Joe Buff
Seas of Crisis
The whole point of the next big surprise attack against America is that it really will come as a total surprise — not just as to where and when, but especially as to who, why, and how.
The boldest measures are the safest.
Note from the Author
Submarines rank among the most sophisticated weapons systems, and among the most impressive benchmarks of technology and engineering, ever achieved by the human race. Stunning feats of courage by their crews, of sacrifice and endurance, loom large on the pages of history. Since the end of the Cold War, a whole new generation of submarine classes, with astonishing sensors, weapons, off-board vehicles, and stealth, has been conceived and is under construction by the United States Navy.
The world’s oceans are the world’s highways for the transport of goods and the conduct of commerce. Continued mastery of undersea warfare is vital, because whoever controls the ocean’s depths controls its surface, and thus protects much of the world. Sea power, strongly employed, is key to upholding peaceful societies everywhere.
But do America and our allies take our free access through international waters too much for granted? Advanced submarine technology is proliferating among countries who haven’t always been our friends. Nuclear weapons are also spreading at an alarming pace, with transnational conspiracies, shrewdly hidden for years, only recently being unmasked. What mortal threats to freedom still remain hidden?
The enemy you don’t see coming, because of your own blind spots and preconceived notions, is the one who’ll get you every time. The 9/11 Commission Report warned us all of “failures of imagination” and “unprepared mind-sets.” Beyond the global war on terror, what shape might the twenty-first century’s almost inevitable eventual major worldwide armed conflict take? When faced with so many dangerous future unknowns, the Navy wargames what-if scenarios to learn everything it can; “not implausible” worst cases are very educational. As an award- winning military commentator and seasoned risk analyst, my extreme action-adventure novels aim to do the same thing, based on a firm foundation of nonfiction research. Perhaps the only certainty is that heroic submariners and special operations forces will play a key role in deterring that Next Big War, or in winning it.
Prologue
By the middle of 2011, the global war on terror had flared up and died down repeatedly, with serious losses in damage and blood. Personal freedoms in many countries had also been eroded, while international friendships more and more were a thing of the past. All this was the cost, and the legacy, inflicted or triggered by those whose highest goals were senseless destruction and death. Then, just as the worst of terrorism seemed to have been contained, that struggle was eclipsed by a shocking new conflict of much greater magnitude.
In July 2011, Boer-led reactionaries seized control of the government in South Africa, which was in the midst of social chaos, and restored apartheid. In response to a UN trade embargo, the Boer regime began sinking U.S. and British merchant ships. U.S.-led coalition forces mobilized, but Germany and Russia held back. Troops and tanks drained from the rest of Europe and North America, and a joint task force set sail for Africa — into a giant, coordinated trap.
There was another coup, in Berlin. Ultranationalists, exploiting American unpreparedness for such all-out war, would give Germany her “place in the sun” at last. A secret military-industrial conspiracy had planned it all for years, brutal opportunists who hated the cross-border mixing and feuding of the European Union as much as they resented what to them was seen as America’s arrogance and bullying. Big off-the-books loans from Swiss and German banks, collateralized by wealth to be plundered from the losers, funded the stealthy buildup in a perverse but effective form of voodoo-economics bootstrapping and accounting fraud. Coercion by the noose won over citizens not swayed by patriotism or the sheer onrush of events.
This Berlin-Boer Axis had covertly built tactical atomic weapons, the great equalizers in what would otherwise have been a most uneven fight — and once again America’s intelligence community was clueless. Compact, energy-efficient, very-low-signature dual-laser isotope separation techniques let the conspirators purify uranium into weapons-grade in total privacy.
The new Axis, seeking a global empire all their own, used low-yield A-bombs to ambush the Allied naval task force under way, then destroyed Warsaw and Tripoli. Those decades of Cold War division, by the overbearing superpowers, into East Germany and West Germany — armed camps in a tinderbox face-off pitting brother against brother — in hindsight debunked the postreunification fairy tale of German pacifism. The most warlike nation in modern history was on the warpath again.
France, stunned, followed NATO’s recognized nuclear strategy option of preemptive capitulation, surrendering at once. Continental Europe was overrun. Germany won a strong beachhead in North Africa, while the South African army drove hard toward them to link up. The battered Allied task force put ashore near the Congo Basin, in a last- ditch attempt to hold the Germans and well-equipped Boers apart. In both Europe and Africa the fascist conquest trapped countless Allied civilians, who were herded into internment camps next to major Axis bases, factories, and transport nodes, to be held as hostages and human shields.
It was unthinkable for the Allies to retaliate against Axis tactical nuclear weapons, used primarily at sea, by launching ICBMs loaded with hydrogen bombs into the heart of Western Europe, especially when the murderous fallout of H-bombs dropped on land obeyed no nation’s overflight restrictions. The Axis shrewdly avoided acquiring hydrogen bombs of their own. The United States and the United Kingdom thus were handcuffed, forced to fight on Axis terms on ground of Axis choosing: the mid-ocean, with A-bomb-tipped cruise missiles and torpedoes. Information-warfare hacking of the Global Positioning System satellites, and ingenious jamming of smart-bomb homing sensors, made Allied precision-guided high-explosive munitions much less precise. Advanced radar methods in the FM radio band — pioneered by Russia — removed the invisibility of America’s finest stealth aircraft.
Thoroughly relentless, Germany grabbed nuclear subs from the French, and hypermodern diesel subs that Germany herself had exported to other countries. The Russian Federation, supposedly neutral yet long a believer in the practicality of limited tactical nuclear war, sold weapons, oil, and natural gas to the Axis. Autocratic and ambitious, Russia was more than glad to take on America by proxy once more — this time she’d let the Germans and Boers do her dirty work. Most of the rest of the world, including China, stayed on the sidelines, biding their time out of fear or greed or both.
American convoys to starving Great Britain are being decimated by the modern U-boat threat, in another bloody Battle of the Atlantic. On land, in theaters of combat and intrigue ranging from the South Pacific to South America, to Central Africa and the Middle East, the Axis have waged campaigns of calculated daring and astonishing callousness, based on razor-thin margins between success and atomic holocaust.
