“Eight, sir.”
“Right! With the four we already have that makes twelve. We’ll clobber the Stalingrad Division from behind with six. Won’t know what the hell hit them. Confusion’ll be worth as much to us as the casualties we inflict. And, gentlemen, let’s not be mean about this. We’ll split the other six with two for the KMK factory at Novokuznetsk, which we’ll fire first, and two we’ll donate to Akademgorodok, near Novosibirsk. The KMK factory,” he explained to Lopez, who hadn’t picked up on the name, “is where they make their tanks as well as these GSTs. And that leaves two for our two friends up north. Seeing they stole our technology, let’s demonstrate its accuracy, gentlemen. All right?”
“All right.”
“Okay. Let’s have a sonar ping,” ordered Brentwood, and the easy tone of a second ago was now replaced by his professional demeanor. “Come on, hurry it up.”
“Yes, sir.” Now they were on active sonar, Brentwood explaining, “Might as well be brazen about it. What’s that old man Freeman always says? L’audace, I’audace, toujours I’audace!”
“He stole it from Patton,” said Johnson.
“Who stole it from Frederick the Great,” said Brentwood. “Well, it’s ours now.”
The active’s “pings” were now bouncing, or “bonging,” back, telling them that they had a relatively thin ice roof no more than half a mile three degrees starboard.
“No problem, sir,” Johnson pronounced. “Looks as thin as a virgin’s—”
“Yes, yes, all right,” said Robert Brentwood, notoriously prudish about such matters, even in front of his sister Lana who, is a nurse had seen it all and had “done time,” as young David put it, with “Scumbag” La Roche.
Reaching the area of the thin ice, Brentwood ordered Johnson to take the sub to a depth of two thousand feet, approaching the sub’s crush depth, and at an off angle to the targeted ice patch. He then pulled the lever to release float charge. Two minutes later there was a gut-wrenching thud, and Brentwood immediately ordered the GST to fifty feet.
“Fifty feet, aye, sir,” came Johnson’s confirmation. At fifty feet he levelled the sub out, still surprised at how quickly the tiny GST, a seal compared to a whale in size, responded. The problem was not to let it get ahead of you and slam into the ice.
“Half speed,” Brentwood instructed Lopez, then to Johnson, “Twenty-five feet.”
“Twenty-five feet, sir… Levelling at twenty-five.”
“Very well. Man battle stations missile. Set condition one!”
“Condition one, aye, sir,” responded Johnson.
“Departments ready?” asked Brentwood. There were only two departments, Lopez’s and Johnson’s, but Brentwood knew that this was a time for tried and true procedures to steady their nerves.
“Steerage ready, sir,” reported Lopez, followed by Johnson’s, “Sonar ready.”
“Very well,” acknowledged Brentwood. “Neutral trim.”
Johnson made a slight adjustment to starboard.”Neutral trim, sir.”
“Stand by to flood tubes one and two,” ordered Brentwood, it being standard procedure on any missile submarine to be ready to fire torpedoes in defense of the ship should an enemy vessel try to interfere with the missile launch. “Completing spin up,” Brentwood advised them as he entered the final salinity and current corrections that would affect the missiles’ trajectories. “Spin up complete. Prepare for ripple fire.”
“Prepare for ripple fire,” responded Johnson.
“Fire one,” ordered Brentwood.
“Fire one. One fired.” There was a hiss of compressed air and a rasping noise, the sub rolling ten degrees port before regaining neutral trim.
“Fire two.”
“Fire two. Two fired.”
In less than three and half minutes all four cruise missiles had passed through their nose cones’ protective membranes, exited the ice-free hole, booster rockets engaged, and were en route to their targets. Lopez and Johnson exited the sub for the reloads, while Brentwood made copious notes on the GST’s performance as he prepared a course to take the sub toward thinner ice at the eastern shore after all salvos had been fired.
“In the spring, General,” said Professor Leonid Grigorenko, looking out on the frozen Ob Sea that was Akademgorodok’s private lake, “I hope you’ll find time to come out sailing with me and lrena.”
The gruff, heavy-browed Yesov shook his head. “Nyet, thank you all the same, Professor. I am no sailor. Besides, there will still be ice in the spring.”
“Oh, come now, Comrade. It adds to the adventure, yes?”
“Nyet.” Yesov looked about so that none of his aides at the professor’s cocktail party, to celebrate the success of the GST offensive, heard that he was leery of anything to do with water-including bathing, some had said. “I get sick in the Jacuzzi, Professor.”
“Ah, Marshal!” said Chernko, his familiarity claiming Yesov, marshal of all Siberian forces, as if he were a long-lost friend. “How goes the Thirty-first?”
“Well,” said Yesov curtly — he didn’t like Chernko, even if he was hailed in Novosibirsk for his GST plan. Yesov was willing to accept the general’s help, but to Yesov it had been too conditional altogether — Chernko telling them, insisting on what pleasures and luxuries, including dachas, he would get in return. Yesov despised him. Here was the Russian, a former KGB chief, now sucking up to the Western alliance in Moscow while slipping Novosibirsk vital information via his spies, information chat Yesov had to grudgingly admit had served them well in stopping the Allies at the Urals, pummeling the Allies in fact. Still, he disliked the man’s opportunism. As far as he was concerned Chernko was little more than the old bourgeois “Communist”—as ideologically unsound and, at root, as uncommitted to the military as Gorbachev had been.
“I’m well satisfied,” said Chernko. “If the Thirty-first does as well in the east against this Freeman as we have in the west, eh. it’ll be over soon. A cease-fire, and then we go for American aid. The Americans are suckers. Once the Thirty-first mauls Freeman’s soft Second Ar—”
The apartment building shook, everyone thinking it was an earthquake, broken glass, whole windows popping out and whizzing through the air, expensive dresses of the elite slashed, many of the generals’ wives screaming from the minor cuts and abrasions created by the first shock wave. Yesov had moved under the mahogany dining table with all the finesse of a charging T-80, sending two colonels’ wives splaying on the plush Persian carpet. As people were getting up off the floor, his beeper was set off by the pressure of his folding gut.
“Machina!”—”Stop that thing!” one of the women screamed hysterically.
“Tishe!”— “Be quiet!” Yesov replied, red-faced, lumbering up with the help of an aide, whom he quickly shook off like an offending mullet. The marshal was in the throes of regaining his ruffled dignity. It was seven minutes, the phone lines being down, before he heard that the KMK works in Novokuznetsk had been badly hit, as well as the Institute of Defense Science in Akademgorodok.
The damage — over 192 killed, several hundred wounded, was not of particular concern to the marshal even though it abruptly ended the cocktail party. Whatever his faults might be, Yesov had been the first in that room, or in Novosibirsk’s Central Committee, to realize that the Americans had suddenly and dramatically demonstrated that they had the ability to reach deep into Sibir. It could only mean that the Americans must now have established forward air bases, despite the Thirty-first’s advance, from which to fire off their air-launch cruise missiles which, skimming at tree level across the taiga and steppe, had hit both the political heart and a vital industrial organ of Siberia. It was clearly a warning of the terrible danger that the vital Siberian oil fields at Mirnyy, in the very center of Siberia and without which she could not continue the war, were at immediate risk. The same would then be true of Siberia’s vital defense industries all the way from Mirnyy, believed to be invulnerable to all U.S. tactical missiles, to the oil field, barely two hundred miles north of Novosibirsk, at Belyy Yar. Everything was now within Freeman’s reach.