The Seventh Angel

Zelenograd, is an older Delta III class boat. Her missiles are deadly against land-based targets, but the Chief of Naval Operations assures me that she won’t last ten seconds in a shooting match with an Akula.”

Gregory Brenthoven smiled, “His missiles.”

The General frowned. “Pardon me, sir?”

“Russian ships and submarines are male,” Brenthoven said. “But never mind that. I didn’t mean to interrupt. Please continue, General.”

The general scratched his chin. “That’s about it, sir. The Kuzbass will sink the missile sub. If that doesn’t work, the Russian Navy chases the missile sub under the ice pack, where they can hunt it down and kill it at their leisure. I guess that’s our fallback plan: let the Russian Navy trap the missile sub if they can’t kill it outright.”

Veronica Doyle glanced at her palmtop computer. “And we’re absolutely certain that this submarine can’t launch missiles through the ice?”

Brenthoven nodded. “The Delta III has no ice penetration capability. Once that submarine is under the ice, it won’t be able to launch.”

“There could be millions of lives at stake here,” the president said. “I’m not comfortable with any plan that amounts to chasing the snake into a corner and tossing a blanket over it. And I’m not particularly crazy about leaving it up to the Russians to do the work.”

“Understood, sir.” the secretary of defense said. “But our options are fairly limited at the moment. Moscow has made it unmistakably clear that U.S. involvement is not welcome. Their diplomatic language is only about two notches short of outright threats. If we insert ourselves into what they regard as an internal situation, we may find that both sides are ready to shoot us in the head.”

“What you’re basically telling me,” the president said, “is that we sit on our hands and hope nobody decides to push the button?”

“We’re not happy about it either, sir,” General Gilmore said. “The Navy has ordered a pair of stealth destroyers into the area to keep an eye on things, and the Air Force and National Reconnaissance Office are getting us all the satellite coverage we need. We’d like to get one of our own subs up there, but — with Russia trying to kill Zhukov’s sub, and Zhukov's insurgents trying to kill Russian subs — that could easily blow the lid off the powder keg. Both sides in this conflict are ready to shoot first and ask questions later. Any direct involvement on our part is likely to provoke the kind of response we don’t even want to think about.”

“Which brings us back to sitting on our hands,” the president said.

The door opened and a young Marine lieutenant walked in, carrying a red and white striped folder. He went directly to General Gilmore, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and spoke softly to the general as he handed over the folder.

General Gilmore opened the folder and read the short document it contained. After a few seconds, he laid it on the table in front of him. “Mr. President, we’ve just received word from the Russian Ministry of Defense. The Kuzbass has been destroyed.”

The president’s eyebrows shot up. “What? How did an aging missile submarine manage to get the drop on an Akula class hunter-killer?”

“It wasn’t the missile sub,” General Gilmore said. “Apparently the Kuzbass was destroyed three days ago, during a scheduled training exercise with a TU-142 anti-submarine warfare aircraft based out of Yelizovo. The exercise was scheduled as a non-firing event, but early assessments suggest that the TU-142 dropped one or more torpedoes on the Kuzbass.” He looked down at the folder. “The timing of the exercise appears to correspond to an unidentified explosion recorded by our Navy’s acoustic surveillance arrays in the region.”

The White House chief of staff cocked her head to one side. “The Russians are just now finding out that one of their submarines was destroyed three days ago?”

The general nodded. “I’m not intimately familiar with the communication cycles for Russian submarines, but I know that our subs like to communicate as little as possible. They have to surface or come to periscope depth to raise an antenna above the water, and that makes them vulnerable. It makes them easier to detect acoustically, and their electronic transmissions can give away their position. Since their mission and their survival depend on remaining undetected, they communicate as little as possible.”

“There are technologies for letting a submerged submarine know that it needs to come shallow for communication,” the national security advisor said. “We call our methods bell-ringers. I don’t know what the Russians call theirs.”

“Neither do I,” the general said. “But the Russians have been trying to communicate with the Kuzbass since Wednesday morning, with no joy.”

The president frowned. “This anti-submarine warfare aircraft that attacked Kuzbass, where was it from?”

“It was based out of Yelizovo, Mr. President,” General Gilmore said.

“And this Yelizovo is on Kamchatka?”

The general nodded. “Yes, Mr. President.”

The president looked up at the television. The CNN news anchor was still frozen in mid-syllable. The words “Crisis in Russia” jittered slightly at the bottom of the screen, an artifact of the DVD player’s pause feature. “Anybody here think the timing of the attack on Kuzbass was a coincidence?”

No one spoke.

“This dovetails too neatly with the onset of hostilities in Petropavlovsk,” President Chandler said. “Zhukov planned the attack on Kuzbass, and he set it up in advance. He needed to ensure that his missile submarine had a clear path into the Sea of Okhotsk.”

The secretary of defense pinched her lower lip. “The Russians are going to bottle that sub up. It’ll be trapped under the ice, and it won’t be able to launch its missiles.”

The president shook his head slowly, his eyes still locked on the motionless image of the television newscaster. “Zhukov is thinking farther ahead than we are. He’s planning farther ahead. He’s got it all laid out. He already knows how he’s going to launch those missiles, ice or no ice.”

The president sat up and looked at the secretary of defense. “Zhukov’s not bluffing. He can launch. He’s planning to launch. Count on it.”

CHAPTER 20

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

NORTHERN PACIFIC OCEAN

SATURDAY; 02 MARCH

1835 hours (6:35 PM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

Ann Roark took a sip of her coffee and made a face. “Ugh! How do the Navy guys drink this crap?”

Sheldon Miggs finished pouring his own cup from the wardroom coffee urn, and carried it carefully to the chair next to Ann’s. “Are you kidding? This is good Navy java.” He made a face of mock machismo. “It’ll put hair on your chest, Sailor!”

Ann treated him to her best you-are-a-complete-idiot glare. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not a Sailor. And unlike certain middle aged wanna-bes, I don’t have any desire to be a Sailor.” She glanced down at her chest. “Nor do I want hair sprouting from my cleavage. That’s a waxing experience I don’t even want to think about.”

She lifted one eyebrow and stared pointedly at Sheldon’s receding hairline. “But if this stuff really grows hair, you should think about rubbing some on your head.”

Sheldon grinned. “Forty-thousand comedians out of work, and I have to get paired up with Donna Rickles.”

Ann took another sip of the acrid coffee and swallowed with another grimace. “Who?”