Alternities (43 page)

“It is.”

“What about the film teams?”

“Photo recon aircraft with long-range optics are flying the ASW routes in place of the P-5s all up and down the coast. The nearest one will get an alert in code three minutes before we smoke the bird. We have at least a fifty percent chance of getting good film.”

“And FNS is standing by?”

“Yes?”

“I want to see the bulletin.”

With a gesture, the General called an officer down out of the tiered seats. “Show the President the draft news release,” he told the new arrival.

The young public affairs officer dug into a folder and came up with a sheet of paper. “Yes, sir. You’ll see it’s all ready except for the dateline. All we have to do is fill in the location and dictate it. It’ll go out immediately on radio and TV. I also have drafts of the first two updates.”

O’Neill shouldered forward. “Do you have a draft that starts ‘Southeastern Cities Destroyed in Soviet Reprisal’?”

“Sir?”

“Maybe you’d better get to work on one,” O’Neill said coldly.

“Sir?”

Shaking his head and smiling, Robinson handed the paper back to the PAO. “Never mind,” he said. “The Secretary was making a joke. General, do you know any operational or tactical reason not to go ahead?”

“No, Mr. President.”

“I was not making a joke,” O’Neill said stiffly.

Robinson ignored him. “Then let’s pick a target.”

As the General turned and gave an order to one of the technicians, O’Neill realized that the room had grown very quiet. Then the center third of the display mutated into a map of the East Coast and the Atlantic Shelf.

It was the Cyclops plot, the closest thing to magic O’Neill had ever seen—a real-time presentation of twenty thousand data points, distilled down to an assortment of oblong blips in black, red, and blue. The overlapping semicircles showing the Javelin batteries and their zones of coverage gave the coastline a lace-edged look.

“The black markers are private and commercial traffic, the blue our naval forces, the red known Soviet vessels,” the General said. “Most of those are submarines.”

Robinson scanned slowly up and down the map. “What’s your recommendation?”

The General turned to the tactical aide at the Cyclops console. “Lieutenant Russell?”

“Best on the map is S-16, there off the Florida coast,” the aide said, twisting in his chair. “Fifteen miles out, forty fathoms down, and nowhere to hide. We’ve had a real good track on that one for more than a week. She seems to have a bad bearing somewhere in the power train, possibly in the primary turbine—been noisy as hell. She’s been trying to use a shadow zone landward of the Florida current, but we can still hear her. Soviet Fleet Operations probably has a replacement already on the way.”

“Surface traffic?” the General asked.

“Weather’s been spotty, so almost none. One fishing trawler six miles out, won’t get more than a good bouncing. Oh, and there’s a good, solid fifteen-knot westerly to blow any fallout out to sea.”

“Is this the one?” Robinson asked, pointing to a red marker off the tip of Florida.

“Yes, sir.”

Robinson turned his head so that he could look directly at O’Neill when he spoke. “General, I want that sub destroyed.”

The General’s orders were simple and brisk. “Mr. Walsh, alert recon 12. Lt. Russell, transmit the go orders.” He turned back, mouth puckered in thought. “I suspect they’ll hear this on the beach in Miami, Mr. President.”

Gazing up at the map expectantly, Robinson nodded. “I’ll be disappointed if it’s not heard a lot farther away than that.”

Like a great gray whale, the elint picket submarine D-57 nosed slowly through the cold green waters, its briskly turning twin screws barely holding their own against the eight-knot current. The teardrop hull resonated with D-57’s high-pitched whale song, being sung by a progressively disintegrating ring bearing on the vessel’s primary generator.

On the choppy white-capped surface some fort' fathoms above, a passive antenna buoy bobbed at the end of a slender tether. Invisible to sonar, the buoy’s three-meter whip collected radio energies ranging from the chirp of the navigation light at Key Biscayne to the chatter of air traffic control at Homestead Air Force Base.

Inside D-57, Captain Andrei Sorkin moved from compartment to compartment, observing the first shift at their stations, trying at once to measure and lift their spirits. The measuring was an easier task than the uplifting; there was a weariness in the men’s voices, a sluggishness to their movements. It was a disease to which Sorkin himself was hardly immune. After nearly three months on station, his friendly jokes were flat, his fatherly admonitions old and familiar, even to himself.

He blamed Fleet Operations as much as himself for conditions aboard. Unlike the big blue-water ballistic-missile boats, D-57 was cramped and noisy, burdened with a grab bag of missions. Mines aft, missiles amidships, torpedoes forward, radio electronics everywhere—all stole space from the ninety-man crew. There was little room for physical activity, none at all for luxuries. Only structured, meaningful activity could fight the lethargy and indifference of a long deployment.

The games of hide-and-seek with the American coastal fleet, the simulated attacks and mine-laying drills, the shadowing exercises, had provided welcome challenge and variety. Predictably, morale had plummeted since the picket fleet had been ordered to withdraw beyond the twelve-mile limit. Here, they had only the rare encounter with a patrol plane to break the monotony.

Last night’s bloody fistfight between two second-shift seaman engineers was only the most overt sign that crew fatigue was becoming critical. Sorkin feared his crew was coming apart. Of late, even the nagging mechanical problems aboard seemed calculated to aggravate the problem—the foul-tasting rust which had appeared in the drinking water, the generator which sang at a pitch that drilled into the skull.

Sorkin entered BCh-4, the communications hut, and settled in an empty chair. The problem with BCh-4 was in many ways the most acute, for their work was the most unrelentingly routine. In recent days an ensign had found the chief operator tapping his foot to music broadcast by American radio stations, and Sorkin himself had found an operator asleep on his watch.

“
V more kak doma, da?
” he said with a forced smile that no one answered. “At home in the sea, yes?”

Three miles west of the submarine and four thousand feet above the water, a slender metal arrow reached the apogee of its graceful ballistic journey. The furious white-smoke trail of the solid-fuel rockets thinned as the second stage burned out, and three explosive bolts fired to separate the spent cylinder from its stubby payload. A halo of small vanes opened at the base of the depth bomb, imparting spin that at one stabilized and slowed the projectile.

“Everything is quiet, Captain,” the senior specialist said dutifully. “Even the American pilots seem bored today. There has been little idle talk between them.”

Like a gleaming stone thrown by a playful child, the depth bomb fell toward the sea. The splash of its impact sent water twenty feet in the air. The force of the impact armed the hydrostatic trigger and snapped the stabilizing vanes flat. The canister sank swiftly, trailing a fine veil of bubbles.

“Splash transient, Captain,” the hydrophone operator called out.

“Our dolphin companions are back,” Sorkin said over his folded hands.

“No, Captain—”

Three hundred feet below the surface, the electrical current created by the pressure of the sea against a tiny crystal reached a threshold, freeing far larger currents to pour through the depth bomb’s network of circuits. Shaped explosive charges fired in synchrony, slamming fragments of enriched plutonium together. In one infinite instant of time, neutrons flew like the devils fireflies, shattering atoms and freeing their deadly energies.

Around the starlike fireball, an expanding bubble of superheated gases and furious radiation violently displaced millions of tons of water. The surface of the sea roiled and lifted up in a great dome, pierced by ferocious jets of steam.

Caught on the fringe of the bubble, D-57 was shoved sideways and upward as though by a great hand. Plates twisted, welds tore open and bulkheads crumpled, opening dozens of leaks through which poured poisonous steam instead of cold brine. As the pressure inside the submarine soared, eardrums burst, blood ran. The air was like fire, scalding skin and lungs.

But there was no time to scream. The fireball was dying, the bubble collapsing, and the water which had been displaced came crashing back to fill the vacuum. Swept along, tumbling, like a fragile shell before a breaking wave, D-57 was cast against a wall of blue-green steel and, torn by forces beyond its builders’ conception, vanished.

Waiting had worn thin, and the excitement of the successful attack had long dissipated. Robinson drummed his fingers impatiently on the table. “What time is it over there?”

“It’s 7:35 P.M, in Moscow,” Rauche said “What do you think?”

“It’s been less than an hour. I’d say they’re still trying to figure out what happened.”

“You said they monitor the FNS. They must have heard the bulletins.”

Rauche nodded. “They’re probably trying to get independent confirmation.”

“Here it comes!” someone cried as a printer started to chatter.

But it was not Molink, which had gone silent minutes after the submarine was destroyed. Instead, noise came from the Fleet intelligence link. A waiting technician tore off the paper and ran it to the main table. “Sir, the Soviet Atlantic Command has gone on war alert.”

“Shit.” Three voices said the word at once.

“Here we go,” another voice said ominously.

“Bogeys dropping off the board,” the Cyclops operator sang out “Everybody’s cutting loose the buoys and going deep.”

“We’d better go to Defcon 2,” Rauche said, his expression grim. “Mr. President, this is a soft target. You should go. Your helicopter is waiting at the river entrance.”

“Tell ’em to turn off the engines,” Robinson said as he came up out of his chair. “I want to talk to Kondratyev. If he won’t call us, we’ll call him.”

O’Neill leaped up to block his path. “What are you gonna say now? ‘Excuse me, I seem to have stepped on one of your little submarines—’ ”

“Shut up, Gregory,” Robinson said, brushing past. A Molink translator came running up with a tablet. “No. The hell with the codes and ciphers. I said I want to
talk
to him. Point me to the right phone and get him on the other end.”

“Here, Mr. President,” a technician called. “We’re requesting the Premier. Stand by for the green light.”

Standing beside the radiophone console, Robinson smiled and flashed his eyebrows. “I do hope our friend Somerset is listening in.”

“He probably will be,” the CIA director said.

“Green light, Mr. President. They must have been expecting us.”

“You bet they were,” Robinson said, lifting the receiver. “Mr. Premier.”

The voice on the other end of the line was terse, the words clipped.

“Mr. President. Apologies are not enough. You have destroyed the very foundation of international trust with your gangsterism—”

In the background, the printers were all chattering, the gallery was hushed.

“I didn’t call to apologize,” Robinson snapped. “Our intelligence shows you at a war alert. Your ships are acting in a hostile and provocative manner—”

“We did not initiate the hostilities,” Kondratyev growled. “You brazenly destroy a harmless reconnaissance submarine and dare accuse us of provocation. We will answer your brutality. Mr. President, and teach you the lesson of your blindness—”

“If you find one of our submarines inside Russian territorial waters, you’re welcome to do your best to destroy it,” Robinson said, “But if you order so much as one missile launched toward the United States or one American naval vessel attacked, before yon can start your celebration you’ll find the Kremlin coming down around your ears—”

““Empty threats will not deter us from defending the free oceans and avenging our dead. I, too have intelligence reports. Your bombers are hours from our borders.”

“If you underestimate me, Mr. Premier, it’ll be the last mistake you make,” Robinson said. “That’s no empty threat.”

“Send your planes. Long before they reach our border justice will have been served on the murderers, and when the planes arrive we will shoot them down.”

“Mr. Premier, you have been misled by your intelligence bureau. I have a squadron of nuclear-tipped missiles within a fifteen-minute flight time of where you’re standing—”

“Somerset is screaming right now,” O’Neill said under his breath to Rauche.

“Lies. Lies will not deter us—”

Robinson turned to the Army Chief. “Targets. Name some targets.” When the Army Chief stared mutely, Robinson called to the room at large. “Quickly. Name some targets the Weasels can reach.”

A young lieutenant at one of the consoles was the first to find his voice. “Ports and naval facilities at Murmansk, Tallinn, Gdansk, Odessa. Steel plants in the Ukraine—”

Others joined in. “The command centers at Kiev, Kharkov, Gorki,” Rauche said.

“The Central Industrial Power System.”

“Refineries. Rybinsk. Cherepovets.”

Robinson repeated the names into the phone. “Are you ready to risk all that? Or do you think you can shoot down our missiles, too?”

“I do not believe these missiles exist,” Kondratyev said coldly. “We will not be taken in by your bluff—”

“Watch your radar screens, Mr. Premier. Watch your screens and see what a bluff looks like.” Robinson put down the phone and pointed to the Army Chief. “I want a Weasel launched. Now!”

“Mr. President, we have to go to Defcon 3,” Rauche pleaded.

“If we launch a missile now their whole Atlantic fleet is going to empty its silos,” O’Neill said angrily. “Back off, Peter. You’ve pushed it too far.”

“I know what I’m doing,” Robinson said. “Target it toward Greenland, anywhere away from the Reds—but make sure they have a good look at it.”