The body of GSM3 Vincente Petrillo should be the easiest to get to. Main Engine Room Number Two was accessible, and they had a fairly good idea of where the sailor’s remains should be.
Aft Steering would be a lot more challenging. Getting in there would take some work, and a lot of thought. Neither officer was ready to tackle that problem yet.
Captain Heller moved on to the next question on his mental list. “Do we have enough power for radars and weapon systems?”
“Should be okay. We’ve got two of the main generators on line, plus one of the auxiliaries. Enough capacity to handle the load.”
“How about propulsion?”
The Cheng stared into his coffee cup. “I’d just as soon not mess around with that, sir.”
“Why not?”
“The port engine shorted out when MER 2 flooded,” said the Cheng. “Starboard engine stayed dry and looks to be okay, but I wouldn’t want to put torque on the starboard shaft until I see how badly things got beat up in Shaft Alley. A few million foot pounds of rotational force can cause a lot of bad mojo if we’ve got a locked line shaft bearing or something. By the way, Captain, that was a good idea: stopping the shafts when that torpedo was after us.”
“Thanks,” said Heller. “I figured there was no chance of outrunning that monster, so the best I could do was limit the damage.”
“Well, it worked,” said the Chief Engineer. “We may have to drift around and wait for a tow, but at least we go home in one piece. Mostly.”
The captain stood up and stretched his muscles. “I’ll settle for mostly, Cheng. It beats the hell out of the alternative.”
“Yes, it does, sir,” said the engineering officer. “It most certainly does.”
At 0940 Zulu (0440 hours local time), a hatch opened in the curved upper hull of the Albany’s bow, exposing the dome shaped waterproof cap of a vertical launch missile cell. Three seconds later, the cap shattered along a series of pre-stressed structural points as a Block IV UGM-109E Tomahawk Land Attack Missile blasted out of its cell and roared toward the surface of the water in a turbulent shroud of smoke-filled bubbles.
When it broke through the wave tops, the weapon climbed into the night sky on a column of gray-white exhaust gasses. At a predetermined altitude, the solid fuel booster broke free and tumbled back into the sea.
The missile transitioned to cruise mode, stubby wings extending from the fuselage and a Williams International F107-WR-402 turbofan taking over the job of propulsion.
The guidance section locked onto down feeds from four GPS satellites, and used three of the signals to perform a Cartesian position calculation using a branch of circular geometry known as trilateration. By comparing the resulting “fix” with the signal from the fourth satellite, the guidance computer was able to determine the missile’s attitude with an error factor of less than one inch.
It was right on course, cruising at 550 miles per hour toward the North Korean missile site designated as Point Orange. It would reach its target in twenty minutes and seventeen seconds.
The second missile in the Point Orange fire mission broke the surface of the water twenty seconds after the first. The third missile broached twenty seconds after that, and the firing pattern continued until six Tomahawks were inbound to Point Orange.
The second fire mission, targeted on Point Green, began eight minutes later. It also consisted of six Tomahawks launched at intervals of twenty seconds. Between them, the twelve missiles comprised the entire land attack cruise missile inventory of USS Albany.
Each weapon followed a slightly different flight path, and they were all timed to arrive on target simultaneously.
There were identical fire missions launched from USS Philippine Sea and USS Lassen, timed to strike Point Blue and Point Red at the same instant as the Albany’s Tomahawks.
Standing ready for follow-up attacks were USS Hué City, USS Farragut, and USS Gettysburg—ready to deliver a second volley of cruise missiles if any of the North Korean launch sites survived the first strike.
The mop-up attacks were not necessary. Twenty-one minutes after USS Albany fired the first Tomahawk, the last of the nuclear missile sites had been eradicated from Cuban soil.
It wasn’t the sort of victory that Master Chief Ernie Pooler and his fellow submariners had hoped for, but it would have to do.
CHAPTER 67
The three B-2 Spirit bombers came in at 50,000 feet, slipping through North Korean air search radar coverage like electronic wraiths. Although not completely invisible to microwaves, their reflective cross-sections were low enough to keep any return signals below the threshold of atmospheric clutter. Coupled with infrared signature suppression, and the fact that the slate gray batwing shapes were extremely difficult to spot visually in the night sky, this made the B-2s as close to undetectable as current technologies permitted.
Based out of Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, the stealth aircraft were half way into a thirty-two hour mission. As long as the flight had been so far, and as much of it as still remained, the mission was twelve hours shy of the standing record.
On such long duration flights, the pilot and the mission commander (also a pilot) took turns sleeping in a folding cot aft of the cockpit. But no one was napping aboard the three bombers now as they made their final approaches to the target.
Coming up nine and a half miles below them was the Ryongsong Residence, the official presidential palace of Kim Yong-nam. Built for Kim Il-sung in the early 1980s by a construction brigade of the Korean People’s Army, the 4.6 square mile compound enclosed a seven story mansion, several lesser mansions, lush gardens, lakefront banquet halls, swimming pools, waterslides, athletic fields, horse stables and riding trails, a shooting range, and a race track for sports cars.
The complex also contained an underground command center intended to serve as wartime headquarters for the North Korean military, as well as subterranean railway tunnels connecting the facility to at least eight other residences of the Supreme Leader.
Kim Yong-nam was known to spend the night here frequently, although defectors from his regime reported that the man often awoke at random hours and rode his private subway to another of his highly-guarded palaces. This ever-shifting game of sleeping places was assumed to be a hedge against assassination attempts and military strikes.
Kim could be snoring peacefully down there, in some palatial bed chamber at this very moment. Or he might be someplace else entirely. The B-2 crews had no way of knowing, and it wasn’t their responsibility to find out. Whether they got lucky with Kim or not, their payloads were about to put a major dent in the military command and control structure of North Korea, as well as sending an unmistakable message to the Supreme Leader, his cronies, and potential enemies of the U.S. all over the world. This is what happens when you fuck with the United States of America.
At a precisely calculated instant, the lead B-2 dropped a GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, more popularly known as the ‘bunker buster.’ The ungainly looking 30,000 pound bomb fell clear of the ordnance bay, pitched over into a nose-down attitude, and used variable angle tail vanes to zero in on the GPS coordinates programmed into its guidance package.
The most powerful non-nuclear weapon of its kind, the GBU-57 was designed to penetrate and destroy hardened bunkers, armored missile silos, and other deep-buried fortified targets that were generally considered to be impenetrable.