Jack Ryan 7 - The Sum of All Fears (102 page)

He'd needed two years to make his theoretical breakthrough into something practical, but fifteen months earlier he'd made his first “recovery” from the U.S. State Department's most secure cipher, called S
TRIPE
. Six months after that he'd proven conclusively that it was similar in structure to everything the
U.S.
military used. Cross-checking with another team of cryptanalysts who had access to the work of the
Walker
spy ring, and the even more serious work done by Pelton, what had resulted only six months earlier was a systematic penetration of American encryption systems. It was still not perfect. Daily keying procedures occasionally proved impossible to break. Sometimes they went as much as a week without recovering one message, but they'd gone as many as three days recovering over half of what they received, and their results were improving by the month. Indeed, the main problem seemed to be that they didn't have the computer hardware to do all the work they should have been able to do, and the 8th Directorate was busily training more linguists to handle the message traffic they were receiving.

Sergey Nikolayevich Golovko had been awakened from a sound sleep and driven to his office to add his name to the people all over the world shocked into frightened sobriety. A First Chief Directorate man all of his life, his job was to examine the collective American mind and advise his President on what was going on. The decrypts flooding onto his desk were the most useful tool.

He had no less than thirty such messages which bore one of two messages. All strategic forces were being ordered to Defense Condition Two, and all conventional forces were coming to Defense Condition Three. The American President was panicking, KGB's First Deputy Chairman thought. There was no other explanation. Was it possible that he thought the
Soviet Union
had committed this infamy?
That was the most frightening thought of his life.

“Another one, naval one.” The messenger dropped it on his desk.

Golovko needed only one look. “Flash this to the navy immediately.” He had to call his President with the rest. Golovko lifted the phone.

For once the Soviet bureaucracy worked quietly. Minutes later, an extremely low-frequency signal went out, and the submarine Admiral Lunin went to the surface to copy the full message. Captain Dubinin read it as the printer generated it.

A
MERICAN SUBMARINE
USS
M
AINE
REPORTS LOCATION AS
50
D
-55
M
-09
S
N   153
D
-01
M
-23
S
W.  P
ROPELLER DISABLED  BY COLLISION  OF  UNKNOWN  CAUSE.
Dubinin left the communications room and made for the chart table.

“Where were we when we copied that transient?”

“Here, Captain, and the bearing was here.” The navigator traced the line with his pencil.

Dubinin just shook his head. He handed the message over. “Look at this.”

“What do you suppose he's doing?”

“He'll be close to the surface. So . . . we'll go up, just under the layer, and we'll move quickly. Surface noise will play hell with his sonar. Fifteen knots.”

“You suppose he was following us?”

“Took you long enough to realize that, didn't it?” Dubinin measured the distance to the target. “Very proud, this one. We'll see about that. You know how the Americans boast of taking hull photographs? Now, my young lieutenant, now it will be our turn!”

“What does this mean?” Narmonov asked the First Deputy Chairman.

“The Americans have been attacked by forces unknown, and the attack was serious, causing major loss of life. It is to be expected that they will increase their military readiness. A major consideration will be the maintenance of public order,” Golovko replied over the secure phone line.

“And?”

“And, unfortunately, all their strategic weapons happen to be aimed at the Rodina.”

“But we had no part in this!” the Soviet president objected.

“Correct. You see, such responses are automatic. They are planned in advance and become almost reflexive moves. Once attacked, you become highly cautious. Countermoves are planned in advance, so that you may act rapidly while applying your intellectual capacities to an analysis of the problem without additional and unnecessary distractions.”

The Soviet President turned to his Defense Minister. “So, what should we do?”

“I advise an increase in our alert status. Defensive-only, of course. Whoever conducted this attack might, after all, attempt to strike us also.”

“Approved,” Narmonov said bluntly. “Highest peacetime alert.”

Golovko frowned at his telephone receiver. His choice of words had been exquisitely correct: reflexive. “May I make a suggestion?”

“Yes,” the Defense Minister said.

“If it is possible, perhaps it would be well to tell our forces the reason for the alert. It might lessen the shock of the order.”

“It's a needless complication,” Defense thought.

“The Americans have not done this,” Golovko said urgently, “and that was almost certainly a mistake. Please consider the state of mind of people suddenly taken from ordinary peacetime operations to an elevated state of alert. It will only require a few additional words. Those few words could be important.”

“Good idea,” Narmonov thought. “Make it so,” he ordered Defense.

“We will soon hear from the Americans on the Hot Line,” Narmonov said. “What will they say?”

“That is hard to guess, but whatever it is, we should have a reply ready for them, just to settle things down, to make sure they know we had nothing to do with it.”

Narmonov nodded. That made good sense. “Start working on it.”

The Soviet defense-communications agency operators grumbled at the signal they'd been ordered to dispatch. For ease of transmission, the meat of the signal should have been contained in a single five-letter code group that could be transmitted, decrypted, and comprehended instantly by all recipients, but that was not possible now. The additional sentences had to be edited down to keep the transmission from being too long. A major did this, got it approved by his boss, a Major General, and sent it out over no less than thirty communications links. The message was further altered to apply to specific military services.

The Admiral Lunin had only been on her new course for five minutes when a second ELF signal arrived. The communications officer fairly ran into the control room with it.

GENERAL ALERT LEVEL TWO. THERE HAS BEEN A NUCLEAR DETONATION OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN IN THE UNITED STATES. AMERICAN STRATEGIC AND CONVENTIONAL FORCES HAVE BEEN ALERTED FOR POSSIBLE WAR. ALL NAVAL FORCES WILL SORTIE AT ONCE. TAKE ALL NECESSARY PROTECTIVE MEASURES.

“Has the world gone mad?” the captain asked the message. He got no reply. “That's all?”

“That is all, no cueing to put the antenna up.”

“These are not proper instructions,” Dubinin objected. “'All necessary protective measures'? What do they mean by  that?  Protecting ourselves,  protecting the Motherland—what the hell do they mean?”

“Captain,” the Starpom said, “General Alert Two carries its own rules of action.”

“I know that,” Dubinin said, “but do they apply here?”

“Why else would the signal have been sent?”

A Level Two General Alert was something unprecedented for the Soviet Military. It meant that the rules of action were not those of a war but not those of peace either. Though Dubinin, like every other Soviet ship captain, fully understood his duties, the implications of the order seemed far too frightening . . . The thought passed, however. He was a naval officer. He had his orders. Whoever had given those orders must have understood the situation better than he. The commanding officer of the Admiral Lunin stood erect and turned to his second in command.

“Increase speed to twenty-five knots. Battle stations.”

It happened just as fast as men could move. The New York FBI office, set in the
Jacob
Javits
Federal
Office
Building
on the southern end of
Manhattan
, dispatched its men north, and the light Sunday traffic made it easy. The unmarked but powerful cars screamed uptown to the various network headquarters buildings. The same thing happened in
Atlanta
, where agents left the
Martin
Luther
King
Building
for CNN Headquarters. In each case, no fewer than three agents marched into the master control rooms and laid down the law: nothing from
Denver
would go out. In no case did the network employees know why this was so, they were so busy trying to reestablish contact. The same thing happened in
Colorado
, where, under the direction of Assistant Special-Agent-in-Charge Walter Hoskins, the local field division's agents invaded all the network affiliates, and the local phone company, where they cut all longdistance lines over the furious objections of the
Bell
employees. But Hoskins had made one mistake. It came from the fact that he didn't watch much television.

KOLD was an independent station that was also trying to become a superstation. Like TBS, WOR, and a few others, it had its own satellite link to cover a wide viewing area. A daring financial gamble, it had not yet paid off for the investors who were running the station on a highly leveraged shoestring out of an old and almost windowless building northeast of the city. The station used one of the Anik-series Canadian satellites and reached
Alaska
,
Canada
, and the
North-Central US
reasonably well with its programming, which was mainly old network shows.

The KOLD building had once been
Denver
's first network television station, and was constructed in the pattern originally required by the Federal Communications Commission in the 1930s: monolithic reinforced concrete, fit to survive an enemy bomb attack—the specifications pre-dated nuclear weapons. The only windows were in the executive offices on the south side of the building. It was ten minutes after the event that someone passed by the open door of the program manager. He stopped cold, turned and ran back to the newsroom. In another minute, a cameraman entered onto the freight elevator that ran all the way to the roof. The picture, hard-wired into the control room and then sent out on a Ku-Band transmitter to the Anik satellite, which was untouched by earlier events, broke into the reruns of The Adventures of Dobie Gillis across Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, Idaho, and three Canadian provinces. In
Calgary
,
Alberta
, a reporter for a local paper who'd never got over her crush on Dwayne Hickman was startled by the picture and the voice-over, and called her city desk. Her breathless report went out at once on the Reuters wire. Soon thereafter, CBC uplinked the video to
Europe
on one of their unaffected Anik satellites.

By that time, the Denver FBI had a pair of men entering the KOLD building. They laid down the law to a news crew that protested about the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which argument carried less weight than the men with guns who shut the power down to their transmitter. The FBI agents at least apologized as they did so. They needn't have bothered. What had been a fool's errand from the beginning was already an exercise in futility.

“So, what the hell is going on?” Richards asked his staff.

“We have no idea, sir. No reason was given for the alert,” the communications officer said lamely.

“Well, it leaves us between two chairs, doesn't it?” That was a rhetorical question. The TR battlegroup was just passing
Malta
, and was now in range of targets in the
Soviet Union
. That required “The Stick's” A-6E Intruders to take off, climb rapidly to cruising altitude, and top off their tanks soon thereafter, but at that point they had the gas to make it all the way to their targets on or near the
Kerch
Peninsula
. Only a year before, U.S. Navy carriers, though carrying a sizable complement of thermonuclear bombs, had not been part of the SIOP. This acronym, pronounced “Sy-Op” stood for “Single Integrated Operations Plan,” and was the master blueprint for dismantling the
Soviet Union
. The drawdown of strategic missiles—mostly land-based ones for the United States—had radically reduced the number of available warheads, and, like planners everywhere, the Joint Strategic Targeting Staff, co-located with headquarters SAC, tried to make up for the shortfall in any way they could. As a result, whenever an aircraft carrier was in range of Soviet targets, it assumed its SIOP tasking. In the case of USS Theodore Roosevelt, it meant that about the time the ship passed east of
Malta
, she became not a conventional-theater force, but a nuclear-strategic force. To fulfill this mission, TR carried fifty B-61-Mod-8 nuclear gravity bombs in a special, heavily-guarded magazine. The B-61 had FUFO—for “full fusing option,” more commonly called “dial-a-yield”—that selected an explosive power ranging from ten to five hundred kilotons. The bombs were twelve feet long, less than a foot in diameter, weighed a mere seven hundred pounds, and were nicely streamlined to cut air resistance. Each A-6E could carry two of them, with all of its other hard-points occupied by auxiliary fuel tanks to allow a combat radius of more than a thousand miles. Ten of them were the explosive equivalent of a whole squadron of Minuteman missiles. Their assigned targets were naval, on the principle that people most often kill friends, or at least associates, rather than total strangers. One assigned SIOP mission, for example, was to reduce the Nikolayev Shipyard on the
Dniepr
River
to a radioactive puddle. Which was, incidentally, where the Soviet carrier Kuznetzov had been built.

The Captain's additional problem was that his battle group commander, an Admiral, had taken the chance to fly into
Naples
for a conference with the Commander of the United States Sixth Fleet. Richards was on his own.

“Where's our friend?”
Roosevelt
's CO asked.

“About two hundred fifty miles back,” the operations officer said. “Close.”

“Let's get the plus-fives right up, skipper,”
Jackson
said. “I'll take two and orbit right about here to watch the back door.” He tapped the chart.

“Play it cool, Rob.”

“No sweat, Ernie.”
Jackson
walked to a phone. “Who's up?” he asked the VF-1 ready room. “Good.”
Jackson
went off to get his flight suit and helmet.