“Thank you, Comrade Lieutenant.” He glanced down at the papers. “Give me a summary.”
The lieutenant dropped his salute, but remained at attention. “Comrade President, your staff is downloading press statements from
Zhukov smiled and thumped himself on the chest. “I must admit that I feel pretty good for a walking corpse.”
The lieutenant returned his smile. “Yes, sir! The papers also report that the threat of nuclear action has passed, and that the
Zhukov felt his smile widen a fraction. This was the news he had been waiting for. He nodded toward the man. “Thank you, Comrade Lieutenant. You may return to your duties.”
The lieutenant saluted, did an about-face, and marched past the Chinese guards and into the command post.
When the door had closed behind the man, Zhukov looked down at the printouts from the newspaper websites. He’d read them later. For now, it was enough to feel them in his hand. Once again, Moscow was reacting as he had predicted.
He turned his eyes to the pillars of smoke rising from the city below him. He would let the story percolate through the various news medias for another couple of hours, to give most of the supposed experts an opportunity to weigh in on the swift destruction of his revolution. Then he would give the order for the next phase of the operation, and reveal to the world that so-called Russian government was populated by liars and fools.
CHAPTER 24
The timing was precise. All six charges detonated at the same instant, and a circular stretch of the ice pack exploded into an expanding cloud of water vapor and ice fragments. When the rumble of the blast had faded to silence and the last of the scattered ejecta had fallen back to surface of the ice pack, a large opening — about thirty meters in diameter — remained in the ice. Between the displacement effect of the shockwave and the heat of the expanding gases, the hole was nearly clear of debris, leaving a sizeable circle of the Sea of Okhotsk open to the frigid Siberian sky.
Left alone, the newly-formed pocket of open sea would have begun to skin-over with new ice almost immediately. But it was not to be left alone, because the detonation of the shaped charges was only the tiniest precursor of the energies about to be channeled through this particular section of frozen ocean.
The water near the center of the opening began to foam, and the surrounding ice began to vibrate. An enormous bubble broke the surface of the water, followed a millisecond later by the blunt-nosed cylindrical shape of a Russian R-29R nuclear missile.
Still riding the supercavitating gas bubble of its submerged launch system, the 35-ton missile had barely cleared the surface of the water when the liquid-fueled rocket engines of its first stage ignited. Nitrogen tetroxide merged with unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine to feed the missile’s fiery exhaust. With a roar like an insanely- massive blowtorch, the weapon leapt toward the sky on a silver-white column of smoke and flame.
Accelerating rapidly, it was moving at 5 kilometers a second — roughly four times the speed of a high- powered rifle bullet — when it blew through the thin layer of cirrostratus clouds in the upper troposphere and shot into the stratosphere. Three seconds later and still accelerating, the first stage burned out and the missile passed through 25,000 meters, where the deepening blue of the sky gave way to the blackness of space.
The engines of the second stage fired, blasting the upper third of the missile up and away from the burned out and empty hulk of the first stage. Relieved of its burden, the missile gained still more speed, climbing away on its own pillar of flame while the remains of the discarded first stage fell back to earth like a man-made meteor of scorched aluminum-magnesium alloy.
The second stage burned out at an altitude of 200 kilometers, triggering timed electrical pulses to a ring of small explosive charges in the mating collar that joined the second stage of the missile to the warhead bus. The explosives detonated instantly, fracturing the aerodynamic collar along carefully-engineered structural stress points. The inertia imparted by the small explosion was enough to separate the warhead bus from the expended second stage.
Referred to by missile engineers as
The trajectory of the weapon began to flatten now, nosing over into a curving arc toward the east, and that mass of land known to humans as
Technical Sergeant Diane Claxton watched the screen of her SAWS console and inhaled softly through clenched teeth. This couldn’t be right. This just
Technical Sergeant Claxton adjusted her communications headset so that the microphone hung a few inches in front of her mouth. She keyed the mike. “Senior Watch Officer, this is Station Five. Eagle Eye is tracking a ballistic missile launch alert in sector green, grid reference twenty-eight alpha. The launch point appears to be south of Siberia and west of Kamchatka. Looks like the Sea of Okhotsk.” She tapped in another sequence of keystrokes. “I have off-axis confirmation from a second Eagle Eye bird. Missile trajectory is east, toward California.”
A voice crackled in the sergeant’s left ear. “This is the Senior Watch Officer; I copy ballistic missile launch alert in sector green, grid reference twenty-eight alpha. Cross-check with PAVE PAWS for radar confirmation.”
It took less than a minute for the PAVE PAWS radar installation at Beale Air Force Base, California to corroborate the inbound missile. By that time, the installation at Clear Air Force Station, Alaska had locked on and was also tracking the missile. Both radars confirmed the findings of the Eagle Eye satellites: an unannounced missile launch, with a ballistic trajectory toward the United States.
The Senior Watch Officer lifted the handset of a blue telephone. The phone had no buttons or dial; it was a direct connection to North American Aerospace Defense Command in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. The Senior Watch Officer swallowed and then spoke the words he had trained for many times, but never expected to say. “This is Tripwire Command. I have emergency flash traffic for CINCNORAD… Code word
