Seas of Crisis

for something to explode — or for everything to simply go dark and useless, inert, which would be just as bad.

The men used their controls to select the first missile. To initiate the final launch sequence, Ildarov and one of his men inserted and turned their keys. Other lights started flashing. A camera showed the lid of the silo rise open by its hydraulic jacks in less than twenty seconds — it tapered toward its bottom, like a cork, to seal the silo top against incoming nukes. Nyurba felt disembodied as he watched, and became fascinated by trivial details: the bottom of the lid was painted dark green.

I’m an executioner, not a warrior. And I’m the first person in history to launch a hydrogen bomb in anger, not in a test.

The flame-deflector exhaust duct covers slid open, pushing debris and bits of burning fuel aside. The first- stage booster engine ignited. On TV, towers of searing flame shot through the surface exhaust ducts. Nyurba saw the missile’s nose cone emerge from the silo, followed by its sleek, silvery body. It seemed to barely move. Then the monster was out of the silo, seventy-five feet long and six feet in diameter, its engine nozzle giving off blinding yellow glare and a churning cloud of brownish smoke. The missile climbed faster and faster. Ildarov followed it with one camera, using a joystick. Soon the missile was too high to see anything but the incandescent glow from its engine, until that moved out of the camera’s field of view, around the solid curvature of the Earth. Nyurba prayed that the warhead actually detonated, and prayed even harder that it went off only where it was supposed to, in outer space above Moscow.

The team repeated this with the second missile, and a guilt-wracked Nyurba repeated his fervent prayers.

Then they launched the third. As it began to leave its silo, a scattering of Russian troops, still alive amid the surface inferno and fumes, managed to rally and rouse themselves.

They found their last reserves of drive and energy, knowing what was unfolding before their eyes.

Nyurba grabbed for the intercom to the interlock, to warn his commandos to rush to defend the missile. But it was too late. As he watched on the TV display, Russian soldiers aimed their rifles at the missile and fired. The engine nozzle came out of the silo and roasted them.

Nyurba waited to see what damage they’d inflicted. The missile soared into the sky like the others, but it headed in a different direction. It was off-course, its trajectory all wrong. He had no idea what its warhead would do, and had no way to disarm or self-destruct it.

Nyurba felt that his last ounce of humanity was shredded by what the team under his orders had just made happen. “Major, have your men bag up as much intel materials as they can carry.”

Ildarov was more than glad to hurry his specialists to this task. He knew what was coming, and welcomed distraction.

The mission doctrine saying “no prisoners” cuts both ways.

Nor could the commandos afford to leave any witnesses. They might have seen the team do subtle things revealing that they were Americans. Deceased, the silo crewmen’s corpses would stop metabolizing those all- important, telltale German interrogation chemicals in their blood.

Nyurba drew his PRI and unemotionally shot each Russian silo crewman in the head; the small-caliber bullets made tiny holes and stayed inside their skulls. The pistol reports were deafening. Ejected shell casings bounced and clinked and rolled along the floor. The pistol slugs and the casings, under close forensic analysis, would be found to have been made in German-occupied Poland, not Russia.

“There it is!” one of Challenger’s fire control technicians shouted.

Jeffrey, startled from his reverie, saw it on his screen, a tiny yellow dot moving up in the dusky purple sky; it was after midnight, and the sun lay behind them to the north.

“Make a proper report,” Bell snapped before Torelli or Sessions could. Everybody was understandably on edge.

“New visual contact, designate Victor One, assess as a Russian ICBM in flight.”

“I concur with assessment,” Torelli said.

“Very well, Weps,” Bell acknowledged.

Jeffrey saw another dot, following the first.

“New visual contact! Designate Victor Two! Second Russian ICBM in flight.”

The photonics head began tracking the missiles. The first one blinked out, then reappeared. “First-stage booster separation. Second-stage ignition.” The spent first stage, already outside the atmosphere, would burn up on its way down.

“Maximum image magnification,” Jeffrey ordered. The picture zoomed in and narrowed, like a twenty-four- power telescope. The technician kept shifting the head from Victor One to Victor Two and back again, since they didn’t fit in the field of view at once now. Both were accelerating rapidly.

Victor Two seemed to blink for a moment. “Victor Two first-stage separation, second-stage booster ignition.”

The second photonics mast was busy scanning the horizon to the south and east. Missiles on other trajectories, or launched from other places, could mean a full-scale Russian preemptive first strike — despite everything the two presidents said.

A third yellow dot appeared above the horizon, on a more northerly course. “New visual contact, designate Victor Three!”

Victor Three was definitely not behaving like the other two missiles. Who had launched it? From where? And why?

Jeffrey grabbed the handset for the radio room. He was so agitated he almost fumbled it the first time he tried to press the Talk button. “Radio, Commodore Fuller. Prepare to transmit on all available frequencies, warning of an unaccounted-for Russian missile in flight, targeting appears to be West Coast United States.”

Victor Three suddenly began plunging back toward the Earth.

“What the—”

“Rig for nuclear depth charge!” Bell shouted. The missile appeared to be coming straight for them. Had the Russians detected Challenger after all, and uncovered Kurzin’s disguise, and chosen a fitting method of revenge?

Victor Three burst into pieces. The scene reminded Jeffrey of the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger.

An unfortunate choice of namesake for this ship.

“Victor Three explosion is chemical,” Sessions announced. Victor One and Two had already gone into second-stage booster separation and third-stage ignition. Even on maximum zoom with further computerized image enhancement, and one mast’s sensor in infrared mode so the missiles would stand out better against the frigid backdrop of outer space, they were tiny dots receding just above the visual horizon, far to the east. Their speed would top out at Mach twenty-four — over fifteen thousand miles per hour.

“Victor Three wreckage includes a one-megaton warhead,” Torelli cautioned. “Warhead status is unknown.”

Debris was fluttering and falling through the sky, trailing smoke. The warhead reentry body, if intact, would be dense and aerodynamically streamlined. It could carry much farther than other wreckage. Its fusing might think it was nearing a target.

Challenger, so shallow and with masts raised, would not withstand the shock and EMP this close. But Jeffrey needed to keep observing for more Russian missile liftoffs. He couldn’t order Bell to go deep. And Victor One and Two, assuming they were launched by Kurzin and not the Kremlin, might have faulty fusing — and could target the U.S. homeland for real.

“Victor One detonation!”

A violet-white flash lit up the entire sky. The brilliant flash was followed by a diffuse greenish glow that lasted about a second. When this faded, a warhead fireball of evanescent blue and red — excited gas molecules and superheated plasma — swelled in the vacuum of space, only a few degrees above the eastern horizon, but four hundred miles above the Earth.

“Victor Two detonation!”

Another bright flash, another green glow, another eerie expanding sphere.

“Bearings are correct to pancake the Moscow-to-Ural-Mountains area,” Torelli reported by the weapons