Jack Ryan 7 - The Sum of All Fears (99 page)

“Stern planes are damaged, sir. Very sluggish on the controls,” the helmsman said. The Chief of the Boat pulled the youngster off the seat and took his place. Slowly and carefully, the Master Chief worked the control wheel.

“Damaged hydraulics, feels like. The trim tabs”—these were electrically powered—“look okay.” He worked the wheel left and right. “Rudder is okay, sir.”

“Lock the stern planes in neutral. Ten degrees up on the fairwater planes.” This order came from the XO.

“Aye.”

“So, what was it?” Dubinin asked.

“Metallic—an enormous mechanical transient, bearing zero-five-one.” The officer tapped the blazing mark on his screen. “Low frequency as you see, like a drum . . . but this noise here, much higher pitch. I heard that on my phones, sounded like a machinegun. Wait a minute . . .” Senior Lieutenant Rykov said, thinking rapidly. “The frequency—I mean the interval of the impulses—that was a blade-rate, that was a propeller . . . only thing it could be .. .”

“And now?” the captain asked.

“Gone completely.”

“I want the entire sonar crew on duty.” Captain Dubinin returned to control. “Come about, new course zero-four-zero. Speed ten.”

Getting a Soviet Army truck was simplicity itself. They'd stolen it, along with a staff car. It was just after
midnight
in
Berlin
, and since it was a Sunday night, the streets were empty.
Berlin
is as lively a city as any in the world, but Monday there is a workday, and work is something that Germans take seriously. What little traffic there was came from people late to leave their local Gasthaus, or perhaps a few workers whose jobs required round-the-clock manning. What mattered was that traffic was agreeably light, allowing them to get to their destination right on time.

There used to be a wall, Günther Bock thought. On one side was the American Berlin detachment, and on the other a Soviet detachment, each with a small but heavily used exercise area adjacent to their barracks. The wall was gone now, leaving nothing but grass between two mechanized forces. The staff car pulled up to the Soviet gate. The sentry there was a senior sergeant of twenty years with pimples on his face and an untidy uniform. His eyes went a little wide when he saw the three stars on Keitel's shoulder boards.

“Stand at attention!” Keitel roared in perfect Russian. The boy complied at once. “I am here from Army Command to conduct an unannounced readiness inspection. You will not report our arrival to anyone. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Colonel!”

“Carry on—and clean up that filthy uniform before I come back through here or you'll find yourself on the Chinese border! Move!” Keitel ordered Bock, who was sitting at the wheel.

“Zu Befehl, Heir Oberst,” Bock replied after he moved off. It was funny, actually. There were a few humorous aspects to all this, Bock thought. A few. But you had to have the right sense of humor for it.

The regimental headquarters was in an old building once used by Hitler's Wehrmacht that the Russians had used more than they had maintained. It did have the usual garden outside, and in the summer one could see the flowers arranged to duplicate the unit's patch. This one was a Guards Tank Regiment, though one with a history to which its soldiers paid little attention, judging by the sentry at the gate. Bock pulled right up to the door. Keitel and the rest dismounted from their vehicles and walked into the front door like gods in a bad mood.

“Who's the duty officer of this whorehouse?” Keitel bellowed. A corporal just pointed. Corporals do not dispute the orders of staff-grade officers. The duty officer, they found, was a major, perhaps thirty years of age.

“What is this?” the young officer asked.

“I am Colonel Ivanenko of the Inspectorate. This is an unannounced operational-readiness inspection. Hit your alarm!” The major walked two steps and punched a button that set off sirens all over the camp area.

“Next, call your regimental commander, and get his drunken ass over here! What is your readiness state, Major?” Keitel demanded, without giving the man a chance to take a breath. The junior officer stopped in mid-reach for the phone, not knowing which order he was supposed to follow first. “Well!”

“Our readiness is in accordance with unit norms, Colonel Ivanenko.”

“You have a chance to prove that.” Keitel turned to one of the others. “Take this child's name!”

Less than two thousand meters away, they could see lights going on at the American base in what had so recently been
West Berlin
.

“They're having a drill also,” Keitel/Ivanenko observed. “Splendid. We'd better be faster than they are,” he added.

“What is this?” The regimental commander, also a colonel, arrived without his buttons done.

“This looks like a sorry spectacle!” Keitel boomed. “This is an unannounced readiness inspection. You have a regiment to lead, Colonel. I suggest you get to it without asking any further questions.”

“But—”

“But what?” Keitel demanded. “Don't you know what a readiness inspection is?”

There was one thing about dealing with Russians, Keitel thought. They were arrogant, overbearing, and they hated Germans, however much they protested otherwise. On the other hand, when browbeaten, they were predictable. Even though his rank insignia was no higher than this man's, he had a louder voice, and that was all he needed.

“I'll show you what my boys can do.”

“We'll be outside to watch,” Keitel assured him.

“Dr. Ryan, you'd better get down here.” The line clicked off.

“Okay,” Jack said. He grabbed his cigarettes and walked down to room 7-F-27, the CIA's
Operations
Center
. Located on the north side of the building, it was the counterpart to operations rooms in many other government agencies. In the center of the twenty-by-thirty-foot room, once you got past the cipher lock on the door, was a large circular table with a lazy-Susan bookcase in the center, and six seats around it. The seats had overhead plaques to designate their functions: Senior Duty Officer, Press,
Africa
—
Latin America
,
Europe
—
USSR
, Near-East—Terrorism, and
South Asia
—
East Asia
—Pacific. The wall clocks showed the time in
Moscow
,
Beijing
,
Beirut
,
Tripoli
, and, of course, Greenwich Mean. There was an adjacent conference room that looked down on the CIA's internal courtyard.

“What gives?” Jack asked, arriving with Goodley in his wake.

“According to NORAD, a nuclear device just went off in
Denver
.”

“I hope that's a fucking joke!” Jack replied. That, too, was a reflex. Before the man had a chance to respond, Ryan's stomach turned over. Nobody made jokes like that one.

“I wish it were,” the Senior Duty Officer replied.

“What do we know?”

“Not much.”

“Anything? Threat board?” Jack asked. Again it was reflexive. If there had been anything, he would have heard it by now. “Okay—where's Marcus?”

“Coming home in the C-141, somewhere between
Japan
and the
Aleutians
. You're it, sir,” the SDO pointed out, quietly thanking a beneficent God that it wasn't himself. “President's at
Camp David
. SecDef and SecState—”

“Dead?” Ryan asked.

“It would appear so, sir.”

Ryan closed his eyes. “Holy Jesus. The Vice President?”

“At his official residence. We've only been going about three minutes. The NMCC watch officer is a Captain James Rosselli. General Wilkes is on the way in. DIA's on line. They—I mean the President just ordered DEFCON-TWO on our strategic forces.”

“Anything from the Russians?”

“Nothing unusual at all. There's a regional air-defense exercise underway in
Eastern Siberia
. That's all.”

“Okay, alert all the stations. Put the word out that I want to hear anything they might have—anything. They are to hit every source they can just as fast as they can.” Jack paused one more time. “How sure are we that this really happened?”

“Sir, two DSPS satellites copied the flash. We have a KH-11 that's going to be overhead in about twenty minutes, and I've directed NPIC to put every camera they have on
Denver
. NORAD says it's a definite nuclear detonation, but there's no word on yield or damage. The explosion seems to be in the immediate area of the stadium—like Black Sunday, sir, but real. This is definitely not a drill, not if we're jacking the strategic forces to DEFCON-TWO, sir.”

“Inbound ballistic track? Aircraft delivery?”

“Negative on the first, there was no launch warning, and no ballistic radar track.”

“What about a FOBS?” Goodley asked. A weapon could be delivered by satellite. That was the purpose of a Fractional-Orbital Bombardment System.

“They would have caught that,” the SDO replied. “I already asked. On the aircraft side, they don't know yet. They're trying to check air-traffic-control tapes.”

“So we don't know jack shit.”

“Correct.”

“President check in with us yet?” Ryan asked.

“No, but we have an open line there. He has the National Security Advisor there also.”

“Most likely scenario?”

“I'd say terrorism.”

Ryan nodded. “So would I. I'm taking over the conference room. Okay, I want DO, DI, DS&T in here immediately. If you need choppers to fetch them in, order 'em.” Ryan walked into the room, leaving the door open.

“Christ,” Goodley said. “You sure you want me here?”

“Yes, and when you have an idea, you say it out loud. I forgot about FOBS.” Jack lifted the phone and punched the FBI button.

“
Command
Center
.”

“This is CIA, Deputy Director Ryan speaking. Who is this?”

“Inspector Pat O'Day. I have Deputy-Assistant Director Murray here also. You're on speaker, sir.”

“Talk to me, Dan.” Jack put his phone on speaker, also. A watch officer handed him a cup of coffee.

“We don't know anything. No heads-up at all, Jack. Thinking terrorists?”

“At the moment, it seems the most plausible alternative.”

“How sure are you of that?”

“Sure?” Ryan shook his head at the phone, Goodley saw. “What's 'sure' mean, Dan?”

“I hear you. We're still trying to figure out what happened here, too. I can't even get CNN on the TV to work.”

“What?”

“One of my communications people says the satellites are all out,”
Murray
explained. “Didn't you know that?”

“No.” Jack pointed for Goodley to get back into the
Ops
Center
and find out. “If that's true, it could scratch the terrorism idea. Jesus, that's scary!”

“It's true, Jack. We've checked.”

“They think ten commercial commosats are nonfunctional,” Goodley said. “All the defense birds are on line, though. Our commlinks are okay.”

“Find the most senior S&T guy you can find—or one of our commo people—and ask him what could snuff out satellites. Move!” Jack ordered. “Where's Shaw?”

“On his way in. Going to be a while the way the roads are.”

“Dan, I'll give you everything I get here.”

“It'll be a two-way street.” The line went dead.

The most horrible thing was that Ryan didn't know what to do next. It was his job to gather data and forward it to the President, but he had no data. What information there was would come in through military circuits. CIA had failed again, Ryan told himself. Someone had done something to his country, and he hadn't warned anyone. People were dead because his agency had failed in its mission. Ryan was Deputy Director, the man who really ran the shop for the political drone placed over his head. The failure was personal. A million people dead, maybe, and there he was, all alone in an elegant little conference room staring at a wall with nothing on it. He hunted a line to NORAD and punched it.

“NORAD,” a disembodied voice answered.

“This is the
CIA
Operations
Center
, Deputy Director Ryan speaking. I need information.”

“We do not have much, sir. We think the bomb exploded in the immediate vicinity of the Skydome. We are trying to estimate yield, but nothing yet. A helicopter has been dispatched from Lowery Air Force Base.”

“Will you keep us posted?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you.” That was a big help, Ryan thought. Now he knew that someone else didn't know anything.

There was nothing magical about a mushroom cloud, Battalion Chief Mike Callaghan of the Denver City Fire Department knew. He'd seen one before, as a rookie fireflghter. It had been a fire in the
Burlington
yards just outside the city, in 1968. A propane tank-car had let go, right next to another trainload of bombs en route to the Navy's munitions terminal at
Oakland
,
California
. The chief back then had had the good sense to pull his men back when the tank ruptured, and from a quarter mile away they'd watched a hundred tons of bombs go off in a hellish firecracker series. There had been a mushroom then also. A large mass of hot air rose, roiling as it went into an annular shape. It created an updraft, drawing air upward into its donut-shaped center, making the stem of the mushroom . . .

But this one was much larger.

He was behind the wheel of his red-painted command car, following the first alarm, three Seagrave pumper units, an aerial ladder truck, and two ambulances. It was a pitiful first response. Callaghan lifted his radio and ordered a general alarm. Next he ordered his men to approach from up-wind.

Christ, what had happened here?

It couldn't be that.. . . most of the city was still intact.

Chief Callaghan didn't know much, but he knew there was a fire to fight and people to rescue. As the car turned off the last side-street onto the boulevard leading to the stadium he saw the main smoke mass. The parking lot, of course. It had to be. The mushroom cloud was blowing rapidly southwest towards the mountains. The parking lot was a mass of fire and flame from burning gasoline and oil and auto parts. A powerful gust of wind cleared the smoke briefly, just enough that he could see that there had been a stadium here . . . a few sections were still . . . not intact, but you could tell what they were—had been only a few minutes before. Callaghan shut that out. He had a fire to fight. He had people to rescue. The first pump unit pulled up at a hydrant. They had good water here. The stadium was fully sprinklered, and that system fed off two 36-inch high-pressure mains that gridded around the complex.