Countdown

CHAPTER 17

Galveston was cruising toward the edge of the ice pack at a depth of eight hundred feet, still on silent routine, still dogging the wake of the Typhoon submarine that had set out from Polyamyy over fifty hours earlier.

The Typhoon had been traveling slowly, barely making ten knots, sometimes slowing or suddenly reversing course as if checking for shadows, a maneuver American submariners referred to as "Crazy Ivan." Galveston followed cautiously, silently, remaining in the Russian sub's baffles, quick to go dead in the water at each Crazy Ivan, remaining nearly motionless as the Russian Typhoon slowly, like a self-propelled island, rumbled past, once passing only a few hundred yards to starboard. The Typhoon was half again as long as the Galveston and was over four times more massive. A collision would have crumpled the Los Angeles attack sub's hull like tinfoil.

Faithful to Schedule-3, Galveston rose every six hours to within three hundred feet of the surface, unreeling a long antenna cable in her wake capable of receiving extremely low-frequency radio waves, or ELF. For over fifty hours, no new orders had come through, and each time, Galveston returned to her hiding place within the sheltering cone of turbulent water spun off from the Typhoon's twin screws.

Through most of that time, Sonarman First Class Ekhart had led the chase, sitting in the sonar compartment, ears encased in the sonar headset, a far-away glaze to his eyes as he followed in his mind the movements of the giant ahead. For the past hour, the target, Sierra Nine, had been probing the edge of the Barents Sea ice pack, rising gradually until her conning tower was brushing just beneath the rugged white ceiling of the ice.

Though Galveston was some ten to twelve miles south of the ice pack, Ekhart was still having to rely on every trick in the book ― and several that weren't in the book as well ― to make sense out of what he was hearing. Sound was curiously distorted beneath the ice, where sounds reflected from the surface as though from a wall, and the ice itself filled the depths with crackling, popping, and rasping noises that masked the stealthy sounds of soft-gliding submarines.

Suddenly, he snapped upright, every muscle taut. "Control room! Sonar!"

"Captain. Whatcha got, Ekhart?"

"Flushing noises, Captain, followed by ice breaking. I think Sierra Nine has just come up under a polynya."

Flushing sounds meant ballast tanks being blown. Sierra Nine was surfacing. Polynya was Russian for a lead in the ice, either an open pool or an area where the water was only thinly iced over. A ballistic-missile sub could not fire its warloads through the ice. It would have to surface first before launching.

Which appeared to be precisely what Sierra Nine was doing.

"Message from Captain First Rank Dobrynin, Comrade Admiral," the aide said, handing Karelin the message flimsy. "Slavnyy Oktyabrskaya Revolutsita is in position."

Karelin glanced at the message, then handed it back. "At last," he said.

"It is time."

He would have been happier if both of Admiral Marchenko's Typhoons had made it out to the open sea, but one should be enough. His principal concern was American attack submarines in the area. Russian naval planning for her nuclear missile boats called for placing them in so-called "strategic bastions," in secret regions of the Barents and White seas and in the Arctic Ocean where a few PLARBs could be protected by a large number of fast and powerful attack boats, the submarines the West called "Alfas,"

"Akulas," and "Victors."

Karelin hadn't dared work his Typhoons into regular Northern Fleet planning, however. If it had become known before the fact that Krasilnikov's faction was planning a nuclear strike against the Rodina herself, even if it was targeted against Leonov's rebels, there could have been mutiny throughout the fleet, perhaps even an attempt by dissidents to stop the Revolutsita before Dobrynin could carry out his orders. A Typhoon could be sunk by an Alfa as easily as by a Los Angeles. But Operation Curtain of Fire appeared to have been successful in blocking the Americans from the Kola Inlet approaches.

Dobrynin's message made no mention of unknown sonar contacts. He appeared to have reached his firing position midway between Spitsbergen and Nova Zemlya undetected.

Taking a notebook from his pocket, Karelin opened to a blank page and carefully printed the words "Crimson Winter Fire," tore the sheet out, and handed it to the aide. "Transmit this to the Kremlin," he said. "Priority One-One, Urgent."

Krasilnikov would receive it within minutes. Then the critical phase of Audacious Flame could truly begin.

Captain First Rank Vsevolod Nikolaevich Dobrynin leaned over Revolutsita's primary communications console, listening to the voice of Marshal Valentin Krasilnikov coming through the speakers.

"We fight for the future of our people, of our Motherland, of our revolution," Krasilnikov's voice said, faint but discernible through the blasting white noise of static. This far north, atmospherics frequently played havoc with radio broadcasts.

"Sacrifices must be made if we are to secure our place in history as saviors of the Socialist Republic, even sacrifices made in fire and blood."

Most holy God, Dobrynin thought… and he had to savagely repress the urge to cross himself. He's actually going to do it.

Dobrynin had not had a religious thought for years. He'd been a good Communist ever since his years in the Leningrad Komsomolets. He'd even been a good Communist during the hard, lean years of Yeltsin's treason, though he'd kept a low profile and been careful not to call undue attention to his beliefs.

But Krasilnikov's words had shaken him so badly that somehow the hated religious instruction pressed upon him in secret by his mother had surfaced like some broaching sea monster. He felt ashamed.

"Traitors have betrayed our Motherland, allowing her to be taken hostage and raped by foreigners and capitalist opportunists. They have taken up arms against the people and against the government which at long last offers hope and stability in a time of economic chaos and ruin. We offer you, who have taken up arms against our sovereign Motherland, one hour in which to recant your capitalist heresies, one hour to seize the traitors who have betrayed our country, Leonov and his cronies, and lay them and your weapons before the forces of the People's Red Army.

"If Leonov is not surrendered within the hour, if the forces of division and counterrevolution continue to defy the forces of lawful government, one SS-N-20 missile with six independently targeted warheads will be launched from a submarine at targets in rebellion against Moscow's authority."

One hour. Krasilnikov was giving them one hour! It was as though he wanted to incinerate Chelyabinsk ― for that was the identity of the rebel city in the orders now locked in Dobrynin's personal safe. That city of a million people in the eastern fringes of the Urals had been chosen as a demonstration site, for there were several major rebel troop and armor concentrations in the area that could also be taken out by the same strike.

"If, after the first target is destroyed, the rebel forces do not surrender the traitor Leonov, a second target will be destroyed one hour after the first."

Alma-Ata was the second target on the list, the capital of the sprawling republic of Kazakhstan. The revelation that Moscow was willing to sacrifice one of its own cities, like Chelyabinsk, would make the republics supporting Leonov eager to change sides. No one seriously believed that a second missile would need to be fired. While Chelyabinsk was still burning, Alma-Ata, Kiev, Minsk, and the rest would be scrambling to be the first to swear eternal loyalty to Moscow. Even the Baltic states might fall into line.

Just in case, though, Dobrynin's orders listed twenty targets, from Minsk in Belarus to Khabarovsk in the Far East.

For at least the hundredth time during the past sixty hours, Dobrynin examined his feelings about the orders he had sworn to carry out.

In a little over one hour, he would give an order and as a direct result, some one million of his countrymen would die, some in a single, searing instant, their shadows burned into the sidewalks and walls of their city, others in lingering pain ten years hence, as cancers rotted their bodies.

Could he possibly carry out such orders?

Even as he asked the question though, he knew ― for the hundredth time ― that he would. He believed in Krasilnikov's vision for a new Russia and had accepted the premise that suffering in the short term was needed to win a future security. Like Chelyag, his counterpart aboard the Pravda, he'd undergone countless meetings with Karelin before this mission ― and even one interview with Krasilnikov himself. They'd screened him carefully, gauging the depth and the conviction of his belief in Communism.

They knew him, he was convinced, better than he knew himself.

And besides, there was Strelbitski.

Kirill Borisovich Strelbitski was the Revolutsita's political commissar, a civilian assigned to the Revolutsita by Karelin "to maintain the political fervor of the crew." Maintaining political fervor, Dobrynin knew, meant keeping an eye on the Captain. If Dobrynin failed to carry out his orders precisely as they were written, he would be relieved of his command and Strelbitski would take his place, and there was no doubt at all that that mean-eyed, thin-lipped reptile would carry out the orders… and even enjoy doing so. As for Dobrynin, his wife Tanya, in Murmansk, his son fighting with the 12th Red Guards at Voronezh, his daughter, a thirty-year-old doctor working in Moscow, all would be rounded up within the hour. And then…

well, he didn't want to think about the ultimate cost of his defection.

Yes, when the time came, he would give the proper order.

It had been another long, working night. They'd reconvened here, in Room 208 of the Executive Office Building, sitting around a long, highly polished table that gleamed in the morning sunlight spilling through the huge windows along the east wall. It was a lot airier here than in the White House Situation Room, with more light and more space.

Hours before, the Sit Room had proved inadequate for the task, as more and more advisors, aides, and staffers had been brought in to ride herd on what clearly was becoming a crisis of mammoth proportions. This room, its nineteenth-century decor masking a wealth of hidden electronics, television monitors, and computers, was large enough to accommodate sixty people.

Some fifty men and women were gathered here at the moment.

Officially designated the Presidential Crisis Management Group, they weren't managing so much as they were floundering in a veritable sea of information coming through from the worsening Kola situation. At the moment, Admiral Scott had the podium at the front of the room, as he ran down the list of American and British assets in the region… and the possible Russian response.

Admiral Magruder leaned back in his chair, his attention less on Scott ― he'd helped the head of the Joint Chiefs prepare his briefing so he already knew its contents by heart ― than it was on the wall at Scott's back.

There, the richly ornamented wood paneling had been rolled back to reveal a giant computer screen. Run by three VAX computers hidden in the room beyond, a digital information and display system, or DIDS, could project on that screen complex maps, graphic representations of data received from around the world, or displays repeated from the National Military Command Center.

Currently, the screen showed a computer-generated map of the northern half of the Kola Peninsula, the Russian coast as far east as Nosovaya, and most of the Barents Sea. Bear Station was a bright blue racetrack oval north of the Norwegian border, but dozens of other U.S. and NATO assets were displayed as well.

P-3C Orions, big, four-engined ASW aircraft, were patrolling the entire area from Svalbard to Nova Zemlya and south almost to the Murman coast.

Fifteen American attack subs, plus four British Trafalgar-class SSNs, were already in the area, though their exact positions could not be known with certainty. And II MEF was racing northeast just off the Norwegian coast, its ASW air and sea pickets spread across ten thousand square miles.

As many red graphics dotted the map as blue. The forty air bases in the Kola Peninsula were all tagged with data lines indicating that they were on full alert. Fortunately, all of the Russians' Northern Fleet was in port, except for some of their submarines. Over thirty of their subs, however, dotted the waters of the Norwegian and Barents seas… and those were just the ones that had been picked up by Western ASW forces.

During the past ten hours, the British, Norwegian, and American sea and air sub-hunters had been dogging the Russian subs, pressing them, rattling their hulls with active, high-frequency sonar, letting their captains know that the NATO forces knew where they were and could kill them at any time. It was a deadly game. The Russians ― or rather, some Russians ― had already attacked American forces, and no one could say for sure how their subs would act, what their orders were or which side of their country's civil war they'd joined. There'd been one incident already, when a Russian Alfa off Iceland had launched a torpedo at the Bolan, a Perry-class frigate dogging its wake.

The frigate had been blown up and sunk with terrible loss of life in those frigid waters; five minutes later the Alfa had been hit by two Advanced Lightweight Torpedoes dropped from the Bolan's SH-2F Seasprite helicopter and was listed now as a probable kill.

It was beginning.

Admiral Magruder was dead on his feet. He'd been up for most of the past two days, briefing aides, reviewing intelligence updates, even going over computer graphics data with the Crisis Management Group staff. Most of the men and women in the room with him had been keeping similar hours, snatching naps when they could on office sofas, or going home, only to be called back a few hours later by another twist in the ongoing crisis.

His primary duties as a senior military aide attached to the White House consisted of acting as liaison between the White House staff and the Joint Chiefs. Technically, he still worked for the Pentagon ― that "six-sided squirrel cage across the river," as he liked to call it ― but in practice he worked out of an office in the White House basement.

God, but he wanted to go home.

As he studied the array of colored lights on the DIDS map, Magruder felt trapped between two opposing fears, two extremes of government in its relation to the military. On the one hand, there was a tendency by the government, by the various bureaucracies in particular, to waffle this way and that on any given foreign policy question. As a result, all too often a crisis best met either by a decisive application of military force or no military force at all was met instead by half measures and tokens. Then, when American boys had already died, the powers-that-be in Washington frequently lost a clear vision of where they were going ― if they'd ever had one in the first place ― and either froze or changed their mind. Magruder was continually haunted by the possibility that the carrier battle force already at Bear Station might be sacrificed, with anything it might have won thrown away by inaction, indecision, or incompetence. The best example Magruder could think of was the terrorist bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983.

On the other hand, there was a constant tendency by Washington to micromanage, to second-guess commanders in the field while attempting to run military operations from W3, an in-joking reference to the White House West Wing. Carter's step-by-step control of the failed Iran hostage rescue mission in 1980 was an example of this opposite extreme.

The temptation toward this end of the military management spectrum was especially strong with the advent of technology such as the DIDS screen he was studying now. Real-time satellite photography and high-altitude Aurora transmissions, computer links with the NSA and with diplomatic stations around the globe, the sense of you-are-there immediacy provided by CNN, ACN, and the various other news networks all contributed to a feeling of almost Godlike power, anchored, somehow, in this building.

If Matt and the rest were to have any chance at all, the people in this room had to steer a careful course between the two extremes of not paying enough attention to the Kola crisis… and of paying it too much.

"At the moment," Admiral Scott was saying, "much of our attention is focused here, at the edge of the Arctic ice pack." The symbols marking the SSN Galveston and the Typhoon it had been tracking flashed obligingly on the DIDS. "The Russian sub appears to be running through a ballistic-missile launch drill, which in itself is provocative enough. Galveston's skipper was originally ordered to stick close, and to open fire if it appeared that the Typhoon was actually going to launch. There's a certain amount of guesswork involved, of course, and-"

At the back of the room, tall, double doors boomed open and an aide walked in, his footsteps echoing slightly in the high-ceilinged emptiness.

The man made his way swiftly to Robert Heideman's side, spoke to the Secretary in urgent whispers, then handed him a manila folder.

After glancing through the contents of the folder, the Secretary of State rose, his long face made longer by some ominous news.

"Mr. Secretary?" Scott said from the podium. "You look like a man with something important to say. You have news, sir?"

"Bad news, I'm afraid." He gestured with the paper in his hands. "I have here a translation of a speech just delivered by Marshal Krasilnikov at the Kremlin. My people are printing up copies for each of you, but I can summarize it now." Briefly, tersely, he told them of Krasilnikov's ultimatum, of the threat to destroy a rebel city within the hour if Leonov was not surrendered.

"Clearly," Heideman concluded, "the situation has changed, becoming more urgent. We cannot allow the Russians to launch that missile."

"Why not?" the White House Chief of Staff asked. "If it's just Russian against Russian…"

"Bob's right," Secretary of Defense Vane said. "If the civil war over there goes nuclear, we're going to have serious problems containing it."

"I might also point out something else," Duvall, the CIA head, said. "A nuclear war is going to affect everyone on this planet, not just the people fighting it."

"Nuclear winter?" someone asked.

"Possibly. And you'll recall that after the nuclear plant disaster at Chernobyl, radioactivity was detected in cow's milk as far away as Sweden.

There's also going to be the problem of vastly increased numbers of refugees fleeing across the border into Eastern Europe. Even one nuclear detonation in this war could set off repercussions that frankly, ladies and gentlemen, we're just not equipped to deal with."

"Admiral Scott? What do you recommend?" the National Security Advisor asked. He sounded subdued.

Scott extended a collapsible pointer, reached high, and tapped the DIDS screen twice, close by the graphic symbol marking the Galveston. "I think we have only one option open to us," he said. "But we're going to have to move damned fast to exercise it."

Commander Montgomery pressed his eyes against the rubber light shield of Galveston's number-one search periscope. The attack sub was at a depth of one hundred feet, creeping north toward the edge of the ice. Underwater visibility was superb. Though still submerged, the sub's periscope gave Montgomery a view of shifting lights and darks; he could see the white shimmer of the ice less than a mile ahead, brighter where it was thin, deeply shadowed where pressure ridges plunged into the aquamarine depths like inverted mountain ranges. The periscope view was repeated on a television monitor on the attack center's bulkhead, showing open water overhead giving way to a ceiling of ice.

"Captain, comm shack."

He reached for an intercom mike. "Captain here."

"Sir, we've just had an ELF ring the bell. Message decodes as 'Priority FLASH, stand by for VLF communications, comply immediate." That's the end of the transmission, sir."

"Very well." He turned from the periscope, catching the eye of Galveston's XO. "Mr. Harris, come about to one-eight-zero. As soon as we're well clear of the ice, come up to fifty feet."

"Course one-eight-zero, aye, sir," Harris repeated, following the correct control room procedure. "Come to five-zero feet when we're clear of the ice, aye, sir." He then turned and repeated the orders to the helmsman and diving planes operator, who sat side by side at the front of the control room.

As he listened to the litany of multiply repeated orders, Montgomery wondered what Washington was so anxious about. It was almost forty minutes past the last Sched-3 contact window.

It had been sheer luck Galveston was still trailing her ELF antenna and had been close enough to the surface to pick up that first priority flash.

Transmitted from enormous antennas at remote shore stations, extremely low-frequency signals, broadcast at from 300 hertz to 3 kilohertz, could penetrate the ocean to a depth of about three hundred feet, far deeper than any other form of radio communications. The drawback was that the laws of physics dictated that information could be transmitted on ELF channels only very slowly, at a rate of about ten bits per minute; it took fifteen minutes to transmit a three-letter code group, enough to, say, order the sub to the surface to receive new instructions according to a pre-arranged code, but not enough to transmit new and detailed orders. Such code groups were called "bell ringers."

Minutes later, Galveston was traveling slowly south away from the edge of the ice. Once the long ELF antenna wire had been reeled in, Montgomery ordered the shorter VLF antenna deployed, trailing it astern from the top of Galveston's sail. The very low-frequency band, broadcast at between 3 and 30 kilohertz, could only penetrate the top fifty feet or so of the ocean. By rising to such a shallow depth, Galveston was dangerously exposed to any Soviet ASW aircraft that might be in the area.

"Captain, comm shack."

"Yeah. Go ahead."

"Message coming through, sir. Code group Red-Charlie-One."

"On my way."

The message would be in code, of course. Red-Charlie-One was the current designation for a launch-condition message, flagged urgent.

Montgomery had a chilling premonition about what might be in such a message.