The Last Ship (44 page)

Y
ears since it had become obvious what the initial objective of both sides would be: that at least the two had in common, mirror images of strategy. This was simply to take out, in the first minutes of any conflict, the command, control, communications, and intelligence network (C
3
I) of the other. Otherwise known as “decapitation,” another of that lexicon which came so obscenely to dominate and corrupt the effective language of the latter years of the century. (In the mindless vulgarity of the time, colorful phrases were evoked to picture the flawless beauty of these acts: “cut off the head of the Soviet chicken,” as an instance, the authors of such metaphors smirking self-congratulatorily at their picturesqueness, as though speaking of some devilishly clever prank.) Decapitation: It was a relatively easy undertaking, though said by some to be easier for them than for us, due to their greater geography and dispersion. For them, the objective was to be achieved by launching simultaneously on Washington, D.C.; SAC Headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base, Omaha, Nebraska; the North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) in Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs; three or four other backup places; and perhaps a dozen critical communications relay points including essential satellites, their locations all well known, their elimination a routine matter; to accomplish all of this requiring no more than thirty minutes at the extreme outside (if done entirely from their own territory), with a strong possibility that that figure could, with proper placement of launching platforms (submarines off American cities), be cut to fourteen minutes or even nine.

The idea was twofold and a genius of the manifest: (1) to remove the political-military leadership, the National Command Authority; and (2) aided by the Electromagnetic Pulse generated by a high-altitude burst, to leave remaining no means of communication through which to send retaliation orders even had there been anyone left to do so. Someone had speculated that the ideal time of all, the perfect time for the other side, would be when the President of the United States was delivering his annual State of the Union message, since on that occasion the entire American succession would be gathered in not just one city, Washington, D.C., but in a single room, the House of Representatives on Capitol Hill: fifteen constitutional successors to himself, from the Vice President clear through the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and the Secretary of Transportation; present also would be the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who while not in the official succession would presumably be prepared if alive, the succession all dead, to take upon themselves, in the absence of any lawful provisions or authority, nonetheless to strike back in such a circumstance; parenthetically present also all members of both houses of the Congress. This wealth of potential usurpers to power gone, who then would anoint himself to give battle back? If he did how could he discover the various rituals—necessary ciphers, Go-Codes and the like—to accomplish a response? And if he did, how could he without any means of communication execute them? And if he found such means, would commanders on the other end follow instructions from this dubious and illegal source?

The whole proposition was so simple that it was everywhere taken for granted that whatever other ancillary strategies there might be, this was certain to be the principal one employed by whoever moved first. By the process of deductive reasoning, our having received no orders from anyone, in any place, one could come to no other conclusion than that this was precisely what had happened, that is to say, removal of all National Command Authority, along with the extermination of means of communications by both direct and EMP forces (though not at the State of the Union, that being always in January). One overwhelming imponderable remained: How had retaliation (if that, instead of first-strike, was indeed what it was) been achieved? Only two theories appeared plausible: first, that the authorities themselves had had sufficiently lightning reflexes to execute response even as the incoming missiles were upon them; or that, had these reflexes been found wanting, someone not on the above list but sufficiently highly placed to have access to the stipulated “rituals” had taken it upon himself in those crucial minutes, even seconds, that remained, to get off one general order before being obliterated along with all communications; thus achieving mutual decapitation. A hypothesis, whichever of the two starter mechanisms actually employed, supported by our own orders to launch having come from TSP (Trinity Security Procedures), both that designation and the ciphers containing the orders being held under the ultimate classification, known at the starting end by an irreducible handful of highest authorities, the ciphers changed daily and reserved exclusively for one of two purposes: to give orders to launch, to give orders not to launch; further supported by the cessation of all communications not long after our launchings.

To these various conclusions, their general tone supported both by the reports picked up by the Russian submarine commander and by the
Bonne-fille
’s radioman, the uninhabitability of Africa, established tentatively by our own shore incursions and conclusively, it appeared, by Lieutenant (jg) Selmon’s deeper one, added the final building block that installed in firm place my resolve not to take the ship to America; further, I had reached the sanguine determination that, abetted by such overwhelming evidence from such a variety of independent sources, I could now safely and with comparative ease win the men over to this inevitable position.

Then the signal from Bosworth arrived. A signal from that same origin and in that same encryption that had not reached us since that morning, seeming now so infinitely long ago though actually but
six
weeks, when it had instructed us to launch our Tomahawks high into the cold blue skies of the Barents Sea. From NCA: National Command Authority. Sent in TSP: Trinity Security Procedures.

 *  *  * 

From the beginning and continuing to the present moment, nothing had commanded more of our dedication—never, in truth, infringed by hopelessness, by disheartenment—than our efforts to bring forth responses from our communications system. I need hardly speak of its prodigious sophistication or belabor the technical aspects of its electronics, highly classified, unknown to the civilian world, even to whose highest experts its talents would have been wondrous . . . even to myself, accustomed to devices, tools, beyond the frontiers, still a marvel of capability, awesome. Manned constantly, in rotation on every frequency, with special attention to the channels known officially as Survivable Very Low Frequency Communications System, which had been brought to a level of performance that had seemed, beforehand, able to pick up whispers from the remotest places and to break through or around every known type of interference or defense, whether created by man or the elements. Originally pursued by the Navy, as I believe I have mentioned elsewhere, specifically to deal with what had been one of the most dangerous and frightening of problems—the difficulty in reaching a submerged nuclear-armed submarine in, let us say, the Sea of Okhotsk, for purposes, for example, of instructing it to unleash its payload—or, conversely, not to unleash it—these channels, as refined, exquisitely perfected I should put it, by Navy persistence, breakthroughs in the art, had become the least fallible method for long-distance communications the insistent genius of man had yet devised.

It was on one of these that it came through.

The signal was sent at 1700, no one remarking then the precision of the time, no reason to do so. It came in with full audibility, free of distortion, clear and clean. The frequency was 26.125 kHz, which our confidential VLF manual readily identified as belonging to a global Navy Communications Center situated in Bosworth, Missouri, used primarily we knew to communicate with those same submerged U.S. ballistic-missile submarines. The message when broken reading in entirety:

FLASH 171700Z

FM: NCA

TO: ALL SHIPS

BT

ANY SHIP, REPEAT ANY SHIP, REPLY

IMMEDIATELY

URGENT

ANY SHIP, REPEAT ANY SHIP, REPLY

IMMEDIATELY

URGENT

BT

We immediately replied; received no answer in return. From that moment we continued to reply without cease, eliciting no response at any time other than a repetition of the original message. This had a peculiarity. Starting with that first time, it came, the message itself never varying, like the voice of some oracle of idiosyncratic, perhaps even purposeful habits chosen for a reason it did not deign to disclose, or perhaps even was unable to do so, perhaps even hopeful that we could figure out why, always on the hour and only on the hour. I was glad that in composing our reply, a captain’s caution at work, I had withheld two elements: our exact longitude-latitude position—the general area the receiver would know by our transmission; and our precise identification as a guided missile destroyer, contenting myself only with what seemed needful, an unnamed U.S. Navy vessel; strictly instructing Bainbridge, our communications officer, not to go further in these revelations unless otherwise ordered by myself. It was after all more than the sender had done: He had not even said who he was, notwithstanding that our replies continued to ask him this question in particular.

 *  *  * 

I stepped out onto the starboard bridge wing and looked across the water to the shoreline of north Africa, along which we had been running our slow parallel course, moving eastward toward Suez. I scanned it first with the naked eye, then through Big Eyes; nothing moved, even the branches of trees behind the beaches motionless; a continent becalmed; lying silent under still skies across which echelons of cumulo-nimbus drifted indifferently; the great mass of land seeming almost menacing in her death throes, the sentence Selmon had pronounced on her, this hardly a metaphor, the continent being or in the process of becoming infinitely hostile to man, to the animals, unaccepting of them—I felt a shudder go through me; turned away to look at the blue plain of the Mediterranean stretching away to the eastern horizon, the sea seeming forever alive. Below me I could see lookouts circling the ship, together holding captive the 360 degrees of the compass and anything that might appear on it. I looked up. The faintest tremor of wind stirred the halyards, was gone, the flag and commissioning pennant silent again after that brief flutter. I knew then. Despite the peace of all elements I could scent weather in the air; could just make out the underlayers of olive hue, unerring signposts, beginning to form like belt bands on the enlarging clouds. I turned and made my way below and into the wardroom where the gathered officers started to rise.

“As you were.”

As they all settled in, I turned promptly to my immediate right.

“Please proceed, Mr. Bainbridge.”

Lieutenant Whitney Bainbridge was nearly bald, with a circle of strawberry hair giving a tonsurelike effect that made him look a member of some monastic order; he had an innocent, slightly feminine manner which I personally found rather appealing; he was of the Catholic faith and had six children back in Lafayette, Indiana, where he had settled in after Purdue; his mind seemed always to be concentrating on something, perhaps esoteric code groups. He was perhaps the closest thing to a wizard (short possibly of Selmon) we had aboard, communications-electronics having become so vastly both more complex and more crucial since my early days in destroyers, having become a branch of warfare itself; so specialized that Bainbridge was by definition of his field—and of our condition, his person embodying our sole potential contact with the outside world—always attentively listened to. The incoming transmissions, each taped, had been meticulously scrutinized, analyzed, repeatedly so, for irregularities in rhythm, pitch, infinitesimal differences in pauses between code groups. Bainbridge repeated now for all to hear what we had discovered; it was not entirely a blank, a zero; there was something at least; actually something of possibly the first importance, the seeming clues, however, only raising more questions than they answered.

“The critical aspects are these. First, it purports to be from National Command Authority. That this may actually be the case is given validity by the fact that they’re using TSP ciphers—in combination with Navy codes. Second, whoever is sending it knows Navy methods—the form of the message tells us that. Third—and this is the part that as communications officer gets to me more than anything else—in the three days we’ve been receiving it they have used a new code each day, starting precisely at zero zero zero zero, ending precisely at twenty-four hundred and exactly then starting another new code. Now since there are no more secrets . . .”

He looked over at me and I nodded. “Since there are no more secrets I can say this. All Navy codes are changed on a daily basis. Every twenty-four hours you have to place a
new
code in the electronic devices we use to transmit and receive radio messages—that’s why the system is essentially unbreakable; crypto change cycles. What all this means in this Bosworth business is that whoever
is
doing this: one, he has exact knowledge of top-secret Navy procedures; two, he has access to top-secret Navy codes; and three—and this is the most important single element to these messages, as I mentioned—whoever he is, he possesses the Trinity Security Procedures.”

Again he looked at me interrogatively. I nodded approval. Aboard the
James
only Bainbridge, myself, and the combat systems officer, Chatham, even knew of its existence. There being no need any longer for this selectivity, he tossed out the fact rather offhandedly to the officers at large.

“Of course it was always the single most highly classified series of ciphers of all. It’s what we used launching Tomahawk. On the sending end, fewer people had it than had anything.”