The President nodded.
“I am familiar with Guillotine Henry, I heard about it before you did,” he smiled smugly, it wasn’t often the chief executive knew of military matters before the chairman of the joint chiefs. “Guillotine is being handled the old fashioned way, on paper. I don’t trust these damn computers since China got into them, so how have you been planning this?”
“Sir, we are using stand-alone's, no network, no Internet.”
“Good, good… tell me about this submarine?”
“Sir, the Xia is a home grown vessel, not a Russian cast-off. She displaces 7,000 tons submerged, has a crew of one hundred and four. Nuclear reactor, two steam turbines and a single screw that is capable of producing 22 knots, flat out. She completed an extensive overhaul two years ago to enable her to carry their new JL-2 SLBM, submarine launched ballistic missile. The JL-2 has a range of 5,200 miles with a payload of four, 3-megaton independent re-entry vehicles each. The Xia carries twelve of these missiles. When at sea, she is always escorted by two Han Class SSNs, which are also PLAN designed and built. The PLAN had four Han Class, one is laid up with reactor problems, and the Royal Navy’s HMS Hood sank another in the North Pacific. And this… ” General Shaw handed an aerial photograph across of a submarine on the surface.
The President took out his spectacles and put them on. “… This was taken by a light aircraft just after dawn, at the start of the invasion of Luzon, in the Philippines.” The General informed him. “Those men on the aft casing are commandos launching rubber boats… something which should be done at night, but maybe they had problems and launched their attack late. The point I am trying to make is this… PLAN was hardly going to have their precious Xia nearby, so the one sunk by Hood had to be part of the Xia’s escort. We know the exact spot she was sunk, the time and day, so it narrows down our search area considerably.”
“Okay Henry, didn’t the Brit boat hear this Xia?”
“Sir, best bet was that the Han was clearing their area of operations of any unwanted shipping. It was attacking a British flagged sailing vessel when Hood bagged it; the Brits didn’t hear anyone else about. The Hood was just about out of ordnance when they sank it, they are enroute to Pearl to reload and offload the sailing boat’s crew, along with a pee-oh-double-u… a Chinese aviator, and two survivors from the John F Kennedy group.”
The President raised his eyes at that.
“How the hell do you survive a nuclear attack?”
“By being out of range, trying to shoot the attackers down at the time. One is a Sea Harrier pilot, the other is… ” he flipped through some pages. “… Lt Nikki Pelham, an F-14 pilot. Her RIO was killed when the Han attacked the sailing boat.”
The name rang a bell somewhere and the President’s forehead furrowed as he tried to recall where he had heard it.
“Pelham… how do you spell that Henry?”
The general told him and the President cursed.
“Oh dear lord… there is nothing fair in this world is there?”
Henry Shaw had a blank look on his face.
“Do you remember the story from Washington, the lawyers killed by the poor guy whose whole family had been killed, and then he turned the gun on himself?”
General Shaw thought for a moment before it came to him. “He was in town to visit the ‘Nam memorial when the bomb went off… then found out his daughter had been aboard John F Kennedy… ” It then dawned on him then that the Pelham in the article was one of the same. “… oh God, poor girl.”
“As soon as we’ve finished here Henry, get a wire off to Pearl, see what you can do for her when she arrives… I take it the press do not know yet that there were survivors?”
“Definitely not Mr President, we do not name any assets, or give the enemy any idea as to what was where and when.”
“Good, keep it that way please… or some sonofabitch is going to be shoving a mike in her face and asking how she feels about her family dying and her dad being a murderer just the second she steps off the boat!”
The President signalled for more coffee and when he and General Shaw were topped up they continued.
“This Russian Major who’s going back into Russia… Bedonavich?” Henry nodded and the President continued with his question. “I understand he wants to try and contact some friends in the Russian military, what do you think his chances are?”
“Well Mr President, pro New Soviet Union types hold all the top echelon of slots on the staffs, plus of course the war is going well for them… I am rather pessimistic as to his having any luck in bringing them over to our camp. I have already spoken to Terry Jones, I think it is unwise to try… at this stage anyway. If one of them denounces him, he will be arrested and tortured as a matter of course. He blew their operation with the bombs, and he is still supposed to be in the West, they are not likely to be using kid gloves if they get their hands on him. It could compromise the whole operation; Terry has already told him that.”
The chief executive approached the plasma screen, which was displaying a large-scale view of the earth from the North Cape to the tip northern tip of Australia. He touched the screen northeast of Moscow, and the view zoomed in on the area.
“What is the state of play with the assets on the ground?”
“Sir, Spec Ops infiltrated a team into Russia once we knew we were going to war with these people. They are fully covert right now; they have taken no action yet except to establish contact with CIA’s people in place and recon the landing site. They have not ventured out into the open, the civil and military police over there are seriously on the lookout for deserters and draft dodgers. The Russian assets that CIA has are only safe if they are in their fifties; the safe houses are all off the beaten track in the forests, as is the airstrip. It is a Second World War site that CIA has been keeping in reasonable shape for years… just in case. There is a tanker of fuel, stolen I believe, and civilian transport.”
The President made a cynical grunting sound.
“What was that movie in the sixties with the phoney secret army in Russia… ’Billion Dollar Brain’, let us hope CIA’s assets really exist, not just on paper!”
The General smiled briefly.
“Sir, Spec Ops troops on the ground verified that everything is as promised.” He brought up the area south of the Gobi Desert on the plasma screen before widening the view considerably. “Anyway, as you already know all about Guillotine sir, can I move onto Equaliser… .For the insertion into Kansu Province, we are positioning B2s for tanking at a military strip west of Rangoon in Burma. They will land at night, tank the insertion aircraft over the Bay of Bengal the same night and be gone by dawn. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are going to promenade their troops and start shaking fists at one another over the Kashmir Region, starting in two days’ time. Hopefully, should the PRC radars spot anything over the Bay of Bengal; they will put it down to one of those three nations up to something nasty which does not involve China. The B2s have a 3000km journey to the DZ, which is 70 clicks from the target… the troops walk the rest of the way. First priorities are the two ICBM fields and the second is China’s space centre. They get into position to laser mark the targets, set up the equipment and egress the area undetected. The sites may, or indeed may not have laser detection devices so the equipment is switched on remotely either by satellite or by the bombers themselves. We use SRAMs, short range attack missiles with 500kt warheads. Unlike command bunkers, which are essentially solid shells on springs, an ICBM silo has to be more accessible in order to launch the missiles; therefore it is less well protected. Extraction of the teams is another thing entirely, they are going to have to E&E, escape and evade to an old mountain airstrip 160 klicks west where we can lift them out by C-140. Mr President, this plan has 1001 things that can go wrong with it, but we have no other options. Japan threw in the towel rather than have her cities nuked… again. The other countries in the region will not take direct action until the nuclear threat is eliminated. Even with the ICBMs taken out, we are going to have one hell of a fight on our hands, even with our potential allies fighting along too.”