Seas of Crisis

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