Ohio Class

PROLOGUE

Once, she had been the most powerful, the most terrifying weapon on Earth.

She rested at her berth at the Puget Sound Naval Yard, quiescent now, but still conveying a somewhat ominous, even sinister feeling through her dark-gray hull plating, her sheer size, and the knowledge of what she once had been.

Commander Keith H. Stewart approached the head of the pier. A Marine sentry snapped to port arms in front of him. "Halt! Who goes there?"

"Captain Stewart, son," he replied. He nodded toward the bulk of the huge vessel, silhouetted against a glorious orange sunset. "I'm her skipper."

"Sir! Advance and be recognized."

Stewart stepped closer.

"Sir! May I see your papers, sir!"

It was not a question, but a demand. Stewart studied the Marine as he handed over his ID and the authorization that permitted him to be on this highly sensitive and restricted bit of boardwalk. Since 9/11, over six years before, security at all U.S. military installations had been tight… and the security for nukes was tighter still.

The Marine — he couldn't be more than twenty, Stewart thought — completed his inspection of ID and pass, returned them, brought his rifle to a crisp right-shoulder arms, and delivered a rifle salute so sharp Stewart could have sworn he heard the air snap. "Sir! I recognize you, sir! You may pass, sir!"

"Thank you, son." Slowly, he walked past the sentry post, moving closer to the looming bulk of the vessel moored to the pier. Other Marine sentries stood farther down the pier, and on the deck of the vessel herself. Farther out in the harbor, a patrol boat maintained her watch.

On the Ohio's deck, a working party was loading supplies down the forward logistics hatch. At the moment, a dockside crane was lowering a supply pallet gently toward the upstretched hands of half a dozen dungaree-clad sailors, who together swayed the pallet inboard and down the open hatch at their feet.

He looked up at her sail, towering above the steady lap of wavelets at the waterline. Magnetic numerals adhered to the side beneath the weather bridge: 726.

My command…

Familiarly known as a "boomer," slang for any ballistic missile submarine, the USS Ohio, SSBN-726, had once carried twenty-four Trident II D-5 ICBMs, each delivering fourteen MIRVed nuclear warheads across a range of up to six thousand nautical miles with astonishing accuracy, able to place them to within four hundred feet of any designated target. Packing 150 kilotons of destructive capability apiece, those 336 individual warheads together amounted to a total of almost four megatons — over 2,500 Hiroshimas packed into a single vessel 560 feet in length and forty-two feet wide at the beam.

The Ohio, the lead ship of her class, had been launched on 7 April 1979, and commissioned on Veteran's Day of 1981, under the command of Captain A. K. Thompson. For over two decades the Ohio, joined year by year by the sister ships of the class, had fought a singular and vital campaign of the Cold War. Those eighteen Ohio-class boomers saw to it that at any given moment enough sheer megatonnage to annihilate the Soviet Union or any other potential nuclear enemy was patrolling somewhere out in the dark depths of the world ocean, utterly silent, undetected by the enemy's attack subs and ASW forces. Even an overwhelming nuclear strike against the United States and all of her forces worldwide could not hope to kill all of those hidden boomers, which carried half of the total U.S. deterrent strike force.

The strategy was known as MAD — the singularly apt acronym for Mutual Assured Destruction — and the Ohio boats played their part in assuring that the nukes never flew, mushroom clouds never blossomed above the world's cities, and civilization — indeed, humankind— survived the forty-four years of the Cold War, until the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989. Somehow, and against all expectations, nuclear deterrence had worked. Ohio had deployed on sixty-one deterrent patrols.

But with the reduction of the Russian nuclear threat had come new treaties, and a general trend toward disarmament, part of the promise of the so-called "peace dividend." America's boomer fleet would be reduced to fourteen boats.

Ohio and three of her sisters — the Michigan, the Florida, and the Georgia—would not be decommissioned, however. Ohio had recently emerged from a year-long overhaul at Puget Sound, with extensive upgrades to her sonar, fire control, and navigation systems. The original plans had called for her to be retired in 2002, but the rise of terrorism worldwide had suggested a new strategy.

In November 2002 the Ohio had entered drydock to begin a long refueling and conversion overhaul. Early in 2008 her conversion from SSBN to SSGN had been completed, and she'd rejoined the Pacific Submarine Force as a conventional missile submarine.

Instead of multikiloton nukes, she now carried vertical launch systems for up to 154 BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missiles, and various other specialized payload packages. Two of her twenty-four launch tubes had been converted to swimmer lockout and equipment tubes. The refitted boat was superbly equipped and outfitted to conduct Special Warfare operations anywhere in the world.

The old girl was still a force to be reckoned with.

Stewart passed inspection with another Marine sentry at the bow, then started up the bunting-draped gangway toward the temporary in-port quarterdeck abaft the sail. As he strode toward his command, a boatswain's pipe shrilled, and he heard a voice announce from a loudspeaker, "Now hear this, now hear this. Ohio, arriving."

It was the time-honored formula announcing the arrival of a captain on board his ship.

They'd said the fall of the old Soviet Union would make the world a safer place. "They," as usual, had been wrong. Stewart certainly didn't mourn the Soviets' passing, but without the superpower balance, the situation throughout the world had gone rapidly from bad to worse. The danger of all-out nuclear holocaust might have lessened somewhat, but there were still plenty of weapons out there in the hands of rogue states and power-hungry dictators, and the possibility of mischance had been magnified enormously.

The real wild cards, though, were al-Qaeda and the other terror groups constantly seeking power and recognition, seeking confrontation with the hated United States, seeking revenge for Afghanistan and Iraq, ever seeking a means of successfully waging war against the world's only remaining superpower. They were destabilizing, they were deadly, and the threat of nuclear force didn't work with them. By going underground in cities all over the world, al-Qaeda and the others could carry on their clandestine operations secure in the knowledge that the United States would never incinerate a city filled with innocent bystanders in order to take them down.

But in the Ohio, phoenix-risen in her new configuration, America possessed a new and potent weapon in her arsenal against the terrorists and the rogue states.

Stewart saluted the ensign hanging from the flagstaff aft, then returned the waiting salute of the Officer of the Deck. "Welcome aboard, Captain," Lieutenant James Piper, the boat's weapons officer, said.

"Thank you, Weps," Stewart replied. "It's good to be aboard."

The world, he thought, was shortly going to become a more dangerous place… for the terrorists.