Within five minutes of the Roosevelt’s surfacing, her VLF aerial was receiving the message from the E-6A TACAMO aircraft out of Reykjavik, Iceland, informing her that limited chemical and nuclear war had broken out in Korea and that “nuclear engagement” might soon occur on the European front. With this in mind, the president had authorized retaliatory strikes should the Russians… The message broke off, then resumed a few seconds later as Murmansk launched three ICBMs on North American trajectories despite the fact that Murmansk HQ, as they had seen clearly on their radar screens and as the TACAMO aircraft had advised them, knew that the Roosevelt’s ICBMs had not gone into intercontinental trajectory, had clearly been disarmed, and had been tracked to destruction on the ice cap. The TACAMO aircraft also advised the Roosevelt there was reason to suspect the Soviet leadership was in “disarray,” which, Zeldman pointed out, meant that no one knew who the hell was in charge of Moscow.
As suddenly as they had picked up the TACAMO message, it ended, the aircraft disappearing from Roosevelt’s sail-mounted radar. Instead, what they did pick up were the trajectories of the Russian ICBMs. Brentwood did not hesitate and ordered two of the remaining missiles, the mid pair — three and four — launched. Firing Control, however, could not get number three to launch, the tube’s humidity control having gone haywire during the severe vibrations. Number four, however, was fired successfully, its launch flame buckling the fairings about the tube hatches, increasing the temperature inside the sub by ten degrees in less than four seconds.
Soon the second of its three-stage boosters took over, the missile streaking into the stratosphere, its seven 330-kiloton warheads independently targeted on seven of Kola Peninsula’s major submarine and military bases. Even given a CEP— circular error probability — of plus or minus two thousand yards, the military targets, including the superhardened sub pens in Murmansk, chosen by Brentwood in retaliation for the Russian launch of the three SS-19 model 3s, were all certain to be destroyed.
Most of the Roosevelt’s crew had been evacuated to the ice through “charge-blown” exits through the hull. Their escape was so quick after the long, tension-filled hours behind them that for many, it had not yet sunk in. Yet leaving their submarine, despite the fact they had no choice, was an emotional affair. It was, had been, their home. They had made it so in a thousand little ways that, though conforming to regulation, permitted them to mark it with their singular and collective humanity. And now, in the gray darkness of the Arctic night, rugging up as best they could in their winter issue, they wondered if their fate on the ice cap would be any better than if they had gone down with the sub. For many submariners the sudden implosion of water was a better death than a lingering approximation of life.
It was a torpedoman’s mate who, assigned as one of the lookouts while the rest of the crew — first those who had been wounded during the Alfa attack — were taken off, first noticed what he thought were “ice piles” jutting up on the endlessly depressing horizon. He was reinforced in this interpretation by the fact that the ice was moving in all about them and locking Roosevelt in. But after several minutes he realized that what he had thought were four dots, moving too low for a radar pickup, were heading ominously toward Roosevelt. Shivering in the Arctic cold, the bridge knuckled with ice, the torpedoman’s mate was struck by the ultimate irony that the most powerful warship ever made now sat as helpless as a beached whale, the black dots no longer four but five.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
As the Russian ICBMs, SS-19s, Model 3s — eighteen warheads in all — were being tracked on the big blue screens deep in Cheyenne Mountain, the mountain itself one of their targets, another being SAC HQ below Omaha, President Mayne stepped from the presidential helicopter at Andrews and boarded “Kneecap.” The 425-ton, 331-foot-long national emergency airborne command post aircraft, or “Doomsday” plane — piloted by Maj. Frank Shirer — was capable of staying airborne for seventy-two hours with refueling and with a ceiling of forty-five thousand feet.
As the 747 rose above the blue hills of Virginia, mobile microwave relay and booster stations were being aligned, while the phone network into which signals from the plane’s five-mile-long, 5/8-inch cable could be fed into the silos and other elements of the triad were being repaired.
From the line of twenty-eight stern-faced computer operators in Kneecap came the information that the targets of the seventeen missiles almost certainly included Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, Omaha, Nebraska, the Trident SLBM sub bases at Bangor, Washington, Kings Bay, and the Trident tracking facilities at Point Magu in California and Cape Canaveral. The remaining eleven 550-kiloton warheads were expected to zero in on the MX silos in the Midwest.
The situation, bad as it was, became more terrible because of what General Carlisle, SAC’s commander, who had already launched Stealth fighter intercepts to fire “spoiler” rockets and B-1 bombers with cruise missiles, told the president in the last phone call he would ever make — that they were faced with the “old north/south problem.”
President Mayne and Paul Trainor, sitting before the banks of small TV screens in the presidential command room aboard Kneecap, knew Carlisle wasn’t talking about the Civil War. The old north/south problem was the fact, not generally known among either the public at large or the military, that all tests of Soviet ICBMs had, for no other reason than the geography of the country, been carried out on east/west axes and not on north/south axes, which, in any hostile launch, such as the one now on the way, would be the axis used in attacking the United States.
To the man in the street, a missile, like a bullet, presumably operated the same way, no matter in what direction it was fired. But, as the president’s aides explained, missiles, due to the necessity of accurately predicting trajectories that would leave the earth’s atmosphere and then reenter it, were not only subject to wind and weather in general but were particularly dependent upon the shifts in the earth’s magnetic field. It was the reason why, even under the most favorable atmospheric circumstances, a missile still had a circular error probability.
This rather esoteric mathematical consideration translated into a monumental decision for the president because of the fact that, unlike the Soviet Union, many U.S. missiles, such as the Tridents deployed in nuclear sub storage areas such as Bangor, near Seattle, were close to, if not part of, American cities. How could the president know, given the vicissitudes of missiles’ circular error probability, whether the Russians were in fact engaging in “counterforce”—antimilitary — or “countervalue”—anticity — attacks, when so many American bases, unlike many in the Soviet Union, were often part of an American city?
On one level the question seemed purely academic — even, as the president acknowledged, cold-blooded — but it was nevertheless one he had to entertain, for he would not have much time to decide what the Russian strategy was. And if he made the wrong decision — to go countervalue rather than counterforce in any retaliatory strike — it could mean an escalation that could result in utter annihilation for both countries’ industries and most of their people. Could he confine retaliatory strikes to military targets like those selected by the Roosevelt’s captain when he had fired an SLBM in retaliation for the Russians’ multiple ICBM launch?