She pointed to Brett Hogshead, the Secretary of War, and to Jeremy Shingles, Secretary of the Navy. “And you two,” she accused. “Out of the blue you decide to send our frogmen into a Russian Navy port and sabotage their submarine Kursk. It goes to sea on an exercise and blows up and kills the entire crew. And for what? Revenge for an American sub they sank thirty-two years before? What was that, your version of revenge served cold?”
She swung her cane to point back at Carlucci. “As for you, you should call Vostov right now and come clean. There are no bombs in his ports. Ask him politely and nicely to call off his Poseidon deployment.” She slowly walked toward the entrance to the room, the long voyage on her cane taking place while the room remained in shocked silence. Finally at the door, she said to Carlucci, “Mr. President, please consider this my resignation.”
She paused for a moment, just long enough for Carlucci to straighten his tie and say calmly, “Your resignation is accepted.”
Chushi shut the door behind her. Carlucci looked up at the meeting’s participants, raising his eyebrows. “More coffee, anyone?” When the silence continued, he said, “Well, then, this meeting is adjourned. I’m sure you all have pressing things to take care of. I’d like the room cleared with the exception of the Secretary of War, Secretary of State, CIA director, chairman of the joint chiefs and you, Admiral Pacino. I’m going to take a break for biological reasons. Please feel free to get fresh coffee and then come back.”
Pacino followed Allende to the wardroom, where a fresh pot of coffee awaited them. She poured for him first, then herself. Pacino spoke to her in a low tone.
“Is all that stuff Chushi said true?”
Allende waved him back to the Situation Room before answering. She sat and looked at him. “It’s all true except for mining Russian harbors with nuclear bombs. We didn’t do it and we didn’t ‘pipeline’ fake intelligence to the Russians saying we did do it. I don’t know where that’s coming from.”
“So how had the vice president gotten this information? Could it be she had some contact within Vostov’s organization?”
Allende shrugged. “I suppose we could bug her residence at the Naval Observatory and her West Wing office to find out, but I doubt that would bear fruit.”
“With her medical condition,” Pacino mused, “do you imagine that maybe she just got confused? Mixed up briefing information? Maybe heard about a potential plan to deploy nuclear mines, a plan rejected? Or an unexecuted scheme to ‘pipeline’ disinformation into the SVR?”
Allende shook her head. “We never even thought about a plot like that. Maybe one of Hogshead’s Pentagon novelists dreamed something up. You know he’s had thriller writers on retainer ever since seven-seventeen, charged with brainstorming incoming threats that his admirals and generals wouldn’t ever dream up. But if someone did put this idea on a Pentagon whiteboard, we never heard about it. And Hogshead would never embark on a plan like that without involving CIA.”
“What about NSA? Those spooks work for the Pentagon. For Hogshead. They could have put this idea into fake message traffic.”
“No way,” Allende said. “We’re tight with NSA and DIA. Hell, we practically live in conference rooms with those guys, and our people are in their task forces and theirs are in mine. NSA can’t send out an order for Chinese food without my people knowing about it. That goes for DIA as well. And no one is going rogue in our agencies. Ever since Snowden? Everyone with a clearance over top secret has as much surveillance on them as we put on the FSB or SVR.”
When Hogshead wandered back in with Shingles, Allende stopped talking. Once the smaller group was reassembled in the room again, Carlucci walked in, sat down, and poured fresh coffee for himself, then looked at Pacino.
“Well, Patch, let’s talk about this option you’ve proposed. Sinking the Omega.”
“It makes the most sense, Mr. President,” Pacino said. “Waiting for the Omega to drop off these bombs in American ports, even if he’s just making some kind of a statement, could go horribly wrong. What if, while being placed, a circuit shorts or the weapon’s AI wakes up and decides the detonation protocols are correct and just blows a ten megaton hole in Norfolk Harbor? Shooting down the Omega might not be a good idea in open water, but under the polar icecap? No satellites can see or hear it, no overhead aircraft will detect it with their sonar buoys or magnetic anomaly detectors, no helicopters with dipping sonars will find it, no antisubmarine warfare ships will detect it on sonar. The water under the icecap is the most isolated location on the planet. And we have an asset a few football fields away from him with armed weapons, ready to take him out. If you give the order, this miserable crisis ends.”
“From a practical point of view, how would this happen?” Carlucci asked. “I was made to understand that subs under the ice are out of radio communication.”
“Not completely, Mr. President,” Jeremy Shingles, the Secretary of the Navy said. “The Navy implemented a four-letter code group for communications with the New Jersey while she’s under ice. These letters are transmitted in extremely low frequency, Mr. President, so they take a long time to receive, but these radio waves are powerful enough to be received by a submerged submarine. Even under the ice. The transmitters require antennae the height of skyscrapers and take power from dedicated power plants, each of which could light up a small town. It takes up to twenty minutes for a single alphanumeric character to be transmitted and received aboard. The four-letter code group would be preceded by that day’s two letter callsign for the New Jersey. So six letters in total. Two hours to receive the directive, which is a long time, unfortunately, but the transit under the ice will take weeks, or longer.”
“What are these pre-arranged messages?” Carlucci asked.
“There’s an entire codebook of possible messages. For example, one was to break contact and come home. A second was to try to provoke the Omega — bang into its hull or ping at it with active sonar. A third was to order the deployment of swimmer-delivered mines to the hull of the Omega, mines that could be detonated by an algorithm like with the attack on the Kursk, or by a particular sonar signal. A fourth code to shoot at the Omega with torpedoes and take her down.”
“Wait, you can set off a mine placed on the Russian’s hull with a sonar sound?” Carlucci asked.
“Sure,” Allende said. “That’s how we detonated the munitions on the Russian Nordstream pipeline. We placed the explosives under the cover of a Baltic NATO naval exercise with a detonator programmed to go off on receipt of a particular sonar sound. Then, a month or so later, a P-8 antisubmarine plane was sent by Norway to drop a single sonar buoy with a one-hour time delay before it pinged the detonate command. By the time the P-8 landed, boom. Pipeline blew up with none of our fingerprints on it.”
“Ah, I remember now,” Carlucci said. “I was briefed on that. But still, Admiral Pacino, shooting at a Russian submarine carrying all those megatons of nuclear weapons, it’s a little disturbing. Couldn’t they go off? Or scatter radioactive plutonium all over God’s green earth? And the explosion from your torpedoes, particularly if they cause the Omega’s own weapons to blow up, won’t that be detected by seismologists? And won’t the Russians become aware that we killed their submarine? What will they do then?”