second in command.
“Rocketeers!” he ordered. “Hyperbaric rounds, target the nearest guard tower. Snipers, concentrate on the more distant towers.” Only two of the snipers acknowledged.
Two men had reloaded their RPG-27 launchers with the new fuel-air explosive hyperbaric rounds. These were designed for troops in foxholes with overhead cover. The commandos fired them at the guard tower.
The rockets soared away from Nyurba toward the tower. His perspective foreshortened, he could see their exhaust flames and smoke trails from behind as if in slow motion. But by now there was smoke and flame everywhere, and wafts of other trails from missiles and rockets and tracers filled the sky.
The hyperbaric warheads impacted the front of the concrete guard tower, below the lip from which the machine gun was shooting. They dispersed their fuel aerosol into a cloud, and a split second later the igniters set off the cloud. The guard tower was engulfed in a blinding red flash that created an overpressure so strong Nyurba felt as if he’d been hit by a hundred-pound bomb. When he pulled himself together, his ears hurt worse than ever and the guard tower was a wreck, chunks of concrete and bodies landing and bouncing on the torn-up asphalt.
Other hyperbaric rounds took out the remaining guard towers.
Suddenly, all firing stopped. The commando team had no targets. Medics were busy treating the wounded.
Secondary explosions from the Hinds and armored cars continued as more ammunition cooked off. Above them, Nyurba heard a deep
Air began to whistle as it was sucked into bunker ventilator shafts. Filtered for contaminants, that air was feeding emergency diesel generators down below. The mine going off by the power lines toppled a pylon, shorting out or snapping the cables — main power to the base complex was dead. The proof was that seconds later, gray smoke belched out of the diesel exhaust shafts. This vividly reminded Nyurba that there were Russians, and SS-27 ICBMs, alive and intact in the underground chambers.
He stood, examining the battlefield. About a third of his men were killed or wounded, and another ten or twelve were occupied helping those who were hurt.
Timing was critical. Russian reinforcements would get here soon. The crews inside the silo bunkers probably heard and felt nothing of the assault, because they were behind such strong shock hardening and acoustic-vibration damping insulation. But the camera pods on the surface, aimed at the silo lids, fed into the bunkers so the crews could monitor each missile launch. They would have caught some glimpses of the fighting. And hardened, buried communications lines came in from the regimental command bunker at the support base. The silo crews would have been warned of a security alert hours earlier, since their normal rotation out had been postponed. Nyurba had no idea what the support base had told them since then, if anything, because he had no idea what the support base itself yet understood about what was going on amid the silo field.
Nyurba made a difficult choice. In this situation, he had to divide his forces. The only underground cover inside the entire fenced-in complex was the entryways to the three control bunkers. Occupying all three entries meant the company could give each other covering cross-fire against the impending Russian counterattack. The team had brought enough specialists to go after two bunkers at once; such redundancy was built in from the very start of planning, in case some Air Force missile experts or SERT Seabees were wounded or killed. But headquarters-platoon casualties so far were unexpectedly light; its role had been to take cover and save ammo, not draw fire. Going after two bunkers simultaneously gave the highest likelihood of achieving the ultimate goal — liftoff of at least two properly armed ICBMs.
“Let’s go, let’s go,
Chapter 23
Nyurba, leading a squad of men, stooped under the concrete overhang that sheltered the entrance to control bunker one. The entryway was deserted, emphasizing the eerie lull in the aftermath of the violent open-air firefight. He quickly took the stairway down, and followed it as four long flights made sharp right-angle turns. He knew these turns were designed to help weaken surface blast overpressures and stop flying debris; he was almost one hundred feet underground. The next turn led to a flat area, not stairs. After a quick check for enemy microphones, he quietly verified on his special ops radio that the commandos going after bunker two could hear him. They responded, five- by-five. He told them to listen on his open mike, and follow the deception gambits he would use.
The man in charge of that group, a Marine Recon major, acknowledged the order. He was now second-in- command of the company, and would take over from Nyurba if necessary — the same way Nyurba took over when Kurzin died.
Nyurba had one of his men, a Delta Force sergeant, use a tiny mirror to peek around the final corner. There was a surveillance camera, in a vestibule, all as expected.
Nyurba whispered his deception plan, parts rehearsed for most of a year and parts made up as he went.
His Seabee chief and a SERT petty officer pretended to be loyal defenders, retreating before an overwhelming assault. They removed their packs, then backed down the steps until they were visible to the camera, with their weapons aimed up the stairway. Someone near the top of the stairs, part of the entryway’s rear guard, fired into the air, in case the camera had a microphone. To the echoing sound of these shots, Nyurba’s men flopped over dramatically, facedown, as if they were dead.
The men guarding the top of the stairs fired several more rounds. Two Delta Force corporals fell into the vestibule — more supposedly loyal Spetsnaz, giving their lives protecting the Motherland’s missiles. They landed faceup, writhing in agony from mortal wounds. In reality, they were unhurt, busy inspecting for a second, hidden camera or microphone.
There was none.
The sergeant reached his arm around the corner and shot out the camera with his pistol. The bullet ricocheted, but he’d aimed so the spent slug was unlikely to hit the men on the floor.
Soon all the commandos with Nyurba were inside the vestibule at the bottom of the stairs. The slain Spetsnaz came back to life and got up to join their comrades.
The stark and stuffy vestibule was lit by bare fluorescents hung on springs. In front of them loomed the outer steel blast door, the first of two that protected and led into the control bunker. It was painted an ugly military- institutional shade of dark green. Signs on the walls gave security warnings and instructions about radioactive decontamination. Just in case, Nyurba took measurements. He found no leakage coming from the H-bombs in the silos. In a full-scale thermonuclear war, these decontamination instructions would take on significance, but he wondered who might be alive out here to read them. He reminded himself that his mission, if something went wrong, might itself be the cause of that war.
Nyurba harnessed the ugly mixture of angst and determination these thoughts brought up, to bring more power into his acting performance. He started to put into play the next moves in an intricate, preplanned con job, one that he’d never have needed if they’d been able to properly waylay fresh silo crews at their intended roadblock this morning after all. He figured enough time had gone by for an imaginary counterattack by nonexistent additional loyal troops to have trapped and slain the pretend traitors — the ones who’d “killed” four Spetsnaz in front of the camera and then shown an arm with a pistol from around the corner of the stairs. He picked up the intercom handset that hung on the wall, so he could speak to the men in the bunker. The intercom undoubtedly was used for crew changeover procedures, but he had something else in mind. The crew still on duty would not be gullible. He
