Jack Ryan 7 - The Sum of All Fears (97 page)

“Where exactly?” Kuropatkin asked.

“Northwest of the city. I believe the explosion is in the southern part of
Denver
, General.”

“Correct. Go on.”

“Rocky Flats is also in the process of deactivation. To the best of our knowledge, there are no more weapons components to be found there.”

“Do they transport weapons through there? I must know something!” The General was finally getting excited.

“I have nothing more to tell you. We're as much in the dark as you. Perhaps KGB has more, but we do not.”

You couldn't shoot a man for honesty, Kuropatkin knew. He switched lines again. Like most professional soldiers, he had little use for spies, but the next call was a necessity.

“State Security, command center,” a male voice said.

“American department, the duty watch officer.”

“Stand by.” There was the usual chirping and clicking, and a female voice answered next. “American desk.”

“This is Lieutenant General Kuropatkin at
PVO
Moscow
Center
,” the man said yet again. “I need to know what, if anything, is happening in the
Central United States
, the city of
Denver
.”

“Very little, I would imagine.
Denver
is a major city, and a large administrative center for the American government, the second-largest after
Washington
, in fact. It is a Sunday evening there, and very little should be happening, at the moment.” Kuropatkin heard pages riffling. “Oh, yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“The final game in the championship-elimination series of American-rules football. It is being played in the new
Denver
city stadium which, I believe, is an enclosed structure.”

Kuropatkin managed not to curse the woman for that irrelevancy. “I don't need that. Is there any civil unrest, any sort of disturbance or ongoing problem? A weapons-storage facility, a secret base of some sort that I don't know about?”

“General, everything we have on such subjects is available to you. What is the nature of your inquiry?”

“Woman, there has been a nuclear explosion there.”

“In
Denver
?”

“Yes!”

“Where, exactly?” she asked, cooler than the General was.

“Stand by.” Kuropatkin turned. “I need coordinates on the explosion and I need them now!”

“Thirty-nine degrees forty minutes north latitude, one hundred five degrees six minutes west longitude. Those numbers are approximate,” the lieutenant on the satellite desk added. “Our resolution isn't very good in the infra-red spectrum, General.” Kuropatkin relayed the numbers.

“Wait,” the woman's voice said. “I need to fetch a map.”

Andrey Il'ych Narmonov was asleep. It was now
3:10
in the morning in
Moscow
. The phone woke him, and an instant later his bedroom door opened. Narmonov nearly panicked at the second event. No one ever entered his bedroom without permission. It was KGB Major Pavel Khrulev, the assistant chief of the president's personal security detail.

“My President, there is an emergency. You must come with me at once.”

“What is the matter, Pasha?”

“There has been a nuclear explosion in
America
.”

“What-who?”

“That is all I know. We must go at once to the command bunker. The car is waiting. Don't bother getting dressed.” Khrulev tossed him a robe.

Ryan stubbed out his cigarette, still annoyed at the “Technical Difficulty—Please Stand By” sign that was keeping him from watching the game. Goodley came in with a couple cans of Coke. Dinner was already ordered.

“What gives?” Goodley asked.

“Picture went out.” Ryan took his Coke and popped it open.

At SAC Headquarters, a lieutenant colonel at the far left side of the third row of battle-staff seats consulted the TV-controller card. The room had eight TV displays, arranged in two horizontal rows of four. One could call up more than fifty individual displays, and the woman was an intelligence officer whose first instinct was to check the new channels. A quick manipulation of her controller showed that both CNN and its subsidiary CNN Headline News were off the air. She knew that they used different satellite circuits, and that piqued her curiosity, perhaps the most important aspect of intelligence work. The system also allowed access to other cable channels, and she started going through them. HBO was off the air. Showtime was off the air. ESPN was off the air. She checked her directory and concluded that at least four satellites were not functioning. At that point, the colonel got up and walked over to C
IN
C-SAC.

“Sir, there's something very odd here,” she said.

“What's that?” C
IN
C-SAC said without turning.

“At least four commercial satellites appear to be down. That includes a Telstar, an Intelsat, and a Hughes bird. They're all down, sir.”

That notification caused C
IN
C-SAC to turn. “What else can you tell me?”

“Sir, NORAD reports that the explosion was in the
Denver
metropolitan area, very close to the Skydome where they were playing the Superbowl. SecState and SecDef were both at the game, sir.”

“Christ, you're right,” C
IN
C-SAC realized instantly.

At Andrews Air Force Base, the National Emergency Airborne Command Post—NEACP, pronounced “Kneecap”—was positioned on the ramp with two of its four engines turning, waiting for someone to arrive so that the crew could take off.

Captain Jim Rosselli had barely been on duty for an hour when this nightmare arrived. He sat in the NMCC Crisis Management Room, wishing a flag officer was here. That was not to be. While there had once been a General or Admiral in the
National
Military
Command
Center
at all times, the thaw between East and West and the downsizing of the Pentagon now meant that a senior officer was always on call, but the day-to-day administrative work was handled by captains and colonels. It could have been worse, Rosselli thought. At least he knew what it was to have lots of nuclear weapons at his disposal.

“What the fuck is going on?” Lieutenant Colonel Richard Barnes asked the wall. He knew that Rosselli didn't know.

“Rocky, can we save that for another time?” Rosselli asked calmly. His voice was dead-level. One might never have known from looking at or listening to the Captain that he was excited, but the former submarine commander's hands were so moist that by rubbing them on his trousers he'd already created a damp spot that their navy-blue color made invisible.

“You got it, Jim.”

“Call General Wilkes, let's get him in here.”

“Right.” Barnes punched a button on the secure phone, calling Brigadier General Paul Wilkes, a former bomber pilot who lived in official housing on Boiling Air Force Base, just across the
Potomac
from
National
Airport
.

“Yeah,” Wilkes said gruffly.

“Barnes here, sir. We need you in the NMCC immediately.” That was all the colonel had to say. “Immediately” is a word that has special meaning for an aviator.

“On the way.” Wilkes hung up and muttered further: “Thank God for four-wheel-drive.” He struggled into an olive-drab winter parka and headed out the door without bothering with boots. His personal car was a Toyota Land Cruiser that he liked for driving the back country. It started at once, and he backed out, struggling across roads not yet plowed.

The Presidential Crisis Room at
Camp David
was an anachronistic leftover from the bad old days, or so Bob Fowler had thought on first seeing it over a year before. Constructed during the Eisenhower Administration, it had been designed to resist nuclear attack in an age when the accuracy of a missile was measured in miles rather than yards. Blasted into the living granite rock of the
Catoctin Mountains
of western
Maryland
, it had a solid sixty feet of overhead protection, and until 1975 or so had been a highly secure and survivable shelter. About thirty feet wide and forty deep, with a ten-foot ceiling, it contained a staff of twelve, mostly Navy communications types, of whom six were enlisted men. The equipment was not quite as modern as that on NEACP or certain other facilities that the President might use. He sat at a console that looked like 1960s NASA in configuration. There was even an ashtray built into the desktop. In front of him was a bank of television sets. The chair was a comfortable one, even if the situation decidedly was not. Elizabeth Elliot took the one next to his.

“Okay,” President J. Robert Fowler said, “what the hell is going on?”

The senior briefing officer, he saw, was a Navy lieutenant commander. That was not very promising.

“Sir, your helicopter is down with a mechanical problem. A second Marine helo is on its way here now to get you to Kneecap. We have C
IN
C-SAC and C
IN
C-NORAD on line. These buttons here give you direct lines to all the other C
IN
Cs.” By this, the naval officer meant the Commanders-in-Chief of major joint-service commands: C
IN
CL
ANT
was Commander-in-Chief Atlantic, Admiral Joshua Painter, USN; there was a corresponding C
IN
C-P
AC
in charge of Pacific area forces, and both were traditionally Navy posts. C
IN
C-S
OUTH
was in
Panama
, C
IN
C-C
ENT
in
Bahrain
, C
IN
C-F
OR
—heading Forces Command—was at
Fort
McPherson
in
Atlanta
,
Georgia
, all three of which were traditionally Army posts. There were others as well, including SACEUR, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, the chief NATO military officer, who at the moment was an Air Force four-star general. Under the existing command system, the service chiefs actually had no command authority. Instead, they advised the Secretary of Defense, who in turn advised the President. Presidential orders were issued from the President through the SecDef directly to the C
IN
Cs.

But the SecDef . . .

Fowler looked for the button labeled NORAD and pushed it.

“This is the President. I am in my
Camp David
communications room.”

“Mr. President, this is still Major General Borstein. C
IN
C-NORAD is not here, sir. He was in
Denver
for the Superbowl. Mr. President, it is my duty to advise you that our instruments put the detonation either at or very near the Skydome stadium in
Denver
. It would appear very likely that Secretaries Bunker and Talbot are both dead, along with C
IN
C-NORAD.”

“Yes,” Fowler said. There was no emotion in his voice. He'd already reached that conclusion.

“The Vice-C
IN
C is traveling at the moment. I will be the senior NORAD officer for the next few hours until someone more senior manages to get back.”

“Very well. Now: what the hell is going on?”

“Sir, we do not know. The detonation was not preceded by anything unusual. There was not—I repeat, sir, not—a ballistic inbound track prior to the explosion. We are trying to contact the air controllers at
Stapleton
International
Airport
to have them check their radar tapes for a possible airborne delivery vehicle. We didn't see anything coming in on any of our scopes.”

“Would you have seen an inbound aircraft?”

“Not necessarily, sir,” General Borstein replied. “It's a good system, but there are ways to beat it, especially if you use a single aircraft. In any case, Mr. President, there are some things we need to do at once. Can we talk about that for a moment?”

“Yes.”

“Sir, on my own command authority as acting-C
IN
C-NORAD, I have placed my command on DEFCON-ONE alert. As you know, NORAD has that authority, and also nuclear-release authority for defensive purposes only.”

“You will not release any nuclear weapons without my authorization,” Fowler said forcefully.

“Sir, the only nukes we have in our inventory are in storage,” Borstein said. His voice was admirably mechanical, the other uniformed people thought. “I propose that we next initiate a conference call with C
IN
C-SAC.”

“Do it,” Fowler ordered. It happened instantly.

“Mr. President, this is C
IN
C-SAC,” General Peter Fremont, USAF announced. His voice was all business.

“What the hell is going on?”

“Sir, we do not know that, but there are some things we should do immediately.”

“Go on.”

“Sir, I recommend that we immediately place all of our strategic forces on a higher alert level. I recommend DEFCON-TWO. If we are dealing with a nuclear attack, we should posture our forces to maximum readiness. That will enable us to respond to an attack with the greatest possible effect. It could also have the effect of deterring whoever got this thing underway, in the event that he might have—or we could give him—second thoughts.”

“If I can add to that, sir, we should also increase our readiness across the board. If for no other reason, the availability of military units to provide assistance and to reduce possible civilian panic might be very useful. I recommend DEFCON-THREE for conventional forces.”

“Better to do that selectively, Robert,” Liz Elliot said.

“I heard that—who is it?” Borstein asked.

“This is the National Security Advisor,” Liz said, a touch too loudly. She was as pale as her white silk blouse. Fowler was still under control. Elliot was struggling to do the same.

“We have not met, Dr. Elliot. Unfortunately, our command-and-control systems do not allow us to do that selectively—at least not very fast. By sending out the alert now, however, we can activate all the units we need, then select the units we need to do things while they come on line. That will save us at least an hour. That is my recommendation.”

“I concur in that,” General Fremont added at once.

“Very well, do it,” Fowler said. It sounded reasonable enough.

The communications were handled through separate channels. C
IN
C-SAC handled the strategic forces. The first Emergency Action Message used the same robotic voice that had already scrambled the alerted SAC wings. While the SAC bomber bases already knew that they were being alerted, the DEFCON-TWO notice made it official and far more ominous. Fiber-optic land-lines carried a similar notice to the Navy's Extremely Low Frequency radio system located in
Michigan
's
Upper Peninsula
region. This signal had to be sent out by mechanical Morse. The nature of this radio system was such that it could only send out its characters very slowly, rather like the speed of a novice typist, and it acted as a cueing system, telling submarines to come to the surface for a more detailed message to be delivered by satellite radios.