Seas of Crisis (25 page)

This time when they withdrew up the stairs, two commandos lay dead for real, at the bottom of gleaming, dripping blood trails; they weren’t faking anything for hidden TV cameras. Over his radio Nyurba issued more orders, and received status reports. All contact had been lost with the sniper-observers. The men in bunker two had also reached the inner blast door. The medics in the vestibule of bunker three were doing what they could for the wounded, but two of their patients had already died. All three bunker entryways were receiving heavy fire from a coordinated Russian assault, and the men there were taking losses.

Nyurba was forced to rethink his plan. It was looking like too slow a job to blow open the bunker blast doors, and the Russian counterattack was gaining momentum too quickly. Advancing hostile troops were going to trap the commandos against the inner door. Even if they did have time to break open the door, they’d be caught between fire from a forewarned silo crew and Russian soldiers. If they overcame the silo crew, the bunker without any blast doors would be an undefendable cul de sac.

Clustered like this in underground chambers, the risk of Russian ordnance knocking men out to be captured alive was high, but the mission doctrine stated that that outcome was unacceptable. Nyurba realized he needed to do something drastic, fast, to preserve the inner door as an armored barrier yet also get behind it somehow. Otherwise he’d have to issue the final, most hideous order of all—mass self-murder, to avoid incriminating the U.S. His family’s adopted homeland would be left at square one, facing Apocalypse Soon or Apocalypse Later.

He grabbed the intercom handset on the wall of the interlock chamber. It had been knocked off its hook by the shaped charge explosion and was dangling by its cord. He hoped it worked.

“Hello! Hello! This is Colonel Nyurba!” He was breathless and hoarse and worn out—that part wasn’t faked.

“Colonel,” the same junior officer answered, “what’s going on? We did what you said, but now the cameras show more combat on the surface, and we heard our inner door being blasted.”

Everything
depended on what he said and how the other man reacted. Instead of toothpicks and ego with Commodore Fuller, Nyurba was playing poker for the highest stakes imaginable.

Half-truths are the best way to lie.

“Listen to me. The battle is seesawing. It’s like Stalingrad out here! Rebels forced their way down and almost penetrated the interlock. My men wiped out the traitors, but now more rebels have arrived in greater strength. We’re being overwhelmed. You need to open the inner door and let us in so we can help protect your bunker in the last extreme.”

“But you said to let no one in.”

“The situation has changed! My men are dying, we can’t hold out much longer. The outer blast door’s completely down. We need to shelter inside the bunker and defend it.”

“We have our own weapons.”

“What weapons do you have?
Pistols?
”

“Yes.”

“We have grenade launchers and assault rifles!”

“How do I know I can trust you?”

“You saw us shed our blood to protect you! You saw it right on the fucking TV!”

“Er, yes.”

“Now you must help protect us, and let us help protect you further, or else they’ll blow open this inner door and kill you all and take the bunker.”

“I don’t know, sir. Maybe we should just smash the launch consoles and hope for the best.”

“And leave the Motherland defenseless? You’ll be shot for treason yourselves if you destroy the launching computers! Now override the interlock and
let us in
!”

“We need a minute to work the mechanism.”

“Do it!” Nyurba hung up and ran up the stairs.

He told his men defending the entryway that they might need to fight a rearguard action, slowly withdrawing down the stairs, using each right-angle turn as a strongpoint until forced further back. He explained that he’d convinced the silo crew to open the inner door to let the Spetsnaz in, on the belief that they, not the Russians busy counterattacking, were the genuine loyalists.

By monitoring Nyurba over his open mike, the men infiltrating bunker two had known to use his same logic and lies to get that bunker’s silo crew to open their inner door.

Once the commandos seized control of bunker one and bunker two, and closed the inner blast doors while they worked to launch the missiles, the rear guards on the stairs could keep in touch via the interlock chambers’ intercoms—their radios wouldn’t penetrate the EMP-shielded doors. A wounded man would be stationed by each intercom, as a phone talker.

Nyurba ordered his men in bunker three’s entryway to hold out as long as they could. He reminded the medics that nobody in the squadron could be taken alive.
Over the open mike, every one of my people heard that.
He hated this, but it wouldn’t be long before other Russian rapid-response shock troops reached the scene, even genuine Spetsnaz units who’d fight ferociously.

He collected the experts he’d need once they got into the bunker. He told the ICBM specialists to hide around the corner of the vestibule. He and the bunker entry team—Delta Force and SERT Seabees—took up positions, with military tear-gas grenades in their hands, and nonlethal rubber bullets in the grenade launchers clipped to their rifles. All were close-combat veterans; the Seabees could instinctively grasp the arrangement of an industrial-like installation with an unknown floor plan.

Everyone was ready. The mounting noises of battle on the surface urged them on. Nyurba picked up the intercom, telling the Russian junior officer to open the inner door. It began to swing outward slowly toward them. The entry team hid behind it.

As soon as the door was open by one meter, the Seabee chief reached around and placed a titanium bar in the gap to prevent the bunker crew from closing the door too soon. The others rushed inside, tossing gas grenades in every direction and knocking down every man they saw with rubber bullets.

Some of the silo crew tried to don their gas masks. Others reached for their pistols. None succeeded. Nyurba saw one officer begin to swallow something. When he aimed his weapon at the man, the Russian raised his hands in surrender; dangling on a lanyard from one hand was one of the launch keys.

The Russians were gasping and choking; their eyes teared so badly they were practically blind. Two were doubled over in pain, where rubber bullets at short range had hit their abdomens.

The entry team quickly disarmed everyone they saw and secured them with duct tape, gagging their mouths and binding them hand and foot, a total of four prisoners—two officers and two senior enlisteds. But this was only the on-duty half of the crew. These men stood twelve-hour shifts in every three-day work rotation. Half of them would be on the lower level, where they slept and ate and relaxed during their twelve hours off.

A metal stairway led below. The entry team dashed down, preceded by more gas grenades, their weapons reloaded.

Nyurba was confronted by a man holding a pistol. He shot the man in the stomach with a rubber bullet. He fell onto his backside but raised the pistol again. Nyurba shot him with the AN-94, a two-round burst to the head.

Another off-duty officer, when he saw how heavily armed the commandos were, including their bulletproof vests, committed suicide with his own pistol, to not be captured. The remaining two on the accommodation level, enlisted men, were less brave or less stupid. Already in gas masks, they put up their hands. The entry team disarmed and secured them with duct tape. Nyurba dragged both Russians upstairs. He dumped them next to the first four prisoners, then removed their gags before the men could suffocate as their noses ran with mucus from the gas. Beneath him, part of the entry team was searching the utility spaces in the bunker’s lowest levels, for anyone cowering there, and for any signs of sabotage—or bombs emplaced by higher command to kill rogues. A Delta Force commando and a Seabee worked together at this, pooling their knowledge of booby traps and machinery.

“Find the blowers,” Nyurba shouted through his mask. “Clear the air.” He was gasping from exertion, and wearing the mask didn’t help. He saw a Russian junior officer involuntarily glance at an equipment console on a wall. Nyurba pointed to it. “See if that’s the environmental control.”

A Seabee read the panel labels, flipped switches, and the tear gas quickly cleared. The team removed their masks.

“Get back outside and firm up the rear guard,” Nyurba told them. “Get the launch specialists in here.” He rethought. “Chief,” he said to one Seabee, “don’t leave.” Nyurba was a SERT Seabee officer himself, but because Kurzin was dead, he was too busy leading the entire effort to be able to apply that expertise. He needed someone on hand who could figure out repairs that might be called for of electrics and hydraulics.

One group of commandos stepped out, through the blast door standing ajar. Different men came in. The last removed the titanium bar and sealed the blast door shut, as others took seats at the consoles, or riffled through technical manuals sitting in piles, or began to inject the silo crewmen with truth drugs.

Chapter 24

J
effrey Fuller awoke groggily from a sleep so deep he didn’t remember dreaming.

“Commodore!”

Jeffrey recognized Bell’s voice. That was what had woken him. “Yes. Yes. I’m awake.”

Bell switched on
Challenger
’s XO stateroom’s light. Jeffrey squinted until his puffy, bleary eyes could adjust. Sessions, asleep in his own rack under the VIP rack, began to stir.

Lord, he was out cold even more than me.
Jeffrey wondered for a moment whether he himself had slept well due to peace of mind about the mission, resulting from his newfound amoral coping mechanism. Or were internal conflicts and ethical qualms so repressed for now that they’d destroy his mental health later?

He brushed this troubling thought aside and glanced at his watch. All peace of mind vanished. “What’s wrong?” He wasn’t supposed to be woken for another three hours. And he should have been woken by a messenger, normal procedure, not by Captain Bell.

“We got the code-letter group by ELF, sir. Colonel Kurzin has begun the attack on the silo complex near Srednekolymsk, as observed and confirmed by surveillance satellite. We’re to proceed to periscope depth, smartly, and monitor further events per our previous orders.”

“
Now?
Are you
sure
?”

“The message was repeated, sir. I checked the decryption myself.”

“But it’s a day early.”

“Something must have sped up their plans.”

Jeffrey climbed out of bed, standing barefoot in his skivvies. He ran a hand over his face.

“I guess something did. . . . All right. . . . Give me five minutes to use the head and get dressed. Have a messenger meet me in Control with coffee. You better prepare the ship for coming to periscope depth and raising the masts.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll have Meltzer start to calculate the relative bearing to watch for missiles rising above our horizon.” Bell turned to leave.

“Wait.” Jeffrey’s thoughts were racing. “Do we know how the attack is going?”

“They wouldn’t send us a code for that, due to overall mission security, sir, assuming even Washington knows.”

“Oh, yeah, right. Sorry, my mind’s still fuzzy.”

“No problem, Commodore.”

Jeffrey read the XO stateroom situation display. Sonar held no threats, neither submerged nor on the surface nor airborne. He called up a navigational chart, as Sessions, also in his boxer shorts and undershirt, looked on. The ship was heading northwest, in the middle of the Laptev Sea, on a course to skirt north of the Svernaya Zemlya islands. The nearest land was Cape Dika, about one hundred fifty nautical miles southwest. The nearest naval base in Rear Admiral Meredov’s area of command was almost due south by three hundred miles: the port of Tiksu, on one edge of the Lena River’s huge delta.
Challenger
was under the pack ice, near the marginal ice zone, using the noise there to hide acoustically at Bell’s favorite depth, nine hundred feet, moving at a stealthy twelve knots. They were in six thousand feet of water—the continental shelf here dropped off much closer inshore than it did by the New Siberian Islands, far astern.

Jeffrey started to figure the distances and timings.

“Sir,” Bell said, smiling at his superior’s typical obsession with work. “Take care of your business first. There’s a polynya ideal for our purposes only three miles off.”

With the blast door closed, it was oddly quiet in control bunker one. Nyurba realized he missed the constant pounding and vibrations that the surface battle had been causing through the air and through the ground. Given the tidy, high-tech appearance of the launch consoles—computer screens and keyboards, rows of switches and knobs and dozens of indicator lights, all labeled with strange abbreviations and acronyms—the bunker seemed surreal. Safes, electronic and power supply cabinets, communications and decoding equipment, printers, and storage lockers lined the walls in the low-ceilinged enclosure. It was antiseptic—a stark contrast to the absolute mess outside.

The lack of any sensations from the violent life-and-death struggle being fought so close above his head brought home what he already knew as a civil engineer: the bunker he was standing in rode on a system of massive springs and torsion bars, powerful shock absorbers and vibration dampers, and suspension rods with high-friction universal joints. Such components surrounded the entryway blast interlock, the control bunker, the blast interlocks at both ends of the tunnels leading to each of the three missile silos, those long tunnels, and the missile silos themselves. Each of these major underground structures was a separate module made of steel and reinforced concrete, with massive rubber bumpers at the joints between them, so the whole system could flex and twist as independent pieces—and thus not build up added stresses or destructive harmonic resonances. Most of the shock-modulation components were installed in a “rattle space” between excavated bedrock and the exterior of the modules; that space was accessible through maintenance hatches. The modular design, including multiple blast interlocks, meant that if one section did fail, those around it would be isolated from any propagating fracture or collapse. American land-based ICBMs, the Upgraded Minuteman IIIs, were housed in a similar way. But the newer SS-27 complexes were built to withstand greater dynamic shear, strain, compression, torque, and shaking than were their older, lifetime-extended U.S. counterparts. Nyurba sent his Seabee chief to gather all the intel he could on the Russian construction methods and specs, using one of the Japanese digital cameras the team had brought to make permanent records. The espionage opportunities were priceless.

“We have intercom communications with bunker two,” the Air Force major said. His name was Akhmed Ildarov, born in Russia’s restive Muslim region of Dagestan. Ildarov was stocky and swarthy, all business at all times; he’d been naturalized as a U.S. citizen during his childhood. “Our people have seized control in bunker two, sir. They report proceeding to obtain information and items required for armed missile launches.”

“Very well,” Nyurba acknowledged. “Activate all surface TV cameras.”

“Yes, sir.”

The silo crewmen must have turned them off because they found the combat scenes too disturbing.

Display screens lit up to show views, in full color, from aboveground; the pictures weren’t very sharp, and the cameras had no zoom lenses. As the major’s men hurried around doing their jobs, Nyurba mostly studied these screens. Some of the cameras had failed even though they were armored—these, like the radio antennas, were expected to be lost in an attack, and reserve units hid behind armored shutters. Nyurba decided to save those cameras for right before bunker one’s missiles launched—assuming they ever did.

The cameras that were working showed that the fight for the bunker entryways, so vicious while Nyurba was in the stairwell, had reached a stalemate. Before, he’d only been able to see what a pounding his men were taking. Now, he could see what they’d dished out.

New funeral pyres of aircraft and vehicles threw flames and smoke into the sky. Dead Russians lay contorted where they fell. Charred corpses smoldered. Wounded crawled or clutched at entrails or raised their arms in pleading for help. Some of the figures that burned were moving, either because limbs drew into outreaching postures as muscles and tendons were cooked—or because they were still alive.

The Russians had suffered heavy losses from the squadron’s supersonic SA-16 missiles, the shaped-charge and hyperbaric warheads of the RPG-27s, and the grenade launchers and flak-vest-piercing AN-94s. Surviving helicopters and armored cars and troops in the open were mostly keeping their distance. Individuals fired back and forth sporadically, but at longer range the AN-94 was much more accurate than the AK-47 or the AK-74. The camera displays showed that the triple chain-link fences had been knocked down in a number of spots, but the area be-
tween them still held many unexploded mines. It was difficult to defuse these mines while under fire from the commandos—this was one factor working to the squadron’s advantage. It held the Russians at bay, even as it trapped the commandos.

On one screen, Nyurba saw man-sized lumps moving on the ground by a gap in the fence.
Russian minefield-clearing teams?

The earth around them leaped into the air in many small clods.
Hits from AN-94 rounds?

Some lumps jerked or rolled over and stopped moving. The others kept advancing. There was a sudden bright flash on the screen, weird because the picture had no sound. Lumps, and parts of lumps, cartwheeled through the air and landed heavily.

Scratch one more mine-clearing team.

But small units, whether Mi-24s of different varieties, or BTR-70s—or the newer, diesel-powered BTR-80s that had shown up—or squads of soldiers, would make lunges and feints to get the commandos to waste their ammo. Realizing this, the commandos in the entryway dugouts held their fire, playing possum, until the lunges got too close for their weapons to miss. Then they’d fire a missile or a grenade, causing further Russian losses—but expending further ammo, and sometimes taking killed and wounded themselves.

Nyurba saw another lunge, this one by a squad of twelve infantrymen each holding an RPG-27 or similar grenade launcher. They spread out wide to make harder targets, and ran right into the minefield through holes in the fence. Three of them set off mines, and grabbed for legs that weren’t there until they set off more mines and lay dead. Nine men never broke stride, and now were on the asphalt. They were charging straight toward bunker two, from the direction facing its entryway. They obviously wanted to get within the two-hundred-yard range of their warheads and use them as bunker-buster grenades. They wore extra-thick body armor; sometimes they hesitated or staggered as if they’d been hit, but then kept coming. One man was hit in a leg—Nyurba saw a puff of pink vapor come out the back of his thigh. He hopped forward on the other leg. A commando in bunker two fired at one Russian using the grenade launcher under his rifle, but its range in a high lob from the launcher was no better than that of the RPG rockets with their flatter flights. A flash and a puff of smoke showed that the commando’s grenade fell short. That soldier broke ranks, knelt, and fired back. A rocket streaked toward the bunker, and a ball of fire above the asphalt showed that it too fell short—a hyperbaric warhead. The other Russian soldiers were still coming on. One by one they were picked off with shots to the head or neck, or crippling shots to the lower abdomen and groin—or raking full-auto fire that shredded their thighs or their calves. Nyurba was transfixed by this amazing show of courage. Only one Russian had to get within effective grenade range, out of the dozen who had started this death charge, to take out everyone on the stairs of bunker two.

One last man got close enough.

He knelt and aimed his rocket launcher.

A shower of grenades landed all around him. Nyurba was impressed—the commandos had fired in advance as a group, anticipating where he’d be before he got there, so the arcing pop flies of their grenades impacted before he could shoot. Amid the flashes and smoke engulfing the Russian, there was a brighter, more prolonged eruption—a grenade fragment had set off the rocket warhead and its fuel while still in the barrel. All that was left were burning pieces of flesh.

After this the battle went into another lull. It had become a slow and grinding attrition fight: each side wore the other down, bit by bit. The winner, at least of this phase of the larger contest, would be whoever ran out of resources last. The Russians could run low on aircraft and armored cars—or troops could run out of the willingness to advance in the next probe or feint, only to die horribly like those who’d gone before. The commandos could run out of men or ammunition. Based on the numbers on both sides, as Nyurba judged from the camera views and from reports he got over the intercom in the interlock—from which the bunkers’ defending squads were all within radio contact—the commandos would eventually lose. The real question was whether they’d be able to launch some SS-27s before Russian troops broke into bunker one and bunker two and stopped them. The Russians didn’t seem in any major hurry now, which implied that their commanders didn’t think the attackers—whoever they actually were—would be able to launch an ICBM.

Are they underestimating the preparedness and skill of my squadron, or are we underestimating their preventives against an unauthorized launch?

Do they realize we’re already inside two control bunkers?

Nyurba tore his eyes from the screens and watched as the ten men with him continued their assigned tasks systematically and speedily. Some were digesting the normal launch procedures, using the manuals that provided explicit details and checklists. Others were busy hacking the computer systems, to learn the current arming and targeting passwords, and find out how to set the desired flight coordinates and detonation parameters.

Two men kept bombarding their prisoners with questions. The six Russian silo crewmen had been blindfolded, then divided into two groups held out of earshot of each other, one in a corner on the upper level and one on the level below. By cross-examining the men, now deeply under the influence of truth serums, and then comparing answers to the same questions asked of both groups, the interrogators could confirm information and weed out any lies. The chemicals flooding their brain cells made it very hard for the Russians to lie. But these rigorously selected silo crewmen had a strong sense of duty—as two had shown right at the start, they’d rather die than help rogues launch armed nukes.

For all they knew, Nyurba was targeting Moscow.

One of the very first questions was about bunker voice or video recorders. These were located and smashed.

What simplified the main work was that Nyurba didn’t care about procedures to verify that an incoming launch order was valid. This was a large part of silo crew training in any country, but today’s purpose was achieving unauthorized launch. A valid order would include directions for safing the complex’s antirogue traps—the team had to assume that all radio messages now were tricks meant to disable or destroy the ICBMs.