Arc Light (4 page)

“Yuri?”

“Yes, Andrushenka” came the response, again after a pause—a satellite transmission delay.

“What . . . ?” Thomas began, but found himself at a loss.

“Andrew, I am calling you with very regrettable news,” the man said, his words slightly slurred as if by liquor, although Thomas knew that would not be the case.

He sounds exhausted,
Thomas thought as he flicked a small switch on the side of his phone. A yellow light next to the word
TAPING
came on. “Go ahead,” he said guardedly.

“We have taken our strategic rocket and ballistic missile submarine forces from ‘Constant' to ‘Increased' alert status. Your next satellite pass should confirm that. In addition, the Svobodnyy Missile Field in the Far East has gone all the way up to ‘Maximum' alert.” Razov paused, and time seemed to stand still. “In less than half an hour, my heavy artillery and rocket forces will strike fourteen tactical targets along our front in Occupied Northern China with nuclear weapons. We plan to lay open holes through which we
will launch counterattacks intended to stabilize our lines. In order to avoid risking escalation, we will of course have to neutralize the Chinese strategic forces.”

“Yuri,” Thomas said as his mind reeled, “in God's name you can't do this.” A shiver went up his chest as a box, long ago closed, opened suddenly to release its demons.

“We will do it, but not in God's name.”

“No” was all Thomas could think to say. “No! Yuri, if the Chinese get a shot off . . . !”

“You know as well as I that the Chinese have only four operational T-4s capable of reaching our European populations. We will strike their T-3s, T-2s and T-1s plus their submarines and B-6 bomber bases, but once we knock out the T-4s they will be unable to threaten us strategically.”

“They could still get a shot off!”

“Their land-based missiles are all liquid fueled—nitrogen tetroxide as the oxidizer and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine as the fuel. You know what those liquids' corrosive effects do to the fuel tanks. Plus there are the evaporation rates. We have shared the intelligence, Andrusha, and I know your conclusions correspond to our own. Those missiles remain dry until prelaunch sequencing, and ever since we knocked their satellites down in the last war, they have had no technical means of monitoring our launches. Therefore, they won't have any warning until the reentry vehicles hit the upper atmosphere and ablation releases enough reflective material to return a radar signature. That would be no more than twenty to thirty seconds before detonation—not nearly enough time to fuel.”

“You can't do this, Yuri,” Thomas said, pressing his thumb into his ear as he sat hunched over his desk, staring off into space as thoughts began to fly like sparks through his mind, fears lit by the sparks beginning fires that consumed all other worries.

“Are you ready to hear the rest?” Razov asked, and Thomas pulled out a pencil and note pad. “Our Strategic Rocket Forces will fire nineteen missiles of the type you have named SS-19, with the possibility of a small number more in a restrike within less than an hour's time. The missiles will deploy one hundred sixty-nine war-heads.” Thomas wrote the numbers down. “All will be fired exclusively from the Far Eastern Military District. None, I repeat,
none,
of these missiles will in any way threaten the United States or any of her allies.”

“The hell they won't, Yuri! This is
insane!
You
can't
do this!” Thomas noted the time on his watch and wrote that on his pad also. His secretary stuck his head in the door, his own phone to his ear. Thomas jabbed his finger at the mouthpiece of the telephone's handset,
and his secretary rolled his finger in the air and pointed at his watch before returning to his desk.

Thomas had to stall. “Listen to me, Yuri. I'm warning you, something will go wrong. Something
always
goes wrong! You know that! Your plans—they demand perfection. They're brittle. What if the Chinese have seen your ground troops maneuvering to hit spots on their line that make no sense, and they've put two and two together and gone to a higher alert status? What if there's a leak?”

“As usual,” Razov said with a hint of amusement, “you sound like the prophet of doom. The Chinese are not on higher alert. We have confirmed that by technical means. And I can assure you, Andrew, that our plans are the most highly guarded secret in Russia today. We have an automated firing system, as you know, not launch crews as in your system. The only people who know of the plan are the principals of the Supreme High Command at
STAVKA
who authorized it, the two officers manning
STAVKA
's nuclear communicators, and my aide and two army commanders, who drew up the plan here in Khabarovsk. There is no way that they will get off a shot, Andrew. It is impossible.”

Thomas's secretary reappeared, and Thomas muted the telephone.

“They're tracing, sir, but it'll take—”

“Get the President on the line
now!
Emergency telephone conference! Then I want telephonic missile threat, missile warning system, and significant event conferences—in that order!” The secretary's eyes widened and he turned from the doorway to lunge for his desk. Thomas released the
MUTE
button. “Yuri, nothing is impossible.” He closed his eyes and focused his attention on the phone, on the man at the other end. “Do you remember the talks we had in the last war? You've got to have robust plans, plans that can withstand one, two, maybe three unanticipated things going horribly wrong and still work. Your plan falls apart if just one thing goes wrong, Yuri. If the Chinese find out . . . ”

“I have told you. They will not find out.”

“Open discussions with them. Talk to them about a cease-fire. You'll have to give them back some of your security zone in Occupied China, but you'll do that one day anyway. Hell, threaten them with nuclear weapons if you have to, but Yuri, for the love of God, please don't play with fire. I'm warning you—you'll get burned.”

“The release orders have already been sent from the nuclear communicators,” Razov said. “They were ‘Launch-at-Designated-Time' releases, Andrew. The launches are automatic from this point forward.”

Thomas gathered his strength to begin collecting from his desk
the papers he would need. He heard a door burst open and the sound of running feet in the outer office. A colonel—the duty officer—and a major, his deputy, appeared at the door, both out of breath from their run. Thomas switched to the speakerphone and again pressed the
MUTE
button. “Get down to the Tank,” Thomas ordered the two men in a flat voice, already emotionally drained from his worries. “
FLASH OVERRIDE
. I'm declaring
DEFCON
3—all forces worldwide.”

“Andrew?” Razov said, and Thomas glanced at the phone, his finger still resting on the
MUTE
button. When he looked back up, the duty officer was standing ramrod straight. “Get the senior duty controller at the Air Combat Command in Omaha. Have him scramble bomber and tanker crews to their aircraft and start their engines. Then get the ACC commander in chief and have him flush the bombers to their positive control points.”

“Andrew?” Razov said again.

“What Target Base, sir?” the duty officer asked.

Thomas felt a chill wash over him before he spoke the words. “Strategic War Plan—Russia.”

The two officers looked stricken, and Thomas spoke hurriedly. “I want a protective launch by all commands of their airborne command posts, and I also want all air base controllers to get everything they can up into the air. Have the navy surge the boomers to their firing stations . . . surge everything. Get ‘em out to sea.”

He tried to remain composed in front of the officers but felt his heart racing as he spoke. “I have the following alert order. Attack Condition Bravo. I repeat,” he said more slowly, enunciating each word and staring into the two men's eyes, “Attack Condition Bravo.” The officers looked at each other and turned to run for the door of the outer office. “And scramble the antisubmarine aircraft along the coasts. I want firing solutions on Russian boomers kept constant!”
Where the hell is the trace?
Thomas thought, swallowing to wet his drying throat and looking at his watch. He took his finger off the
MUTE
button. “Yuri?”

“I must be going,” Razov said abruptly.

“Wait!” Thomas said, racking his brain for something to stall him. “You said something about . . . You called me a ‘prophet.' ” Two military policemen with M-16s appeared in the door, and Thomas again muted the phone. “Check with my secretary on the trace!”

One of the men disappeared as Thomas lifted his finger from the
MUTE
button. “Are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember the last time we talked about this plan, Yuri? About a plan to go nuclear with the Chinese?” Razov did not reply, but Thomas knew he remembered. “It was in the last war.
Things were at their bleakest. It was just before your counterattack, and you thought all was lost.”

“You were a prophet of doom then too, Andrew.”

“That's what you called me. I was up from Vladivostok on an inspection tour of our forward supply teams. Right there in your command post you and I discussed employing nuclear weapons to stop the Chinese, and you called me a prophet of doom when I warned you of the risks. Do you remember what you said to me? You quoted somebody.”

His secretary appeared at his door and rushed to his desk.

“Celano,” Razov said. “I said you reminded me of something I had once read by Thomasso di Celano.”

Thomas read the message slip handed him by his secretary. “Nippon Telephone & Telegraph ETS-V geosynchronous satellite. Uplink from Khabarovsk, Russia.”

Thomas rose to slip into the jacket held open for him by his secretary and then took the secure portable telephone handed to him. His secretary whispered, “Conferences convened, sir.”

His mind raced with a dozen moves to be made, preoccupied now by the dozen orders urgently required. He was surprised to hear Razov's deep and thickly accented voice from the speaker.

“ ‘Day of wrath! O day of mourning! See fulfilled the prophet's warning, heaven and earth in ashes burning!' ” The soldiers in Thomas's office stared at the speakerphone in stunned silence. “Good-bye, Andrusha. Good-bye.” The red light went black, and Thomas rushed toward the door.

“Greg!” Jane Lambert said as her husband walked up to the table. She rose on her tiptoes and pulled his head down with a cool hand on the back of his neck. He kissed her before turning to the other couple.

“I didn't think the President would let his national security adviser out for a dinner with friends on a night like this,” Pavel Filipov said, shaking Greg's hand warmly and nodding toward the television over the bar, the West Coast baseball game not yet interrupted for the President's address. Greg kissed Irina, Pavel's wife, on the cheek and then sat.

“Well, I can't stay long,” Greg said, grabbing Jane's hand under the table.

“I don't suppose we are still on for racquetball tomorrow?” Pavel asked.

Greg laughed as he took a large bite of bread. “Not even close,” he said with his mouth full. “Too bad too. I was looking forward to this new serve you've been developing in secret.”

“It drops dead in your backhand corner,” Pavel said, taking a sip of his wine.

“Bring it on. I'll just kick your butt again.”

Pavel scratched his eyelid with his middle finger, a gesture he had learned from Greg.

“G-r-r-r,” Jane said, making a fierce expression before laughing. “It's called macho, Irina,” she said, flexing her thin arms and making muscles. “Greg hasn't grown out of being a basketball star in college, and Pavel has a dose of the ex-jock too, I see.”

“Oh,” Irina said, shaking her head, “it is not athletes. It is men. They are the same all over.” Greg rolled his eyes as Jane and Irina began to recount the most humiliating stories from their husbands' pasts.

As Pavel raised his napkin to his lips, Greg saw again the missing tip of his finger.
Frostbite,
he remembered as he did every time he saw it.
His index finger.
In the last Russo-Chinese War, Pavel's rifle company had run out of fuel on a hillside and had dug into the snow, fending off wave after wave of Chinese infantry for the next three days. The tip of his trigger finger, which he had left uncovered for too long against the cold, had been lost to frostbite.
The price of empire,
he thought.

Greg had studied military affairs, had years of experience with the Defense Intelligence Agency, was a “star” in the national security world—the new National Security Adviser at the unheard-of age of thirty-eight—but, being a civilian, he'd never experienced war.
The last war in China was just the winter before last,
he thought. Most Americans knew little of it, as the video was scarce, but Greg had researched it thoroughly. It had been one of his several claims to fame at DIA: calling for a Crisis Action Team well before the war's outbreak when all of his colleagues' attention had been on the Middle East and Southern Africa. It was inevitable, he had written, that the resurgent China, whose economy grew at double-digit rates, would be attracted to Siberian natural resources to the north, which were held increasingly tenuously by Russia, a declining European imperial power.

Pavel had been called back from Washington in the last Russo-Chinese War, but was sitting out this second round safely ensconced as military attaché at Russia's Washington embassy.
I wonder if he
wishes he were there now, with his comrades?
Lambert thought.
With General Razov?