signals intercepts didn’t tell him much. Meredov’s forces were being surprisingly quiet, now that the furor over Jeffrey’s decoy from days before had died down. Russia’s reaction to the commando raid was hard to gauge. Main command channels transmitted constantly, random numbers or gibberish between genuine messages, to prevent eavesdroppers from noticing alterations in the amount of traffic. Indications of heightened activity or raised alert levels could only be gained if the codes used on those channels had been broken. Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces changed their codes often. History taught that any encryption system, if used too long, could be cracked.
Hours had gone by since the ELF message came in telling Jeffrey that the commandos’ attack had started; the sun had moved a long way in its perpetual summertime waltz with the horizon since
And if caught dwelling here suspiciously, too soon, before Kurzin’s missiles took off, Jeffrey’s cover story — about a German sub purchased from Russia, far away — would be shot to pieces. The whole game plan would totally unravel after that.
The intercom from the ESM room blinked. Bell answered. “Commodore, they want to speak to you.”
Jeffrey’s chest tightened. “ESM, Fuller, what is it?”
“Sir,” the NSA technician said in a deep-South drawl, “we got peculiar traffic from our own spaceborne platforms, and neutrals. Huge fires raging at the complex near Srednekolymsk.”
“What
“Near as we can tell, heat signatures of three SS-27s but they’re stationary, no launches. Assessing as in-silo explosions and ground-level burning of solid fuel.”
Before Jeffrey could react to this news, which seemed to imply that Kurzin’s team had failed disastrously, Bell called him again. “Sir, Radio wants you. I told them you were on the line with ESM, but my comms officer says he needs you, smartly.”
“Wait one,” Jeffrey told the ESM room. He switched circuits. “Radio, Fuller, what?”
“Sir, we just finished receiving an ELF three-letter block. Decoding confirmed as cipher for ‘To Commodore,
“Let’s get this damn ball rolling!” Nyurba ordered. “We’ve got three missiles to launch!”
He fretted, because the time element was constantly becoming more and more critical. Every added hour that passed expanded by hundreds of miles the distance, and exponentially increased the area, from which stronger and stronger counterattacking forces could be staged, flown in, and ordered to make the next assault. Eventually the pieces of missile fuel from bunker two would burn themselves out, and the steam geysers they were causing would subside. The worst of the deadly fumes would disperse on the wind, and aircraft and airborne units wouldn’t be deterred by moderate forest fires. The commandos definitely couldn’t stand up to another, more massive counterattack.
The Air Force missile specialists did their thing, speaking in Russian terminology — as they’d been briefed by expatriates, and as they knew from the manuals and checklists.
Nyurba understood the basics from his own briefing materials. Explained in U.S. terminology, the launch crew had to first achieve a permissive action link unlock, enabling the nuclear warhead to be armed at a later date. Then they had to program into the missile and warhead electronics a correctly formatted safe-to-arm signal, which would be sent into the warhead just before the warhead bus separated from the third-stage booster. The signal would only be sent while in flight if the missile’s self-contained computers decided that everything was functioning properly, and the missile was on course toward its designated target. Then came warhead arming. For an exoatmospheric blast immediately after third-stage booster separation, this was relatively simple. It tied in with the fourth major event, actual warhead fusing and detonation.
It would have been much more complicated, and more difficult to achieve without authorization, if the launch team really wanted to target a place on land in a foreign country. Those complexities were the various factors — deceleration, air pressure, altitude — related to the supposed spoofing ability of what Commodore Fuller had labeled the “magical, mystical, mystery missile shield.” But they weren’t the launch crew’s concern now, in real life.
Nyurba listened with a mixture of awe and dread while Major Ildarov and his people ran through the various checklists. Lights on panels changed colors as they performed each step. They made status reports to each other, or issued orders.
By now, big antirogue bombs hidden in dehumidifier cabinets in the silos, adjoining the missiles’ second-stage boosters, had been found and defused. Electronic booby traps, designed to erase essential files and scramble passwords, were bypassed. Circuit elements that had to be inserted manually, after being removed from safes with secret combinations, were inserted where they were supposed to go. Mechanical devices that needed to be put in place, or dismantled, were taken care of. Alarms blared again and again that were meant to warn the rest of the crew that things were being done to undertake launch procedures, and each time the commandos turned them off as irrelevant.
The silo inspection team was still at work in silo three. A specialist monitoring the bunker’s radios and decryption gear, tuned to district command channels, reported that a two-battalion airborne assault, with air- dropped field artillery and light tanks, was on the way. Two battalions were over a thousand men.
“It’s now or never, guys!” Nyurba said. They had to trigger liftoff immediately. After that any ambulatory squadron remnants would need to try to escape and evade through the horrific conditions above. Once the next counterattack formations reached the scene, escape would be totally hopeless.
Major Ildarov recalled the silo team. They came into the bunker from the interlock to the tunnel to silo three. They were drenched in sweat and smeared with grease and oil, their faces were pinched, and their stances showed utter exhaustion. They couldn’t guarantee what would happen with the missiles.
Jeffrey still sat at his console. For the umpteenth time, seeking hidden meanings and any reassurance he could find, he examined a paraphrased transcript of a brief but pointed conversation the presidents of the U.S. and Russia had had, via the Hot Line, after three missile silos at Srednekolymsk blew up — and the complex became obscured from further detailed spaceborne recon by heat and smoke. The exchange had been encoded and relayed to Jeffrey by satellite, for his use as a heads-up and for situational orientation.
The trend of events was not reassuring. The American President was already compelled to improvise, off- script, with guesswork and hedging forced as to what scenario was really unfolding. The possibility that one isolated group of silos would explode, while Kurzin’s men might still be working to achieve successful launches of another group, had never been considered in mission planning — an oversight, glaringly obvious only in retrospect. Jeffrey cursed the lack of more specific information from on scene, but the commando team were incommunicado and entirely on their own.
The text in his hands conveyed no inflections or tones of voice between the two heads of state. But both presidents played games, jabbing and blocking according to different agendas, their diplomatic choreography very much at cross-purposes.
WASHINGTON: Why have three of your SS-27 silos exploded?
MOSCOW: An unfortunate maintenance accident while blast interlocks were overridden. One missile set off the other two. It is not a concern, for us or for you.
WASHINGTON: How can I be sure this is not a subterfuge, a distraction, a prelude to a strategic first strike?
MOSCOW: You insult me. Your intelligence assets would give signs if we were preparing for such a mutually suicidal act.
WASHINGTON: Depending on your tactics and goals, you might not consider it suicidal. Do not attempt to manipulate me by your own view of American antinuke phobias.
MOSCOW: Our submarines are not surging! Our bomber fleets aren’t mobilizing! It was only a maintenance accident.
WASHINGTON: Then am I to assume there will be no further accidents in the near future?
