The Seventh Angel (31 page)

The Secretary of State rested her elbows on the table. “Could he have built his own transmitter station? For Zevs, or ELF?”

‘
No, Madam Secretary,” the admiral said. “The facilities are enormous, and far too expensive. The entire economy of Kamchatka for twenty years wouldn’t cover the cost. In any case, the antenna feed lines have to be about thirty miles long. You can’t hide a construction project that large. Not in the Congo, not in the arctic, not in the Sahara. Not even in Kamchatka. We don’t know what method they’re using, but do know that it’s not Zevs or ELF.”

“
ONI is looking at this right now,” he said. “So are DARPA, and the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins. There’s got to be an answer. We’ll find it.” He faced the national security advisor. “With your permission, Mr. Brenthoven, I’d like to put the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office on the problem as well. Those guys spend all their time peeking over fences and listening at keyholes. They might have some ideas about how Zhukov is talking to his sub.”

Gregory Brenthoven nodded. “I’ll put them on it.”

The president looked around the table. “We deploy the
Tucson
,
Seawolf
, and
Bremerton
into the Sea of Okhotsk to locate and destroy the K-506. We simultaneously investigate Zhukov’s method of communicating with his missile submarine. Does anyone have any objections to the plan, or any refinements to add?”

No one spoke.

The president pushed back his chair and stood up. “Go with it, Admiral. And keep me informed at every step.”

He paused, and was about to speak again when the door opened and a Secret Service agent walked in, escorting White House Communications Director Roger Chu.

The man crossed quickly to the head of the table. He was visibly trembling. “Please forgive the interruption, Mr. President, but there’s a breaking story on CNN that you need to see immediately, sir.” His eyes darted to the screen and then instantly back to the president. “My assistant is burning the clip onto disk right now. It should be here in a couple of minutes.”

“
Thank you, Roger,” the president said. “While we’re waiting for the video, why don’t you give us the short version?”

Chu swallowed. “Yes, sir.” He looked around the table and saw that every face was turned in his direction. His voice wavered. “Mr. President, Governor Zhukov has just made another public statement to the media. Actually, it was a demand—issued to the United States, the Russian Federation, and Japan. He wants every submarine in our collective military inventories on the surface in the next three hours. He says he has agents in numerous countries, monitoring commercial imaging satellites. He says he knows exactly how many submarines we have at our disposal, and he wants every one of them out in the open, where he can see it. Attack subs, missile subs, all of them. Then he wants us to put them all in port, and keep them there. But first we have to bring them all to the surface, where he can see them.”

“
That’s crazy,” the Secretary of Defense snapped. “Mr. President, we can’t do that.”

“
The deadline is 6:00 AM, Greenwich Mean Time,” Roger Chu said. The man was close to tears. “Governor Zhukov says if a single submarine from
any
of our nations is not clearly visible on the surface, he’ll launch nuclear weapons against …” Chu looked down at a piece of paper in his hand. It was shaking so badly that he had trouble reading the list he had copied there. “Moscow, Vladivostok, Saint Petersburg, Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Denver.”

Chu lowered the paper, still clutched in his trembling hand. “Mr. President … Governor Zhukov said something about a
surprise package
, sir. He said he would also hit three cities that are
not
on the list. But he didn’t say which country those three cities were in.”

The room was utterly silent.

Roger Chu emitted a sound that might have been a sob.

“
Mr. President, we can’t do that,” the Secretary of Defense said again. “I’m not just talking about our national policy against negotiating with terrorists, sir. I’m talking about strategic defense. Our attack subs would be bad enough, but we
can’t
reveal the locations of our missile submarines. The second we put those missile boats on the surface, our national security goes up in smoke. Our deterrence will be gone. Our second strike capability will be gone. We
have
to keep our missile submarines hidden. Otherwise, we can’t protect this country.”

The president looked at his Director of Communications. The normally rock-solid man was on the verge of breaking down.

“
Does anyone see any alternatives?” the president said. “Any ideas at all, I don’t care
how
crazy.”

Gregory Brenthoven exhaled sharply. “We … My God, I can’t believe I’m saying this … We launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Kamchatka. We wipe out Zhukov before he can issue launch orders to his submarine.”

“
That’s not going to work,” the Chief of Naval Operations said. “The Kamchatka peninsula is about 140,000 square miles. That’s nearly the size of California, and we don’t have any idea where—in all of that territory—Zhukov might be hiding. How do we know we can even
hit
him? And what happens if we
don’t
hit him?”

“
I agree,” the president said. “If we launch nuclear strikes against Kamchatka and we
don’t
kill Zhukov, he’s going to incinerate every city and town west of the Rocky Mountains.”

“
Then we hit it
all
,” Brenthoven said. “We turn the entire peninsula into a fucking parking lot.”

The Secretary of State shook her head. “No, Greg. They’re right. We don’t know what instructions Zhukov has given to the captain of his missile submarine. Maybe the guy’s got orders to nuke
everything
if he loses communication with Zhukov. We can’t take that chance. If we can’t take the submarine out of the equation, we can’t shoot at Zhukov.”

“
Well, shit!” the president said. “Shit, shit, shit, and double-shit. What do we do now?”

“
I hate to say this,” the CNO said. “But we’re going to have to put our subs on the surface.”

“
We cannot knuckle under to a fucking madman,” Secretary of Defense Kilpatrick said. “We can’t do it. We just
can’t
.”

“
We don’t have a choice,” the president said. “I’m not going to sacrifice six million American lives to protect our national prestige. If we have to kiss this guy’s ass, then we get on our knees and pucker up. Right up until the moment that we stick a knife in his heart.”

He turned his eyes to the Chief of Naval Operations. “Put the submarines on the surface Bob. All of them. Do it now.”

He shifted his gaze to his secretary of state. “Liz, we need to open immediate diplomatic dialogues with Japan and Russia. Make sure they intend to comply with Zhukov’s deadline. Hopefully, they’re smart enough to realize that this nutcase is not bluffing. If they balk, tell them we’re working on a plan to neutralize the threat, and that we’ll share it with them as soon as we nail down the details. In the meantime, they need to get their submarines on the surface so that Zhukov doesn’t start launching nuclear missiles.”

The president lowered himself into his chair. “We’re back to square one,” he said. “We’ve got to figure out how to destroy the K-506 without submarines.”

He slammed his fist on the table. “And then we’re going to go and kill the maniac who started this nightmare.”

ICBM: A COLD WAR SAILOR’S MUSINGS ON THE ULTIMATE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

(Reprinted by permission of the author, Retired Master Chief Sonar Technician David M. Hardy, USN)

At the close of the Second World War, German rocket engineers under the direction of Wernher von Braun were engaged in developing the A9/A10: a powerful two-stage missile capable of reaching across the Atlantic Ocean to attack New York and other American cities. The A9/A10 development effort was part of a larger program called
Project Amerika
, which was dedicated to the creation of specialized bombers, rockets, and other weapons, to be used in Germany’s eventual conquest of the United States.

If it had ever been completed, the A9/A10 would have been the first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile in history. Instead, it became the theoretical model from which later ICBMs would be built.

The program came to a halt in 1945 with the surrender of the German military, but Wernher von Braun and a number of his fellow scientists were quietly whisked away to America, where they became the core of the rocket and missile research programs for the U.S. military.

Having foreseen the collapse of the Nazi regime, von Braun’s team had managed to conceal and protect many of their blueprints and research papers. In some cases, the recovered technical documents were nearly as useful as the scientists themselves.

This was certainly true for the Soviet Union. Because Soviet agents in post-war Germany did not immediately recognize the potential value of Hitler’s rocket scientists, the Soviets acted too slowly to capitalize on this brief opportunity. Consequently, when Soviet rocket designer Sergei Korolev began constructing his nation’s missile program, he had captured German blueprints to work from, but almost no German technical expertise to help him decipher them. To paraphrase a prominent military historian:
The United States had already snatched up all the good German engineers
.

But—Germans or no-Germans—the race was on. Although they had been allies in the fight against the Nazis, the United States and the Soviet Union had very different plans for reconstructing the world in the aftermath of the war. The relationship between the two nations had been strained even when they’d been in formal alliance. With the dissolution of the alliance, mutual suspicion deepened into outright hostility. Even as World War II was ending, the Cold War was beginning.

As a result of military and industrial buildup, economic capacity, and postwar positioning, the Soviet Union and the United States emerged as the so-called
superpowers
. The rivalry between them was intense from the outset, but it was also one-sided. America had the atomic bomb. Soviet Russia did not.

Then, in August of 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its own atomic bomb at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. The US intelligence community would later learn that the Russian weapon had been an almost direct copy of the American ‘Fat Man’ bomb dropped on Nagasaki. In point of fact, the Russian atomic bomb was more a product of espionage than research. But the source of the information paled beside a single inescapable fact … The Soviet Union now had nuclear weapons.

The balance of power no longer leaned in America’s favor. It had become a true balance, with the growing might of the US on one side, offset by the growing might of the USSR on the other.

In 1952, America briefly regained a significant technological edge with the first successful test of a nuclear fusion weapon: the infamous
hydrogen bomb
. This development brought another quantum leap in destructive potential. Previous
fission
-type nuclear weapons had yielded explosive forces in the kiloton range, equal to the destructive power of several thousand tons of TNT.
Fusion
-type or hydrogen weapons offered explosive yields in the megaton range, equal to the destructive power of several
million
tons of TNT. The deadliest weapon in history had just become, quite literally, a thousand times more destructive.

This new capability gave the United States a tremendous strategic advantage, but the shelf-life of that advantage was very short. In 1953, the Soviet Union tested its own fusion weapon, the
Sloika
(“Layer Cake”). Once again, the US and USSR had rough military parity, and the nuclear balance of power had been reestablished.

The superpowers differed on virtually everything, from political ideologies, to economic models, to human rights, to the very future of mankind. The Soviets believed that the Communist ideal was destined to spread to every nation on earth. Fearing that very thing, the US began building military and political alliances in Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. The intent was to ‘contain’ the threat of communism, and to guard against Soviet military aggression.

This philosophy led to the signing of the
Treaty of Brussels
in 1948, and a year later, to the formation of the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
, or NATO.

The Soviet Union interpreted these alliances as a direct strategic threat, and responded in 1955 by forming the
Warsaw Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance
(better known to history as the ‘Warsaw Pact’). Essentially a military alliance of socialist states in Eastern and Central Europe, the Warsaw Pact was intended to counterbalance the threat posed by NATO.

Sides had been chosen. The battle lines had been drawn for an entirely new kind of war.

Until the 1940s, even the most lethal of weapons had been limited in their capacity for destruction. As horrific as the machineries of warfare had become, their deadliness had never been absolute. Even the bloodiest battles tended to leave survivors on both sides—among the victors and among the vanquished. No matter how high the death toll rose, it was never high enough to completely eradicate the population of the defeated nation.