by Bart Gauvin
Yuri sighed. That was all in the past now. He had a job to do, and the faster he finished it the sooner they could land, and the sooner he could pry himself out of this rickety, flying deathtrap. Yuri finished transferring the last coordinate and contact report into the digital radio, the same kind he used in his bomber to transmit contact reports to the Soviet constellation of communication satellites, as well as to submarines down below. He had no idea who would be on the receiving end of this report. He could only imagine why they might need the positions of random ships outside one of the busiest harbors in the world, but that need not keep him from filling his role in whatever this little escapade really was.
Yuri called forward to the pilot through the drone of the engine, “Ready to transmit.”
The pilot nodded and said, “Da, transmit.”
0855 EST, Sunday 13 February 1994
1255 Zulu
Aboard K266 Severodvinsk, one hundred miles southwest of Long Island
“Final contact report arriving now, tovarich Captain,” announced the communication officer from his station on the port side of the submarine’s control room.
“About time.” muttered Senior Captain Grigory Orlov, commander of the Soviet fleet’s newest and most advanced cruise-missile carrying nuclear-powered submarine, an “SSGN” in naval jargon. His project 949A Antey-class boat, called an Oscar II by the Americans, had been at communication depth for over eight minutes now. Which was about seven minutes too long for Orlov’s taste, especially as they were so painfully close to the coastline of his country’s most dangerous enemy in the opening hours of war.
“Weapons officer,” he growled, “how long until we can launch.”
“Two minutes, tovarich Captain,” said the weapons officer, not taking his eyes from the blue screens on which a pair of starshini—senior enlisted Soviet sailors—were typing in their final coordinates. Over the shoulders of the two sailors, the weapons officer watched to ensure that the targeting coordinates were loaded properly into the inertial guidance systems for each of the twenty-four huge P-700 “Granit” cruise missiles in canted launch tubes lining the flanks of the submarine’s pressure hull.
Two more minutes, thought the captain, trying to calm his nerves, only two more minutes, then we can do the deed and be gone from these waters.
They’d been at sea for seven weeks now. Severodvinsk had departed the Kola Inlet on December 25th of the previous year, accompanied by the older and unimaginatively named Charlie II-class SSGN K503, and their escorting Akula-class SSN, or nuclear-powered attack submarine, the K157 Vepr. The three boats had slowly and quietly churned northward until they reached the acoustic camouflage provided by the grating, grinding arctic pack ice. The small flotilla continued under the icecap, passing east of Svalbard before turning west and making for the Nares Strait, the narrow passage between northern Greenland and Canada, which led from the Arctic Ocean into Baffin Bay.
Outside the Nares Strait, the group rendezvoused with the ancient November-class SSN K115. They transited the narrow waterway in the company of this prodigious noisemaker in the hope that whatever sensors NATO had in the channel would zero in on the noisiest of the company. The K115 had turned back, leaving the three original boats to continue their journey southward, hopefully undetected.
After over a month at sea they emerged from under the winter ice pack into the Labrador Sea. There they waited, tucked against the rugged southwest coast of Greenland until it was time to transit to the edge of the North American continental shelf, a mere hundred miles south of Long Island.
The long passage across the top of the world had taken its toll on both boat and crew. Supplies of fresh food had begun to run out several days ago, and the submarine’s passageways reeked with the odd smell combination of old cabbage, body odor, and lubricating oil. At least there’s still plenty of tea, Orlov thought. He didn’t even want to consider what conditions were like on the older, and far more cramped K503, or even worse, the relatively tiny Vepr. The upside, however, was that they were now all but certain that none of the stealthy American hunter submarines could be following them.
The final confirmation had arrived five minutes ago. So, we’re really doing this, then? Orlov thought, still only half believing it, and not entirely happy. Expending all our missiles on whatever random shipping passes our way?
The two starshini were prioritizing the targets based on size alone. The largest contacts warranted four missiles, medium-sized ones: two, and the smaller targets would receive attention from only one. The commander of the Severodvinsk shuddered to think of the risks being taken by whoever it was that was flying around up there to provide the three separate contact reports he’d just received. Several dozen kilometers to the east, K503 would be receiving the same reports. Both submarines’ orders instructed them to expend their entire complement of missiles at whatever contacts the mysterious fliers above them reported. It was an odd mission, to say the least, but Orlov had to admit he could see the logic behind the tactic. Better to sink these ships now, while they are alone and vulnerable, instead of later when they are escorted in convoys by warships.
The Project 949A submarines, of which Severodvinsk was the newest unit, had been designed from the keel up to sink mighty American aircraft carriers with huge salvoes of supersonic cruise missiles, in concert, of course, with missile-carrying bombers and surface ships. Given the need to carry twenty-four of the ten-meter-long P-700 weapons, appropriately called “Shipwrecks” by NATO, the boats of this class were big, three-quarters the size of one of the Kirov-class battlecruisers. In fact, the Americans had even given his boat the nickname “Mongo” in recognition of the submarine’s huge displacement and hitting power.
Sinking civilian and commercial vessels was not what Severodvinsk was made for. Orlov longed to hunt American aircraft carriers, but that would have to wait until they rearmed and re-provisioned at Reykjavik. His orders assured him that the Icelandic port would be under Soviet control by the time he arrived there. Orlov would believe that little detail when he saw it.
“Tovarich Captain!” the weapons officer called over from the missile station, the blue light from the control screens giving his face a deathly pallor, “all missiles are ready. At your command!”
Finally, Orlov thought, looking at his watch. Ten minutes at communications depth already! He stood and walked to the weapons officer’s console, removing the missile launch key from around his neck as he did so.
“We will fire all missiles, alternating sides,” the captain confirmed as he fitted the key into its slot next to the weapons officer’s key. The other man nodded. Then they turned their keys in unison in their well-rehearsed launch drill.
The Severodvinsk’s commander turned and strode back to his command chair as the other officer depressed the launch button for the first of twenty-four missiles they would fire that morning, “Firing One!”
The sixteen-thousand-ton submarine shuddered as compressed air and rocket propellant ejected the first missile from its launch tube, pushing it the two-dozen meters to the surface. The weapon roared out of the choppy seas atop a column of white smoke and seawater before arcing back downward on a northwesterly course. By the time the first missile was settling onto its wavetop-level flight pattern, the weapons officer was already announcing “Firing Two!” as the huge submarine shuddered again.
With relentless regularity one missile after another broke the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, nosed over, dropped to low-level flight, and accelerated to one-and-a-half times the speed of sound.
CHAPTER 66
1559 MSK, Sunday, 13 February 1994
1259 Zulu
Main Ministry of Defense Building, Arbatskaya Square, Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
VLADIMIR KHITROV LEANED back in a cheap office chair. His cramped workplace was filled with hazy smoke, a heaping ashtray sat next to the chessboar
d on his cluttered desk. He pulled a long, last drag from the stub of his cigarette. He’d been practically living here for the past several days, seeing to all the minute details that would put the finishing touches on his masterpiece, the symphony now unfolding on the television screen in front of him. Khitrov had pulled many strings with the KGB to have a television with access to US network and cable news channels installed so he could watch as the fruits of his labor unfolded before a global audience, gage the reactions of people around the world, and evaluate the impact on his enemies’ psyche.
Minutes before, CNN had begun to broadcast images of the infrastructure attacks across North America. The American media was unwittingly executing their role in his plan, just as he knew they would. He’s counted on it. They even re-broadcasted the false, pre-recorded news reports transmitted across the American television networks. Khitrov was particularly proud of that little detail of his maskirovka. He cared not that the lifespan of those intelligence trawlers sailing off the great American metropolitan conurbations of New York and Los Angeles would be measured in mere minutes after the Yankees realized what was happening. Sowing confusion in the American press about who’d actually started the war, even if only temporarily, was worth the sacrifice in Khitrov’s arithmetic.
The fact that CNN, in their typical desire to be the first with a “scoop,” had rebroadcast to a global audience his little stage drama, recorded here in Moscow and starring two English language specialists from Moscow State University, was simply icing on the cake. Perhaps other news services, The BBC, perhaps? Khitrov wondered with a smirk, would also pick up the footage in their desperation to give their viewers some sort of information about the storm breaking around the world.
The CNN footage was covering the destruction wrought by Khitrov’s agents on the great bridges and tunnels connecting Manhattan to Long Island and New Jersey, in San Francisco and even in Canada. A reporter across from the wreckage of the Manhattan Bridge had been talking about the series of ambushes that several of his teams had executed outside of various NYPD precinct headquarters. That should slow their response, Khitrov thought. Give the teams time to break contact and prepare for their follow-on missions. Nearly every Soviet Spetsnaz soldier, GRU operative, and KGB agent on earth was engaged in some way with the global onslaught Khitrov’s plan had unleashed. He was willing to spend their lives, but also understood that they were resources not to be wasted unnecessarily. If the American police were worried about fighting off ambushes everywhere they went, then they would have fewer resources to devote to hunting down his teams.
Of course, the attacks Khitrov had coordinated were targeting far more than the police. He was bringing the war to the doorsteps of every American, forcing them to react not just physically, but psychologically. Hence the attacks on the bridges. He was restricting the lifeblood of New York City, forcing the huge quantities of food and commodities required to feed the great city to come across a few vulnerable ribbons of asphalt or railroad track, and that didn’t even take into account the attacks on the City’s water supply which should be occurring even now. Khitrov’s mouth curled into a truly wicked smile. With any luck the average New Yorker would wake up tomorrow to find their city short of food, water, and all the other most basic supplies that made metropolitan life possible.
The plan was grander than just New York City, however. As if on cue, the feed changed to a report from San Francisco, where a grainy camera image showed the outline of the Golden Gate Bridge against the predawn sky, the center of its span engulfed in yellow-orange flames. Khitrov could not quite tell from the picture, but it seemed to him that the famous span was sagging. At the same time, the news ticker began to announce attacks in Canada, including an explosion at the Welland Canal locks, which controlled access to the Great Lakes, and at the MacDonald rail tunnel through the Rockies.
Khitrov nodded at the screen, pleased. News from the rest of the world would be much slower to reach him. Other places did not possess the same drama and spotlight of New York and the broader North American media market, but he was confident of his plan. He pulled a bottle of vodka out of his desk and poured himself a celebratory shot. He was actually enjoying himself, watching his tour de force unfold on television. In truth, Khitrov knew that all he could do was improve the odds of his country winning against the west, but he still thought of himself as the director of some great stage drama, and only he knew how all the intricate acts fit together.
The first act was coming to a close. Khitrov sat back, sipping the sweet, fiery vodka, and watched the continuing coverage. Absently picking up the bishop piece from his chessboard, he looked at his watch. It was just about time for act two to begin.
PART VII: DAGGER TO THE HEART
“There is never a convenient place to fight a war when the other man starts it.”
—Arleigh Burke
CHAPTER 67
0900 EST, Sunday 13 February 1994
1300 Zulu
E-3 AWACS “Darkstar,” over the Atlantic Ocean, twenty miles south of Long Island
“HOLY CRAP,” MUTTERED the radar operator. Three small, low-flying contacts had just appeared on the scope of her console. “Hey Sarge!” she called into her headset to her supervisor sitting two consoles away in the Boeing AWACS aircraft monitoring the airspace along this stretch of the United States’ Atlantic coast, “You gotta see this!”
Master Sergeant Troy Funk shifted his two-hundred-and-sixty-pound frame in his seat and switched his console to his subordinate’s feed. “What is it?”
“Sarge, I’ve got three, no, there’s another one! Four contacts that just appeared in my sector, bearing is one-nine-zero relative, range nine zero miles, altitude under a hundred feet, speed is—whoa, speed is over a thousand knots!”
Funk felt a cold knot take hold in the lower reaches of his gut as he watched a fifth contact appear on the scope. The only thing that could just appear out of nowhere and accelerate to Mach one-point-five like this was a missile. That’s not good, was the only thought the master sergeant could muster as he ran a hand through his bristly salt and pepper crew cut.
The five, no, six, supersonic contacts all seemed to originate from the same patch of empty ocean about a hundred miles south of Long Island, and were fanning away from that point to the north and northwest. Oh my God, Funk thought, is this really happening? Is this it?
“Sergeant!” called another airman from two consoles down, “Vampire! I have multiple supersonic contacts on my scope as well. Bearing is one-two-zero, range one-five-five, wavetop altitude!”
That did it for Master Sergeant Funk. He said to the lieutenant colonel in charge of this flying command post, “Sir! Get on the horn to NORAD! We have multiple cruise missile contacts inbound towards the New York area from multiple sources”
Yet another officer was shouting, “Vampire! Vampire!” over the air defense frequency radio.
The warning from Darkstar traveled at light speed into space where it was received by a US Air Force communication satellite, which relayed it back down to the NORAD’s Combat Operations Center nestled deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, just south of Colorado Springs. There it joined similar messages that were arriving from all around the periphery of the United States’ maritime boundaries.
Moments later a radio call came in from “Looking Glass,” the Strategic Command’s airborne command post, which had been up and orbiting over the Midwest, waiting for doomsday, since DEFCON Four had been declared hours earlier.
“Darkstar,” came the deadpan call over the SATCOM link, “this is Looking Glass. Please confirm what we’re seeing over your data-link. It looks like we have a major cruise missile attack developing against the New York area. Is your data accurate, over?”
“Roger,” Funk heard the officer in charge of the AWACS’ controllers respond at the other end of the 707’s brightly-lit crew compartment, “what you’re seeing is accurate.
We have more than a dozen vampires in the air, there are now three points of origin, over.”
When the American president had ordered US conventional forces to DEFCON One at the commencement of hostilities an hour before, he also ordered the country’s nuclear forces to assume DEFCON Two, a level of readiness not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis. As a result, dozens of bombers were staging on airbase runways all over the United States, with thermonuclear weapons in their bomb bays and crews waiting for the word from NORAD that the world was, indeed, coming to an end. Now, it seemed, that moment might have arrived.
Funk knew that with the report of supersonic cruise missiles approaching the American coast, the commander of NORAD, a four-star general, would have to pick up his direct line to the US Strategic Command, or STRATCOM, headquarters at Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska. The bombers are probably thundering down the runways right now, thought Funk. The ICBMs are probably in pre-launch countdown procedure. Funk was sweating bullets and feeling nauseous. This is Armageddon.
There were now eighteen missiles inbound from at least three source points. Elsewhere in the cabin, Funk heard the announcement that the dreaded TACAMO—“take charge and move out”—message had been sent, alerting all of the Navy’s ballistic missile submarines on deterrence patrol in the vastness of the world’s oceans to be prepared to execute a retaliatory strike on only a few moments’ notice. The Looking Glass system was now active, designed to keep the National Command Authority, military speak for the US president or his successor, in continuous contact with the country’s nuclear assets.