Jack Ryan 7 - The Sum of All Fears (115 page)

“Thinking terrorism again?” Pat O'Day asked. “I thought the bomb was too big for that.”

“Russell was a suspected terrorist, and we think he might—shit!”
Murray
exclaimed.

“What's that, Dan?”

“Tell Records I want the photos from
Athens
that're in the Russell file.” The deputy assistant director waited for the call to be made. “We had an inquiry from the Greeks, one of their officers got murdered and they sent us some photos. I thought at the time it might be Marvin, but. . . there was somebody else in there, a car, I think. We had him in profile, I think . . .”

“Fax coming in from
Denver
,” a woman announced.

“Bring it over,”
Murray
commanded.

“Here's page one.” The rest arrived rapidly.

“Airline ticket . . . connecting ticket. Pat—”

O'Day took it. “I'll run it down.”

“Shit, look at this!”

“Familiar face?”

“It looks like . . . Ismael Qati, maybe? I don't know the other one.”

“Mustache and hair are wrong, Dan,” O'Day thought, from his phone. “A little thin, too. Better call Records to see what they have current on the mutt. You don't want to jump too fast, man.”

“Right.”
Murray
lifted his phone.

“Good news, Mr. President,” Borstein said from inside
Cheyenne
Mountain
. “We have a KH-11 pass coming up through the
Central Soviet Union
. It's almost dawn there now, clear weather for a change, and we'll get a look at some missile fields. The bird's already programmed. NPIC is real-timing it into here and Offutt also.”

“But not here,” Fowler groused.
Camp David
had never been set up for that, a remarkable oversight, Fowler thought. It did go into Kneecap, which was where he should have gone when he'd had the chance. “Well, tell me what you see.”

“Will do, sir, this ought to be very useful for us,” Borstein promised.

“Coming up now, sir,” a new voice said. “Sir, this is Major Costello, NORAD intel. We couldn't have timed this much better. The bird is going to sweep very close to four regiments, south to north, at Zhangiz Tobe, Alyesk, Uzhur, and Gladkaya, all but the last are SS-18 bases. Gladkaya is SS-11s, old birds. Sir, Aleysk is one of the places they're supposed to be deactivating, but haven't yet. . . .”

The morning sky was clear at Alyesk. First light was beginning to brighten the northeastern horizon, but none of the soldiers of the Strategic Rocket Forces bothered to look. They were weeks behind schedule and their current orders were to correct that deficiency. That such orders were nearly impossible was beside the point. At each of the forty launch silos was a heavy articulated truck. The SS-18s—the Russians actually called them RS-20s, for Rocket, Strategic, Number 20—were old ones, more than eleven years, in fact, which was why the Soviets had agreed to eliminate them. Powered liquid-fueled motors, the fuels and oxidizers in were dangerous, corrosive chemicals—unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide—and the fact that they were called “storable” liquids was a relative statement. They were more stable than cryogenic fuels, insofar as they did not require refrigeration, but they were toxic to the point of nearly instant lethality to human contact, and they were necessarily highly reactive. One safeguard was the encapsulation of the missiles in steel capsules which were loaded like immense rifle cartridges into the silos, a Soviet design innovation that protected the delicate silo instrumentation from the chemicals. That the Soviets bothered with such systems at all was not—as American intelligence officers carped—to take advantage of their higher energy impulse, but rather a result of the fact that the Soviets had lagged in developing a reliable and powerful solid fuel for its missiles, a situation only recently remedied with the new SS-25. Though undeniably large and powerful, the SS-18—given the ominous NATO codename of S
ATAN—
was an ill-tempered, pitiless bitch to maintain, and the crews were delighted to be rid of them. More than one Strategic Rocket Forces soldier had been killed in maintenance and training accidents, just as Americans had lost men with its counterpart
U.S.
missile, the Titan-II. All of the Alyesk birds were tagged for elimination, and that was the reason for the presence of the men and the transporter trucks. But first, the warheads had to be removed. The Americans could watch the missiles in the destruction process, but the warheads were still the most secret of artifacts. Under the watchful eyes of a colonel, the nose shroud was removed from Rocket Number 31 by a small crane, exposing the MIRVs. Each of the conically shaped multiple independently-targetable re-entry vehicles was about forty centimeters in width at the bottom, tapering to a needle point 150 centimeters above its base. Each also represented about half a megaton of three-stage thermonuclear device. The soldiers treated the MIRVs with all the respect they so clearly deserved.

“Okay, getting some pictures now,” Fowler heard Major Costello say. “Not much activity . . . sir, we're isolating on just a few of the silos, the ones that we can see the best—there's woods all over there, Mr. President, but because of the angle of the satellite we know which ones we can see clearly . . . okay, there's one, Tobe Silo Zero-Five . . . nothing unusual . . . the command bunker is right there . . . I can see guards patrolling around . . . more than usual . . . I see five—seven people—we can get them real good in infra-red, it's cold there, sir. Nothing else. Nothing else unusual, sir . . . good. Okay, coming up on Alyesk now—Jeez!”

“What is it?”

“Sir, we're looking at four silos on four different cameras . . .”

Those are service trucks,“ General Fremont said, from the SAC command center. ”Service trucks at all four. Silo doors are open, Mr. President."

“What does that mean?”

Costello took the question: “Mr. President, these are all -18 Mod 2s, fairly old ones. They were supposed to be deactivated by now, but they haven't been. We now have five silos in sight, sir, and all five have service trucks there. I can see two with people standing around, doing something to the missiles.”

“What's a service truck?” Liz Elliot asked.

“Those are the trucks they use to transport the missiles. They also have all the tools you use to work on them. There's one truck per bird—actually more than one. It's a big semi-truck, like a hook 'n' ladder truck, actually, with storage bins built in for all the tools and stuff—Jim, they look like they pulled the shroud—yeah! There are the warheads, it's lit up, and they're doing something to the RVs . . . I wonder what?”

Fowler nearly exploded. It was like listening to a football game on the radio, and—“What does all this mean!”

“Sir, we can't tell . . . coming up to Uzhur now. Not much activity, Uzhur has the new mark of the -18, the Mod 5 . . . no trucks, I can see sentries again. Mr. President, I would estimate that we have more than the usual number of sentries around. Gladkaya next . . . that'll take a couple of minutes. . . .”

“Why are the trucks there?” Fowler asked.

“Sir, all I can say is that they appear to be working on the birds.”

“God damn it! Doing what!” Fowler screamed into the speaker phone.

The reply was very different from the cool voice of a few minutes earlier. “Sir, there's no way we can tell that.”

“Then tell me what you do know!”

“Mr. President, as I already said, these missiles are old ones, they're maintenance-intensive, and they were scheduled for destruction, but they're overdue for that. We observed increased site security at all three SS-18 regiments, but at Alyesk every bird we saw had a truck and a maintenance crew there, and the silos were all open. That's all we can tell from these pictures, sir.”

“Mr. President,” General Borstein said, “Major Costello has told you everything he can.”

“General, you told me that we'd get something useful from this. What did we get?”

“Sir, it may be significant that there's all that work going on at Alyesk.”

“But you don't know what the work is!”

“No, sir, we don't,” Borstein admitted rather sheepishly.

“Could they be readying those missiles for launch?”

“Yes, sir, that is a possibility.”

“My God.”

“Robert,” the National Security Advisor said, “I am getting very frightened.”

“
Elizabeth
, we don't have time for this.” Fowler collected himself. “We must maintain control of ourselves, and control the situation. We must. We must convince Narmonov—”

“Robert, don't you see! It's not him! That's the only thing that makes sense. We don't know who we're dealing with!”

“What can we do about it?”

“I don't know!”

“Well, whoever it is, they don't want a nuclear war. Nobody would. It's too crazy,” the President assured her, sounding almost like a parent.

“Are you sure of that? Robert, are you really sure? They tried to kill us!”

“Even if that's true, we have to set it aside.”

“But we can't. If they were willing to try once, they will be willing to try again! Don't you see?”

Just a few feet behind him, Helen D'Agustino realized that she'd read Liz Elliot correctly the previous summer. She was as much a coward as a bully. And now whom did the President have to advise him? Fowler rose from his chair and headed for the bathroom. Pete Connor trailed along as far as the door, because even Presidents are not allowed to make that trip alone. “Daga” looked down on Dr. Elliot. Her face was—what? the Secret Service agent asked herself. It was beyond fear. Agent D'Agustino was every bit as frightened herself, but she didn't—that was unfair, wasn't it? Nobody was asking her for advice, nobody was asking her to make sense of this mess. Clearly, none of it made sense at all. It simply didn't. At least no one was asking her about it, but that wasn't her job. It was Liz Elliot's job.

“I got a contact here,” one of the sonar operators said aboard Sea Devil One-Three. “Buoy three, bearing two-one-five . . . blade count now . . . single screw—nuclear submarine contact! Not American, screw's not American.”

“Got him on four,” another sonarman said. “This dude's hauling ass, blade count shows over twenty, maybe twenty-five knots, bearing my buoy is three-zero-zero.”

“Okay,” the Tacco said, “I have a posit. Can you give me drift?”

“Bearing now two-one-zero!” the first one responded. “This guy is moving!”

Two minutes later, it was clear, the contact was heading straight for USS Maine.

“Is this possible?” Jim Rosselli asked. The radio message had gone from Kodiak straight to the NMCC. The commander of the patrol squadron didn't know what to do and was screaming for instructions. The report came in the form of a R
ED
R
OCKET
, copied off also to C
IN
CP
AC
, who would also be requesting direction from above.

“What do you mean?” Barnes asked.

“He's heading straight for where
Maine
is. How the hell could he know where she is?”

“How'd we find out?”

“SLOT buoy, radio—oh, no, that asshole hasn't maneuvered clear?”

“Kick this to the President?” Colonel Barnes asked.

“I guess.” Rosselli lifted the phone.

“This is the President.”

“Sir, this is Captain Jim Rosselli at the
National
Military
Command
Center
. We have a disabled submarine in the
Gulf of Alaska
, USS Maine, an Ohio-class missile boat. Sir, she has prop damage and cannot maneuver. There is a Soviet attack submarine heading straight towards her, about ten miles out. We have a P-3C Orion ASW aircraft that is now tracking the Russian. Sir, he requests instructions.”

“I thought they can't track our missile submarines.”

“Sir, nobody can, but in this case they must have DF—I mean used direction-finders to locate the sub when she radioed for help.
Maine
is a missile submarine, part of SIOP, and is under DEFCON-TWO Rules of Engagement. Therefore, so is the Orion that's riding shotgun for her. Sir, they want to know what to do.”

“How important is
Maine
?” Fowler asked.

General Fremont took that. “Sir, that sub is part of the SIOP, a big part, over two hundred warheads, very accurate ones. If the Russians can take her out, they've hurt us badly.”

“How badly?”

“Sir, it makes one hell of a hole in our war plan.
Maine
carries the D-5 missile, and they are tasked counter-force. They're supposed to attack missile fields and selected command-and-control assets. If something happens to her, it would take literally hours to patch up that hole in the plan.”

“Captain Rosselli, you're Navy, right?”

“Yes, Mr. President—sir, I have to tell you that I was CO of
Maine
's Gold Crew until a few months ago.”

“How soon before we have to make a decision?”

“Sir, the Akula is inbound at twenty-five knots, currently about twenty thousand yards from our boat. Technically speaking, they're within torpedo range right now.”

“What are my options?”

“You can order an attack or not order an attack,” Rosselli replied.

“General Fremont?”

“Mr. President—no, Captain Rosselli?”

“Yes, General?”

“How sure are you that the Russians are boring straight in on our boat?”

“The signal is quite positive on that, sir.”

“Mr. President, I think we have to protect our assets. The Russians won't be real pleased with an attack on one of their boats, but it's an attack boat, not a strategic asset. If they challenge us on this, we can explain it. What I want to know is why they ordered the boat in this way. They must know that it would alarm us.”

“Captain Rosselli, you have my authorization for the aircraft to engage and destroy the submarine.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Rosselli lifted the other phone. “G
RAY
B
EAR
, this is
M
ARBLEHEAD
”—the current codename for the NMCC—“National Command Authority approves I repeat approves your request. Acknowledge.”

“
M
ARBLEHEAD
, this is G
RAY
B
EAR
, we copy request to engage is approved.”

“That's affirmative.”

“Roger. Out.”

The Orion turned in. Even the pilots were feeling the effects of the weather now. Technically, it was still light, but the low ceiling and heavy seas made it seem that they were flying down an immense and bumpy corridor. That was the bad news. The good news was that their contact was acting dumb, running very fast, below the layer, and almost impossible to miss. The Tacco in back coached him in along the Akula's course. Sticking out the tail of the converted Lockheed Electra airliner was a sensitive device called a magnetic anomaly detector. It reported on variations in the earth's magnetic field, such as those caused by the metallic mass of a submarine.