Seas of Crisis

saw one officer begin to swallow something. When he aimed his weapon at the man, the Russian raised his hands in surrender; dangling on a lanyard from one hand was one of the launch keys.

The Russians were gasping and choking; their eyes teared so badly they were practically blind. Two were doubled over in pain, where rubber bullets at short range had hit their abdomens.

The entry team quickly disarmed everyone they saw and secured them with duct tape, gagging their mouths and binding them hand and foot, a total of four prisoners — two officers and two senior enlisteds. But this was only the on-duty half of the crew. These men stood twelve-hour shifts in every three-day work rotation. Half of them would be on the lower level, where they slept and ate and relaxed during their twelve hours off.

A metal stairway led below. The entry team dashed down, preceded by more gas grenades, their weapons reloaded.

Nyurba was confronted by a man holding a pistol. He shot the man in the stomach with a rubber bullet. He fell onto his backside but raised the pistol again. Nyurba shot him with the AN-94, a two-round burst to the head.

Another off-duty officer, when he saw how heavily armed the commandos were, including their bulletproof vests, committed suicide with his own pistol, to not be captured. The remaining two on the accommodation level, enlisted men, were less brave or less stupid. Already in gas masks, they put up their hands. The entry team disarmed and secured them with duct tape. Nyurba dragged both Russians upstairs. He dumped them next to the first four prisoners, then removed their gags before the men could suffocate as their noses ran with mucus from the gas. Beneath him, part of the entry team was searching the utility spaces in the bunker’s lowest levels, for anyone cowering there, and for any signs of sabotage — or bombs emplaced by higher command to kill rogues. A Delta Force commando and a Seabee worked together at this, pooling their knowledge of booby traps and machinery.

“Find the blowers,” Nyurba shouted through his mask. “Clear the air.” He was gasping from exertion, and wearing the mask didn’t help. He saw a Russian junior officer involuntarily glance at an equipment console on a wall. Nyurba pointed to it. “See if that’s the environmental control.”

A Seabee read the panel labels, flipped switches, and the tear gas quickly cleared. The team removed their masks.

“Get back outside and firm up the rear guard,” Nyurba told them. “Get the launch specialists in here.” He rethought. “Chief,” he said to one Seabee, “don’t leave.” Nyurba was a SERT Seabee officer himself, but because Kurzin was dead, he was too busy leading the entire effort to be able to apply that expertise. He needed someone on hand who could figure out repairs that might be called for of electrics and hydraulics.

One group of commandos stepped out, through the blast door standing ajar. Different men came in. The last removed the titanium bar and sealed the blast door shut, as others took seats at the consoles, or riffled through technical manuals sitting in piles, or began to inject the silo crewmen with truth drugs.

Chapter 24

Jeffrey Fuller awoke groggily from a sleep so deep he didn’t remember dreaming.

“Commodore!”

Jeffrey recognized Bell’s voice. That was what had woken him. “Yes. Yes. I’m awake.”

Bell switched on Challenger’s XO stateroom’s light. Jeffrey squinted until his puffy, bleary eyes could adjust. Sessions, asleep in his own rack under the VIP rack, began to stir.

Lord, he was out cold even more than me. Jeffrey wondered for a moment whether he himself had slept well due to peace of mind about the mission, resulting from his newfound amoral coping mechanism. Or were internal conflicts and ethical qualms so repressed for now that they’d destroy his mental health later?

He brushed this troubling thought aside and glanced at his watch. All peace of mind vanished. “What’s wrong?” He wasn’t supposed to be woken for another three hours. And he should have been woken by a messenger, normal procedure, not by Captain Bell.

“We got the code-letter group by ELF, sir. Colonel Kurzin has begun the attack on the silo complex near Srednekolymsk, as observed and confirmed by surveillance satellite. We’re to proceed to periscope depth, smartly, and monitor further events per our previous orders.”

“Now? Are you sure?”

“The message was repeated, sir. I checked the decryption myself.”

“But it’s a day early.”

“Something must have sped up their plans.”

Jeffrey climbed out of bed, standing barefoot in his skivvies. He ran a hand over his face.

“I guess something did…. All right…. Give me five minutes to use the head and get dressed. Have a messenger meet me in Control with coffee. You better prepare the ship for coming to periscope depth and raising the masts.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll have Meltzer start to calculate the relative bearing to watch for missiles rising above our horizon.” Bell turned to leave.

“Wait.” Jeffrey’s thoughts were racing. “Do we know how the attack is going?”

“They wouldn’t send us a code for that, due to overall mission security, sir, assuming even Washington knows.”

“Oh, yeah, right. Sorry, my mind’s still fuzzy.”

“No problem, Commodore.”

Jeffrey read the XO stateroom situation display. Sonar held no threats, neither submerged nor on the surface nor airborne. He called up a navigational chart, as Sessions, also in his boxer shorts and undershirt, looked on. The ship was heading northwest, in the middle of the Laptev Sea, on a course to skirt north of the Svernaya Zemlya islands. The nearest land was Cape Dika, about one hundred fifty nautical miles southwest. The nearest naval base in Rear Admiral Meredov’s area of command was almost due south by three hundred miles: the port of Tiksu, on one edge of the Lena River’s huge delta. Challenger was under the pack ice, near the marginal ice zone, using the noise there to hide acoustically at Bell’s favorite depth, nine hundred feet, moving at a stealthy twelve knots. They were in six thousand feet of water — the continental shelf here dropped off much closer inshore than it did by the New Siberian Islands, far astern.

Jeffrey started to figure the distances and timings.

“Sir,” Bell said, smiling at his superior’s typical obsession with work. “Take care of your business first. There’s a polynya ideal for our purposes only three miles off.”

With the blast door closed, it was oddly quiet in control bunker one. Nyurba realized he missed the constant pounding and vibrations that the surface battle had been causing through the air and through the ground. Given the tidy, high-tech appearance of the launch consoles — computer screens and keyboards, rows of switches and knobs and dozens of indicator lights, all labeled with strange abbreviations and acronyms — the bunker seemed surreal. Safes, electronic and power supply cabinets, communications and decoding equipment, printers, and storage lockers lined the walls in the low-ceilinged enclosure. It was antiseptic — a stark contrast to the absolute mess outside.

The lack of any sensations from the violent life-and-death struggle being fought so close above his head brought home what he already knew as a civil engineer: the bunker he was standing in rode on a system of massive springs and torsion bars, powerful shock absorbers and vibration dampers, and suspension rods with high-friction universal joints. Such components surrounded the entryway blast interlock, the control bunker, the blast interlocks at both ends of the tunnels leading to each of the three missile silos, those long tunnels, and the missile silos themselves. Each of these major underground structures was a separate module made of steel and reinforced concrete, with massive rubber bumpers at the joints between them, so the whole system could flex and twist as independent pieces — and thus not build up added stresses or destructive harmonic resonances. Most of the shock-modulation components were installed in a “rattle space” between excavated bedrock and the exterior of the modules; that space was accessible through maintenance hatches. The modular design, including multiple blast interlocks, meant that if one section did fail, those around it would be isolated from any propagating fracture or