Seas of Crisis (11 page)

“No.”

“Then don’t start botching.”

Jeffrey decided it was time for a counterattack—he had to get in the spirit of things as much as Kurzin was. “Let me know when you’re finished, Colonel. Or should I say,
Podpolkovnik.”
Lieutenant Colonel in Russian. “Your histrionics grow tiresome to me.” Jeffrey faked a yawn as best he could.

Kurzin didn’t react in the least. “Good, I’m getting through to you.”

“Speaking of moral qualms, I have some questions about how this whole thing is supposed to work.”

“Upstairs.
Now.
It’s undignified to stand in a closet.”

Jeffrey didn’t point out that this cozy chat in the closet was Kurzin’s idea to begin with.

Kurzin stroked one of the AN-94s lovingly, as if he looked forward to using it soon against live, human targets. He undogged the door and stalked out.

Jeffrey turned to Nyurba. “Is he always like that?”

“You haven’t seen him in combat.”

Chapter 12

T
he assembled strike group’s first mission briefing began. After a while Kurzin announced a pause for questions. Everyone deferred to Jeffrey.

“I’ll ask what I think are my easier questions first and save the toughest one of all for last.”

“Please proceed,” Kurzin told him with supreme confidence.

“The easiest one, I believe I’ve answered for myself, but I want to make sure.”

“Yes?”

“Why aren’t you aiming the ICBMs at Germany?”

“A natural query. What do you think is the reason?”

“Given Berlin’s mentality these days, it’d immediately provoke a nuclear exchange between them and Russia. Which could spread. Armageddon could break out.”

“It could. An undesirable outcome.”

Kurzin’s talent for deadpan understatements is remarkable.
“Aiming the missiles
away
from Germany,” Jeffrey said, “toward the U.S. instead, in a much more sophisticated gambit, is as effective for us in the end but safer . . . at least in theory.”

“Correct. We hurt Berlin by indirection, deal them what we hope is a staggering geopolitical blow, by the total ruination of their friendly terms with Russia. But we must not tempt them to escalate, to retaliate against the Kremlin, or against Washington, in an irrational fit of rage when they already have tactical nuclear weapons in play. Rather, in actual real life, Washington as the imaginary supposed target understands why the missiles took off, and knows from the start that they were programmed to explode outside the atmosphere. These factors lead to moderation in U.S. behavior, and this visible moderation from the very first moments will be greatly calming to Moscow. Berlin, though angered by a purely statecraft defeat, will see the same moderation and calm and thus be dissuaded from acting so rashly as to launch an atomic first strike against anyone’s homeland—which if they did would mean their own instant and utter destruction at Russian or American hands. There’s vastly more to it that we’ll walk through step by step. Next question?”

“You’re supposed to be German commandos of Russian ancestry, disguised as Russian Federation extremists—”

“Ethnic Russian
Kampfschwimmer
as loyal to their adoptive country as we are to America!”
Kampfschwimmer
were German Navy combat swimmers, the equivalent of U.S. Navy SEALs.

“Okay. Okay. What if the Russians don’t see through the disguise, and they think the raid and the missile launch were done by their own people? Chechens, or ultra-hard-line neocommies, or anarchists, or whomever?”

Nyurba answered; Jeffrey had thought him a hard-to-read sort, but that was before he met Kurzin. In comparison to the colonel, Nyurba seemed like a really nice guy.

“Commodore,” Nyurba said, “the people who planned this out had a number of Blue Teams and Red Teams go through all the possible permutations of partial success, partial or total failure, and potential misunderstandings, with a healthy respect for Murphy’s Law. The U.S. view, the Russian view and response, they even had a Tiger Team behaving as the Germans might, both as planners of the raid and as the party later accused of it while knowing their lack of involvement. . . . If the Russians don’t see through the disguise, then most likely two things would happen. First, our mission will fail because there’d be no rancor created between Russia and Germany. The Kremlin would be very apologetic to Washington, sure, and would make some token concessions, but it’s unlikely their logistical support of Germany would be swayed. Second, there’d be a brutal crackdown against whichever faction Russia concludes was responsible.”

“Which means you’re setting up an innocent group for a pogrom, a purge. Persecution and extermination.”

“We’ll leave enough hard evidence so the Russians quickly figure out that the team did come from Germany.”

“Such as the metallurgy in the ammo expended?”

“And our flesh and blood. We expect to take losses. Getting into a Russian missile silo field will not be a cakewalk, even with all of our cleverest preparations. Wounded men will bleed. Men killed in action will be left behind, of necessity, as abhorrent as that sounds.”

“How would that help?”

“For some time, all the medications we’ve been taking, to protect us as much as possible against diseases and toxins in the areas we’ll cross, are of German manufacture.”

“Prewar?”

“No. They’ve developed some interesting pharmaceuticals since the start of the war. We have an adequate supply for our purposes. Don’t ask me how we got them. You don’t need to know.”

“American-manufactured copies?”

“The original German formularies.”

Kurzin broke in. “The key was to plan and execute this mission the way the Germans would. They’d rely a lot on technology. Their mistakes would be very subtle. But they would make mistakes.”

“What if they didn’t? Don’t?”

“Hah!” Kurzin pounced. “You’re getting so caught up in this, you’re thinking the Germans are doing the raid!”

“Woops. I did have myself going for a minute there.”

“Good. Get as deep into this as you can. And stay deep.”

“The point is, sir,” Nyurba continued, “
we
control the parameters of physical outcomes. The Germans, if they did perform this raid, would have no compunctions framing some ethnic group or splinter political faction in Russia. Outwardly, that’s how
we
make it look. . . . That’s why our ammo propellant is Russian. To use German powder would be too obvious an error.”

“With the chaos you induce, who’s to make these complex lab analyses of bullets and blood? And where do the baseline comparison samples come from for the forensics match?”

“Vladivostok will be unaffected by the raid. They own state-of-the-art facilities to study the metals and blood chemistry. They’ll have a potent need to do so, to find out and prove to the U.S. who perpetrated it, since Russia’s president will know it wasn’t something he authorized himself. . . . The Kremlin’s elite appointees take these fancy German drugs, too. They know their own medical system and public health stink. Rank-and-file troops, even Spetsnaz, don’t get them. . . . Russia buys spare parts made from the same Polish sheet metal and rod stock that were used to make our ammo. . . . If they don’t put it all together on their own, you can nudge them.”

“Then what about DNA, speaking of matching and blood? And fingerprints. You’re all in the Pentagon databases.” He was referring to stored information used for identifying remains of men and women killed in action. “The Germans could hack their way in, then prove that you’re all U.S. military.”

Nyurba smiled. “Our records were quietly changed. Genome profiles that fit our outward body characteristics, to avoid drawing suspicion from any overambitious moles. But the data’s made up. It won’t correspond to real people, living or dead.”

“All right. Let’s step way back. One much harder question is, what’s Berlin’s motivation for this raid supposed to be?”

“You mean, for breaking into a Russian missile-silo control bunker and shooting off a handful of ICBMs at America?”

“Yeah.”

“Keep in mind from the start that this is purely hypothetical, the German rationales and points of view.”

“It still needs to make sense, to me and to the Russians.”

“Granted. Then consider this. Few live warheads would get through the U.S. terminal defenses out of the very small number launched. They’ll be aimed at military targets in sparsely populated areas, but significant targets. Nuclear theorists call that a limited counterforce strike.”

“I know.”

“America would be damaged using Russian missiles as proxies, frightening the U.S. public half to death, which directly helps the Germans. America would not be damaged fatally, by any means, except in an extremely powerful emotional sense, which fits perfectly with Berlin’s psychological-warfare grand strategy.”

“Keep going.”

“The U.S. government would then have to decide how to react, respond. The worst case that’s deemed likely by think-tank thinkers is called
lex talionis,
a tooth for a tooth. Speaking again hypothetically, this is what planners in Berlin would wargame. The U.S. retaliates against Russia in kind, tit for tat, despite Moscow’s profuse apologies and instant denial of government culpability. This retaliation hurts Russia, but if the exchange is proportional, say three live H-bomb warheads launched in return for the three that get launched out of Russia, then Russia isn’t harmed fatally either. It’s weakened, presenting less of a future threat to German world supremacy, but Russia would still be able to provide a lot of natural resources and arms support to Germany. A deep wedge would have been driven between Moscow and Washington, irrecoverably. Good insurance for Berlin. After that, Russia would never, ever join the Allies and could conceivably be driven straight into the Axis camp.”

“What if things do escalate, and more and more missiles start flying back and forth?”

“Germany would assume that those in charge in Moscow and Washington would not be so insane.”

“That sounds awfully risky, from Germany’s point of view.”

“They know that the concept that nuclear war could never stay limited is not valid military science but a myth planted in many civilian minds. A myth, by the way, that traces its roots to Soviet propaganda and KGB agitators in the nineteen-fifties, when their atomic arsenal was weak compared to ours.”

“I’m aware of that. Still. Myths sometimes come true.”

“Returning to the hypothetical, specifically German concern about escalation, this is exactly the sort of risk that we, and Russia, have seen them take in different ways repeatedly.”

“So your presumption is that if the Germans really did what you’re going to pretend they do, then they wouldn’t target Washington, or some other major city, or U.S. strategic command-and-control, to make sure that what’s limited stays limited? Avoid mass deaths, not go for a leadership decapitation strike?”

“Not unless the Germans were insane, which they aren’t. They’re extreme risk-takers, yes, but the calculated risks always make sense, and the consequences of losing are never fatal to them. The proof of this being that even though their gambles collapsed upon them several times, they’re still very much in the war. That’s why we need to perform this mission, take back the global initiative. And that’s why it’s plausible that the Germans would push the envelope even more, hit America by using Russian weaponry, exploit the Kremlin as patsies, and set up an innocent Russia to take all the blame.”

“Lord,” Jeffrey said, “this gets complicated.”

“It certainly does,” Kurzin said. “Concentrate on the view from sixty thousand feet for now. Just get a basic sense of all the moving parts and how they interact. See for yourself the rigor of the logic that went into this. If you start to feel overwhelmed today, just stick to the highlights. Greater clarity will come, with time and with the unfolding of events.”

Jeffrey nodded. “So these alleged Russian separatists, or warmongers, or whatever . . . The Germans would have gamed out this part too. . . . What’s the motivation of the supposed Russian perpetrators that the
Kampfschwimmer
go disguised as? . . . Before, that is, your men masquerading as pseudo-Russian
Kampfschwimmer
get unmasked by our deceptions as being genuine Germans. We hope.”

Nyurba answered that one. “The faked perps’ motivation is to discredit the regime in charge in the Kremlin, because it’s too repressive or because it’s not repressive enough. Or because it’s too neutral toward the U.S., or not in alliance enough with Germany. Sacrifice some American and Russian lives for the good of the Motherland, at least as the made-up fanatics see it. These imaginary rebels would want to force Russia to take a firmer side in the Allies-versus-Axis conflict, or force a regime change in Moscow, or even both.”

“They’re internal terrorists?”

“Not in their own minds,” Kurzin said. “They’d be heroes, martyrs. They’d see the mainstream Russian government as the terrorists, and maybe the U.S. too. Their actions against both would be justifiable retribution. Or, they’d see the Moscow crowd in office now as being much too moderate. . . . Chechens, modern anarchists, pro-German Russian FSB agents, or military megahawks, we want to leave ambiguity in Kremlin heads as to who were the bad actors, in the first few crucial minutes after the SS-Twenty-sevens launch. Ambiguity
you
will play off of, Commodore, as and when suspicion starts getting cast on Germany.”

“But—”

“The team that gamed out the German approach said they’d want ambiguity too, leave Moscow confused and unfocused so they’re more likely to come over and cling to Berlin in the face of American ire while the handful of mushroom clouds bloomed on two continents. Even our Red and Blue Teams concluded that real rogues, if they existed, wouldn’t claim credit initially, to sow more seeds of doubt and then surge into the power vacuum.”

Jeffrey fiddled with his ear. “I don’t know about this.”

“Sir,” Nyurba told him, “there’s important precedent. It’s what gave our commander in chief the idea to begin with.”

“Continue. Please.”

“The Golf-class diesel boat that sank in the Pacific in nineteen-sixty-eight? The one that Howard Hughes with CIA backing tried to salvage off the ocean floor with the
Glomar Explorer
?”

“Aw, not that boondoggle.”

“Sir, it’s been in the open literature since the late nineteen-nineties that the U.S. concluded almost immediately that it was virtually certain the Golf sank because a rogue faction in her crew took over the ship and tried to nuke Hawaii with one of the three ballistic missiles in their vertical launch tubes at the rear of the conning tower.”

Jeffrey nodded. “I read about that. Nixon used it behind the scenes to threaten, blackmail Russia. It’s how he forced Brezhnev to come to the arms reduction table at some summit meeting. Then Nixon took credit for terrific statesmanship. What a charade. I forget the details.”

“But this
is
real-life stuff, Commodore. And it
was
declassified, or leaked, or whatever, in documents, books, available to the public since before the Global War on Terror began. And Russia and Germany know it too.”