Warshot

resulting in communication brownouts.

* * *

When the news of the explosion in Hillsboro first hit the streets, there was confusion over the name. Some reporters confused it with the Hillsview Reservoir. Others thought it was the Hillsboro of movie fame, the stand-in for Dayton, Tennessee, made famous or infamous, depending on the point of view, by its “Monkey Trial” in 1925, wherein newspaper luminary H. L. Mencken, writing for the Boston Globe, reported the clash of the Titans, when presidential hopeful William Jennings Bryan and the great defense attorney Clarence Darrow battled it out over the Tennessee school law forbidding the teaching of evolution.

But the Hillsboro in question was in Wisconsin, and there was no confusion on the part of the “sleeper” SPETS team, suspected by FBI investigators later to have consisted of two cells of three men each, which, using heavy eighty-one-millimeter mortars, blew the cesium clock building to hell, also knocking out the electric “feed-in” for the backup atomic clock.

Kirov’s “Ballet” had begun. AT&T’s big “tote board” in New Jersey went crazy, the byte — eight bits to a byte — slippage in every mainframe computer irreversible. This meant not only that Lana La Roche, nee Brentwood, couldn’t phone from Dutch Harbor to California to find out whether Frank Shirer was as yet in overseas B-52 training or had been caught in the helter-skelter sabotage that was apparently breaking out all over the U.S., but also that all defense computers and most phone lines were down.

In fact, Shirer was already en route to Nayoro, for Freeman had sent out an urgent request for BUFFs. No one knew why, because while the “big ugly fat fellows” could bomb from thirty thousand feet outside most AA missile envelopes, all the pilots, including Frank, knew that you simply wouldn’t have the accuracy from that height, and certainly not in the blizzard conditions.

In any event, even if the U.S. phone networks hadn’t been shut down, Lana wouldn’t have been told where Shirer was. But if the shutdown of all personal calls was a trial for the ordinary citizen, the Defense Department had a much more serious problem. All ICBM silo computers were down, including those inside NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain and those responsible for the prearranged coded “burst” messages to American submarines, like Robert Brentwood’s USS Reagan, a dual purpose SSBN/SSN, ICBM/Hunter-Killer Sea Wolf II.

In the Pacific Northwest, in Washington State, another sub, the USS Corpus Christi, a 16,000-ton Trident II, her gold crew aboard, slid effortlessly through the long, moonlit race of water stretching out from the Bangor Base into Hood Canal. The pine-scented banks slipped by like spiked velvet, and the “boomer”—as they called the intercontinental ballistic missile Trident — headed out to join the First Pacific Fleet several thousand miles west nor’west of Bangor. She was to become part of the hectic American buildup and resupply of Second Army, or rather, one of the hidden protectors of the convoys racing to satisfy the enormous appetite for materiel created by the logistics of fighting a two-front war across the other side of the world.

The OOD — officer of the deck — Ben Cashell, reported, “Degaussing station coming up,” informing the captain and the crew in the redded-out control room beneath the sail that the sub was entering the huge “magnetic wiping” shed which would temporarily erase the Corpus Christi’s telltale magnetic signature. At the very least, her signature would be sufficiently altered so that it couldn’t be easily identified by any of the Siberian nuclear subs. Some of the Sibirs, as they were known by the U.S. submarines, had passive sonar arrays-big spools of transparent, oil-filled cable that housed listening mikes, which they trolled hundreds of yards behind them in the oceanic sound channels off the American west coast.

Cashell, a native of the drier regions of Texas before he graduated from Annapolis as the first black to be so rapidly promoted to executive officer aboard Tridents IIs, reveled in the sheer natural beauty of the deep-water sound, the fresh ocean smell mingling with that of the pine forests that swept right down to the sea, the moon a silver disk above the heavy, dark foliage of the timbered hillsides — all of it elemental in its mystery. He heard the depth readout from control and looked farther down at the bow, watching the thin line of phosphorescence, caused as much by the incoming tide as by the sub’s egress speed, and he knew that soon, a moment he always savored — once they were beyond the sound and approaching patrol speed — the Corpus Christi’s thin line of foam would become a creamy bow wave before the “cut-out” speed. Then there would be no visible bow wave at all, just a continuous, oily-looking hump of water sliding over the forward section as the sub, carrying ten MIRV nuclear warheads on each of its twenty-four missiles — more than all the explosive power used in World War II — headed quietly out to deep water.

For some, the subs represented a monstrous intrusion into nature’s realm, but for Cashell the ship immersed in the sea represented not a conflict, but a harmony between man and nature. Far from violating the integrity of the natural realm, the sub became part of it, its very shape — a giant forty-two-foot-wide, 560-foot-long cylinder with a bulbous bow like that of a great whale, and streamlined sail, diving planes, and pressure hull — moving in concert like the fins of a great fish in a perfect marriage of function and form. And because of this, unlike the older submarines of World War II, which had to make most of their torpedo attacks on the surface, the Tridents and their smaller cousins, the Sea Wolfs, attacked from below. Here even the enormous bulk of the 16,000-ton Trident, a whale compared to the smaller Sea Wolf, was as responsive as any marine mammal to the slightest change in the ocean’s environment.

Corpus Christi was all but through the “chicken wire” of the degaussing station and when Cashell saw the light he thought it was a hunter’s flashlight blink from shore. Then the starboard lookout yelled, “Incoming!” That’s all Cashell remembered.

The first blink was followed by two others — three ninety-four-pound Hellfire antitank missiles.

No one in the sub’s control was hit, but fourteen seamen on the forward starboard side were killed instantly when one of the sub’s Mark-48 torpedoes exploded beneath them following the Hellfire’s impact, the antitank missile ripping open the hull forward of the sail at the waterline, wiping out all bow-inset sonar sensors as well as gutting the torpedo room. Three more men were found dead, trapped in the tangled wreckage of the forward section’s fourth level, another five having survived by being sucked out after the initial inrush of water which had doused fires immediately. As the sub had been on the surface, these five managed to swim ashore. But the sub, barely kept afloat by a chief of the boat who had quickly ordered all affected compartments sealed off from the rest of the ship, was effectively out of commission for what the Bremerton yard boss later estimated would be at least six months.

In San Diego the Aegis-equipped guided missile cruiser, the Santa Fe, had been sunk, the torpedoes used in the attack thought by both the CIA and FBI to have been two of three stolen from the San Diego Naval Yards during the Super Bowl game, the attention of perimeter guards diverted. Subsequent spectroscopic analysis, however, proved that the torpedoes, though definitely U.S. Mk-48s, had come from the Canadian west coast naval base of Esquimau. Presumably they had been smuggled across at some point along the three-thousand-mile U.S.-Canada border by “illegals” who, like their cohorts in the U.S., had entered North America during the Gorbachev-Bush honeymoon, possibly having slipped in from a Russian trawler in for “repairs” at one of Canada’s ports. The CIA in particular drew the president’s attention to the “peculiar reluctance” of CSIS — Canadian Security Intelligence Service — to follow suspected illegals across their border into the U.S. “They’re very good in Signals Intelligence, sir,” reported presidential press secretary Trainor. “But when it comes to HUMINT…” He shook his head.

“Quite so, I’m afraid,” agreed British liaison officer Brigadier General Soames, representing Her Majesty’s government in the crisis. “Canadians are rather reserved in this area, I’m afraid. Not their line of country at all, really. They wait to be invited. RSVP, if you get my drift.”

“I do,” said President Mayne glumly. “Novosibirsk must love it.”

“Oh yes. Novosibirsk, St. Petersburg — they’re very fond of Ottawa. Home away from home. Cold as well.”

The only thing seriously challenging the CIA’s theory of the origins of the torpedoes was that the dredged remains of the two that had sunk Santa Fe and killed over 140 U.S. sailors indicated that several critical gearing sprockets had been constructed of nylex, a steel-hard plastic sheathed in fiberglass. The only reason for this would have been to make them undetectable at airports where, contrary to somber international agreement, metal detection scans of diplomatic bags were routinely carried out by CIA “ground crews.” All of which would suggest that the two torpedoes could had been smuggled in by air, piece by piece. Whatever the reason, in a concomitant sabotage attack in San Diego, eight F-4 Phantoms were total write-offs, the forty-million-dollar-apiece aircraft destroyed not by the explosion of the airfield’s ammunition dump, as was first reported, but by surface-to-