“What is this?” Karen Chushi asked impatiently. “Why are we worried about a torpedo? You worried about our aircraft carriers?”
“No, ma’am,” Sutton said. “This is an autonomous weapon with a nuclear power plant and a range of up to seven thousand nautical miles. It can travel at up to fifty-four knots. It’s two meters in diameter and twenty-four meters long and can dive to a thousand meters. It has enough nuclear fuel to loiter on station — that is, lie on the bottom — for years. It has a nuclear payload of between two and ten megatons, with some sources claiming it could be as big as a hundred megatons. We’ve refined our estimates in the last months to put its yield at ten megatons, one of the biggest hydrogen bombs in military use. As you know, most of our nukes are now in the hundreds or mere tens of kilotons. It’s been years since we used yields in the megaton range.”
“Why is that?” the VP asked.
“Our weapons have dramatically improved in accuracy,” Sutton said. “The smaller yields get to all those hard-to-reach places despite being kilotons rather than megatons. The other reason is that our revised targeting is almost all military targets. And by and large, we no longer target civilian cities, which is the only thing a megaton-range nuke does for you now, which is city-killing.
“The NATO name ‘Kanyon,’” Sutton continued, “was appropriate, because this weapon was designed to drive itself into a coastal port and wait. At the time to detonate, this unit would make a crater that would form a brand new bay. The displaced water would form a tsunami that would cause even more damage inland. Worse, there is speculation these bombs might have warheads doped with Cobalt-60, which would leave the radioactive areas downwind uninhabitable for a hundred years or more. So we modeled what a ten megaton blast would do to the Port of New York—“ Sutton moved to click to the next slide, but Carlucci cut her off.
“Don’t show that slide, Admiral,” he snapped. “It’s inflammatory. We get it. A ten megaton nuke would be bad for business. But big deal. So the Russians have a big scary torpedo. So what?”
Sutton glanced at CIA Director Margo Allende and sat down. Margo looked over at the president, glanced at the heads of NSA and DIA and then back at Carlucci.
“Sir, Russian President Vostov and his staff have been sending memoranda about the possibility of deploying Poseidons from the Belgorod at several target harbors on the U.S. east coast. Then yesterday Vostov’s calendar was changed, inserting in the upcoming month a tour of the shipyard factory that assembles these weapons, and of the Belgorod itself. This and other intercepts hint that Vostov’s actually committing to sending these to American shores.”
For a long moment, Carlucci leaned back in his seat, his face hard, his arms crossed. “Well,” he finally said, his voice deep and furious. “Obviously that’s goddamned unacceptable. Ms. Allende, I want a meeting with you and your deputy ops director in my study in one hour.” Carlucci looked at Pacino. “You too, Admiral Pacino.” There was no doubt. Carlucci had definite ideas about how to respond to the Russian president.
3
Monday mornings were always brutal, Anthony Pacino thought, but never so much as when it was Monday in the shipyard. He rolled up to an empty parking space at Norfolk Naval Shipyard’s Admin Building 1182 just as the sun rose over the horizon, the old red brick building a short walk from Graving Dock Number One, where the burned-out hulk of the USS Vermont lay helplessly on the blocks, black smoke still wafting out of her hatches while shipyard engineers and technicians swarmed over her, trying to assess when she’d be seaworthy again, if ever. And what the plan would be to repair her. Odds were they would have to rip out most of the forward compartment and start over at the bare hoop steel. It could be years before the boat would be refloated. And what, in the meantime, Pacino thought, would he and the crew do until then? Babysit the shipyard shitcanning the interior structures?
He cut the Corvette’s engine and grabbed his briefcase and cover from the passenger seat, got out and locked the door, putting on his Vermont ball cap. He wore the shapeless, baggy, awful khaki two-piece fire-resistant working uniform that resembled pajamas, hating the uniform. He swore, if he ever rose to a high enough rank in the Navy, he’d bring back the uniforms that made the enlisted and officers proud to wear them. Goddamned Big Navy, he thought, out of touch, more concerned with political correctness than warfighting. If it ever came to combat, he thought, they’d be in sad shape indeed. He clenched his jaw, forced himself to stand up straight and walked to the entrance to the admin building, wondering if the crew would be blaming him for the fire on the submarine.
He climbed the stairs to the second deck, already starting to sweat from the sweltering August morning in a building with substandard air conditioning. Down the hallway, he stuck his head into the department head bullpen, where the engineer, navigator, weapons officer and supply officer had desks, each pushed against the outer wall of the room. He glanced mournfully at Rachel’s desk, which had been piled high with “get well” cards. The weapons officer and supply officer were absent this early, but the chief engineer sat at his desk, reading glasses perched on his nose.
The engineer, Lieutenant Commander Elvis “Feng” Lewinsky peered at his tablet computer, reading some memo from the shipyard about the health of his reactor plant. The engineer had no problems, Pacino thought, with the exception of his auxiliary machinery room forward of the reactor compartment, which had experienced some measure of fire damage. The emergency diesel engine, rumor had it, had been unscathed.
Pacino stepped all the way into the room.
“Hey, Feng,” Pacino said to his old friend. The “Feng” callsign acknowledged that Lewinsky wasn’t just the engineer, he was the fucking engineer.
Lewinsky looked over, tossed his tablet and reading glasses to the desk, and stood up, an expression of deep sympathy coming to his face. He walked up, shook Pacino’s hand, and clapped his shoulder. Lewinsky was Pacino’s height, but muscle-bound, taking his frustrations out on a heavy bag and his bench press rig. He had a close-cropped blonde crewcut, a strong jawline, and usually an intimidating expression unless he were smiling, or like now, when he looked concerned.
“Patch. How are you bearing up?”
Pacino found himself blinking back moisture in his eyes, embarrassed at his show of weakness.
“I’m okay, Feng. I just got back from the hospital.”
“The Nav — any change?”
Pacino shook his head. “She’s not good. Doctors won’t say she’s brain dead, but her brain activity is not good and the coma continues. I suppose her burns are healing. They used this new artificial skin for a skin graft and it’s looking good. But I’m worried for her.”
“Yeah,” Lewinsky said.
Pacino supposed there was nothing more to say about Rachel. “Are you hearing anything from the yard birds about the boat? Repair schedules?”
Lewinsky glanced back at his pad computer and turned to Pacino. “It’s not good. In fact, it’s so bad that they’re thinking about cutting off the forward compartment of the Vermont and replacing it with the bow of the new construction boat, the 798 Massachusetts, then rebuilding Vermont’s forward compartment and welding it onto the ass end of the 798. But a maneuver like that — imagine a head transplant on a human being. Every single cable, fiber optic line, duct and pipe has to be cut off at frame one-oh-seven and then re-spliced into place in the new location, and then you’d have to sprinkle holy water on it and pray that it will all work when things are said and done.”