World in Flames

because he wanted to point out that after Gorbachev’s brief fling with glasnost, the Russian people would surely be alert to the distinction between canister tear gas and nerve gas.

Here the Minister for Propaganda fairly bristled with pride. “We have skillfully spliced the film of the American police in riot control using the gas with casualties from the Bhopal chemical disaster from the American plant in India which killed hundreds, and also other footage of American marines firing canisters—”

“So you not only have tear gas clouds fired by Americans,” interjected Marchenko, ‘“but nerve gas victims as well? Is that correct?”

“Yes, Comrade.”

“Can you match color, locale, such things…”

The minister for propaganda couldn’t suppress a smile at the war minister’s naivete on such technical matters. “We have the best Canadian documentary techniques, Comrade, and West German technology to implement and splice.”

Marchenko, bottom lip protruding, nodded approvingly. He wasn’t one to hold grudges, and he had to admit that Chernko and the Propaganda Ministry had done a fine job in presenting their argument. The propaganda minister added that they were getting much mileage from footage of the “yellow rain” defoliants the Americans had used in Vietnam together with napalm victims, American peace activists, and “brushed-up” footage of an American actress in Hanoi, complete with Vietcong pith helmet, denouncing American fliers on Hanoi radio as war criminals.

Marchenko himself had a sudden and, he thought, convincing argument for Chernko’s position. “Of course, if the Americans fired chemical weapon missiles in Europe, the West Europeans would be furious. The danger is obvious — any winds that carry the gas to the Allied front will certainly sweep further west over Germany.”

“Exactly!” said Chernko, seizing the moment. “Comrade Marchenko is exactly right on this point.”

Suzlov had said little, and now all eyes were on him. He was a man who had risen to power on Party consensus, and in a sense, a decision on chemical warfare was not more or less important than any other requiring Party solidarity.

“We will come together again, Comrades. I want a full vote. It must be unanimous.”

“I can assure you, Mr. President—” began Chernko.

Suzlov interrupted. “That the comrades not here will concur? Are you so sure, Comrade? Personally I find your argument a strong one, but it must be unanimous from every STAVKA member. This, I insist, must be on record.” He looked at his watch and announced, “Given the urgency of the matter, Comrades, we will meet here again tomorrow evening — midnight. Waiting thirty hours will not scuttle your plan, Comrade,” Suzlov assured Chernko, “and it will give our other comrades time to attend. How long would it take to launch the gas attack if we give it unanimous approval?”

“Within the hour,” said Chernko. “Our frontline commanders are already on standby.”

“Then we can’t wait thirty hours?”

Chernko knew bureaucratic immovability when he saw it. And Suzlov wouldn’t move until he got unanimous support. “Yes, Mr. President. We can wait thirty hours.”

“Good. Then notify all members we’ll meet here tomorrow. Twenty-four hundred hours.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

Suzlov nodded and walked back to his desk.

“Do you think we’ll get unanimous support tomorrow night?” asked Marchenko. “That’s if we can get a forum.”

Chernko’s smile was like that of an alcoholic asked if he could manage another drink. It was a smile that told Marchenko all the KGB’s IOUs and power would be used to make sure that everyone who should vote, would. He wondered how much pressure the KGB chief at Khabarovsk, Colonel Nefski, was applying to his son, who apparently was persisting in his liaison with the Jewish woman.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Sonar man Emerson wasn’t sure he liked the blue glow of the sonar room forward of Roosevelt’s control. He was used to working in the redded-out subs, and in his view, the argument that blue light around the sonar consoles made it easier for the operators to see the blips on the digitized display screen was debatable. “Different strokes for different folks,” as he had told the chief of the boat. The chief suspected, however, that Emerson’s quandary over the light was really a cover for a much larger concern — namely that this was Emerson’s first trip under the ice.

It was, for operators, like moving to a different neighborhood. Lying in bed at night, you knew it was traffic outside, but familiarity with the different sounds took time to get used to. Unfortunately, the war didn’t allow you much time to learn — especially given the rate of sub sinkings and “sonar operator stress syndrome,” or “SOS,” as it was known among the operators. Many had spent up to sixteen hours at a stretch on seventy-five-day war patrols as the Soviet subs lay in wait in the deep ocean ravines of the mid-Atlantic Ridge. It was these ravines, sounded and plotted by prewar Soviet oceanographic “research” ships, that had proved such a boon to the new Soviet sub offensive. No matter how good the NATO warships’ depth and profile sounders were, many of the ravines’ profiles were so jagged, often near upwellings and other thermoclines, that probing sonar signals were merely scrambled. Such sonar profiles revealed nothing more than the tops of the mountain ranges that formed the Atlantic range.

Despite the hours off watch that he had devoted sitting listening to the Roosevelt’s “library”—tapes of enemy noise signatures and the types of sea noise — to fine-tune his ability to distinguish between background sea clutter and heavy concentrations of Arctic phytoplankton, Emerson still felt uneasy about this, his first long war patrol in the high Arctic.

While the rest of the crew actually felt safer below the roof of frozen sea, the constant grinding of the pack ice was particularly disconcerting for a sonar operator, the noise having a tendency to “bully” out all other sounds — a fact that Soviet subs had taken advantage of, using their big cargo ships’ prop noise to drown out that of their subs as they broke out of their home ports just before war had officially broken out.

Adding to Emerson’s apprehension was Roosevelt’s mission to remain as an undetected submarine launch platform for the forty-two warheads atop the six Trident missiles—”the weapons of last resort.” Roosevelt’s greatest defense, its silence, meant eschewing its active sonar, whose outgoing noise pulses would give its position away as well as pinpointing the enemy’s.

This meant that unless Emerson received a specific release order from either Captain Brentwood or the officer of the deck to go “active,” all he could do was to stay in the passive mode. However, in passive there was no time/space ratio during the duration between an active sonar’s pulse and the return of its echo.

In short, it would be impossible for him to tell accurately how far away a noise source was, or in any ice-free zone, whether it was on the surface or submerged.

Experienced sub hands often made fairly accurate guesstimates of the distance, but this was based purely on experience, not formula. The fact that survival at sea was as much art as science had been brought home to Emerson during the Russian cruiser attacks against the American subs early in the war. Captain Brentwood’s advice to a colleague had once saved that man’s sub and his crew when, acting quickly in an evasive maneuver, he had simultaneously ordered that the bodies of two men who had died due to flooding caused by a previous depth charge attack be cut up and blown to the surface in several of the torpedo tubes along with diesel oil and assorted garbage, convincing the Russian sub chaser that they’d done their job.

Emerson’s sense of responsibility, the knowledge that he could mistake a “biological” noise, such as the sudden turn of a tightly bunched school of fish, for an attacking sub, weighed heavily on him. It would mean life or death for the entire crew, for if he didn’t identify an enemy sub quickly enough, there’d be no time for Brentwood to get a fish off. And yet if he mistakenly identified a noise as a sub when it wasn’t and Brentwood fired, then at that very moment of the torpedo’s release, any enemy sub listening would hear the high-pressure ejection and the cavitation of the torpedo’s propeller and would know exactly where the Roosevelt was.

The responsibility on Emerson was made worse by the crew’s well-intentioned assurances to him that now