squadron doing ASW operations – for real. The North Koreans possessed nearly a hundred submarines, ranging from Yugo midget subs to twenty or so Romeo-class patrol boats, locally constructed vessels based on a 1950s Russian submarine. Most of them were armed with torpedo tubes, and just because the Romeos were of an old design, that didn’t mean they weren’t a threat.
The ship had secured from Action Stations when it became clear that the missile launch from Ok’pyong was an isolated occurrence, but it was still operating at Yellow Alert, the second-highest state, as a precaution. Moving around was difficult, as most of the watertight bulkhead doors in the main fore-and-aft port and starboard passageways were currently being kept closed.
‘Frankly, Blackie, I don’t know,’ Richter replied. ‘My boss sent me here to brief the captain, which I’ve done, and that’s the limit of my instructions at the moment. There’s no point in flying me back to Seoul, because there’s nothing useful I can do there. Anyway, if the North Koreans do launch an invasion attempt, South Korea’s one place I definitely don’t want to be.’
There was a roar from above as a Sea Harrier accelerated along the flight deck, followed a few seconds later by the second aircraft of the pair.
‘But I can take a turn in a Harrier, if that would be any help. If the squadron’s going to be flying CAP sorties round the clock, you’re going to need all the pilots you can get. I’m still technically in the Royal Naval Reserve, and I’ve got about four hundred hours on FA2s, so I think I can probably drive a GR9.’
Roger Black stared at him across the table. ‘The trappers would have a field day with that! But these are exceptional circumstances, and it might be useful,’ he said. ‘The squadron’s a man short already, after one of the junior pilots went down with a stomach bug. An extra driver would be no bad thing in the meantime, so I’ll talk to the CO, see if he’ll bend the rules and have you.’
As the two men stood up, the Tannoy burst into life. ‘Commander (Air) and Lieutenant Commander Richter are requested to report to the bridge.’
‘They’re playing our tune,’ Black remarked.
‘Yeah,’ Richter concurred. ‘I’m just not sure I want to stay for the dance.’
The missile control compound was a three-acre fenced-off area out on the perimeter of Malmstrom Air Force Base, but the casual visitor might be forgiven for assuming that he’d been sent to the wrong location.
The entire area was virtually featureless scrubland, surrounded by an eight-foot-high chain-link fence, within which were a handful of pole-mounted floodlights, two wooden huts and six vehicles. On the fence next to the gates was a sign that read ‘US Government Property: No Trespassing. Use of Deadly Force Authorized’, and beside that a single telephone handset labelled ‘Security’.
After approaching the compound at a steady twenty-five miles an hour, the Ford compact braked to a halt. Captain Dave Fredericks climbed out, strode over to the gate and picked up the telephone. He identified himself, quoted his official number, and waited until the electric lock buzzed and the gate swung open. Then he got back into the Ford and drove through the gates towards the first of the two huts. Behind him, the gate swung shut and its lock clicked home.
As Fredericks and his passenger, Major Richard Whitman, entered the wooden hut, they were greeted by two armed guards who then checked their identification cards with extreme thoroughness, despite the fact that both men were known to the guards almost as well as their own families. The two officers were finally ushered towards a small elevator, whose control panel contained two unmarked buttons. After Whitman pressed the lower one, the lift door closed and the elevator descended just over fifty feet.
When the door slid open again, they were facing a short corridor, at the far end of which was a four-ton blast door that could be opened only from the other side. That meant from within the missile control capsule itself. Whitman and Fredericks stood together in front of a closed-circuit television camera, permitting the staff inside the capsule to identify them visually while Fredericks read out their military identification numbers into another telephone handset. A warning bell sounded and the blast door slowly swung open.
The first ICBM silo complexes, constructed in the tense and uncertain years immediately following the end of the Second World War, were fairly small and self-contained, and almost inevitably subterranean. Most of these complexes comprised three launch silos, where the missiles resided vertically below solid concrete half-moon doors, a control centre, living area, and utility sections. Each launch silo contained an ICBM, usually an Atlas, with an equipment and maintenance room to one side and the propellant store on the other. The Atlas was a liquid- fuelled rocket, and the transition from an inactive state to firing readiness was a prolonged and hazardous process, due to the highly volatile fuel.
And there were other dangers, too. The Atlas was an excellent delivery vehicle when it worked, but during an extensive series of test-firings carried out in the early 1960s, launch failures had been both common and spectacular. A missile that detonated its fuel load in or close to its silo was quite capable of destroying the entire launch complex. The introduction of the Minuteman, with its solid-fuel motor, had considerably reduced the inherent risks. As a result, five hundred units of this missile, now in its Minuteman III version, provided the backbone of the American ICBM force.
Unlike the early silos, the current Minuteman launch complexes are huge. Radiating from the central missile control capsule, like the spokes of an immense wheel, are narrow tunnels through which run the communication links to ten Minuteman silos in all. Each is separated from its neighbouring missile, and from the control capsule itself, by a distance of at least three miles, and the hardened silos themselves extend ninety feet deep and are constructed of reinforced concrete designed to withstand the blast effects of a nearby nuclear detonation.
Inside each silo a single LGM-30 Minuteman Three sits on huge coiled springs designed to act as shock absorbers in the event of a nuclear strike. A one-hundred-ton concrete hatch protects each missile from above, and this lid is blown off the silo immediately prior to launch. Sixty feet tall and weighing well over thirty tons, the missile is accelerated by its three-stage solid-fuelled motor to a velocity at burnout of fifteen thousand miles an hour, about Mach 23 at altitude, has a ceiling of around seven hundred miles, and a maximum range that’s still classified but is in excess of eight thousand miles. It normally carries three W62, W78 or W87 warheads, each inside a Mark 12A reentry vehicle contained within the nose-cone, giving a total yield of between one and two megatons, or between sixty times and one hundred and twenty times the explosive power of the Hiroshima weapon.
Usually, the change-over of watch in the control capsule is the occasion for light-hearted banter. All the officers know each other, and frequently meet socially as well as professionally. But not this time. They’d all now been briefed on the detonation of the North Korean nuclear weapon in the Pacific and were well aware that a shooting war was at the very least a strong possibility.
‘What’s the state of play, Jim?’ Whitman asked the outgoing senior officer, Major James Keeble.
‘Pretty much what you’d expect. We’ve been ordered to retarget all missiles at coordinates north of the Demilitarized Zone. Most of the targets are airfields, known missile sites and command centres, but a couple of missiles are aimed at Pyongyang itself. We’ve run operational readiness and diagnostic checks on all the Minutemen, and the numbers are in the green. We completed that about ten minutes ago.’
‘The message folder’s over there beside the teletype machine,’ Keeble completed his handover briefing. ‘Good luck, and look sharp. Today could be real bad news.’
CVN-65, the USS
