Commander-in-Chief

62

President Jack Ryan had done his best to get as much sleep as he could on the flight back from Europe so he would be ready to hit the ground running upon his return to D.C. He’d managed four and a half hours of rest, which was less than he’d hoped for but more than he’d expected, but his body clock was thrown off by the seven-hour time difference.

The international press had been hard on President Ryan’s stop-off in Sweden after his failure with NATO. Many editorialized that it was cynical of him, and they characterized his actions as storming away from a failure. Insults flew from half the newspapers on the continent, accusing him of using the dead of the Swedish Airlines flight as pawns in his militaristic game.

But his meeting with the prime minister of Sweden had gone well. Ryan didn’t mention the fact he was considering unilateral action in Lithuania, but he hinted that he was prepared to help the Baltic nation resist the Russians in some way. The prime minister expressed his fury at the Russians for the deaths of his countrymen on SA44, and with a handshake he told Ryan he personally would do all he could to encourage his national legislature to support America should it get involved in the Baltic.

Ryan sat in the Oval Office now at four-thirty p.m., the fading light of the late-October day still glowing through the windows behind him, but with all the time changes he’d undergone, he felt like it was midnight after a full day’s work.

And on top of his fatigue today was the worry about the two thousand Marines he was considering sending into harm’s way. Two thousand versus fifty thousand was an oversimplification. The Lithuanians had a brigade-strength force of four thousand or so of their own troops, plus another five thousand volunteer militia who could be used for non-front-line duty: roadblocks, rear security, and the like.

And the two thousand Marines would be assisted by U.S. Air Force aircraft flying from all over Europe, perhaps even from B-52s and other platforms flown from the USA.

But still, the Marines heading into the Baltic were going to be seriously outnumbered, and a lot of them would die.

Ryan reached for his coffee and downed a third of it as his secretary came over the intercom. “Mr. President, Director Foley and Secretary Burgess are here.”

Ryan tapped the intercom. “Send them in, please.”

All three sat on the sofas in front of the President’s desk. Ryan thought they would have some defense-related intelligence product to show him; he wasn’t certain about their request for the quick meeting but had assumed it would only involve satellite photos over Belarus.

But they had nothing in front of them.

Mary Pat said, “Mr. President, technicians at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency have been working on a project for the past three and a half years that we would like to bring to your attention because we think it might be helpful now.”

Ryan said, “I get briefings on ongoing NGA projects. Which one is it?”

Burgess said, “Actually, this is one you don’t know about. It was something that seemed a little pie-in-the-sky a couple of years ago, from the viewpoint of the DoD, so it didn’t get a lot of funding or attention. But now we at the Pentagon have seen what this system can do, and we want your blessing to use it.”

Ryan raised his eyebrows. “Tell me more.”

Mary Pat still had nothing to show him, which he thought was odd. She said, “The project is called EARLY SENTINEL. It melds the latest satellite and global-positioning data, signals and electronic intelligence information, along with high-quality battle-space imagery and ballistics and trajectory data.”

“To do what, exactly?”

“To radically speed up the deployment process of troops into combat zones, and to increase the efficiency of the troops.”

“It’s… it’s a computer program?”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“And it will speed up deployment by how much?”

“Compared to just four years ago, by a factor of five. What used to take a day can now be accomplished in under five hours.”

Ryan was incredulous. “You’re kidding.”

Burgess said, “I’ve seen it in action. It’s as good as the NGA advertised it from the beginning.”

“How does it work?”

Mary Pat said, “I’m going to give you the simplest version of this I can give you, not to patronize you, Mr. President, but simply because I don’t understand it all myself. NGA has put into their system all the data regarding Russian troops in position in both Kaliningrad and Belarus, including weapons systems and logistical needs, and dozens and dozens of additional criteria. And NGA also inputs all the ballistic and terminal data of the weapons of our troops. They’ve taken information from the Pentagon and DIA about our assumptions for the Russian plan of attack, and the specific terrain, geography, meteorology, architecture, soil composition, and hundreds of other pieces of data.”

Burgess nodded. “Even humidity, the percentages of leaves left on the trees this time of year, even rainfall and wind data.”

“Keep going,” Ryan instructed.

Mary Pat said, “All this data generates specific positional deployment orders down to the level of the individual warfighter. We can tell a specific Marine rifleman, for instance, which window in a particular apartment building he needs to position himself in in order to have a line of sight on both a specific clock tower where a Russian sniper might hide himself and the highway, so he can report up to his command if heavy trucks pass. We’ve mapped out individual geometries of fire for every different weapon on the battlefield, including indirect-fire weapons, laser targeting devices, and other more technical weapons.”

Burgess broke in again. “So when the time comes to deploy, we give information to the battalion commander, who tasks his company commander, who sends it down to his people, et cetera, et cetera. By the time the helicopters, Ospreys, and C-130s land in Lithuania, we will have a battalion of Marines with each one knowing exactly where he needs to be.

“The NGA has determined that the Russians’ options for attack are extremely limited. Terrain is the culprit chiefly. Those tanks can’t pick and choose where they want to cross the border. They have to do it somewhere high and dry enough for them to avoid getting bogged down.

“The logistics staff will have the most work, of course, but once everyone is in place, it will be down to the eighteen-year-old rifleman to know that, if he orients himself in just the right direction, he’ll have the best situational awareness for his location.”

Ryan was skeptical. “The map is not the territory.”

Burgess said, “Very true, but this is not a map. We’ve had operatives in Lithuania in the past two weeks taking hundreds of high-level images that were input into the system to increase the precision even more.”

Burgess had been ready for pushback from Ryan. “NGA had a lot of skeptics at the Pentagon, as you can imagine, myself included. And obviously we understand that several factors are involved that we cannot possibly control for. But our war planners who have been working on the Lithuania area of operations for the past several weeks, refining it the moment our satellites showed us just who showed up for the snap drill… they are convinced EARLY SENTINEL provides the most efficient and effective way to deploy our assests to turn our Marines into a blocking force against an enemy vastly superior in numbers.”

Mary Pat Foley said, “The most important feature of this program, Mr. President, is the deception element.”

“Deception?”

“Yes, sir. With deployment sped up by a factor of five, we can hold our units in reserve until the moment we know the attack is imminent. The Russians will see no barriers ahead of them, they will formulate their movements accordingly.”

Ryan said, “And then, when they get over the border, they are suddenly up against well-trained Marines who weren’t there four hours earlier.”

“Correct.”

“I want to see how this works,” Ryan said, his fatigue momentarily forgotten in the excitement of this new program.

Mary Pat did not look surprised. “I’d be very pleased to show you, Mr. President. I can have a PowerPoint worked up and I can deliver it myself.”

Ryan shook his head. “You misunderstand me, Mary Pat. I want to go to the Pentagon, right now, or the NGA building in Springfield, if that’s where I need to go. I want to sit at a desk, and I want to see this. I’m not going to micromanage our military in this. If the Pentagon wants to use EARLY SENTINEL, then that’s what we’ll do. But I want to see it for myself.”

Mary Pat nodded, still not surprised that Ryan, an ex — CIA analyst, required raw data in his face to make up his mind on how to proceed.

The Granite was an oil-products tanker hauling kerosene from Houston to Tallinn, Estonia, with a stop-off in Gdańsk, Poland. It had just left port in Gdańsk three hours earlier, and was now steaming northeast in international waters just west of Kaliningrad.

The captain of the Granite was South Korean, and his crew almost exclusively Malaysian. He had strayed east of the regular shipping lanes by design, hoping to avoid the high seas that would come from a storm passing to the east. He kept a keen eye on his marine navigation computers, kept himself clear of hazards and other traffic, as well as national boundaries.

He was vigilant, but he never saw the boat that killed him, nor did he see the instrument of his death. The boat was the Vyborg, a Russian Kilo-class submarine that had been in service for thirty-five years. And the weapon was the Type 53–65, a five-thousand-pound, twenty-five-foot-long torpedo.

The Kilo had been traveling astern of the Granite, not the best place from which to attack, but the massive oil-products vessel was cruising at only twelve knots. The Type 53–65, the captain of the Vyborg knew, would attack at forty-eight knots, and its acoustical homing equipment would have no trouble picking up the signature of the big and loud cargo vessel alone on this stretch of sea.

This was the eleventh boat the Vyborg had tracked in the past two days. The captain’s orders had been to find a commercial vessel skirting the waters of Kaliningrad, ideally straying unequivocally inside, and to destroy the boat. If the boat was over one hundred meters in length, so much the better.

The Granite was 185 meters, it was within two hundred sixty meters of the territorial waters of Russia, and the captain of the submarine knew once it lost its ability to maneuver, its wreckage would drift well within the maritime exclusion zone.

So the Granite would die.

He fired a single torpedo. If the surface vessel had posed any kind of a threat whatsoever, the captain would have launched a salvo of at least two torpedoes, but the ship five thousand meters off his bow was so much more helpless than a sitting duck, because a sitting duck could, if it came down to it, flap its wings and fly away.

The torpedo was designed to defeat all manner of countermeasures, so this shot was akin to shooting fish in a barrel. It homed in on the unmistakable acoustic signature of its target, then as it got closer it began following the wake of the vessel, closed the distance between the submarine and the tanker, and neared the big vessel.

In the last phase of the weapon’s attack, the torpedo dove from a depth of thirty feet to a depth of sixty feet and raced under the Granite to position itself directly under the hull, and then its electromagnetic fuse detonated.

The explosion of the Granite was impressive. The Kilo did not watch it in real time. No, it had followed protocol and dove after firing, it was eighty meters below the surface and far out of periscope depth, but the Kilo’s sonar technicians listened to the detonation and the subsequent death of the vessel.

No one on board knew why they did what they had just done. The specific orders to track and kill had come from the Baltic Fleet commander in Kaliningrad, and in typical fashion no explanation was given for the order. But a rumor passed among the sailors on board was that Russian intelligence had determined that the ship they attacked was an American electronic-intelligence spy vessel, stealing information about Russian naval personnel off wireless communications bouncing through the air this close to the coast of Kaliningrad.

Others — not many, but a few — thought Valeri Volodin had gone insane and was begging the world for a fight.

The Kilo followed its orders and headed to the south, leaving the burning wreckage of the Granite to sink with all hands, and then drift closer to Kaliningrad.