by Joe Buff
Which is why I picked this area for infiltration and eavesdropping. It’s the last place they’d expect a pair of American nuclear subs to actually be.
And since the islands were plugged into the regional communications net, the trunk cable Jeffrey wanted to find was likely to run very near them.
Except the Russian mind is infamously difficult to read. Maybe, to them, this is precisely where spy subs would come, into the teeth of their defenses and right under their sentries’ feet.
Once Harley’s probe went active, the Seahorse might instead set off a buried acoustic-intercept intruder alarm, or even detonate a mine. The Seahorse was expendable, but the unmistakable blast would bring alerted forces from everywhere, and the strike group would be surrounded with nowhere to run or hide. If the mine was an RMT-1, similar to the American CAPTOR but more lethal, it would release a torpedo that rose from the mud and homed on the nicest target within the considerable range of its seekers — which meant Challenger or Carter.
The senior control room teams on both ships knew there was no way around this. The strike group simply had to locate the cable. Jeffrey was taking his biggest gamble yet. He granted Harley permission to go active with his probe.
Fatalistically, Jeffrey waited for Carter’s Seahorse to produce results. Whether the next thing to happen would be Harley’s signal of success, or the eruption of a mine going off, or the whine of a torpedo inbound, only time would tell. The acid burning in Jeffrey’s stomach acted up again. From the jittery movements of people sitting or standing around him, he knew he wasn’t alone in this torturous stress.
The solid resistance to perpetual pack-ice drift, caused by the two small immovable islands, was an added factor making the cap here unusually dynamic, constantly splitting and piling up and grinding. Those noisy 3-D quadraphonic effects on the sonar speakers, giving spatial cues for the violent natural goings-on so close above, made Jeffrey feel oppressively hemmed in.
“Carter signals,” Sessions finally announced, “ ‘Have located buried cable. Ice above it is thick, solid, and jagged. No polynyas are near. Permission to commence cable tapping?’ ”
“Signal Carter, ‘Permission granted, commence cable tap operations. At will, inform flagship ideal position assume for massive parallel data processing.’ ”
Harley’s ship took the lead. Carter and Challenger converged on the Seahorse III that was hovering over the buried military fiber-optic cable.
Chapter 16
For the next phase, Nyurba’s duties and status as second-in-command of Kurzin’s squadron meant that his proper place was in USS Jimmy Carter’s battle management center, within her Multi-Mission Platform. To Nyurba, the space’s layout and the feel of its people at work resembled Challenger’s control room, except most of the staff were nonsubmariners — passengers aboard Carter who formed a support-and-liaison section that wouldn’t go into Siberia with the Air Force Special Ops Squadron. But instead of having a ship control station, the command center had stations for controlling off-board probes. Other consoles were being used to operate diver airlocks and the hangar space’s ocean interface — through which unmanned vehicles departed or returned covertly. Near the forward end of the space, the bulkheads angled inward; Carter’s wasp waist began to taper there, at the front of the battle management center.
The data and imagery on the console screens and bulkhead displays consisted of everything relevant to the commandos completing their mission. A tactical plot aided team situational awareness: Challenger was two hundred yards away, ahead and to starboard. The commodore had two of the three Seahorses, and both LMRS probes, deployed five miles off in different directions, as early-warning trip wires.
Colonel Kurzin stood impatiently, in overall charge, while an Air Force major handled minute-to-minute decisions and orders as leader of the mission-support section. Activity here was so classified that not even Captain Harley could enter without Kurzin’s permission while espionage divers worked on the bottom, as they were right now. Several intercom systems and dedicated sound-powered phones, as well as fiber-optic data buses, let the control room and the special ops center stay in constant touch. From these it was clear that Harley and his people had their hands full, making Carter hover as if glued in place.
Nyurba watched for progress, or problems, while a display screen showed six Navy SEALs, in closed-circuit mixed gas rebreather gear, carefully digging into the bottom muck to unearth the buried fiber-optic cable. The rebreathers had much longer endurance than open-circuit scuba, with the added benefit of not releasing bubbles that rose to the surface to increase the risk of being detected. The mixed gas was necessary at a depth of two hundred feet, where compressed air’s oxygen could cause convulsions, nitrogen would induce the pleasant but often fatal rapture of the deep, and it also increased risk of barotrauma — the bends — even if the divers were returned to normal atmospheric pressure gradually.
The widescreen display was windowed to show the divers from several perspectives at once. The pictures were sharp, because now that the immediate area had been thoroughly scoured for threats, Commodore Fuller ordered active laser line-scan cameras to be used. One feed came from the Seahorse III that had found the cable, and hovered nearby. Other feeds came from photonic sensors mounted along Carter’s keel, and from a hand-held camera used by one of the divers. His camera had a fiber-optic tether of its own, and a SEAL chief at one console in the special ops center, wearing headphones and a lip mike, was in continual voice contact with him through that tether.
The divers all wore harnesses connected to lifelines fastened to fittings on Carter’s keel. This was a standard safety precaution.
One diver spent almost all his time looking up. This was for safety, too. He was watching Carter’s hull for depth change or drift. The ship’s rounded underside was only fifteen feet directly above the divers’ heads. A sharp drop and she could squash them. A quick rise and the lifelines would yank the SEALs up shallow too fast, to hideous deaths.
Carter was being held in position laterally by her auxiliary maneuvering units, her bow facing into the current — which near the bottom set to the east at one-quarter knot. This was enough to cause noticeable drag against someone standing upright. The divers had to be cautious to keep their footing and not kick up silt; their buoyancy-compensation vests were deflated to make them heavy — they stepped softly and slowly in their extra-large-sized combat swimmer fins. As they dug, using titanium shovels meant for the purpose, they deposited the muck downcurrent, so they could see what they were doing. Nyurba understood all these things because he was a qualified Seabee diver himself, although he’d mostly used compressed air or pure oxygen and rarely gone below thirty feet. His focus, as a construction engineer, had been on assessing underwater repairs — for bridge abutments and water mains — or planning submerged obstacle-removal demolitions.
The SEALs hadn’t yet exposed the cable. Their trench looked about three feet deep. From what the Seahorse’s sonar had shown, they wouldn’t need to go down much farther.
Nyurba glanced at another bulkhead display, a large-scale map. He knew from prior briefings how to interpret it at a glance. Icons, and color-coded ribbony bands that reminded him of party streamers, explained why the trunk fiber-optic cable was here, why Commodore Fuller had decided to tap it here, and why Kurzin and Nyurba would lead their men ashore on the mainland Siberian coast nearest to here.
The central part of the Russian Federation consisted of a wilderness with virtually no east-west transportation infrastructure. Other than aircraft flights, or plodding cargo ships taking the Northern Sea Route in the brief Arctic summer, the only way from Moscow to Vladivostok — even today — was the Trans-Siberian Railroad. The trip in one direction took a week. To lessen the chance that secret messages would be intercepted, and to increase protection against an electromagnetic pulse attack — which might be nuclear or nonnuclear — fiber-optic cables were used as an alternative to satellite communications and shortwave rad
io. Fiber-optic cables covering long distances could either be laid underwater, or on land. Moscow years ago chose some of both. This provided redundancy, in case one cable broke down, as sometimes happened. It also saved money, because even with the need for icebreakers or commercial submarines to help lay a fiber-optic trunk line along the whole north coast of Russia, this was still far cheaper than stringing or burying lines across the heartland anywhere except along the Trans-Siberian Railroad’s right of way. The railroad ran through the southernmost part of Siberia, more than a thousand miles from the Arctic coast. And between the two, north-south, were dozens of Russian military installations of all kinds.
Intermediate lines branched off the Arctic undersea cable, to reach into Siberia like fingers. Most of these branch lines existed due to the major rivers flowing north, draining into the different seas that fringed the Arctic Ocean itself. These rivers formed the primary transportation and heavy logistics arteries in that whole part of Russia. In winter the rivers froze solid, becoming ice highways for trucks. In spring and summer, when the waters, due to snow-thaw runoff, drained millions of square miles of Siberian interior, the biggest rivers were navigable. Then cargo ships would use them, serving small, seasonal ports up to hundreds of miles inland.
One of these rivers, the Lena, supported the western edge of the jurisdiction of the rear admiral with whom Commodore Fuller would try to meet. Another, the Indigirka, led to very near that admiral’s central base. A third, the Kolyma, near the eastern edge of the admiral’s turf, was the logistical route to the ICBM field that was Kurzin’s and Nyurba’s target, and was also their planned route of egress if all went well. A smaller river, the Alazeja, on the Siberian mainland coast at the spot that was closest to Genrietty and Zannetty, happened to cut diagonally southeast — down and to the right on the map — from near the Indigirka’s delta toward the Kolyma near the missile field. The missiles were three hundred miles in a straight line from the admiral’s office, but that route on the ground was impassable.
The Alazeja’s mouth was where Kurzin, Nyurba, and their men would sneak out of the water. Nyurba dreaded this part. The Alazeja was one of the most polluted rivers in the world. The continental shelf near its mouth was a major Russian nuclear-waste dumping ground.
Which is exactly why that’s where we plan to sneak in.
“They’ve got it,” Kurzin said tightly.
Nyurba turned back to the bulkhead screen showing the divers. And there it was, a cable as thick as his wrist, unearthed. Pairs of SEALs, dive buddies, went to work at each of the opposite ends of the trench they’d dug, exposing more of the cable, while the cameraman and the safety monitor watched. They signaled they were ready, then all stepped well away, upcurrent, using the play available on their lifeline tethers.
“Hyperbaric work chamber pressurized to depth at the keel, one-eight-zero feet,” the SEAL chief in the command center reported. “Atmosphere gas mix correct. Chamber is ready.”
Kurzin acknowledged. He went to a different console. Nyurba joined him there. The technician sitting at the console accessed the look-down imagery on one of his displays. He activated a low-power blue-green laser range finder. An aiming reticule appeared on his other console screen. He began to manipulate his trackmarble and joystick. A grapnel lowered itself from a big open hatch in Carter’s underbelly, gradually reaching toward the cable. He squeezed the red button on top of his joystick, and grabbed the cable on the first try. He worked more controls and the grapnel arm slowly retracted, drawing up a length of cable with it, so that the cable ran from the grapnel down to the two ends of the trench, where it disappeared in the bottom sediments.
On camera, the SEAL safety monitor made an okay sign with one hand. The technician continued lifting, until the grapnel, holding the cable, withdrew back inside the Multi-Mission Platform’s outer hull.
“Cable now in place in hyperbaric work chamber,” the SEAL in the command center stated. The chamber was a pressure-proof compartment in Carter’s garage space.
“Recall the divers,” Kurzin ordered.
The SEAL chief spoke into his lip mike. The SEAL on the bottom made hand signals to the others. They double-checked that all their tools were still attached to their lanyards. They made sure that their lifelines weren’t tangled. They swam up toward the look-down cameras, and disappeared through the hatch into the work chamber.
The SEAL chief activated different cameras. These showed the work chamber. It was in there that the SEALs would begin the highly classified steps, first developed by the National Security Agency, that were needed to tap an undersea fiber-optic cable. The cable now was locked in place on what resembled a surgical operating table. The SEALs removed their scuba and dry suits, no longer needed since they were in a shirtsleeves environment, where the atmosphere was safe to breathe at a depth of one hundred eighty feet — five and half times sea-level air pressure, enough to hold back the ocean below.
They unreeled a rubber hose connected to Carter’s holding tank of extremely pure distilled water, usually used for topping up the nuclear reactor’s primary coolant loop. With the hose, they thoroughly washed a portion of the muddy cable about a yard long. Then they rinsed away, down into the open bottom hatch, any other traces of mud and of highly conductive seawater, making sure to douse themselves in this manner, too.
“Chamber high-speed fans are on.”
The SEALs opened small lockers in a bulkhead of the work chamber, removing new tools and supplies. They dried everything using special lint-free absorbent cloths, and donned disposable white garments, including hats and masks, like the outfits worn in a technological clean room. The high-speed fans scrubbed the atmosphere, purging it of lint and dust and even shed skin cells. The men put on long rubber insulation gloves and rubber boots, and stood on thick rubber mats. Once done with their complex task, Nyurba reminded himself, they’d begin a lengthy decompression in a different chamber, ready to rejoin the full commando squadron only as Carter reached Kurzin’s final dropoff point.
The SEALs began to cut away the cable’s outer armored sheath, which gave the cable its structural strength. Then they peeled back the softer waterproofing layer under the armor, revealing the working innards of the cable. The most dangerous part of the process now, from the perspective of the SEALs, was avoiding the power cable that ran beside the eight cladded fiber-optic strands. The power cable carried thousands of volts, needed to power the signal amplifiers that a trunk fiber-optic cable required every few miles. Nyurba knew that fiber optics weren’t superconductors — they did suffer signal loss with distance. Whether the trunk cable was strung underwater or on land, automated amplifiers had to be part of the system. Electricity to run the optical amplifiers needed to come from somewhere. Land lines could use local power suppliers along their routes. Undersea cables brought that power with them.
Slowly and carefully, they separated the eight cladded fiber-optic strands, to be able to work on them individually. Inside every strand, through a thread of glass the thickness of a human hair, a stream of coherent laser light carried information at a rate of about twenty billion bytes per second.
With devices resembling instruments for microsurgery, they painstakingly inserted the ends of even smaller glass threads of their own into each of the Russian ones. These threads, Nyurba had been told, drew off the signal without reducing its strength enough for the Russians to notice. The delicate threads were connected to optical amplifiers, and the output of those amplifiers was fed to Carter’s onboard supercomputer.
“Commodore,” Sessions said, “Carter signals, ‘Ready to send across fiber-optic lead for Challenger supercomputer.’ ”
Jeffrey was expecting this. “Phone Talker, inform Systems Administrator that Carter is preparing to connect fiber-optic feed from cable tap.” The System Administrator’s station was on the deck below the control room.
“Fire Control, signal Carter, ‘Ready to receive fiber-optic lead.’ ”
Bell told COB to put the h
ull-mounted photonic sensor imagery onto one of the main vertical display screens.
They watched as a pair of divers from Carter emerged out of the murk, swimming with a reel of cable carried between them. They connected the end of the cable to a fitting inside a small hatch in the port side of Challenger’s sail.
“Sir,” the phone talker reported, “Systems Administrator confirms good connection with the cable, handshake between supercomputers successful. Data feed from tap appears to be nominal.”
Jeffrey went below to visit the Systems Administrator. Bell remained in Control in case a threat was identified while the strike group was glued to the undersea cable like flypaper.
“How’s it going?” Jeffrey asked.
The Systems Administrator’s office was the size of a broom closet, just large enough to hold the equipment he needed to control the ship’s local area network performance and manage the status of different computers and software.
“Artificial intelligence routines are mapping out the contents of the cable strands right now, sir. Methods called expert systems and genetic algorithms. Pretty neat stuff.”
“What’s the map showing?”
“Well, the cables transmit a mixture of voice and data and video. Each strand handles several thousand separate message streams at once. But they all follow known formats and protocols, so step one is figuring out what’s where. The next step will be monitoring the information flow and finding which channels have the specific traffic we want to listen in on.”