“Displeased enough to frame you for nuking America?”
“I doubt it, but I’ll put them down, too.”
“Okay. That’s our list of culprits. In other words, at this point, it could’ve been almost anybody. So, what next?”
“Events suggest the attackers infiltrated by submarine.”
“Foreigners?”
“Maybe not. A rogue faction with penetration into the Northern or Pacific Fleet could have sent them.”
“I see what you’re getting at.”
“But I don’t think they were from Russia.”
Bingo. “Why not?”
“The timing and speeds and distances aren’t right. We know that a submarine penetrated the Russian side of the Bering Strait from the south and evaded attack by Balakirev’s forces, then very slowly entered the waters for which I’m held responsible…. A decoy pretending to be Challenger is an especially baffling conundrum. Why was it launched at all? To mislead, or to draw attention? Why pretend to be Challenger in particular? Why send it on the specific course it followed?”
Whoops. Not bingo. Better think fast.
“I suppose I should be flattered that someone thought they’d gain, somehow, by pretending to be me. Which seems consistent with another country, not America, being the perpetrator and seeking to implicate the U.S. circumstantially. Doesn’t it?”
“It wasn’t you who launched the decoy?”
“No, I did not launch any decoys.” Jeffrey wondered if Meredov could tell that he’d just been lied to again. The admiral, a seasoned infighter and shrewd managerial gamesman, had a good poker face of his own.
Meredov began drawing a map on the whiteboard, similar to the one on the other wall, but with just the highlights of the northern coastal waters and islands. He wrote “Decoy” in the East Siberian Sea, added the date and time it was launched, and drew an arrow in the direction the decoy had headed. He didn’t say or write anything about K-335. He did make a mark in the Bering Strait, with the date and time for that depth charging.
“The false report of detecting Challenger, the decoy, caused a heightened alert among submarine and antisubmarine units, including mine. But the Strategic Rocket Forces didn’t pay it any attention. In retrospect they should have.”
“Seems so.” It’s taking an awfully long while for the Hot Line to get working.
“But there was more. Some of my people who track drifting ice that might threaten the Northern Sea Route summer shipping lanes noticed a large piece of floe that was behaving strangely.” Meredov drew more arrows, marked “Wind” and “Current.” Then he drew a big “U” on the map, from the edge of the ice cap to the coast and back to the cap. He put in more dates and times.
“The floe had an ice hummock on one side. I thought perhaps this accounted for the odd course it followed, with prevailing winds and surface currents coming from opposite directions. But prior events had strongly aroused my suspicions. Having slept on the problem, I sent helicopters to locate the floe and make an examination. From very close. By landing on it.”
“What did you find?”
“The hummock was gone.”
“Melted.”
“No. It was never a hummock to begin with.”
“Admiral?”
“Holes and wear marks and fibers left on the floe made it clear that a submarine had moored itself to the floe, gone south with it, then returned to the edge of the cap, cut loose, and disappeared under the pack ice.”
“That’s how the attackers came ashore?”
“I raised a second alarm at once. This time the army paid attention. They found tracks left by a group of commandos, roughly following the Alazeja River, coming inland, heading south. At first I was worried that they might be after my headquarters. But then we realized that the commandos had gone the other way, toward Srednekolymsk.”
“What happened next?”
“All this took several days, you understand. But finally the Strategic Rocket Forces put the base complex there on highest alert against intruders. Even so, hours later the commandos made their attack. Which, as you know, was successful.”
“So you’re saying that your antisubmarine operations provided adequate warning, coupled with tracking by the Army, and still the base was penetrated?”
“Yes.”
“It sounds more and more like the commandos had inside help. Either from the government, or from rogues hiding within the government. Sorry, Admiral, this doesn’t support Russia’s case. The Kremlin is so in bed with Berlin, and has been so unreceptive to American diplomatic urgings for true neutrality for so long, that the President of the United States will have his own list of culprits, and ‘Russia’ will be at the top of the list. For all he and I know, Germany is complicit as well. They could have dreamed up the idea first and shared it with the Kremlin. Or with rogues Berlin recruited in promise of taking charge of Russia, as their puppets, after a coup. Either way, Moscow is in deep trouble, the offender to American eyes.”
“But now we come to Challenger.”
“What about Challenger?” At this point, Jeffrey wasn’t volunteering anything.
Meredov drew another mark, in the middle of the Laptev Sea, and put a date next to it, today’s. “Here is where you contacted me, at your president’s orders.”
“Sure.”
Meredov began to draw dotted lines between some of the different places he’d marked. One nuclear sub could have been at all those different places easily… and the trail ended with an indisputable fact: Challenger breaking stealth to call Meredov.
He looked at Jeffrey hard. “Why did you sneak through the Russian side of the Bering Strait two weeks ago? What have you been doing in our waters ever since?”
“I did no such thing in the Bering Strait. I came across the top of Canada from the United States East Coast.”
“Nonsense. We know you were in Australia too recently.”
“I was not in Australia recently.”
Meredov reached into his jacket pocket. Jeffrey saw he’d hit some kind of showdown with the man. It was as if Meredov, knowing he held a winning hand, was putting his cards on the table, with utter finality.
Meredov unfolded a piece of paper. He showed it to Jeffrey. “This is you, Captain, on the Russian side of the Bering Strait, heading north, outfoxing Balakirev’s antisubmarine units in a way which is entirely in character for your known command style. I repeat the question. What were you doing there? And more importantly, what were you doing since then?”
“You know I can’t comment on undersea warfare activities.”
“Then you don’t deny that this computer-generated image is indeed your ship, at the time and place so indicated?”
“I neither confirm nor deny anything. This aggressive cross-examination is inappropriate, and counterproductive. Anyone with graphics software could manufacture that imagery.”
“Don’t insult my intelligence!”
Bad move. He knows that printout is real.
“You have two choices, Captain Fuller. You can give me a good explanation of your ship’s recent movements and intent, or you can decline to do so. In the latter case, I will have to tell my superiors that your ship is strongly implicated in perpetrating the missile disaster at Srednekolymsk.”
The silence over the speakerphone was deafening. Meredov was turning up the heat on Jeffrey before a live but invisible audience — one that could swing things way out of U.S. control.