Suddenly he reduced thrust to idle on the two eighteen-thousand-pound-thrust Tumanskys, bleeding off speed, the plane’s attitude a hammerhead stall/slide in the vertical plane — the effect of this on the enemy’s Doppler radar calculated to be one of utter confusion, for without relative speed measurement, no target would appear on the enemy plane’s screen.
Shirer remembered the Russian maneuver, reduced thrust, went into a climb, broke cloud, and glimpsed the Fulcrum still above him sliding backward into his HUD sight. It was only for a fraction of a second. Shirer’s thumb pushed the Vulcan button — the burst only a half second, but in that time, twenty-five of the machine gun’s twenty-millimeter bullets hit the Fulcrum’s spine, the burst finishing its run in the cockpit, the Fulcrum’s Perspex exploding in whitish-green fragments. The Fulcrum kept sliding, tail first, its number nine in front of the box jet intake and the slogan “Ubiytsa Yanki”—”Yankee Killer”—seen only briefly before the fighter quickly went into an uncontrolled spin, the big slab tail fins a gray blur, obscured momentarily by the sudden opening of the cruciform braking chute. But now the plane was burning, and in another second the chute was a black smudge against the snow of the Yalu’s foothills, the explosion as the Fulcrum hit, a silent orange blossom.
“Good kill! Good kill!” the RIO was shouting.
“Any pilot chute?” asked Shirer.
“Negative,” confirmed his RIO. “No chute!”
“Great! Now I can go back to the Bus. By this time tomorrow night, I’ll be heading back to Andrews.”
The RIO was perplexed; the only “Bus” he knew about was the reentry-vehicle dispenser used on intercontinental ballistic missiles.
By now the four Tomcats were too far apart and their fuel too low after the afterburners’ greedy consumption to regroup, and so they made their way individually back to Kapsan field south of the Yalu.
In Washington, President Mayne was sitting quietly behind the Oval Office desk as he and the four chiefs of staff, Security Adviser Schuman, and Press Secretary Trainor listened to the chief of naval operations.
“So, gentlemen,” Mayne asked, the migrane that had threatened him thwarted not only by medication but by sheer will. “What to do?”
“Tell the Russians,” said the CNO, Admiral Horton, “if they go nuclear, we’ll fire everything we’ve got.”
“Don’t by silly!” said Mayne.
The admiral was stunned, as were the other chiefs of staff and press aide Paul Trainor, though Trainor, with long experience in front of the press, did not betray his surprise. Adviser Schuman, however, was not surprised and sat holding his cane, calmly gazing down at the plush carpet, observing the intricate design of the new great seal of the United States at war, the eagle’s clutch of arrows in the right rather than the left claws.
“The president’s correct,” said Schuman. “You people were telling us only the other day, Admiral, that whatever their deficiencies, the Russians are infinitely better equipped to have at least a quarter of the population avail themselves of extensive nuclear shelters. We, however, are out to lunch as far as that’s concerned, because, as you correctly pointed out, gentlemen, my learned colleagues in Congress have long accepted Mr. Sagan’s view that a nuclear war is unwinnable. Never mind the limited radiation yield, for example, on our atomic shells, et cetera. Mr. ‘Billions and Billions’ and his disciples convinced us that civil defense was futile. Now we’re paying the price for our gullibility on that score. And because of that, the only thing we can really threaten them with is our submarine-launched missiles. We have a few ICBMs operational in the Midwest, but communications are so generally fouled up because of continuing sabotage, we cannot depend on any realistic coordinated or widespread missile offense from our land-based silos or from SAC.”
“Sir, I think—” began Allet.
“Oh, yes, yes,” said Schuman, “you may get a few planes off — providing the SPETS cells in this country, who we already know have used surface-to-air Stinger missiles, don’t bring them down as they take off. Besides, it will take only one or two air bursts and the resulting electromagnetic pulse would scramble whatever networks we have remaining. There’s not enough sheathed wire in the country to prevent a wholesale screw-up.”
Mayne had never heard Schuman use anything approaching foul language.
“No,” continued Schuman morosely yet emphatically, using the tip of his cane like an exclamation point. “In the last analysis, we can really rely only on our submarines.” He turned to the CNO. “Can we get a message to them about the Korean situation vis-à-vis the use of Chinese nerve gas and U.S.A.-shell retaliation, perhaps tempting the Soviets to go nuclear in Europe?”
Admiral Horton pointed out it would be difficult to raise all of the submarines — as even in the best of circumstances, there were problems with thermal inversions, atmospheric conditions, et cetera, though he conceded submarines would certainly be alert to any massive “nuclear engagement in progress.” Air bursts above most targets, especially those on the seaboard such as New York and Boston, and in Europe above such vital ports as Portsmouth and Hamburg, would be picked up all over the world by some sub via the sound channel.
“Then,” concluded a somber Schuman, “seeing as our civilian population is without shelters of any kind against an all-out exchange, the only option we’ll have if things become unraveled is tit for tat. Instant retaliation — target for target.
The president nodded. They could hear the clock on the mantel above the fireplace. Finally it was Mayne who broke the silence. “Of course, if ‘Merlin’ succeeds, we might be off the hook — prevent Europe from turning into another Yalu.”
The chiefs were split on this. The army thought that if the SAS could eliminate the Moscow leadership, it would certainly buy time. The navy and air force, however, were still worried about the IAL—”independent launch authority”—of Soviet submarines.
“Surely to God,” said Mayne, “we must know where most of their subs are and so be ready to intercept any—”
“Most of their nukes, yes, sir,” answered Horton. “That is, we can pretty well tell you the general areas where all the nuclear subs are but, the problem is that if this—” Exhausted, the admiral tried to think of the man’s name, but the more he tried, the more it receded.
“Captain Ray Brentwood,” said Trainor.
“Yes. Well, the problem is, if his hypothesis about two diesel-electrics being close in somewhere on the West Coast is correct, we could be in a lot of trouble. Now that we’ve managed to repair the severed hydrophone arrays on the East Coast, we’ve got the situation in hand in the Atlantic. Of course, that’s where we’ve had our greatest concentration of ASW forces because of the NATO convoys. The problem in the Pacific is that they don’t have to go through anything like the Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap, where we managed to sink a lot of the Russian subs early on. -
“The assumption made by this Ray Brentwood, and I think he’s correct, is that the two diesel-electrics unaccounted for probably came out of Vladivostok, snorkeling in bad weather, when it’s hard to spot them, even by satellite, and when prop noise is difficult to pick up. Coming down from the Japanese Current into the southbound Californian Current, they’d be able to drift a ways and come in close on battery power. Their silent running, unlike that of the nukes, is really silent. At least with their nukes, our hydrophones can pick up the sound of the pumps.”
“How big are these diesel-electrics?” asked the president.
“Assuming these are the ones whose signatures we had prewar but cannot account for now, we’d say they’re probably converted Golf V-class diesel-electrics. Around twenty-seven hundred tons — three hundred and twenty-eight feet long. Carrying either one SS-N-20 or two SS-N-8 ICBMs and ten torpedoes. This Brentwood thinks they’re probably carrying the two SS-N-8s — each warhead a reentry vehicle with seven hundred and fifty kilotons. Not very fast subs, compared to the nuclear boats — seventeen knots surface, twelve to fourteen submerged.”