by Jeff Edwards
“Thirty-two meters to bottom,” Gabriella said.
Charlie nodded. “Thanks.” He eased back on the yoke a little more. They were still a little too far away from the bottom to see anything, but this was as good a time as any to heat up the exterior lights. “Floods coming on,” he said, and he flipped three switches near the top of his console.
Outside the hull, three banks of sealed halogen floodlights flared to life, casting a sphere of light around the little submersible. The darkness was not banished; it hung just beyond the reach of the floods, like an impenetrable curtain of blackness. This was where night lived. On the surface, the sun ruled half of the planet at any given time. But down here, night was always master.
The thought gave Charlie a mild case of the creeps, despite the fact that it had occurred to him a hundred times before. It was a little creepy. But it was also cool. Because this was Charlie’s domain. Anywhere else in the world, he was just a geeky looking guy with a spare tire around his waist. But down here, Charlie flew like Icarus through the secret realms of darkness. He’d had that thought before too, but it never failed to bring a smile to his lips.
He dimmed the cabin lights, to make it easier to see through the view port. Gabriella’s reflection faded with the interior illumination.
Steve snorted. “What exactly is a light red? Is it like a candy apple red? Or a fire engine red?”
Damn it. He wasn’t going to let it drop. “No,” Charlie said with a sigh. “It’s more of a whitish red.”
“A whitish red?” Steve’s voice was incredulous. “You mean like a pink?”
“It’s not pink!” Charlie snapped. He stopped and corrected himself. “I don’t like to think of it as pink, okay?”
Steve’s laugh sounded like the cackle of a hen. “Dude! You bought a pink Porsche?”
Charlie tapped a pressure gauge with unnecessary force. “Will you kindly shut the hell up?”
“Aye-aye, sir!” Steve said it in a theatrically-formal voice. “Shutting the hell up as ordered, sir!”
If past behavior was anything to judge by, it was a fair guess that Steve had accompanied the words with a brisk simulation of a salute, pointed in the direction of Charlie’s back.
A laugh from Gabriella confirmed the suspicion.
Charlie opened his mouth to call Steve an asshole, when the control yoke gave a strange twitch. All thoughts of playful banter vanished instantly from his mind. “Steve, did you feel that?”
“Did I feel what, Porsche Boy?”
“I just felt some kind of a jerk in the control yoke,” Charlie said.
“Yeah, yeah … Let me guess, it was me, right? I’m the jerk?”
“Knock it off,” Charlie snapped. “I’m not joking!”
The control yoke twitched again, harder this time—an abrupt twist to the right that nearly wrenched the pistol-shaped grips out of his hands. The submersible rolled about ten degrees to starboard, in instant response to the movement of the controls.
Charlie snatched the yoke back to the left, and then centered up quickly, compensating for the sudden roll. The sub righted itself, but he could feel a definite starboard drag.
“I’ve got some kind of steering casualty,” Charlie said. “Switch me to backup, now!”
“I’m on it,” Steve said. “Switching to backup steering now!” He punched a button and relays clicked softly.
“Thanks,” Charlie said. The drag on the control yoke vanished as the backup steering circuits kicked in. For a half-second, he considered trying to finish the dive on backup steering. But the deep ocean is unforgiving. When something went wrong a half mile under water, the smart thing to do was head for the surface before a little problem could become a big problem.
He checked the dive clock on the instrument panel above his head. “I’m declaring a mission abort at time zero-nine-five-seven. Call it in.”
“Got it,” Steve said. “Mission abort, time zero-nine-five-seven. Is this an emergency abort, or a deliberate abort?”
Charlie thought about that for a few seconds. An emergency abort meant releasing the fifteen hundred pound lead ballast plate built into the bottom of the submersible. The boat would instantly gain three-quarters of a ton of positive buoyancy. They’d shoot for the surface like a cork. Their ascent would not be easily controllable, and there was the possibility of ramming into their tender ship as they broke the surface. Charlie was a good pilot, and he was pretty certain that he could steer clear of the Otis Barton, but there was a degree of risk.
A deliberate abort would allow him to control the Nereus’s ascent. It would also save the expense of the lead ballast plate; those things were custom-manufactured to excruciatingly fine technical tolerances, and they were not cheap. A deliberate abort also meant a lot less hassle once they got to the surface.
If he declared an emergency, formal investigations would follow. They would be required by law. Everyone associated with the project would be interviewed within an inch of their lives. Every nut and bolt on the submersible would be removed and inspected. The Nereus would be decertified for diving operations for weeks, or even months. Gabriella’s research project would be over the second Charlie spoke the word ‘emergency.’
If he called for a deliberate abort due to minor technical issues, the troubleshooting and repair of the steering problem would go down in the logs as routine corrective maintenance. They might be able to resume the diving schedule tomorrow, or the day after.
His fingers tightened on the controls. “Deliberate abort,” he said. “I am not declaring an emergency.”
“Understood,” Steve said. “Deliberate abort.”
Charlie heard him lift the handset for the underwater telephone. Like all other forms of electromagnetic energy, radio waves are rapidly absorbed by water. Within a hundred feet of the surface, they could talk to their mother ship, the Research Vessel Otis Barton, by radio. But even the most powerful radios can’t penetrate a thousand feet of water. When the Nereus was this deep, all communications had to be carried out via the underwater telephone, a two-way acoustic transponder system that could transmit and receive amplified voice signals.
Steve began his report. “Otis Barton, this is Nereus. We are declaring a deliberate mission abort. I say again—deliberate mission abort.” He spoke slowly, pronouncing each syllable with great deliberation. Amplified acoustic voice signals had a tendency to become garbled as they propagated through the water. He paused to give his message time to stop reverberating through the water.
Charlie pulled back on the yoke, bringing the nose of the submersible up. “Let’s go, old girl. Time to head back toward fresh air and sunshine.”
“I’m not that old,” Gabriella said softly.
It was obviously intended as humor, but her words gave Charlie a chill. This was not the pleasant tingle of attraction, but the cold realization that his decision to avoid an emergency abort might be putting Gabriella’s life at risk. He’d gotten so locked up in weighing the technical issues of the decision that he’d forgotten to factor in Gabriella. Charlie and Steve were accustomed to the risks. This was what they trained for. This was their job. But to Gabriella, this was a scientific expedition. She probably hadn’t considered how badly things could go wrong at the bottom of a three thousand foot tall column of water.
At this depth, the water pressure on the hull was over 1,300 pounds per square inch. Suddenly, Charlie could almost feel the ocean squeezing his little submarine, pressing in the way that the darkness tried to crush the sphere of light cast by the flood lamps.
From somewhere near the rear of the cabin came a rapid metallic chattering. Electrical relays were clicking on and off many times a second, making electrical connections, breaking them, and then making them again. The exterior floodlights dimmed, brightened, dimmed again, and then went out.
“Holy shit!” Steve shouted. “I’m losing the main electrical bus! I’ve got breakers tripping all over the board, and I’m showing low volts on the auxiliary bus
!”
Charlie lifted his right hand from the control yoke to fumble for the emergency ballast release. The hot ozone smell of burning electrical insulation filled the air. His fingers wrapped around the handle, but—before he could release the safety latch—the control yoke darted hard to the right. Charlie couldn’t hold it steady with only one hand. It twisted out of his grasp, rolling the sub almost ninety-degrees, onto its starboard side.
Charlie was thrown against his safety belts. His head slammed into something. Neon colors exploded in his brain, smearing bright streaks of pain on the insides of his eyelids. Far away, he could hear someone screaming. He wanted to turn and find the screaming person, to help if he could, but his body didn’t seem to be obeying his commands.
Like Icarus, his magic wings had failed him. They folded uselessly and tore away from his body. And Charlie Sweigart tumbled helplessly into the heart of darkness.
CHAPTER 4
ICBM: A COLD WAR SAILOR’S MUSINGS ON THE ULTIMATE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
(Reprinted by permission of the author, Retired Master Chief Sonar Technician David M. Hardy, USN)
In the years since the fall of the Warsaw Pact, the word bomb has come to be associated with terrorism. We use the term to describe car bombs, roadside bombs, improvised explosive devices, and the feared—but never seen—dirty bomb. When we think of bombs, we think of wounded American Soldiers, dead or injured Middle Eastern civilians, and innocent victims in European train stations. But for the last half of the twentieth-century, the word meant something altogether different.
I was a child of the Cold War. I was born in the shadow of Sputnik, when America’s nuclear adversary, the USSR, dominated the strategic high ground of outer space. I took my first steps at just about the time a Soviet surface-to-air missile blasted Francis Gary Powers and his U-2 spy plane out of the sky over Sverdlovsk. I was learning to brush my own teeth right about the time the Cuban Missile Crisis had the world teetering on the brink of nuclear holocaust. John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev managed to drag us back from the edge of destruction, but it was nearly a foregone conclusion that, sooner or later, the Cold War was going to go hot.
Back then the bomb was the big one: the A-bomb. The term didn’t refer to any individual weapon. Outside of James Bond movies and the pages of Dr. Strangelove, there was no ultra-secret doomsday device waiting to bring nuclear annihilation to the human species. The bomb was the label we gave to the collective nuclear arsenals of the world. It was cultural shorthand for our bombs, and China’s bombs, and the bombs of the Soviet Union. And, in carefully unspoken subtext, the term signified the eventual extermination of man by his own hand.
That was the world I grew up in. A world in which it was taken for granted that we would see Armageddon within our lifetimes. When I enlisted in the Navy that was the world I served in. We didn’t look forward to it. We certainly didn’t want it. And, despite what you may have seen in movies or political commentaries, the militaries on both sides went to extraordinary lengths to prevent it. But many of us labored under the mortal certainty that a nuclear showdown was inevitable. The United States and the Soviet Union were going to unleash their nuclear arsenals upon each other and the world. It wasn’t a matter of if; it was a matter of when.
Now, so long after the fall of the Berlin wall, those fears seem distant and even a bit foolish. We’ve refocused our worries on terrorism at home and abroad. We’re concerned about the stability of the Middle East. We’re nervous about the threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran and North Korea. But the specter of the Russian bomb has been laid to rest. The apocalypse will not arrive riding on the shoulders of a Soviet-built ICBM. Or will it?
The Russian military, under-funded at the best of times, is having trouble paying its own people. According to the U.S. National Intelligence Counsel, Russian Strategic Rocket Forces are suffering from wage arrears, food shortages, and housing shortages. Put simply, the Russian military is having difficulty paying, housing, and even feeding the very people entrusted with safeguarding their strategic nuclear weapons.
In 1997, the 12th GUMO (Main Directorate of the Ministry of Defense) was forced to close a nuclear weapons storage site due to hunger strikes by its workers. In 1998, the families of Russian nuclear workers organized protests to recover back pay and benefits. The Russian media reports that the pay problems have been ironed out, and that most Russian military personnel are now paid regularly. But even on full pay, many members of the Russian military cannot afford to feed their families. Russian officers rarely receive more than $70.00 a month, and their enlisted personnel are paid considerably less than that.
Contrary to the reassurances of the Russian press, the problem hasn’t gone away, and it doesn’t stop at pay shortages. The U.S. intelligence community believes that weapons-grade plutonium, seized in Bulgaria in 1999, originated in Russia. Some time between 2001 and 2002, Chechen rebels stole radioactive materials from the Volgodonskaya nuclear power station near the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. Control over the material at the site in question was so lax that the date of the theft can only be estimated to within about 12 months. This is not the plot of a bad science fiction movie; it’s an ongoing state of affairs.
In 2000, sailors aboard a Russian submarine in Kamchatka stole nine radioactive catalyst tubes used for igniting the nuclear reactor. The tubes contained palladium, which is more valuable than gold. Not realizing that the stolen tubes were radioactive, the sailors hoped to sell them to a local scrap metal dealer. Following the incident, the Kamchatkan newspaper Vesti reported that the thieves had nearly caused a nuclear disaster when they attempted to lift the control rods out of the reactor. The Vesti article claimed that an accident was only averted because an unidentified Russian submarine engineer had the foresight to weld the handle of the control mechanism down, so that the thieves couldn’t lift it.
Two senior Russian submarine officers were relieved of duty after the incident came to light, and two Russian admirals and ten other officers were penalized for negligence. The deputy head of the Russian North East Army Group’s press center accused the media of exaggerating the danger.
The crime rate in the Russian military is skyrocketing, with theft, criminal assault, drug dealing, and illegal weapons trafficking as the most persistent problems. Desertions and suicides are both on the rise among the enlisted ranks. The problem, in other words, appears to be getting worse rather than better.
If the difficulties were confined to the conventional Russian military, I’d call it an internal problem. After all, the crime rate in the Russian Federation and the readiness of their military are their business, not ours. But the incidents mentioned above and many more like them make it clear that the integrity of the Russian nuclear forces is being affected. Men guard Russian nuclear stockpiles. And the mounting evidence tells us that those men are in serious trouble.
As a veteran of the Cold War, I feared the former strength of the Russian military. Now, in the wake of its virtual collapse, I’m beginning to fear its weakness even more. In other words, the danger of nuclear attack may not be as remote as we’d like to believe. Our margin of safety may be narrower than ever. To the eyes of this old Sailor, it appears to be eroding by the second.
How did we arrive at this precarious state of affairs? Is it possible to trace the chain of events that led us here?
If we hope to gain any true degree of insight, we must understand the weapons themselves. What are these engines of destruction that cast the shadows of annihilation over our very planet? Where did intercontinental ballistic missiles come from? How were they developed? And, perhaps more importantly, why?
Any study of ICBMs must begin with the history of rocketry. And that takes us back to ancient China.
CHAPTER 5
WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON, DC
MONDAY; 25 FEBRUARY
6:30 PM EST
At six foot four, President Francis ‘Frank’ Chandler was taller than both of
the Secret Service agents who escorted him through the double doors into the White House Situation Room. In truth, there probably wasn’t much more than an inch of height difference between Frank and the shorter of the two agents. Both agents were large men in superb physical condition, but something about the president’s long-boned frame and shambling walk made him seem larger than he really was.
The impression was further exaggerated by some indefinable element of presence. The agents looked sharp and professional in the conservative business suits that were the de facto uniform of the plainclothes branch of the Secret Service. Their suits were probably off the rack, with only the amount of alteration needed to make them fit properly. Frank’s suit was a masterpiece of single needle tailoring in blue-gray Hunt & Winterbotham wool, and he still came off looking like a farm hand dressed in someone else’s clothes. Even the legendary Georges de Paris, tailor for every American president since Lyndon Johnson, could not make Frank Chandler look at home in a necktie.
Back during Frank’s now famous underdog bid for Governor of Iowa, Jenny had started calling it the Jethro factor. His wife had only used the term in private, but Frank’s campaign manager had come unglued at the first mention of Jenny’s secret joke.
The man had very nearly shouted into Jenny’s face. “The Beverly Hillbillies? I’m trying to get the media to treat the son of a corn farmer like an honest-to-god political heavyweight, and you’re coming out with the Beverly-frickin’-Hillbillies? If word of this gets around, it’s going to make the front page of every newspaper in the state.”
Jenny hadn’t been the least bit intimidated by the man’s outburst. “It’s a joke,” she’d said calmly. “Lighten up.”
The campaign manager’s nostrils had flared visibly. “I know it’s a joke. And that’s exactly what your husband’s campaign is going to become when the media gets a hold of it.” He’d crammed his hands into his pockets with a force approaching violence. “What are you going to say when some reporter shoves a microphone in your face and asks you why your private nickname for your husband is Jethro?”