by Jeff Edwards
Until the 1940s, even the most lethal of weapons had been limited in their capacity for destruction. As horrific as the machineries of warfare had become, their deadliness had never been absolute. Even the bloodiest battles tended to leave survivors on both sides—among the victors and among the vanquished. No matter how high the death toll rose, it was never high enough to completely eradicate the population of the defeated nation.
The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki changed that. With the advent of nuclear warfare, it became possible (at least theoretically) for one country to utterly annihilate the inhabitants of another country.
In hindsight it seems incredible, but the nuclear warhead became both the symbol of absolute national power, and the ultimate tool of military force projection. In their ceaseless contest for strategic dominance, the United States and the Soviet Union poured enormous amounts of funding and effort into building, testing, and stockpiling new and more powerful nuclear weapons.
As the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers grew, the technology of weapons delivery platforms advanced to keep pace. Propeller driven bombers gave way to jet bombers, and then to supersonic jets.
By the mid 1950s, the jet bombers of America’s Strategic Air Command were operating in a state of around-the-clock readiness, continually prepared to obliterate every city and military target in Soviet Russia. The Soviets held their own bombers in a similar state of readiness, poised to rain nuclear death on the United States with equal efficiency.
The total extermination of a nation’s inhabitants was no longer an abstract theory. The assembled firepower of either of the nuclear superpowers was now sufficient to virtually guarantee the annihilation of populations on a national scale.
For the first time in history, two adversarial nations had become so powerful that they did not dare take their disagreements to the field of battle. Any direct military contact between the superpowers might lead to an exchange of nuclear weapons, and any nuclear combat—no matter how small in scale—could lead to a cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation, until a small conflict escalated into a full-scale nuclear war. Neither nation could hope to survive an unrestricted nuclear attack, and a growing body of scientific research suggested that a major nuclear war might well destroy all life on planet earth.
In the context of nuclear warfare, traditional concepts of victory and defeat lost all meaning. No one could win a war in which there were no survivors. Victory and defeat were replaced by a doctrine known as mutually assured destruction, which is often referred to by the somewhat-appropriate acronym: MAD.
The threat of mutual destruction kept the NATO alliance and the Warsaw Pact from battling each other directly, so the superpowers sought and found indirect methods of combat. They fought small wars by proxy, taking opposite sides in battles between third-party countries as a substitute for the direct military confrontation that neither side dared to risk. They competed for supremacy in industrial capacity, scientific achievement, technological advancement, space exploration, and even cultural development. The competition for military dominance was more intense than ever.
Advances in jet bomber technology had given each side the ability to reach and destroy the cities of its adversary within hours. But the dawning of the space age made that timeline seem almost ludicrously slow. Each side wanted—and felt that it needed—a vehicle that could deliver nuclear attacks against its national enemies within minutes.
The solution had already been addressed, at least in principle, by the Nazi A9/A10 missile program. Hitler’s unfinished ocean-spanning missile incorporated liquid fueled engines for supersonic flight speeds, multiple rocket stages for altitude and flight range, and enough payload capacity to carry a nuclear warhead.
Under the technical guidance of expatriated German engineers, the United States undertook several separate programs to build Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. In part, the division of effort was a reflection of the rivalries between the different branches of the US military, but notes and documents from the 1950s suggest that President Eisenhower may have seen value in taking several different approaches to solving such a difficult technical problem.
The Army Ballistic Missile Agency, and the recently-formed US Air Force, concentrated on land-based missile designs. By contrast, the US Navy plan was to launch nuclear ballistic missiles from submerged submarines. Navy leaders reasoned that land-based launch facilities could be located and bombed. Submarines, on the other hand, could move freely and stealthily around the world, remaining hidden from America’s enemies, and launching nuclear strikes from unexpected locations.
Despite the advantage of multiple programs and the benefit of German engineering expertise, the United States did not win the race to launch the first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. The Russians reached that milestone first, launching the R-7 Semyorka missile in August of 1957. The first successful launch of an American Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, the Atlas-A, took place four months later, in December of the same year.
This emerging class of nuclear super-weapons was initially referred to by the abbreviation ‘IBM,’ short for Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. This caused some confusion, because the International Business Machine company was already popularly identified by those same three letters. To avoid further misunderstanding, the US military revised the missile abbreviation to include the letter ‘c’ from the word ‘Intercontinental.’ The new weapons were re-designated as ICBMs.
The superpowers continued to build newer and more advanced ICBMs. Hardened concrete missile silos were carved into the mountains, fields, and prairies of Russia and the United States. The American Atlas ICBMs were joined by Titan I missiles, Titan II missiles, Minuteman I, Minuteman II, and Minuteman III missiles, and the MX Peacekeeper missile series. The Soviets followed the R-7 ICBMs with the R-9 series missiles, the R-16 series, R-24, R-29, R-36, and their successors.
The US Navy’s planned fleet of nuclear ballistic missile submarines became a reality with the active deployment of the submarine-launched Polaris series missiles, and then the Poseidon series, and then the Trident series. The Soviets designed and deployed their own nuclear ballistic missile submarines, each generation with increasingly lethal nuclear weapons aboard.
The nuclear superpowers had finally obtained the Holy Grail of modern warfare: the ability to completely exterminate an enemy nation in mere minutes. By way of ultimate consequence—whether intended or unintended—each of the major adversaries now had the power to destroy the entire human race.
The last war and ultimate destruction of mankind, was just the push of a button away. The world found itself hovering on the brink of Armageddon.
CHAPTER 31
WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF’S OFFICE
WASHINGTON, DC
SUNDAY; 03 MARCH
5:59 PM EST
White House Chief of Staff Veronica Doyle rummaged in the top drawer of her desk until she found the slim plastic form of a television remote control. She pointed the remote toward a small high-definition screen tucked into a bookshelf to the right of her desk.
The screen flared to life, and Doyle caught the last twenty seconds of a commercial about medical insurance. She fiddled with the remote, bringing the volume up to an audible level just in time to hear the insurance firm’s duck mascot blurt the name of the company in a brassy nasal twang that could easily be mistaken for a quack.
Doyle smiled, briefly. That silly duck always made her want to laugh, which—she understood quite well—was the entire point of the advertising campaign.
The famously-trademarked quack faded into silence, to be instantly replaced by the opening musical fanfare of an equally-famous news debate program.
The Crosstalk logo appeared: a pair of animated three dimensional arrows—one red, the other blue—rushing toward each other from opposite sides of the screen. They collided in the center with an explosion of silver light, which dissolved quickly to an establishing shot of a television news studio. The camer
a held this angle long enough for the viewing audience to register the elegantly high-tech trappings of the studio set, and its three-sided interview table. Then the camera zoomed in for a close-up of the show’s celebrated moderator.
The moderator smiled, revealing a set of perfect white teeth below piercing blue eyes. “Good evening,” he said, “and welcome to Crosstalk. I’m your host, Darren Cartwright.”
The camera panned right, revealing the show’s first guest, a lean and hawkish looking man in his late thirties, a flawlessly-tailored black business suit stretched over his angular frame. “With us tonight, we have John Gohar of the National Center for Strategic Analysis, and Republican Senator Richard Blair, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.”
The camera panned left, centering on the show’s other guest, a fiftyish man in slightly rumpled tweed jacket. The senator nodded toward the camera, with the tiniest suggestion of a wink. His maroon necktie was loose, and it was obvious that the top button of his shirt wasn’t fastened. The message of his wardrobe was reinforced by his thoughtful but relaxed facial expression, and the easy set of his shoulders.
Veronica Doyle smiled. Dick Blair had long been a bitter opponent of the Chandler administration, but the old scoundrel was good; she had to give him that. He was the very image of a seasoned elder statesman: purposeful, intelligent, informed, consummately professional, and—above all—clearly undaunted by the challenges of national leadership.
The camera cut back to the moderator of the show. With the opening pleasantries out of the way, Cartwright traded his introductory smile for a more serious expression. On a wall-sized video screen behind his head, the Crosstalk logo gave way to an aerial shot from a helicopter, loitering above the entrance to a harbor. Superimposed lettering identified the scene as San Diego, California.
In the foreground, the black shape of a submarine was silhouetted against rolling waves, its wake a line of white foam across blue water. In the middle distance, two more submarines could be seen making their way toward the breakwater.
The screen shuffled through a series of similar scenes: submarines tied to piers or returning to various harbors, sometimes accompanied by Navy tug boats, sometimes not. With each changing scene came an identifying caption … Kings Bay, Georgia; New London, Connecticut; Bangor, Washington; Norfolk, Virginia; Pearl Harbor, Hawaii …
The screen finally settled on a view looking out across empty ocean waves, with no submarines in sight. The subtext of the video was clear; our nation has no submarines at sea.
The moderator looked into the camera. “We are witnessing an event that is literally without precedent. For the first time since the creation of America’s nuclear submarine force, every submarine in our country’s arsenal has been ordered to return to port.”
He turned toward the guest on his right. “Mr. Gohar, you’re first in the hot seat tonight. How does the recall of our submarines affect national military strategy? And, more to the point, does this move leave our country open to attack?”
Gohar frowned slightly. “Those are deceptively simple questions, Darren. I can’t really give useful answers without putting your questions into some kind of meaningful context. For all practical purposes…”
Senator Blair cut him off. “Thirty seconds into the program, and you’re already starting with the doubletalk!” he snapped. “President Chandler has handed over control of our nuclear submarines to a proven enemy of the United States. Not one of our submarines. Not some of our submarines. All of them!”
He gestured toward the video screen, the gently rolling waves devoid of any manmade object. “How much context do we need to understand that?”
The moderator raised a hand. “Please, Senator… You’ll get your chance to respond.”
Gohar cut a quick sideways glance toward the senator. “As I was saying…” He paused, as though waiting for another interruption. “For all practical purposes, we already have been attacked. We’ve had a nuclear detonation within a hundred miles of a major U.S. city, and—if we hadn’t managed to intercept them—we would have had two more detonations within a few hundred miles of the west coast.”
Gohar looked directly into the camera. “We’re dealing with a madman here. He has an entire arsenal of nuclear warheads at his disposal, and he’s already proven that he’s not afraid to use them against the United States.”
“Of course Zhukov is not afraid,” the senator said. “We’ve got a president who goes belly-up at the first sign of a threat. Why in the hell should anybody be afraid to attack us?”
“Excuse me,” the moderator said. “I’d like to get back to my original question.”
Gohar ignored him. “Six and a half million,” he said. “That’s how many people would be dead if those three warheads had reached their targets.”
He glared across the table toward his opponent. “I realize that they’re not your constituents, Senator Blair, but surely we don’t have to risk the incineration of six and a half million Americans to uphold your sense of national dignity.”
Sitting at her desk, Veronica Doyle cracked another smile. Ouch! Let’s see how fast old Dick backs away from that one...
“I’m not talking about dignity,” the senator growled. “I’m talking about national security. Strategic deterrence. National policy. Do any of these words ring a bell?”
Veronica Doyle picked up the remote and turned off the television. The show was just warming up, but she’d heard all she needed to hear.
A lot of people around the beltway were already treating Richard Blair as the presumptive Republican nominee for the next presidential election. He was clearly positioning himself for the nomination. One thing was certain; the crafty old bastard had identified the theme of his campaign.
CHAPTER 32
USS TOWERS (DDG-103)
WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN
MONDAY; 04 MARCH
0141 hours (1:41 AM)
TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’
Bowie woke into darkness, his heart still pounding in his chest as the dream grudgingly released its grip on his mind. He lay in the bunk of his at-sea cabin, tangled in his sheets, his throat burning with remembered adrenaline.
He blinked away tears and concentrated on slowing his breathing while his brain sorted through the jumbled logic of the nightmare, separating dream images and memories of the past, from the realities of the present. The urgency of the dream began to give way, the memories gradually fading from his conscious thoughts.
This was not the Siraji minefield. There was no torpedo clawing its way up the wake of his wounded ship. Those events belonged to the past. They were gone and done with, no matter how many times they came back to haunt his sleep.
The parade of corpses was fading as well. Bowie was lying in his bunk alone. He was not standing in Combat Information Center, and he was not surrounded by the broken and bloody ghosts of the Sailors who had died under his command.
He stared toward the darkened ceiling, and didn’t reach for his wristwatch. He didn’t want to know what time it was. Not yet. He didn’t want to know how much sleep he’d had, or rather, how little.
He thought about trying to go back to sleep.
Maybe tonight would be different. Maybe this time, the dream wouldn’t come again. Maybe he would sleep, with no dreams at all. He jerked the sheets away from his legs. And maybe the Tooth Fairy would leave a quarter under his pillow.
The dream didn’t come often. Sometimes it left him alone for days at a time, and once he’d gone three weeks without a single troubled night. But sooner or later, it always came back. Always.
If he let himself fall asleep now, he’d be back in the minefield, standing shoulder to shoulder with Clint Brody, and Alex Sherman, and Julie Schramm, and all the rest of them—with their torn and burnt flesh, and their mangled limbs.
They wouldn’t question him, or accuse him. They hadn’t done it in life, and they didn’t do it in the dream. They just stood there, mangled and lifeless, reminding Bo
wie of the terrible price that each of them had paid for following his orders.
Damn.
He might has well get up. He wasn’t going to get any more sleep tonight.
Bowie sat up on his bunk. He was reaching for his coveralls when the phone rang. He fumbled for it in the dark, locating it by touch, and unlatching the receiver from the cradle.
He held the phone to his ear. “Captain speaking.”
The voice of his Executive Officer came over the line. “Captain, this is the XO. I apologize for disturbing your sleep, but we’ve got Flash message traffic, sir. Immediate execute.”
Bowie yawned. “Thanks, Nick. I’ll meet you in the wardroom in a couple of minutes.”
He yawned again. “You’ve seen the message. Is this something we’re going to need to wake up the Department Heads for?”
“I think so, sir,” the XO said.
“Alright,” Bowie said. “Roust them out, and head them up to the wardroom. I’ll be up there in two shakes.”
He hung up the phone. Immediate execute? That could only be one thing.
The XO hadn’t given him any details, because the ship’s regular internal telephones were non-secure. He’d find out in a minute, when he read the message. But it had to be the submarine. Bowie couldn’t think of anything else that would justify Flash message traffic with Immediate execute orders.
He stood up and began pulling on his coveralls. The Towers was getting orders to go after the Russian missile sub. That had to be it.
They were going to go kill the submarine. He whistled through his teeth. Nothing like a little taste of déjà vu to get the morning started off right.
CHAPTER 33
NEW KOBOSHI HOTEL
CHIBA PREFECTURE, JAPAN
MONDAY; 04 MARCH
0326 hours (3:26 AM)
TIME ZONE +9 ‘INDIA’
Someone was knocking on the door.
Ann Roark grunted and rolled over, pulling a pillow over her head.