There, the richly ornamented wood paneling had been rolled back to reveal a giant computer screen. Run by three VAX computers hidden in the room beyond, a digital information and display system, or DIDS, could project on that screen complex maps, graphic representations of data received from around the world, or displays repeated from the National Military Command Center.
Currently, the screen showed a computer-generated map of the northern half of the Kola Peninsula, the Russian coast as far east as Nosovaya, and most of the Barents Sea. Bear Station was a bright blue racetrack oval north of the Norwegian border, but dozens of other U.S. and NATO assets were displayed as well.
P-3C Orions, big, four-engined ASW aircraft, were patrolling the entire area from Svalbard to Nova Zemlya and south almost to the Murman coast.
Fifteen American attack subs, plus four British Trafalgar-class SSNs, were already in the area, though their exact positions could not be known with certainty. And II MEF was racing northeast just off the Norwegian coast, its ASW air and sea pickets spread across ten thousand square miles.
As many red graphics dotted the map as blue. The forty air bases in the Kola Peninsula were all tagged with data lines indicating that they were on full alert. Fortunately, all of the Russians' Northern Fleet was in port, except for some of their submarines. Over thirty of their subs, however, dotted the waters of the Norwegian and Barents seas… and those were just the ones that had been picked up by Western ASW forces.
During the past ten hours, the British, Norwegian, and American sea and air sub-hunters had been dogging the Russian subs, pressing them, rattling their hulls with active, high-frequency sonar, letting their captains know that the NATO forces knew where they were and could kill them at any time. It was a deadly game. The Russians ? or rather, some Russians ? had already attacked American forces, and no one could say for sure how their subs would act, what their orders were or which side of their country's civil war they'd joined. There'd been one incident already, when a Russian Alfa off Iceland had launched a torpedo at the Bolan, a Perry-class frigate dogging its wake.
The frigate had been blown up and sunk with terrible loss of life in those frigid waters; five minutes later the Alfa had been hit by two Advanced Lightweight Torpedoes dropped from the Bolan's SH-2F Seasprite helicopter and was listed now as a probable kill.
It was beginning.
Admiral Magruder was dead on his feet. He'd been up for most of the past two days, briefing aides, reviewing intelligence updates, even going over computer graphics data with the Crisis Management Group staff. Most of the men and women in the room with him had been keeping similar hours, snatching naps when they could on office sofas, or going home, only to be called back a few hours later by another twist in the ongoing crisis.
His primary duties as a senior military aide attached to the White House consisted of acting as liaison between the White House staff and the Joint Chiefs. Technically, he still worked for the Pentagon ? that 'six-sided squirrel cage across the river,' as he liked to call it ? but in practice he worked out of an office in the White House basement.
God, but he wanted to go home.
As he studied the array of colored lights on the DIDS map, Magruder felt trapped between two opposing fears, two extremes of government in its relation to the military. On the one hand, there was a tendency by the government, by the various bureaucracies in particular, to waffle this way and that on any given foreign policy question. As a result, all too often a crisis best met either by a decisive application of military force or no military force at all was met instead by half measures and tokens. Then, when American boys had already died, the powers-that-be in Washington frequently lost a clear vision of where they were going ? if they'd ever had one in the first place ? and either froze or changed their mind. Magruder was continually haunted by the possibility that the carrier battle force already at Bear Station might be sacrificed, with anything it might have won thrown away by inaction, indecision, or incompetence. The best example Magruder could think of was the terrorist bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983.
On the other hand, there was a constant tendency by Washington to micromanage, to second-guess commanders in the field while attempting to run military operations from W3, an in-joking reference to the White House West Wing. Carter's step-by-step control of the failed Iran hostage rescue mission in 1980 was an example of this opposite extreme.
The temptation toward this end of the military management spectrum was especially strong with the advent of technology such as the DIDS screen he was studying now. Real-time satellite photography and high-altitude Aurora transmissions, computer links with the NSA and with diplomatic stations around the globe, the sense of you-are-there immediacy provided by CNN, ACN, and the various other news networks all contributed to a feeling of almost Godlike power, anchored, somehow, in this building.
If Matt and the rest were to have any chance at all, the people in this room had to steer a careful course between the two extremes of not paying enough attention to the Kola crisis… and of paying it too much.
'At the moment,' Admiral Scott was saying, 'much of our attention is focused here, at the edge of the Arctic ice pack.' The symbols marking the SSN Galveston and the Typhoon it had been tracking flashed obligingly on the DIDS. 'The Russian sub appears to be running through a ballistic-missile launch drill, which in itself is provocative enough. Galveston's skipper was originally ordered to stick close, and to open fire if it appeared that the Typhoon was actually going to launch. There's a certain amount of guesswork involved, of course, and-'
At the back of the room, tall, double doors boomed open and an aide walked in, his footsteps echoing slightly in the high-ceilinged emptiness.
The man made his way swiftly to Robert Heideman's side, spoke to the Secretary in urgent whispers, then handed him a manila folder.
After glancing through the contents of the folder, the Secretary of State rose, his long face made longer by some ominous news.
'Mr. Secretary?' Scott said from the podium. 'You look like a man with something important to say. You have news, sir?'
'Bad news, I'm afraid.' He gestured with the paper in his hands. 'I have here a translation of a speech just delivered by Marshal Krasilnikov at the Kremlin. My people are printing up copies for each of you, but I can summarize it now.' Briefly, tersely, he told them of Krasilnikov's ultimatum, of the threat to destroy a rebel city within the hour if Leonov was not surrendered.
'Clearly,' Heideman concluded, 'the situation has changed, becoming more urgent. We cannot allow the Russians to launch that missile.'
'Why not?' the White House Chief of Staff asked. 'If it's just Russian against Russian…'
'Bob's right,' Secretary of Defense Vane said. 'If the civil war over there goes nuclear, we're going to have serious problems containing it.'
'I might also point out something else,' Duvall, the CIA head, said. 'A nuclear war is going to affect everyone on this planet, not just the people fighting it.'
'Nuclear winter?' someone asked.
'Possibly. And you'll recall that after the nuclear plant disaster at Chernobyl, radioactivity was detected in cow's milk as far away as Sweden.
There's also going to be the problem of vastly increased numbers of refugees fleeing across the border into Eastern Europe. Even one nuclear detonation in this war could set off repercussions that frankly, ladies and gentlemen, we're just not equipped to deal with.'
'Admiral Scott? What do you recommend?' the National Security Advisor asked. He sounded subdued.
Scott extended a collapsible pointer, reached high, and tapped the DIDS screen twice, close by the graphic symbol marking the Galveston. 'I think we have only one option open to us,' he said. 'But we're going to have to move damned fast to exercise it.'
Commander Montgomery pressed his eyes against the rubber light shield of Galveston's number-one search periscope. The attack sub was at a depth of one hundred feet, creeping north toward the edge of the ice. Underwater visibility was superb. Though still submerged, the sub's periscope gave Montgomery a view of shifting lights and darks; he could see the white shimmer of the ice less than a mile ahead, brighter where it was thin, deeply shadowed where pressure ridges plunged into the aquamarine depths like inverted mountain ranges. The
