“Which they’ll take severe precautions to protect.”
“Once Carter drops us off where we’ll sneak ashore through toxic coastal waters, our five-day overland hike will be timed to reach a particular missile base just before a regular silo personnel shift change. We intend to commandeer the approaching trucks bringing in replacement crews, and penetrate the installation that way. We’ll then take over the control bunkers for half a dozen ICBMs.”
“Horribly chancy.”
“We anticipate that our silo entry phase may become extremely violent. We are fully prepared for this.”
Jeffrey glanced around the room at Kurzin’s commando force. Their faces were blank, inscrutable. “You’re telling me you’re going on a one-way mission.”
“We understand the meaning of service and sacrifice.”
“Come back to how we’re supposed to make Russian latest-generation warheads go off prematurely.”
“That part is in the script included in your orders.”
“If I’d tried to learn the whole script in one sitting, I’d’ve been in that stateroom for forty-eight hours or more.”
“That’s why you still have a week-plus to memorize everything,” Nyurba said.
“What I did see, or skim, I’m not so sure about. Gamma-ray lasers and microwave lasers and proton particle beams in the vacuum of space, plus radar spoofers tuned perfectly, all making a nuclear warhead think it’s reentered the atmosphere, that it feels the heat and the rising air pressure and the deceleration, and its radar altimeter, if it has one, detects the ground coming up. Zapping timers and blinding celestial-navigation sensors, without ruining the warheads altogether…. You’re counting on too many things going just right.”
“Again,” Kurzin told him, “you’re so caught up you forget that this is all bluff. It does not actually have to exist, let alone work correctly. The Russians just have to believe that it’s plausible, and see the evidence with their own eyes that tells them it’s real and it did work.”
“The exoatmospheric blasts.”
“Yes.”
“Which fry so many satellites and ground systems instantly that the Russians have no telemetry to prove that there never was a gamma-ray laser firing, a particle beam gun discharging, a radar spoofer radar broadcasting. All deployed from supposed nuclear-powered stealth satellites that they can’t detect, not because they’re too stealthy to detect, but because in fact they never existed.”
“An excellent summary, Commodore. Remember, it’s the President’s job, on the Hot Line, to convey all this to the Kremlin. A deep-black DARPA project, now unveiled. You wouldn’t have known about something so secret in advance. You know what you do know, supposedly, because of a radio message received only after the warheads explode. The same long message that orders you to Siberia as your commander in chief’s personal, on-site, back-channel mouthpiece. Your role in this part of the act is a supporting one. You merely need to believe what you were told.”
“Which brings us back full circle, to one main thing that still is bugging me. What if the Russians think it’s all too pat? Challenger appearing at just the right time and place by sheer happenstance, and this magical, mystical missile shield idea being swallowed whole by the Kremlin, and them not seeing that we had strong motive to have done the nasty deed ourselves to frame Berlin and reap large benefits. Expecting that all of this comes together and Moscow never questions our package of lie after lie after lie… It’s too much like tempting fate.”
“They can’t call our bluff on this next-generation missile shield,” Kurzin said. “The only way would be to launch a live ICBM at the U.S. Suppose they do. Then you posit that the shield has imperfections, that it can leak. Since there’s no way for the Russians to self-destruct an ICBM once it’s in flight, the whole idea of ICBMs as deterrents being that they can’t be recalled after launch, we’d either shoot it down in our end zone along its trajectory with what conventional missile defenses we do have, or it’d detonate over or on U.S. soil. Either way their launch would be an intentional act of war, and we’d certainly retaliate, quite possibly by targeting the Kremlin. Because, remember, we’d still be acting as if we were entirely innocent of anything except protecting ourselves against a Russian preemptive attack, using the nonexistent mystery shield to inflict electromagnetic-pulse damage, which is more or less nonlethal, on the Kremlin environs…. Therefore the only way to call the bluff amounts to an act of suicide for Moscow.”
“I follow the nonlethal aspect of the punishment from this made-up missile shield. I like it as an idea, I said that before, and I wish someday we could field such a system for real. But the Russians don’t have to actually test the shield to doubt its existence. They can simply conclude on their own that it’s just theoretical concepts and double-talk.”
“This is where your faked rage and bluster onshore in Siberia come in. The analogy to magic is more apt than you may recognize, Commodore. It’s a psychological sleight of hand. Your dire accusations and threats as champion atomic warrior, to a senior Russian Navy officer who’ll know exactly who you are. Challenger lurking with her tactical nuclear cruise missiles in case they mistreat you. Very useable weapons, you’ll say, since they don’t breach the barrier to hydrogen bombs. This will all divert Russian thinking away from the U.S. being to blame. Challenger herself becomes a sleight of hand as well, distracting the Russians from thinking that another American sub is present.”
“Only if I can bring it off. Face to face, on camera, hour after hour. Alone in Siberia, among Russians who become our mortal enemy if I make even the slightest misstep. Russia’s romance with Germany sours only if I can bring it all off.”
“Yes.” Kurzin was unemotional. “Only if you bring it off.”
“What if Russia sees through the bluffs and hand-waving and phony biblical wrath, despite even our president over the Hot Line reinforcing me? The Kremlin would strike back in kind, shooting a missile to go off high above America, to inflict an electromagnetic pulse and fry the entire U.S. homeland. For exoatmospheric EMP, a higher detonation is better, it pancakes a larger area. They fling a warhead where our best real defenses can’t possibly reach. We lose the war in a millisecond.”
“That is, unfortunately, true.”
“Russia arrests me, and I’m the one who’s the international terrorist. I’m perfectly placed to be our commander in chief’s sacrificial lamb, the scapegoat in this giant fiasco, to placate the Russians. I can picture the show trial in Moscow on that. The Germans will love every minute. The ending is a bullet in the back of my neck. Unless the Kremlin decides to cremate me alive, feet-first as was the KGB’s custom, so it lasts longer.”
“Inarguably that is one scenario. Two, if you consider each method of execution as a separate scenario.”
“Suppose that Russia buys into everything, and buys it all too well. How do we stop them from glassing Germany with ground-hugging cruise missiles immune to our magical space-based shield?”