Seas of Crisis

“You see, Commodore, we’re not entirely in the dark on what we’ll be trying to do. And before you ask, in this context it’s perfectly believable that the raiders were sent by Berlin. Germany had its own ample share of arrested rogue weapons scientists, and honest Russian emigres too, especially ones with key technical skills. Germany was Russia’s largest import-export partner even before this war. Since the communist state imploded two decades ago, many Russians having the ways and means abandoned the dreary place with lasting bitterness. Some moved to Germany. Some are German citizens now. As we already covered once, immigrants can be passionately patriotic to their new homes.” Kurzin’s men nodded.

“Fine,” Jeffrey said. “But there’ll be computer passwords, now, today. Ones that are frequently altered, if their procedures are anything like ours. You won’t have those passwords, will you?”

“Some things we can sort of hotwire,” Nyurba said, “if we can’t intercept the couriers or overhear the new passwords as they’re conveyed by electronic means.”

“You’re taking far too much for granted.”

“No we aren’t,” Kurzin stepped in firmly. “If any set of circuitry requires a certain password to unlock any protective device in real time, that circuitry itself must know the password. Correct?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“If the password is anywhere in such circuitry, and that circuitry falls into our hands on this raid, we have ways to force it to reveal the password to us.”

“Who’s this ‘we’?”

“Among my squadron officers are experts who were stationed in American missile silos, and others who have great talents at computer hacking. We brought with us devices, designed in the U.S., mimicking German high-end hacker styles, and constructed using Russian and German or neutral components and tools, which will assist us in attempting to crack the codes.”

“You said ‘attempting.’ ”

“Total success is never guaranteed.”

“All right, let’s be optimists on that for now. I have a good cover story for why Challenger is where she is when the warheads go off. I’m on my way to blockade the next Eight-six-eight-U-class submarine that the Russians are selling to Germany. And Carter will emit the acoustic signature of a German Amethyste-Two if she faces any risk of detection. Those parts work for me, in and of themselves. But how do you get into a silo bunker to begin with? They’re hardened against attack by nuclear bombs.”

“The bunkers and silos are hardened, but their locations are permanently fixed. We know exactly where they are, which is a significant plus. Russia’s road-mobile nuclear missiles are far too elusive to preplan a hijacking with any surety. Their carrier vehicles can move much faster than we’d ever be able to keep up with on foot. Their crews, out in the open, if they see they’re losing an ambush, can sabotage their own ICBMs too easily. Ditto for rail-mobile units. The same is not the case for missiles in silos. And yes, the control bunkers are hardened, but the people on duty inside them are not. The humans must rotate in and out periodically, for recreation and rest, the same as U.S. Air Force silo crews. This is their Achilles’ heel.”

“Which they’ll take severe precautions to protect.”

“Once Carter drops us off where we’ll sneak ashore through toxic coastal waters, our five-day overland hike will be timed to reach a particular missile base just before a regular silo personnel shift change. We intend to commandeer the approaching trucks bringing in replacement crews, and penetrate the installation that way. We’ll then take over the control bunkers for half a dozen ICBMs.”

“Horribly chancy.”

“We anticipate that our silo entry phase may become extremely violent. We are fully prepared for this.”

Jeffrey glanced around the room at Kurzin’s commando force. Their faces were blank, inscrutable. “You’re telling me you’re going on a one-way mission.”

“We understand the meaning of service and sacrifice.”

“Come back to how we’re supposed to make Russian latest-generation warheads go off prematurely.”

“That part is in the script included in your orders.”

“If I’d tried to learn the whole script in one sitting, I’d’ve been in that stateroom for forty-eight hours or more.”

“That’s why you still have a week-plus to memorize everything,” Nyurba said.

“What I did see, or skim, I’m not so sure about. Gamma-ray lasers and microwave lasers and proton particle beams in the vacuum of space, plus radar spoofers tuned perfectly, all making a nuclear warhead think it’s reentered the atmosphere, that it feels the heat and the rising air pressure and the deceleration, and its radar altimeter, if it has one, detects the ground coming up. Zapping timers and blinding celestial-navigation sensors, without ruining the warheads altogether…. You’re counting on too many things going just right.”

“Again,” Kurzin told him, “you’re so caught up you forget that this is all bluff. It does not actually have to exist, let alone work correctly. The Russians just have to believe that it’s plausible, and see the evidence with their own eyes that tells them it’s real and it did work.”

“The exoatmospheric blasts.”

“Yes.”

“Which fry so many satellites and ground systems instantly that the Russians have no telemetry to prove that there never was a gamma-ray laser firing, a particle beam gun discharging, a radar spoofer radar broadcasting. All deployed from supposed nuclear-powered stealth satellites that they can’t detect, not because they’re too stealthy to detect, but because in fact they never existed.”

“An excellent summary, Commodore. Remember, it’s the President’s job, on the Hot Line, to convey all this to the Kremlin. A deep-black DARPA project, now unveiled. You wouldn’t have known about something so secret in advance. You know what you do know, supposedly, because of a radio message received only after the warheads explode. The same long message that orders you to Siberia as your commander in chief’s personal, on-site, back- channel mouthpiece. Your role in this part of the act is a supporting one. You merely need to believe what you were told.”

“Which brings us back full circle, to one main thing that still is bugging me. What if the Russians think it’s all too pat? Challenger appearing at just the right time and place by sheer happenstance, and this magical, mystical missile shield idea being swallowed whole by the Kremlin, and them not seeing that we had strong motive to have done the nasty deed ourselves to frame Berlin and reap large benefits. Expecting that all of this comes together and Moscow never questions our package of lie after lie after lie… It’s too much like tempting fate.”

“They can’t call our bluff on this next-generation missile shield,” Kurzin said. “The only way would be to launch a live ICBM at the U.S. Suppose they do. Then you posit that the shield has imperfections, that it can leak. Since there’s no way for the Russians to self-destruct an ICBM once it’s in flight, the whole idea of ICBMs as deterrents being that they can’t be recalled after launch, we’d either shoot it down in our end zone along its trajectory with what conventional missile defenses we do have, or it’d detonate over or on U.S. soil. Either way their launch would be an intentional act of war, and we’d certainly retaliate, quite possibly by targeting the Kremlin. Because, remember, we’d still be acting as if we were entirely innocent of anything except protecting ourselves against a Russian preemptive attack, using the nonexistent mystery shield to inflict electromagnetic-pulse damage, which is more or less nonlethal, on the Kremlin environs…. Therefore the only way to call the bluff amounts to an act of suicide for Moscow.”

“I follow the nonlethal aspect of the punishment from this made-up missile shield. I like it as an idea, I said that before, and I wish someday we could field such a system for real. But the Russians don’t have to actually test the shield to doubt its existence. They can simply conclude on their own that it’s just theoretical concepts and double-talk.”

“This is where your faked rage and bluster onshore in Siberia come in. The analogy to magic is more apt than you may recognize, Commodore. It’s a psychological sleight of hand. Your dire accusations and threats as champion atomic warrior, to a senior Russian Navy officer who’ll know exactly who you are. Challenger lurking with her tactical nuclear cruise missiles in case they mistreat you. Very useable weapons, you’ll say, since they don’t breach the barrier to hydrogen bombs. This will all divert Russian thinking away from the U.S. being to blame. Challenger herself