Nyurba felt that his last ounce of humanity was shredded by what the team under his orders had just made happen. “Major, have your men bag up as much intel materials as they can carry.”
Ildarov was more than glad to hurry his specialists to this task. He knew what was coming, and welcomed distraction.
The mission doctrine saying “no prisoners” cuts both ways.
Nor could the commandos afford to leave any witnesses. They might have seen the team do subtle things revealing that they were Americans. Deceased, the silo crewmen’s corpses would stop metabolizing those all-important, telltale German interrogation chemicals in their blood.
Nyurba drew his PRI and unemotionally shot each Russian silo crewman in the head; the small-caliber bullets made tiny holes and stayed inside their skulls. The pistol reports were deafening. Ejected shell casings bounced and clinked and rolled along the floor. The pistol slugs and the casings, under close forensic analysis, would be found to have been made in German-occupied Poland, not Russia.
“There it is!” one of Challenger’s fire control technicians shouted.
Jeffrey, startled from his reverie, saw it on his screen, a tiny yellow dot moving up in the dusky purple sky; it was after midnight, and the sun lay behind them to the north.
“Make a proper report,” Bell snapped before Torelli or Sessions could. Everybody was understandably on edge.
“New visual contact, designate Victor One, assess as a Russian ICBM in flight.”
“I concur with assessment,” Torelli said.
“Very well, Weps,” Bell acknowledged.
Jeffrey saw another dot, following the first.
“New visual contact! Designate Victor Two! Second Russian ICBM in flight.”
The photonics head began tracking the missiles. The first one blinked out, then reappeared. “First-stage booster separation. Second-stage ignition.” The spent first stage, already outside the atmosphere, would burn up on its way down.
“Maximum image magnification,” Jeffrey ordered. The picture zoomed in and narrowed, like a twenty-four-power telescope. The technician kept shifting the head from Victor One to Victor Two and back again, since they didn’t fit in the field of view at once now. Both were accelerating rapidly.
Victor Two seemed to blink for a moment. “Victor Two first-stage separation, second-stage booster ignition.”
The second photonics mast was busy scanning the horizon to the south and east. Missiles on other trajectories, or launched from other places, could mean a full-scale Russian preemptive first strike — despite everything the two presidents said.
A third yellow dot appeared above the horizon, on a more northerly course. “New visual contact, designate Victor Three!”
Victor Three was definitely not behaving like the other two missiles. Who had launched it? From where? And why?
Jeffrey grabbed the handset for the radio room. He was so agitated he almost fumbled it the first time he tried to press the Talk button. “Radio, Commodore Fuller. Prepare to transmit on all available frequencies, warning of an unaccounted-for Russian missile in flight, targeting appears to be West Coast United States.”
Victor Three suddenly began plunging back toward the Earth.
“What the—”
“Rig for nuclear depth charge!” Bell shouted. The missile appeared to be coming straight for them. Had the Russians detected Challenger after all, and uncovered Kurzin’s disguise, and chosen a fitting method of revenge?
Victor Three burst into pieces. The scene reminded Jeffrey of the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger.
An unfortunate choice of namesake for this ship.
“Victor Three explosion is chemical,” Sessions announced. Victor One and Two had already gone into second-stage booster separation and third-stage ignition. Even on maximum zoom with further computerized image enhancement, and one mast’s sensor in infrared mode so the missiles would stand out better against the frigid backdrop of outer space, they were tiny dots receding just above the visual horizon, far to the east. Their speed would top out at Mach twenty-four — over fifteen thousand miles per hour.
“Victor Three wreckage includes a one-megaton warhead,” Torelli cautioned. “Warhead status is unknown.”
Debris was fluttering and falling through the sky, trailing smoke. The warhead reentry body, if intact, would be dense and aerodynamically streamlined. It could carry much farther than other wreckage. Its fusing might think it was nearing a target.
Challenger, so shallow and with masts raised, would not withstand the shock and EMP this close. But Jeffrey needed to keep observing for more Russian missile liftoffs. He couldn’t order Bell to go deep. And Victor One and Two, assuming they were launched by Kurzin and not the Kremlin, might have faulty fusing — and could target the U.S. homeland for real.
“Victor One detonation!”
A violet-white flash lit up the entire sky. The brilliant flash was followed by a diffuse greenish glow that lasted about a second. When this faded, a warhead fireball of evanescent blue and red — excited gas molecules and superheated plasma — swelled in the vacuum of space, only a few degrees above the eastern horizon, but four hundred miles above the Earth.
“Victor Two detonation!”
Another bright flash, another green glow, another eerie expanding sphere.
“Bearings are correct to pancake the Moscow-to-Ural-Mountains area,” Torelli reported by the weapons consoles.
“I concur,” Meltzer said from the navigation plotting table.
On the photonics display screens, the whole sky turned blood red, in shimmering sheets and dancing curtains — an awesome aurora caused by the exoatmospheric nuclear blasts. As intended, Challenger’s location, and all of eastern Siberia, were outside the area hit by the powerful twin EMPs.
Jeffrey waited for reports from ESM and the Radio Room. He waited to see if more missiles took off. He waited to see if the warhead from Victor Three was live and still coming his way.
In the next few minutes, no nuke exploded from the third ICBM that had launched from Srednekolymsk. No more missiles launched anywhere, so far, that he was aware of. ESM and Radio tuned to local news broadcasts, which were being fed incomplete reports from the edges of the worst-affected zone. These helped confirm that — as expected — the electromagnetic pulses had pancaked cities ranging from Moscow to Magnitogorsk. They’d knocked out power and communications in a broad area of European Russia, sowing confusion and chaos, starting electrical fires in everything from large transformers to laptop computers. Rumors and speculation reported by Russian newscasters about the cause of all this varied from UFOs, to an asteroid hit, to nuclear war, to a new German or American secret weapon.
An ELF code group came through meaning Jeffrey should wait fifteen minutes and then commence the next mission phase, and put his script into action — ELF was immune to distant, prompt EMP effects. The wait was to make it look like he’d received and studied a longer message sent by low-frequency radio, with a much faster data rate than ELF.
Even a quarter-hour later, reception at higher, tactical frequencies was heavy with static — hissing and whistling and popping — but Radio managed to make line-of-sight contact with a Tupolev-204 to the east. Jeffrey used his best Russian.
“Tupolev, Tupolev, this is Captain Jeffrey Fuller of the United States Navy, on USS Challenger in international waters.”
“American submarine, American submarine, this is Tupolev-Two-Zero-Four, call sign Sable Seven. What are your intentions?”
“Sable Seven, Sable Seven, I have been ordered by the President of the United States to meet in this emergency with your regional commanding rear admiral.”