“Lord,” Jeffrey said, “this gets complicated.”
“It certainly does,” Kurzin said. “Concentrate on the view from sixty thousand feet for now. Just get a basic sense of all the moving parts and how they interact. See for yourself the rigor of the logic that went into this. If you start to feel overwhelmed today, just stick to the highlights. Greater clarity will come, with time and with the unfolding of events.”
Jeffrey nodded. “So these alleged Russian separatists, or warmongers, or whatever… The Germans would have gamed out this part too…. What’s the motivation of the supposed Russian perpetrators that the Kampfschwimmer go disguised as?… Before, that is, your men masquerading as pseudo-Russian Kampfschwimmer get unmasked by our deceptions as being genuine Germans. We hope.”
Nyurba answered that one. “The faked perps’ motivation is to discredit the regime in charge in the Kremlin, because it’s too repressive or because it’s not repressive enough. Or because it’s too neutral toward the U.S., or not in alliance enough with Germany. Sacrifice some American and Russian lives for the good of the Motherland, at least as the made-up fanatics see it. These imaginary rebels would want to force Russia to take a firmer side in the Allies-versus-Axis conflict, or force a regime change in Moscow, or even both.”
“They’re internal terrorists?”
“Not in their own minds,” Kurzin said. “They’d be heroes, martyrs. They’d see the mainstream Russian government as the terrorists, and maybe the U.S. too. Their actions against both would be justifiable retribution. Or, they’d see the Moscow crowd in office now as being much too moderate…. Chechens, modern anarchists, pro-German Russian FSB agents, or military megahawks, we want to leave ambiguity in Kremlin heads as to who were the bad actors, in the first few crucial minutes after the SS-Twenty-sevens launch. Ambiguity you will play off of, Commodore, as and when suspicion starts getting cast on Germany.”
“But—”
“The team that gamed out the German approach said they’d want ambiguity too, leave Moscow confused and unfocused so they’re more likely to come over and cling to Berlin in the face of American ire while the handful of mushroom clouds bloomed on two continents. Even our Red and Blue Teams concluded that real rogues, if they existed, wouldn’t claim credit initially, to sow more seeds of doubt and then surge into the power vacuum.”
Jeffrey fiddled with his ear. “I don’t know about this.”
“Sir,” Nyurba told him, “there’s important precedent. It’s what gave our commander in chief the idea to begin with.”
“Continue. Please.”
“The Golf-class diesel boat that sank in the Pacific in nineteen-sixty-eight? The one that Howard Hughes with CIA backing tried to salvage off the ocean floor with the Glomar Explorer?”
“Aw, not that boondoggle.”
“Sir, it’s been in the open literature since the late nineteen-nineties that the U.S. concluded almost immediately that it was virtually certain the Golf sank because a rogue faction in her crew took over the ship and tried to nuke Hawaii with one of the three ballistic missiles in their vertical launch tubes at the rear of the conning tower.”
Jeffrey nodded. “I read about that. Nixon used it behind the scenes to threaten, blackmail Russia. It’s how he forced Brezhnev to come to the arms reduction table at some summit meeting. Then Nixon took credit for terrific statesmanship. What a charade. I forget the details.”
“But this is real-life stuff, Commodore. And it was declassified, or leaked, or whatever, in documents, books, available to the public since before the Global War on Terror began. And Russia and Germany know it too.”
“Granted.”
The motivation of those rogues in 1968 was to trigger nuclear war between the USSR and the U.S., perhaps because they felt the Kremlin at that time wasn’t hawkish enough. It couldn’t be known positively, since they all died. The U.S. was pretty sure they died because they failed to bypass all the range-safety devices — the booby traps installed to prevent an unauthorized launch. American intelligence did know that Moscow was often more afraid of an in-country splinter group hijacking a missile and aiming it their way than they were ever afraid of a sneak attack by America. The liquid fuel in one of those ballistic missiles exploded thanks to the booby traps, and the Golf sank with all hands in three-plus miles of the Pacific Ocean, with a big hole gaping in her side.
“Some of this is beginning to come together for me,” Jeffrey said. “The Russians are aware they had a rogue faction attempt a nuclear launch once before.”
“At least once before that we know of,” Kurzin interjected.
“There might have been others?”
“Our intelligence services have their suspicions. Some of the Soviet accidents with rockets, that blew up on the launchpad or went off course and were self-destructed or crashed. Traces of plutonium that might have come from a nuke warhead destroyed on the ground or in midair.”
What other Cold War secret history has yet to be revealed? “So the plan is that the Kremlin will believe it plausible that some other rogue faction tries the same thing now, except with a land-based silo missile instead of using a submarine.”
“Precisely, sir,” Nyurba said. “And the Germans are aware of all these things, so a scenario of them using their commandos to launch missiles and blame it on Russian rogues is also plausible. Russian governmental and military insiders are most likely to have the knowledge and resources to plan and then conduct the raid. They’re far more obvious culprits than Chechens or anarchists.”
Jeffrey held his head for a minute. “God, who dreamed this stuff up?”
“Some of our best and brightest, Commodore,” Kurzin said.
Jeffrey turned to Bell and Harley. “What do both of you make of this?”
Bell deferred to Harley. “It’s as we discussed among ourselves before, sir,” Harley said. “Our country has three choices. Apocalypse Soon, Apocalypse Later, and this mission if we can pull it off.”
“Which is still one hell of an ‘if,’ ” Jeffrey said. “Let me get to the other part that’s bothering me. Or an other part, because all sorts of things are bothering me. This bluff mentioned in my orders about a next-generation missile shield. Using supposed stealth satellites, ones that the Russians don’t know about and also can’t detect, so they have no way to judge their capabilities.”
“Stealth satellites are nothing new, sir,” Nyurba said. “The idea, and their actual existence, got leaked to the press ten years ago. Leaked, or officially announced.”
Jeffrey stared at the overhead, talking to himself. “A magical, mystical missile shield that can detonate an armed nuclear warhead outside the atmosphere, over the country that launched the ICBM. That part sounds great. I wish we really had something like that. But you and whoever planned this mission know damned well that we don’t. I want to go over again how we get the Russians to believe it.”
“We’ll program the warheads to go off exoatmospherically, over the European part of Russia. With trajectory mechanics as they are, given the Earth’s rotation and the Coriolis force and all of that, it’s why we need to launch from one of their new bases in Siberia. It puts the missiles beyond effective reach of the old ABM system that still rings Moscow, so the Russians can’t shoot their own rogue missiles down.” Nyurba was referring to the antiballistic missile system allowed by a 1970s treaty.