He waited a moment, the line clicking softly for some time. “What time is it in Washington?” he asked.
“It’s 1930 there, sir. 0330 here.”
“Let’s hope he’s awake and not taking a nap,” Vostov said.
“Mr. President?” Vito Paul Carlucci’s voice came over the connection. He sounded tired and weak, Vostov thought.
“Mr. President,” Vostov said. “I was glad to hear you survived and that your surgery went well.”
“Thank you, Dimmi. And I was greatly encouraged that you came through your own surgery.”
“In a manner of speaking, Paul, we both dodged a bullet. Although in a literal sense, we didn’t dodge them at all.”
“I think we have a mutual problem, Dimmi,” Carlucci said.
“Yes, we do, Paul. When things return to normal,” Vostov said, “we should talk about our good friends in White and Red China.” Vostov coughed, and waved over his aide to give him water.
“We will, Dimmi. We definitely will.”
“But Paul, I wasn’t calling about China. I was calling to give you, what do you Americans call it, a ‘head’s up,’ I believe.”
“Yes? Go ahead, Dimmi.”
“I heard from my defense minister that Prime Minister Melnik just gave an order to the Navy to relay to our Omega class submarine Belgorod under the polar icecap. Belgorod reported that they were being followed by an American submarine. Melnik ordered Belgorod to attack and sink the American submarine.”
There was silence on the connection for a moment. When Carlucci spoke, his voice was choked with emotion. “Mr. President, I thank you will all my heart for this information.”
“Paul, I owed you a favor. You saved my life.” Vostov chuckled. “That was an assassination attempt ago. Plus, your vice president — I heard his son is on the American submarine that followed my Belgorod under the ice. I don’t want the vice president’s son hurt or killed.”
“I guarantee I am conveying Vice President Pacino’s deepest thanks as well,” Carlucci said. “I should let you rest, Dimmi.”
“It has been a pleasure to speak to you, Mr. President,” Vostov concluded formally. “Good-bye and I leave you with my best wishes for your return to full health.”
“And my wishes for your health, Mr. President,” Carlucci said. “Good-bye.”
The connection ended and Vostov handed the phone back to Irina, wondering if he had just doomed his own submarine Belgorod with this phone call. He shook his head. Probably not, he thought. Belgorod was armed with a one-megaton Gigantskiy torpedo. The American submarine would just turn tail and run home, he thought. It was, after all, the only logical thing to do.
Vice President Michael Pacino paced the Oval Office as the early evening’s emergent domestic policy session continued, becoming impatient with the agenda of internal problems that were paraded in front of him. He had developed a newfound respect for Carlucci and his ability to deal with the minutiae of domestic policy. The infighting between cabinet members was akin to kindergarten, Pacino mused. The office politics were intense. In the middle of a debate about funding for an education initiative, a senior military aide entered the room and hurried up to Pacino.
“Secure phone call from President Carlucci,” he said, handing Pacino a secure phone.
Pacino took the phone and left the Oval Office, shutting the door to the president’s study.
“Sir,” Pacino said. “Mr. President. How are you feeling?”
“Good, Patch, on the mend, but I called you urgently because I just got off with Vostov.”
Pacino listened for a moment, his expression a deepening fury. “I understand, Mr. President. If you’ll excuse me, I need to get to the joint chiefs and the Navy.” He hung up on Carlucci and lunged for the phone on the massive desk.
“White House operator, sir,” the female voice said instantly.
“Get me Admiral Catardi immediately, and if you can, patch General Zaka in with us, but don’t delay getting me with Catardi while you look for Zaka.”
“Please stand by, sir,” the operator said.
Pacino leaned on the desk, his eyes shut, thinking of Anthony.
“Admiral Catardi,” Rob Catardi said into the phone.
“Admiral Catardi, it’s Pacino.”
“General Zaka is here with you both,” Zaka’s voice rasped.
“Yes, Mr. Vice President,” Catardi said.
“Admiral, Vostov just told Carlucci that Belgorod got orders to sink the New Jersey. I know what we discussed before, but now we have no choice but to take the risk. Now we have to hope that New Jersey can survive shooting torpedoes at the Omega. Admiral, I’m ordering you to radio the New Jersey to attack and sink the Belgorod by any means necessary. That includes employment of nuclear weapons, if there’s a situation that can make good use of them. Does New Jersey already have nuclear release authority?”
There was a second’s silence as Catardi wrapped his mind around what the vice president had ordered.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “New Jersey was sent from Faslane with full nuclear release authority. I will radio New Jersey immediately with orders to sink the Belgorod.”
“Once that’s done, you and General Zaka report to the Situation Room. We’re going to watch this operation from there.”
BOOK IV
DAMAGE CONTROL
22
The shipwide announcing circuit clicked with the voice of Captain First Rank Georgy Alexeyev. “All senior officers not actually on watch, report to the captain’s stateroom.”
“You know, sir,” Captain Second Rank Ania Lebedev said, “back in the South Atlantic, you made all the tactical decisions yourself, brushing off all advice from anyone else. Including advice from me.” Lebedev stood a meter away from Alexeyev, who was seated in his command chair at the end of the table.
“I know,” he said quietly. “You want to know what keeps me up at night, Madam First? What if I had taken your advice instead of doing it my way? Would that have turned the battle? I decided, if we fail in this mission, it won’t be from my ignoring advice.”
Lebedev nodded in sympathy. “You’ve changed, Captain. In my way of thinking, for the better.”
“You have too, Ania,” he said, looking up at her. “You were a cold, calculating careerist when we left for the South Atlantic. You have empathy now. You can see into people. Into me, even.”
She smiled. “I hope I remain calculating, Captain. We may need that, with these orders.” Despite her previous brain-storming suggestion that they could preemptively take out the American submarine, her tone now betrayed that she thought these orders were foolish, but then, hadn’t this entire mission been foolish, conceived by politicians who had no idea about the intricacies of operating submarines? Especially submarines under ice?
The officers began to file into the room, Navigator Maksimov first, then Weapons Officer Sobol, Chief Engineer Ausra, then Kovalov and his crew — First Officer Vlasenko, Navigator Dobryvnik, Chief Engineer Chernobrovin and Systems Officer Trusov. When they were all seated, Lebedev shut the door.
“Madam Navigator, would you project your tactical ice plot on the displays for us?” Alexeyev asked.
Maksimov manipulated her pad computer and her display of the nav plot flashed up. “In this scale, the display is roughly fifteen nautical miles wide. You can see the ice wall on the right side — the east side — with the superimposed blast zone at the ice target in the upper right corner of this box of clear water. In orange, I’ve identified the approximate boundary of the polynya created by the blast, which is about two to three miles wide, east-to-west and perhaps half that north-to-south. You can see that the ice wall didn’t open up at the target area but for a thousand or so meters into the ice pressure ridge, so continuing on our previous course is not feasible. To the west on the left side of the screen, you can see the other wall that bounds this rectangle of clear water, approximately seven miles from the ice target. The southern edge of that wall is the passage where we entered into the seven-mile-wide rectangle. Farther to the west, we took a serpentine path around ice ridges to get here. About thirty miles farther west, the ice ridges mostly stopped, and the water depth increased. Average water depth here is between a hundred and three hundred meters, which is probably why we encountered so many ice walls. Our present situation is that we are surfaced here, near the original ice target, at the open water of the polynya, where we transmitted our request for a change of routing, and where we received our new orders.”