“Aside from the fact that doing so would bring them into wholesale nuclear war with Germany? Which neither will want?”
“Aside from that. The Kremlin does have true megahawks.”
“That’s why our president sends you to Siberia. Charm, guile, warnings, wordplay, it’s a crucial part of your job.”
Boarding the mini for Challenger, everyone was exhausted and glum. The trip was a mob: six experts who needed to transfer from Carter added to the passenger load. Jeffrey and Nyurba took the two seats in the last row of the transport compartment.
“You know,” Nyurba said, “in the more remote parts of Siberia, there are still some practicing shamans.”
Jeffrey hesitated, but sensed that Nyurba, who seemed subdued, felt the need to talk. “Is that your religion?”
“My family is Russian Orthodox. But the old creation myths are kept alive. Many peoples equate the North Star with a bear.”
“You mean, like constellations?”
“The star Arcturus, in some Lapp and Finn and Siberian groups, is called Favtna. The hunter. The Big Dipper is supposed to be his bow.”
“I thought it was a plow, or something.”
“The ancient prophecy is that someday Favtna will shoot an arrow at the bear. And the North Star, around which the heavens turn each night, is known also as the pillar of the world.”
“Makes sense.” Jeffrey wondered where Nyurba was leading. He’d heard that Russians, including Siberians, could be moody.
“When Favtna’s arrow strikes home, at the bear, the North Star, the pillar of the world, the prophecy goes something like this: ‘The sky will plummet down, and then the earth will be smashed, and the world will burst into fire and smoke, and it will be the end of everything.’ ”
“That’s pretty morbid stuff.”
Nyurba stared into space. “Sometimes, with this mission, I think I’m Favtna. The bear is Russia, the arrow is an ICBM, and when I shoot the missile the prophecy will literally come true.”
Chapter 13
Right after the rendezvous, Jeffrey had his strike group begin to proceed by a devious route under the ice cap, to eventually worm into position north of Siberia. The route had been chosen consulting with Meltzer and Carter’s navigator, while Bell and Harley offered advice. No one past the two ships’ hulls could possibly know which dog-leg courses and zigzags Jeffrey intended to take — including that mole in DC.
Soon after he first returned to Challenger, Jeffrey handed a packet from his orders pouch to Bell, for the ship’s systems administrator, a rather cerebral senior chief with a master’s degree in computer science.
“What’s this?” Bell asked.
“Disks with special software. We’ll need it running later. Intel-gathering, to support our endeavor…. And message code phrases we’ll receive to formally confirm or cancel our mission…. Operating specs and installation info are in there.”
To take a breather, Jeffrey went to his office, Challenger’s XO’s stateroom. He sat in one of the guest chairs, putting his feet up on the other. He stared into empty space, at a spot that seemed miles beyond the bulkhead only inches from his shoes. He tried to make sense of all that was going on.
His orders said that Commander, U.S. Strategic Command and the President would be waiting, and the start of Kurzin’s assault on the ICBM complex would be observed from orbit by American spy satellites. To explain the lack of initial reaction to these events on the ground in Siberia, U.S. commanders could always claim they assumed this activity was a Russian security drill, with mock invaders firing blank rounds, and chicken blood used for realism. Missile launches would be detectable by other satellites — the SBIRS-High system — that watched for the distinctive infrared heat signature of rocket engines; these satellites hovered over Russia constantly, in geosynchronous orbit a tenth of the way to the moon.
When Kurzin’s men were seen to move to attack, Jeffrey would receive an ELF message to come to periscope depth in a polynya, and raise his photonic masts and antennas to act as the U.S. President’s eyes and ears. This was needed because satellites that didn’t shut down would be blinded, and some would be destroyed, by the H-bomb blasts and resulting persistent energetic particles in space. If the SS-27 missiles did take off, and did detonate hundreds of miles outside the atmosphere over Moscow, Jeffrey would see the visual and electromagnetic effects. Challenger would be far enough away, her masts and antennas shielded and hardened, so as not to suffer from the EMP.
The President of the United States would know when to pick up the phone to the Kremlin, and what to say, if the President of Russia didn’t grab the phone and call him first in panic. From SS-27 liftoff to warhead detonation would take less than two minutes — as opposed to the half-hour a warhead needed to strike the U.S. Neither America nor Russia would have time to bring their strategic nuclear missile forces up to immediate launching status. This was one major advantage of using the SS-27: the missile’s more powerful engines shortened the boost phase significantly compared to earlier-generation Russian ICBMs. The dust would settle, reason would prevail, and common sense would kick in, well before a wholesale thermonuclear exchange came close to occurring. Or so it was intended in the mission plan.
But that would all come days from now, and the train of events is fraught with imponderables and uncertainties.
In the meantime, it was vital that Allied command and control give no hint whatsoever, through unusual physical or signals activity, that anything out of the ordinary was on the verge of happening. For a while yet Jeffrey and his strike group were entirely on their own. He’d always preferred to work like this, unsupervised and with lots of opportunity for initiative. But later in Siberia himself, coordinating via conference call with his President on the Hot Line in real time while potentially hostile Russians joined in — both face to face and from Moscow — would be a completely new experience for him.
He had mixed feelings on many levels. There was no one in whom to confide. The loneliness of strike group command tasted vile. He decided, once and for all, to repress his emotions and follow an inner, amoral, task-oriented autopilot.
Yet he could tell that his deepest self was becoming worn down. He knew that following orders, though they formed his sworn and inescapable duty, would be no excuse on a higher plane or in a court of law. Violating Russian sovereignty, in the premeditated way he would do it, was an act of aggressive war. He’d snuck onto neutral or Allied soil before, but never like this. The ultimate mission goal amounted to a crime against humanity, if viewed in isolation from its benefits. The necessity and the benefits were pure theory, based on wargame simulations only, no matter how credible that modeling effort might be. The pressure on Jeffrey, and the corrosive effect on his soul, felt immense.
Nyurba’s morbid mood, probably just standard preinsertion heebie-jeebies, must be contagious…. Yes, it’s just the usual doubts and fears before any fresh mission gets rolling.
Jeffrey liked this rationalization, conveniently invented though it was. The notion — delusion? — of normal prebattle stage fright fit well with his newfound get-the-job-done amoral compass. The inner compass was a survival tool, for which he expected he’d sooner or later pay a heavy price. But that would come afterward, when he could afford to let his conscience return and try to reconcile his actions with his own value system, his ethics, his religious beliefs. He’d find out then, the hard way, here or in the afterlife, if reconciliation was even possible. In the meantime he needed to shake these too-distracting ideas off.