She had blown her top, “Needling the USA?” she’d asked him. “Why the hell would Russia risk nuclear war just to ‘needle’ the USA?”
“No one believes you’d start WW3 over Saint Lawrence Island,” the man said, with untypical directness. “The Ukraine, Syria, Finland… this is Russia once again testing how far they can push you.”
She saw how you could look at it that way, if you bought into the bill of goods Russia was selling. “OK, but look. You’ve seen my report, what is Canada’s play here? If Russia marches into Alaska, you have to react.”
“We’re not worried, but we’re ready,” he’d said. “Army is activating the 3rd Division, moving all 4 brigades into British Columbia. And in the unlikely event of an invasion, our Prime Minister would probably be open to discuss US air and ground forces staging out of BC if he received a formal approach.”
“Oh he’d be open to discuss,” she’d sighed. “That’s so kind.”
She sat down in her chair and swung her tired legs up on her desk. At her elbow was a pile of papers and she picked from the top of it a book Carl Williams had sent her a few days before. “The Man Who Saved Britain,” by a Harvard history professor. She had read the blurb on the inside cover. The professor had come across a trove of papers in Germany written by the impressively named Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg, the last German ambassador to the Soviet Union before Operation Barbarossa, the battle which signaled the start of the German war on Russia. In his personal letters, written communiques and personal diaries von der Schulenburg had relentlessly pursued a campaign to persuade the Reich Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, and his trusted coterie, that if they embarked on an invasion of Britain, their Russian ‘allies’ would take advantage of their distraction and immediately stab them in the back, marching into Poland, Czech, Slovakia, Albania, Yugoslavia and most importantly, the precious oilfields of Romania. He cited numerous conversations with Russian politicians, bureaucrats and military officers to back his claims, he sent translated clippings from newspapers, and he made three trips to Berlin to personally brief the Nazi party hierarchy about the threat. He also cited conversations with the US Ambassador in Russia indicating the US had no intention of entering the war in Europe.
In the end, he prevailed. Hitler postponed his plan to invade England, shored up his defenses along the Atlantic front, and sent his tanks and Stukas east. He was mostly right, Russia would have stabbed Germany in the back, postwar documents confirmed that. But the US did enter the war and together with Russia, gave Nazi Germany a spanking.
The small handwritten note in the front told her what Williams was thinking, sending her the book.
To Devlin von der McCarthy,
Sometimes the voice of one person is enough. Keep at it.
In the early part of the century, the US became very concerned about the threat to its ability to project sea power from Chinese and Russian hypersonic anti-ship missiles. In testing, the scram-jet driven missiles proved capable of speeds up to Mach-8; eight times the speed of sound. Fitted with double core fragmentation warheads Russia had showed that a missile like its Tsirkon DM33 could achieve a terminal velocity of 5,800 miles per hour, making it impossible for even state of the art counter-missile defenses to track, let alone intercept it.
With a range of about 250 miles and the ability to cover 100 miles in less than a minute, able to be launched from multiple platforms on, above or under the sea, the missiles risked making not just aircraft carriers and larger surface combatants vulnerable, they could make them obsolete.
In addition to accelerating its own hypersonic missile program in the face of advances by China and Russia, the US invested billions into research on how to counter such missiles. How could they even be tracked? The problem wasn’t designing a radar that could detect them, but whether the software could keep up and what type of algorithm was needed to solve the problem of target ‘ambiguity’. What type of processing capabilities would be needed to react and activate countermeasures when reaction time was measured in milliseconds? Could they be spoofed by decoy strategies? Could they be jammed? Could they be destabilized with simple air cannons fired by perimeter vessels?
Quantum computing and dedicated radar and processing software solved the detection problem, and the answer to intercepting hypersonic missiles was found not in ballistics, but in optics. The only defensive system able to target and fire quickly enough was a high-powered laser. After successful testing, the Gen 5 High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS) was deployed on all US Navy ships, military and industrial targets which were deemed vulnerable to hypersonic or ballistic missile attacks. In the Syria — Turkey conflict it had proven able to intercept eight out of ten conventional ballistic missiles before they reached their targets.
Seen to be politically akin to a weapon of mass destruction, no hypersonic missiles were used in the Syria conflict and it was widely perceived that the first nation to use them in war would be opening a new Pandora’s box.
Of course, HELLADS just triggered a new arms race, on the premise that the best way to defeat HELLADS was to overwhelm it with multiple missiles, and all the major armies started stockpiling scramjet missiles at the same time as fitting their surface warships, submarines and aircraft to be able to field them, while arguing strenuously in public that the use of hypersonic missiles by any nation would be akin to using a tactical nuke.
Still, it remained that a hypersonic weapon had never been used in war, and the HELLADS system on the USS Enterprise and its escorts had never actually been tested in combat.
Perri Tungyan was feeling pretty combat tested.
“I’m looking at him right now,” Perri said down the line to his new friend Sarge in Canada. “Through the window of the headmaster’s office. Got my scope on him.”
“For God’s sake, don’t do anything stupid!” Sarge said urgently. “You don’t know what the situation is inside that building.”
“He’s on his own in there, just smoking a cigarette, scratching his butt,” Perri said. “I could take him down, then we could check out the school. If he’s the only one, I could get our people out.”
“And if he’s not, they could all be dead,” Sarge said. “Did the Russians take any wounded with them? Did you see stretchers, people being carried?”
Perri looked at Dave, who shook his head. “No.”
“Then if they’re alive, they’re still in there and they’re probably still able to hold a gun on your people. Or they could have wired the place with explosives in case they are attacked, take out your entire town with a flick of a switch. Just relax son.”
“I am relaxed,” Perri said to him through gritted teeth. “But I have about ten minutes to decide if we do something about this guy and try to get our people out of that school, or we go after the others who are getting further and further away the longer we talk.”
Sarge gave him a moment to calm down. “They are probably going to an evacuation point, to meet a ship or submarine,” Sarge speculated. “If they are, we need to know.”
“Why would they be heading out of town?” Perri asked. “A ship could pick them up here.”
“I thought you said the harbor was destroyed,” Sarge asked. “It looked like it in the photos you sent.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“They could be going down to Kavalghak Bay,” Dave said. “You could get a small ship in close to shore there.”