by Joe Buff
“Some things we can sort of hotwire,” Nyurba said, “if we can’t intercept the couriers or overhear the new passwords as they’re conveyed by electronic means.”
“You’re taking far too much for granted.”
“No we aren’t,” Kurzin stepped in firmly. “If any set of circuitry requires a certain password to unlock any protective device in real time, that circuitry itself must know the password. Correct?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“If the password is anywhere in such circuitry, and that circuitry falls into our hands on this raid, we have ways to force it to reveal the password to us.”
“Who’s this ‘we’?”
“Among my squadron officers are experts who were stationed in American missile silos, and others who have great talents at computer hacking. We brought with us devices, designed in the U.S., mimicking German high-end hacker styles, and constructed using Russian and German or neutral components and tools, which will assist us in attempting to crack the codes.”
“You said ‘attempting.’ ”
“Total success is never guaranteed.”
“All right, let’s be optimists on that for now. I have a good cover story for why Challenger is where she is when the warheads go off. I’m on my way to blockade the next Eight-six-eight-U-class submarine that the Russians are selling to Germany. And Carter will emit the acoustic signature of a German Amethyste-Two if she faces any risk of detection. Those parts work for me, in and of themselves. But how do you get into a silo bunker to begin with? They’re hardened against attack by nuclear bombs.”
“The bunkers and silos are hardened, but their locations are permanently fixed. We know exactly where they are, which is a significant plus. Russia’s road-mobile nuclear missiles are far too elusive to preplan a hijacking with any surety. Their carrier vehicles can move much faster than we’d ever be able to keep up with on foot. Their crews, out in the open, if they see they’re losing an ambush, can sabotage their own ICBMs too easily. Ditto for rail-mobile units. The same is not the case for missiles in silos. And yes, the control bunkers are hardened, but the people on duty inside them are not. The humans must rotate in and out periodically, for recreation and rest, the same as U.S. Air Force silo crews. This is their Achilles’ heel.”
“Which they’ll take severe precautions to protect.”
“Once Carter drops us off where we’ll sneak ashore through toxic coastal waters, our five-day overland hike will be timed to reach a particular missile base just before a regular silo personnel shift change. We intend to commandeer the approaching trucks bringing in replacement crews, and penetrate the installation that way. We’ll then take over the control bunkers for half a dozen ICBMs.”
“Horribly chancy.”
“We anticipate that our silo entry phase may become extremely violent. We are fully prepared for this.”
Jeffrey glanced around the room at Kurzin’s commando force. Their faces were blank, inscrutable. “You’re telling me you’re going on a one-way mission.”
“We understand the meaning of service and sacrifice.”
“Come back to how we’re supposed to make Russian latest-generation warheads go off prematurely.”
“That part is in the script included in your orders.”
“If I’d tried to learn the whole script in one sitting, I’d’ve been in that stateroom for forty-eight hours or more.”
“That’s why you still have a week-plus to memorize everything,” Nyurba said.
“What I did see, or skim, I’m not so sure about. Gamma-ray lasers and microwave lasers and proton particle beams in the vacuum of space, plus radar spoofers tuned perfectly, all making a nuclear warhead think it’s reentered the atmosphere, that it feels the heat and the rising air pressure and the deceleration, and its radar altimeter, if it has one, detects the ground coming up. Zapping timers and blinding celestial-navigation sensors, without ruining the warheads altogether…. You’re counting on too many things going just right.”
“Again,” Kurzin told him, “you’re so caught up you forget that this is all bluff. It does not actually have to exist, let alone work correctly. The Russians just have to believe that it’s plausible, and see the evidence with their own eyes that tells them it’s real and it did work.”
“The exoatmospheric blasts.”
“Yes.”
“Which fry so many satellites and ground systems instantly that the Russians have no telemetry to prove that there never was a gamma-ray laser firing, a particle beam gun discharging, a radar spoofer radar broadcasting. All deployed from supposed nuclear-powered stealth satellites that they can’t detect, not because they’re too stealthy to detect, but because in fact they never existed.”
“An excellent summary, Commodore. Remember, it’s the President’s job, on the Hot Line, to convey all this to the Kremlin. A deep-black DARPA project, now unveiled. You wouldn’t have known about something so secret in advance. You know what you do know, supposedly, because of a radio message received only after the warheads explode. The same long message that orders you to Siberia as your commander in chief’s personal, on-site, back-channel mouthpiece. Your role in this part of the act is a supporting one. You merely need to believe what you were told.”
“Which brings us back full circle, to one main thing that still is bugging me. What if the Russians think it’s all too pat? Challenger appearing at just the right time and place by sheer happenstance, and this magical, mystical missile shield idea being swallowed whole by the Kremlin, and them not seeing that we had strong motive to have done the nasty deed ourselves to frame Berlin and reap large benefits. Expecting that all of this comes together and Moscow never questions our package of lie after lie after lie… It’s too much like tempting fate.”
“They can’t call our bluff on this next-generation missile shield,” Kurzin said. “The only way would be to launch a live ICBM at the U.S. Suppose they do. Then you posit that the shield has imperfections, that it can leak. Since there’s no way for the Russians to self-destruct an ICBM once it’s in flight, the whole idea of ICBMs as deterrents being that they can’t be recalled after launch, we’d either shoot it down in our end zone along its trajectory with what conventional missile defenses we do have, or it’d detonate over or on U.S. soil. Either way their launch would be an intentional act of war, and we’d certainly retaliate, quite possibly by targeting the Kremlin. Because, remember, we’d still be acting as if we were entirely innocent of anything except protecting ourselves against a Russian preemptive attack, using the nonexistent mystery shield to inflict electromagnetic-pulse damage, which is more or less nonlethal, on the Kremlin environs…. Therefore the only way to call the bluff amounts to an act of suicide for Moscow.”
“I follow the nonlethal aspect of the punishment from this made-up missile shield. I like it as an idea, I said that before, and I wish someday we could field such a system for real. But the Russians don’t have to actually test the shield to doubt its existence. They can simply conclude on their own that it’s just theoretical concepts and double-talk.”
“This is where your faked rage and bluster onshore in Siberia come in. The analogy to magic is more apt than you may recognize, Commodore. It’s a psychological sleight of hand. Your dire accusations and threats as champion atomic warrior, to a senior Russian Navy officer who’ll know exactly who you are. Challenger lurking with her tactical nuclear cruise missiles in case they mistreat you. Very useable weapons, you’ll say, since they don’t breach the barrier to hydrogen bombs. This will all divert Russian thinking away from the U.S. being to blame. Challenger herself becomes a sleight of hand as well, distracting the Russians from thinking that another American sub is present.”
“Only if I can bring it off. Face to face, on camera, hour after hour. Alone in Siberia, among Russians who become our mortal enemy if I make even the slightest misstep. Russia’s romance with Germany sours only if I can bring it all off.”
“Yes.” Kurzin was unemotional. “
Only if you bring it off.”
“What if Russia sees through the bluffs and hand-waving and phony biblical wrath, despite even our president over the Hot Line reinforcing me? The Kremlin would strike back in kind, shooting a missile to go off high above America, to inflict an electromagnetic pulse and fry the entire U.S. homeland. For exoatmospheric EMP, a higher detonation is better, it pancakes a larger area. They fling a warhead where our best real defenses can’t possibly reach. We lose the war in a millisecond.”
“That is, unfortunately, true.”
“Russia arrests me, and I’m the one who’s the international terrorist. I’m perfectly placed to be our commander in chief’s sacrificial lamb, the scapegoat in this giant fiasco, to placate the Russians. I can picture the show trial in Moscow on that. The Germans will love every minute. The ending is a bullet in the back of my neck. Unless the Kremlin decides to cremate me alive, feet-first as was the KGB’s custom, so it lasts longer.”
“Inarguably that is one scenario. Two, if you consider each method of execution as a separate scenario.”
“Suppose that Russia buys into everything, and buys it all too well. How do we stop them from glassing Germany with ground-hugging cruise missiles immune to our magical space-based shield?”
“Aside from the fact that doing so would bring them into wholesale nuclear war with Germany? Which neither will want?”
“Aside from that. The Kremlin does have true megahawks.”
“That’s why our president sends you to Siberia. Charm, guile, warnings, wordplay, it’s a crucial part of your job.”
Boarding the mini for Challenger, everyone was exhausted and glum. The trip was a mob: six experts who needed to transfer from Carter added to the passenger load. Jeffrey and Nyurba took the two seats in the last row of the transport compartment.
“You know,” Nyurba said, “in the more remote parts of Siberia, there are still some practicing shamans.”
Jeffrey hesitated, but sensed that Nyurba, who seemed subdued, felt the need to talk. “Is that your religion?”
“My family is Russian Orthodox. But the old creation myths are kept alive. Many peoples equate the North Star with a bear.”
“You mean, like constellations?”
“The star Arcturus, in some Lapp and Finn and Siberian groups, is called Favtna. The hunter. The Big Dipper is supposed to be his bow.”
“I thought it was a plow, or something.”
“The ancient prophecy is that someday Favtna will shoot an arrow at the bear. And the North Star, around which the heavens turn each night, is known also as the pillar of the world.”
“Makes sense.” Jeffrey wondered where Nyurba was leading. He’d heard that Russians, including Siberians, could be moody.
“When Favtna’s arrow strikes home, at the bear, the North Star, the pillar of the world, the prophecy goes something like this: ‘The sky will plummet down, and then the earth will be smashed, and the world will burst into fire and smoke, and it will be the end of everything.’ ”
“That’s pretty morbid stuff.”
Nyurba stared into space. “Sometimes, with this mission, I think I’m Favtna. The bear is Russia, the arrow is an ICBM, and when I shoot the missile the prophecy will literally come true.”
Chapter 13
Right after the rendezvous, Jeffrey had his strike group begin to proceed by a devious route under the ice cap, to eventually worm into position north of Siberia. The route had been chosen consulting with Meltzer and Carter’s navigator, while Bell and Harley offered advice. No one past the two ships’ hulls could possibly know which dog-leg courses and zigzags Jeffrey intended to take — including that mole in DC.
Soon after he first returned to Challenger, Jeffrey handed a packet from his orders pouch to Bell, for the ship’s systems administrator, a rather cerebral senior chief with a master’s degree in computer science.
“What’s this?” Bell asked.
“Disks with special software. We’ll need it running later. Intel-gathering, to support our endeavor…. And message code phrases we’ll receive to formally confirm or cancel our mission…. Operating specs and installation info are in there.”
To take a breather, Jeffrey went to his office, Challenger’s XO’s stateroom. He sat in one of the guest chairs, putting his feet up on the other. He stared into empty space, at a spot that seemed miles beyond the bulkhead only inches from his shoes. He tried to make sense of all that was going on.
His orders said that Commander, U.S. Strategic Command and the President would be waiting, and the start of Kurzin’s assault on the ICBM complex would be observed from orbit by American spy satellites. To explain the lack of initial reaction to these events on the ground in Siberia, U.S. commanders could always claim they assumed this activity was a Russian security drill, with mock invaders firing blank rounds, and chicken blood used for realism. Missile launches would be detectable by other satellites — the SBIRS-High system — that watched for the distinctive infrared heat signature of rocket engines; these satellites hovered over Russia constantly, in geosynchronous orbit a tenth of the way to the moon.
When Kurzin’s men were seen to move to attack, Jeffrey would receive an ELF message to come to periscope depth in a polynya, and raise his photonic masts and antennas to act as the U.S. President’s eyes and ears. This was needed because satellites that didn’t shut down would be blinded, and some would be destroyed, by the H-bomb blasts and resulting persistent energetic particles in space. If the SS-27 missiles did take off, and did detonate hundreds of miles outside the atmosphere over Moscow, Jeffrey would see the visual and electromagnetic effects. Challenger would be far enough away, her masts and antennas shielded and hardened, so as not to suffer from the EMP.
The President of the United States would know when to pick up the phone to the Kremlin, and what to say, if the President of Russia didn’t grab the phone and call him first in panic. From SS-27 liftoff to warhead detonation would take less than two minutes — as opposed to the half-hour a warhead needed to strike the U.S. Neither America nor Russia would have time to bring their strategic nuclear missile forces up to immediate launching status. This was one major advantage of using the SS-27: the missile’s more powerful engines shortened the boost phase significantly compared to earlier-generation Russian ICBMs. The dust would settle, reason would prevail, and common sense would kick in, well before a wholesale thermonuclear exchange came close to occurring. Or so it was intended in the mission plan.
But that would all come days from now, and the train of events is fraught with imponderables and uncertainties.
In the meantime, it was vital that Allied command and control give no hint whatsoever, through unusual physical or signals activity, that anything out of the ordinary was on the verge of happening. For a while yet Jeffrey and his strike group were entirely on their own. He’d always preferred to work like this, unsupervised and with lots of opportunity for initiative. But later in Siberia himself, coordinating via conference call with his President on the Hot Line in real time while potentially hostile Russians joined in — both face to face and from Moscow — would be a completely new experience for him.
He had mixed feelings on many levels. There was no one in whom to confide. The loneliness of strike group command tasted vile. He decided, once and for all, to repress his emotions and follow an inner, amoral, task-oriented autopilot.
Yet he could tell that his deepest self was becoming worn down. He knew that following orders, though they formed his sworn and inescapable duty, would be no excuse on a higher plane or in a court of law. Violating Russian sovereignty, in the premeditated way he would do it, was an act of aggressive war. He’d snuck onto neutral or Allied soil before, but never like this. The ultimate mission goal amounted to a crime against humanity, if viewed in isolation from its benefits. The necessity and the benefits were pure theory, based on wargame simulations only, no matter how credible that modeling effort might be. The pressure on Jeffrey, and the corrosive effect on
his soul, felt immense.
Nyurba’s morbid mood, probably just standard preinsertion heebie-jeebies, must be contagious…. Yes, it’s just the usual doubts and fears before any fresh mission gets rolling.
Jeffrey liked this rationalization, conveniently invented though it was. The notion — delusion? — of normal prebattle stage fright fit well with his newfound get-the-job-done amoral compass. The inner compass was a survival tool, for which he expected he’d sooner or later pay a heavy price. But that would come afterward, when he could afford to let his conscience return and try to reconcile his actions with his own value system, his ethics, his religious beliefs. He’d find out then, the hard way, here or in the afterlife, if reconciliation was even possible. In the meantime he needed to shake these too-distracting ideas off.
It occurred to him that boomer captains and crews must have gone through the same sort of agonizing issues often, wondering how they’d feel if they got an order to fire their missiles. But those orders never came, whereas Jeffrey’s orders sat on the desk, in writing. Though there truly was no precedent for what he and his people had to do, thinking like a boomer captain could help a little for Jeffrey to cope.
And while he might be lonely, he didn’t need to be alone. He went into Challenger’s crowded control room, with men at every console, and icons dancing on the displays. As Challenger and Carter steamed in company away from the rendezvous point, secured from battle stations but maintaining ultraquiet, Jeffrey began to feel mentally restored. The human company, the active motion of his strike group, the collective sense of purpose, were excellent tonics. He quickly returned to his normal self, the driven warrior. The surest sign of this was that another important tactical insight sparked within his brain.
He asked Bell for a moment with him in the captain’s stateroom; it was larger than his office, and he welcomed the slightest change of scenery. They went inside.