Power Play (31 page)

But Jack Myers knew better than that. For the past three or four weeks, he had been preoccupied with a new space laboratory being launched in the next few days. But he still had read the memos detailing how a huge fortified monastery in North Russia was being converted into the main target of the US surveillance system in that part of the world.

Here was final proof that something was going on. General Myers did not know what the massive white and rippled sphere contained, but he was sure it was something to do with satellite communications.

The second photograph showed something unusual rather than mystifying. The freighter turning into the Bosporus had been tracked by US satellites all the way from the northern ports of the Black Sea. But this one was from a Russian Naval harbor, outside Sevastopol in the Ukraine. The ship was civilian, around five thousand tons, and it had made a beeline north to south across the Black Sea, straight to the Bosporus.

This was the unusual part. Russian Naval vessels rarely left the Black Sea these days, conducting exercises and workups for newly refitted warships right there in the 168,000 square miles of this inland ocean, which is 7,000 feet deep in parts and 800 miles wide.

For a civilian ship to come out of a Russian Naval yard and head directly for the only Black Sea exit was unusual. The Russian Navy traditionally did all of its own fetch-and-carry work. General Myers wondered what this five-thousand-ton freighter was carrying when it pulled out of Sevastopol.

He asked for details and was quite surprised to be told an hour later there was a good chance it was carrying nothing, it was riding so high in the water. It was moving at sixteen knots and picked up a Turkish pilot as soon as it crossed the unseen line across the northern entrance to the Bosporus between Fort Rumineleferi to starboard and the headland of Anadolu on the left.

General Myers instructed his ops room to keep a weather eye on the ship, and he sent a signal to the Pentagon, alerting them he was tracking a large, empty merchant freighter out of Russian Naval Base Sevastopol,
making its way through the Bosporus Strait toward the Mediterranean. Its name was
Koryak,
presumably after the Siberian Mountain range north of the Kamchatka Peninsula in the northern Pacific.

Everything about it was unusual. It was almost unheard of for any Russian merchantman to leave the Black Sea with no cargo. It was doubly unusual that
Koryak
came from a navy port, and there was absolutely no record of its going into the Sevastopol Base, which suggested it had been in the dockyard for many months.

General Myers had been specifically instructed to keep a keen watch on anything out of the ordinary that took place in or around Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, and this fitted the profile. US satellites would track that ship to the end of the earth if necessary.

 

The news from the monastery was not wonderful. A serious question had been raised about the Iskander-K’s guidance system by one of the North Korean nuclear missile scientists. And Admiral Alexander Ustinov knew better than to argue with very smart Far Eastern rocket men.

The technician in question, Dr. Chon Nam-sun, was on loan at hideous expense from the government of North Korea, and he was concerned about the Russian missile’s reaction to sudden landmasses as it flew over water. This involved the most sensitive areas of radar guidance and had bedeviled missilemen all over the world for decades.

The most common issue was in the radar of the fire-and-forget cruise missile, or SAM (surface-to-air). With the radar beams aimed out over open water, the system worked perfectly and could detect any incoming fighter-bomber or missile in very good time. The problems always arose when the radar scan flashed onto an island, or even the mainland, and momentarily the screen would fill with “snow,” fizzing out the picture.

Nowadays it usually cleared, but many operators recall the old days of twenty-five years ago when, on certain systems, it never cleared. It seemed the sudden change from sea to land confused it, and while the problem has been removed from some modern Western missile systems, there are
often traces of the old flaw. This was likely to cause a rush of blood to the heart of any missile scientist.

Dr. Chon Nam-sun, working deep in the underground laboratories of the Solovetsky Monastery, had seen something that alarmed him. He spoke to the lead Russian project director, pointing out the blip on the screen when the computer fed in a landmass to the fictitious virtual missile. “Just imagine,” he had said, “that missile flying at Mach-5 across the Caribbean, suddenly is faced with the Florida peninsula up ahead, swerves, and smashes straight into downtown Miami. With nuclear warhead, that flatten very big city, and bring you very bad war with Americans—goodnight, Moscow.”

“Doctor, we can take no chances,” replied the Russian. “But I ask you one thing: how come the test went so well, no problems of this kind?”

“Sir, there were two problems, so small hardly anyone recognized them, but I was looking at the screen and for single second there was a blip, very early on when the missile reached the Kola Peninsula, and another when it crossed above the polar ice cap northeast of Spitsbergen.

“I said nothing at the time, but I did study the playback. I showed the main-screen technical observer, and he also had noticed the two blips, and one of them was distinctive, blocking the screen for maybe one and a half seconds.”

“Is this serious?”

“I don’t know. But I’m concerned about the missile suddenly running directly at very warm land, like Florida. We can fix it, but I need to know it’s not going to happen before I sign off the final documents that express my satisfaction with the work we have carried out.”

“How do we find out?”

“We run a new test, and this time we will try to fly a similar course to the real thing.”

“That’s predominantly over water. The Panama launch will send the missile straight out over the western Caribbean,” replied the Solovetsky project chief, at the same time pulling up a computerized satellite picture of the area.

He studied it for a few moments and said, “It’s ocean all the way for the first 800 miles, and then the missile needs to fly straight over the narrowest part of the Cuban jungle. From there it’s a 300-mile slingshot up past the Bahamas, logging 1,140 miles off Miami.”

“How far off Miami?” asked Dr. Chon.

“I’d say close to 100 miles, but far enough for them to miss seeing us, with luck.”

“At supersonic speed we make Maryland in under fifteen minutes, flying the ocean all the way,” said the doctor. “That’s nice. Very nice. I’m not worried about the range, only the swerve if that radar scanner blips on us. Florida has many, many people on east coast. Many important people. No swerves, okay? I sign nothing ’til chances of swerve eliminated.”

“You may do whatever it takes to perfect the Iskander’s guidance system,” replied the Russian formally.

“Sir, it would be simple if we could fly higher,” said Dr. Chon. “But my orders are to stay low as possible, maybe fifty feet above water surface. Always under American radar.”

“When will you be ready for the new test?”

“Two days. We launch same place but spotter locations different. Must be very accurate.”

“You want it made open to VIP visitors?”

“Not this time. Very quiet. Just in case I am not satisfied. Because it may all look fine, but I know there is a very small flaw, and I must kill it.”

Dr. Chon had spent the next hour plotting the new route, trying to fly straight over possibly the coldest ocean in the world in order to fly very fast over one of the warmest.

Russia’s deadly Iskander-K would blast off vertically, locking onto its route with a huge swing to the northeast and then ripping across the White Sea, straight up to the only seaway in and out of this landlocked northern ocean.

Three hundred miles, in four and a half minutes, would see the missile cross the Kanin Nos headland, which guards the White Sea at the very tip of the long and desolate Kanin Peninsula, to starboard for exiting ships.

Now over the Barents Sea, the Iskander would streak another six hundred miles before crossing the glaciers on the huge island of Novaya Zemlya, the old Russian nuclear-testing site that separates the Barents from the Kara Sea.

Dr. Chon plotted a forty-five-degree swing north just to keep the missile low over the water up to the permanent ice shelf of the North Pole. From there he did not much care where the missile went, so long as it
stayed on course and crashed into the ice. He intended no explosion, since he already knew the warhead was well tested and fail-safe.

The route he mapped out had three landmass crossings over the peninsula, twice over Novaya Zemlya and then the ice shelf, which may or may not count. And all the way, Dr. Chon would keep his eyes glued to that screen, watching for the blip, the fizzing snow that he was certain he could eliminate before blastoff.

Admiral Ustinov studied the report from Dr. Chon and agreed with every word. The consequences of a malfunction that might cause the missile to hit a US city were too calamitous to ponder. And the admiral could not work out to whom such a disaster would prove a worse fate—himself or the North Korean nuclear expert.

The admiral himself had never been in the middle of a true catastrophe, except for the Chirkov spy disgrace, but he guessed Dr. Chon had, since North Korea’s diabolically unreliable test missiles had made more big but unscheduled splashes into the Sea of Japan than the local bluefin tuna.

But Dr. Chon was a warhead specialist, with a secondary interest in rocket range and guidance. His opinions were valuable on either subject. Admiral Ustinov was more than happy to grant formal permission for the second test, and, frankly, the less everyone knew about it, the better.

 

 

Admiral Bradfield read Mack Bedford’s detailed report about his findings in northwestern Ireland. He liked what he was learning. And he smiled at the sheer scale of the plan’s title: US Naval Base Donegal.

Simon Andre had stopped by earlier in the day and had astounded him at the continuing scale of Irish debt on the international markets. It was currently running at $2.3 trillion, which worked out to around $500,000 per head! Ireland stood sixth out of 188 countries in terms of external debt—that’s the total public and private debt owed to nonresidents.

On the other hand, the United States owed $15 trillion, but its vast, rumbling economy meant that was a mere $47,000 per citizen. The UK owed $9 trillion, and that was $144,000 per head of population.

Ireland also had the second-highest household debt in the world and had suffered several credit-rating downgrades by Standard and Poor’s, damaging its reputation and branding it a high-risk nation. Simon Andre said Ireland would be lucky to hang on to a single-A rating in the next few months.

Secretary Andre thought this was all absurd. Ireland had been trying extremely hard to manage the debt. In the years since 2012 when it seemed the roof might fall in, they had cut back government spending and done everything they could to improve the situation.

If there had been a world table for pure effort, Ireland might have finished on top. And, unlike most other countries, their situation was visibly improving. The Irish were a savvy and hardworking nation, and there was no question of a default on the international market.

“But,” said Simon Andre darkly, “what wouldn’t they do to get out of that debt situation?”

That was the question that could very easily settle the issue of a new US Navy base in northwestern Ireland. There were many forms of assistance that the United States could offer to the fiercely independent nation across the Atlantic, but was there one that Ireland might be unable to refuse?

Simon Andre believed the answer to that was a resounding yes. “The crash of 2008 took them completely by surprise,” he said. “They were the first country in the European Union to enter recession. Their very solvency was brought into question.

“The main trouble was far beyond the comprehension of ordinary people. It was caused by reckless banks lending astronomical amounts of money to property companies. This created a major oversupply in both residential and commercial buildings.

“Worse yet, some of the largest Irish institutions like pension funds were exposed to what became the biggest property crash in Irish history. They just ran out of customers. No one wanted to buy anything. Banks had to start waiving the covenants, just to enable the borrowers to pay back the interest—it was touch and go whether the entire Irish banking system caved in. And they have not yet been able to get out of it.”

“But they keep trying?” added Mark Bradfield.

“Yes. And with some success. The Irish government has shown an admirable
determination to do whatever may be necessary to put the economy right. And, hopefully, that may be where we will come in.”

“You mean step in and pay off Irish government debt?” asked Admiral Bradfield.

“No need to go that far,” said Secretary Andre, “because they are making progress. But I see a scenario where we might take over the ultimate responsibility—perhaps form a brand-new partnership with Ireland as a trading nation.”

“How about making them the fifty-first state?” asked Mark Bradfield. “That way we could pump in some cash to the banks in return for ownership and build a new base in Donegal, which would be a substantial boost to their economy, since everything in that base would be Irish made.”

“I’ve heard worse ideas,” replied Simon Andre. “And there’s a hell of a lot more Irishmen living in the United States than there even are in Dublin. An Irish-American nation-state would be a great benefit to everyone involved . . . and they just might spring for it.”