“Understood. We’ll be ready for them.”
“Good man. Nyurba, out.” He hung up. “Major, crack the door.”
The gush of air almost sucked the respirators out on their own. Nyurba had to be careful not to be sucked out with them.
“Shut it!”
The door closed and locked.
“What’s interior pressure now?”
“One point zero five bars, sir,” the Seabee said. Bar was the metric equivalent of one atmosphere — all the Russian readouts were calibrated in the metric system.
“Keep it there, just in case. How’s the environment in our missile silos?”
“Temperature, pressure, humidity are nominal.”
“Major, how are the missiles?”
“Electronic checkouts of missiles and warheads all read as nominal,” Ildarov said, “safed against arming and launch.”
“How much longer until we’ll be able to do that last part?”
“The missiles use ring-laser gyros so there’s no time required to spool them up. A lot depends on what the silo inspection teams find, or don’t find, or miss finding, while they’re sanitizing the missiles and silo machinery. We have the targeting coordinates ready for the missile flight profiles we want, and we have the codes and procedures to set and prearm the warheads to go off exoatmospherically. We have both launch keys.”
Chapter 25
Challenger hovered at periscope depth in an area of thin, flat annual ice that had begun to break up and melt. Both photonics masts were raised, one aimed toward where ICBMs from Srednekolymsk were expected to become visible if all went according to plan. Jeffrey stared at the screen display on his borrowed console in the rear of the control room. His concentration kept wandering, from worry and lack of results. The other photonics mast scanned constantly for airborne threats that might be maintaining radio and radar silence — Russian antisubmarine aircraft could rely on their observers alone, to seize the element of surprise by avoiding detection on an opponent’s electronic support measures equipment. Jeffrey had enough respect for Rear Admiral Meredov by now to expect that his planes sometimes did this. But both photonic displays showed only featureless ice and empty sky.
The ESM heads on Challenger’s photonics masts did pick up occasional weak signals from Tupolev 204s in the distance, to the east and the west, but none so far were approaching this part of the cap in mid — Laptev Sea. It was only a matter of time, though, before their standard search patterns brought them much too near.
Challenger had deployed her trailing wire antennas, unreeling them in a line downcurrent to float up against the underside of the pack ice. Her sonar towed array wasn’t deployed. When things started to happen, they’d happen fast — there’d be no time to retract the array, and Bell didn’t want to have to jettison it. Jeffrey concurred. The antenna masts were also raised, to grab what information they could in the meantime, and not waste a moment when the big show began.
He felt awfully exposed to Russian sensors while keeping this lookout post, but his orders required it. Soon, satellites would have to shut down to avoid being fried, and Jeffrey needed to be available as his President’s eyes and ears. World War III with Russia could break out if things went awry, and Challenger might well be the best, or only, operating early-warning platform America had.
If I see many more than three ICBMs, I’ll know that Armageddon has started. I’ll need to violate radio silence, so the U.S. knows what’s on the way, for all the good that would do.
Jeffrey dearly missed the information from Carter’s previous tap of the fiber-optic cable. What the NSA teams in Challenger’s radio room and ESM room were catching via signals intercepts didn’t tell him much. Meredov’s forces were being surprisingly quiet, now that the furor over Jeffrey’s decoy from days before had died down. Russia’s reaction to the commando raid was hard to gauge. Main command channels transmitted constantly, random numbers or gibberish between genuine messages, to prevent eavesdroppers from noticing alterations in the amount of traffic. Indications of heightened activity or raised alert levels could only be gained if the codes used on those channels had been broken. Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces changed their codes often. History taught that any encryption system, if used too long, could be cracked.
Hours had gone by since the ELF message came in telling Jeffrey that the commandos’ attack had started; the sun had moved a long way in its perpetual summertime waltz with the horizon since Challenger came shallow here. It now seemed probable, as intelligence analysts had predicted, that the Strategic Rocket Forces hadn’t even informed the Russian Navy that something was amiss. And they were being cagy in every way with communications about any response to a ground attack against one of their SS-27 complexes — that complex was a thousand miles distant from Challenger, which made overhearing anything useful all the more difficult.
And if caught dwelling here suspiciously, too soon, before Kurzin’s missiles took off, Jeffrey’s cover story — about a German sub purchased from Russia, far away — would be shot to pieces. The whole game plan would totally unravel after that.
The intercom from the ESM room blinked. Bell answered. “Commodore, they want to speak to you.”
Jeffrey’s chest tightened. “ESM, Fuller, what is it?”
“Sir,” the NSA technician said in a deep-South drawl, “we got peculiar traffic from our own spaceborne platforms, and neutrals. Huge fires raging at the complex near Srednekolymsk.”
“What sort of fires?”
“Near as we can tell, heat signatures of three SS-27s but they’re stationary, no launches. Assessing as in-silo explosions and ground-level burning of solid fuel.”
Before Jeffrey could react to this news, which seemed to imply that Kurzin’s team had failed disastrously, Bell called him again. “Sir, Radio wants you. I told them you were on the line with ESM, but my comms officer says he needs you, smartly.”
“Wait one,” Jeffrey told the ESM room. He switched circuits. “Radio, Fuller, what?”
“Sir, we just finished receiving an ELF three-letter block. Decoding confirmed as cipher for ‘To Commodore, Challenger Strike Group, personal. Hot Line in use. Remain on station.’ ”
“Let’s get this damn ball rolling!” Nyurba ordered. “We’ve got three missiles to launch!”
He fretted, because the time element was constantly becoming more and more critical. Every added hour that passed expanded by hundreds of miles the distance, and exponentially increased the area, from which stronger and stronger counterattacking forces could be staged, flown in, and ordered to make the next assault. Eventually the pieces of missile fuel from bunker two would burn themselves out, and the steam geysers they were causing would subside. The worst of the deadly fumes would disperse on the wind, and aircraft and airborne units wouldn’t be deterred by moderate forest fires. The commandos definitely couldn’t stand up to another, more massive counterattack.
The Air Force missile specialists did their thing, speaking in Russian terminology — as they’d been briefed by expatriates, and as they knew from the manuals and checklists.
Nyurba understood the basics from his own briefing materials. Explained in U.S. terminology, the launch crew had to first achieve a permissive action link unlock, enabling the nuclear warhead to be armed at a later date. Then they had to program into the missile and warhead electronics a correctly formatted safe-to-arm signal, which would be sent into the warhead just before the warhead bus separated from the third-stage booster. The signal would only be sent while in flight if the missile’s self-contained computers decided that everything was functioning properly, and the missile was on course toward its designated target. Then came warhead arming. For an exoatmospheric blast immediately after third-stage booster separation, this was relatively simple. It tied in with the fourth major event, actual warhead fusing and detonation.