The first missile rotated its winglets and climbed vertically skyward. At an altitude of 2500 feet, it shut off the jet engine and coasted, arcing over gently until it was falling toward the sea. Twenty-four more explosive bolts fired and separated the now unused jet engine from the nosecone. Ten seconds later, the nosecone blew apart, exposing a cylinder that was a little over three feet long. Out of the aft end of the cylinder, pyrotechnics ejected a streamer, which pulled out a drogue parachute, which in turn pulled out the main parachute, a digital camo blue pattern of silk, under which the cylinder glided gently toward the waves. As it was halfway down from the peak altitude of the missile, the second missile streaked by, and soon after, it too flew for the sun and climbed half a mile into the sky, then shut down its jet engine and ejected a second cylinder, that cylinder farther east by ten miles. As the second missile’s cylinder began floating downward toward the sea, the first missile hit the waves. The parachute blew off and the cylinder began sinking.
The cylinder’s instrumentation included a pressure sensor that detected depth. It counted off the numerals. Thirty feet. Fifty feet. One hundred feet. Two hundred feet. As it reached a depth of 300 feet, ten miles farther east, the second cylinder hit the water’s surface and blew off its parachute. 400 feet, then 450. The cylinders had been programmed for what the designers called a ‘time-on-target’ assault, in which both cylinders would act at the exact same moment in time, despite there being a significant time between their launches. Unavoidably, this would cause unit one to act at a deeper depth than unit two, but that had been eventually considered a good thing, that the entire sea’s depth spectrum would be covered.
So it was that unit one was at a depth of 1800 feet at zero hour while unit two was at 900. And at time zero, both units did the exact same thing. Within the guts of unit one’s cylinder, a thick metal safety plate rotated to line up four large holes, which were blocked previously. Those holes formed a channel leading from the lower end of the cylinder upward toward the top. At the top end were high voltage actuators, which would be impacted by projectiles with bullets that resembled blasting caps. Time zero came, and the actuation projectiles were all fired by the pyrotechnic charges, blew upward through the channels of the safety plate, and hit their targets, the high voltage actuators, which all fired behind a ping-pong ball-sized plug of plutonium, blowing it like a bullet toward a hollowed-out sphere of plutonium, until the plug hit the sphere like putting the lid on a jack-o’-lantern. Even before the plutonium plug could make full contact with the hollowed-out sphere, the fission reactions immediately intensified in the first ten microseconds to be a thousand times higher than before. The neutrons formed by nuclear fission had previously been leaked to the environment, and there had been no chain reaction. But once the plug hit the sphere, the shape became perfect, and more neutrons stayed within the envelope of the sphere than leaked to the universe, and when that happened, the chain reaction started, each fission putting out heat energy while blowing out two or three neutrons, each of which caused another fission with more energy release and another two or three neutrons, until the chain reactions released so much energy that the sphere became the temperature of the surface of the sun, and when it did, it expanded and blew up the small canisters of heavy water lining the outside of what had been the cylinder, which then underwent fusion reactions, the hydrogen of the heavy water atoms combining to form helium, the helium product having a lower mass than the reactants, and that “mass defect” was all converted to heat energy by Einstein’s famous equation linking matter to energy, and with a few more microseconds, the fireball grew outside the cylinder and extended into the sea beyond.
At the same time unit one’s hydrogen bomb was exploding, unit two, ten miles east, exploded in sympathy, the two explosions extending into the depths of the sea, the shock wave from their blasts hitting the seafloor two miles below and forming a gigantic wall of a pressure wave, both of them blowing huge mushroom clouds of steam and water into the atmosphere, the twin mushroom clouds fully two miles high.
The shock wave, a massive wall of high pressure, traveled through the sea, hammering everything in its path, killing fish, whales, dolphins, microscopic organisms, until it reached the high yield steel of a submarine constructed by the Russian Republic. And one belonging to the Islamic Republic of Iran. And another belonging to the United States.
“Excuse me, ma’am, sir,” the Marine corporal said at the door to the room. “There’s an incoming for you from Langley.”
CIA Director Margo Allende paged through her pad computer and looked at it, then projected it onto the screen beside the chart display. It was a view of the sea looking down from above. Allende read the email text to herself while National Security Advisor Michael Pacino stared at the video.
On the screen was a periscope, a slight wake extending behind it. To the right side of the small wake was another mast, this one shorter and stubbier, with a larger cylinder on top of it. Farther behind the two masts, a plume of heavy black smoke rose from the sea.
“This is a drone shot from a Predator, two damned hours old. What are we looking at, Patch?” Allende asked.
“Periscope and snorkel mast,” Pacino said. “Not one of ours, that’s an optical periscope. We use optronics now. The snorkel mast is designed to bring air into the ship for an emergency diesel engine to provide power and emergency propulsion, or to ventilate the ship. And that plume of smoke — the sub is ventilating the ship and blowing out that smoke. That’s not diesel exhaust. That’s way too dense for diesel exhaust. Modern diesel fuel leaves almost no smoke.”
“Smoke from what?”
“A fire. By the looks of it, a goddamned bad fire.”
“There’s a spectrographic analysis of the smoke.” Allende pushed her pad computer to Pacino, who looked down at the display.
“It’s toxic. Burned insulation and high voltage cables. Oxidized atmo-control chemicals. Burned plastic and rubber.” Pacino looked at Allende. “This is bad. As in, not-survivable bad.”
“So,” Allende said, “who’s driving this boat?”
“We’ve always thought the Russians’ AI systems were far more advanced than our own. Frankly, we American submariners don’t trust AI. Who knows if it will glitch and screw up the atmosphere, or send us into a jam dive below crush depth one Tuesday? But the Russians see it as a way to lower the crew count. A Yasen-M has twice the tonnage of a Virginia-class submarine and half the crew. You can only do that if you rely heavily on automation. On artificial intelligence. The Russian’s AI is operating that ship. It’s continuing the mission. And there’s no telling how well it will carry out that mission. How ruthless is an AI system programmed to kill another submarine?”
“I think you know the answer to that question, Patch, if I know your history.”
“That drone sub was nothing compared to this, Margo. The drone sub that took down Piranha only had a bellyful of conventional Mark 50 torpedoes. This thing? Loaded to the gills with nukes, all of them with Panther’s name on them. And Vermont’s. Margo, we have to shoot at this sonofabitch. We have to direct Vermont to lob a nuke at him now.”