authorization, if the launch team really wanted to target a place on land in a foreign country. Those complexities were the various factors—deceleration, air pressure, altitude—related to the supposed spoofing ability of what Commodore Fuller had labeled the “magical, mystical, mystery missile shield.” But they weren’t the launch crew’s concern now, in real life.
Nyurba listened with a mixture of awe and dread while Major Ildarov and his people ran through the various checklists. Lights on panels changed colors as they performed each step. They made status reports to each other, or issued orders.
By now, big antirogue bombs hidden in dehumidifier cabinets in the silos, adjoining the missiles’ second-stage boosters, had been found and defused. Electronic booby traps, designed to erase essential files and scramble passwords, were bypassed. Circuit elements that had to be inserted manually, after being removed from safes with secret combinations, were inserted where they were supposed to go. Mechanical devices that needed to be put in place, or dismantled, were taken care of. Alarms blared again and again that were meant to warn the rest of the crew that things were being done to undertake launch procedures, and each time the commandos turned them off as irrelevant.
The silo inspection team was still at work in silo three. A specialist monitoring the bunker’s radios and decryption gear, tuned to district command channels, reported that a two-battalion airborne assault, with air-dropped field artillery and light tanks,
was on the way. Two battalions were over a thousand men.
“It’s now or never, guys!” Nyurba said. They had to trigger liftoff immediately. After that any ambulatory squadron remnants would need to try to escape and evade through the horrific conditions above. Once the next counterattack formations reached the scene, escape would be totally hopeless.
Major Ildarov recalled the silo team. They came into the bunker from the interlock to the tunnel to silo three. They were drenched in sweat and smeared with grease and oil, their faces were pinched, and their stances showed utter exhaustion. They couldn’t guarantee what would happen with the missiles.
Jeffrey still sat at his console. For the umpteenth time, seeking hidden meanings and any reassurance he could find, he examined a paraphrased transcript of a brief but pointed conversation the presidents of the U.S. and Russia had had, via the Hot Line, after three missile silos at Srednekolymsk blew up—and the complex became obscured from further detailed spaceborne recon by heat and smoke. The exchange had been encoded and relayed to Jeffrey by satellite, for his use as a heads-up and for situational orientation.
The trend of events was not reassuring. The American President was already compelled to improvise, off-script, with guesswork and hedging forced as to what scenario was really unfolding. The possibility that one isolated group of silos would explode, while Kurzin’s men might still be working to achieve successful launches of another group, had never been considered in mission planning—an oversight, glaringly obvious only in retrospect. Jeffrey cursed the lack of more specific information from on scene, but the commando team were incommunicado and entirely on their own.
The text in his hands conveyed no inflections or tones of voice between the two heads of state. But both presidents played games, jabbing and blocking according to different agendas, their diplomatic choreography very much at cross-purposes. In a potential nuclear crisis, doublespeak becomes perverse. . . .
WASHINGTON: Why have three of your SS-27 silos exploded?
MOSCOW: An unfortunate maintenance accident while blast interlocks were overridden. One missile set off the other two. It is not a concern, for us or for you.