“Dammit, Kodiak, tell them to move. That missile is coming in at 650 miles an hour. We got nine, ten more minutes tops.”
“Yes sir, I’m in contact with Oceana’s tower now.” Chief Carter called to Donchez from across the room.
“Sir. Admiral. The President’s on Secure One.” As Donchez reached for the secure phone he gave Kodiak another order.
“Lieutenant, get that F-14 airborne. It’s the only game in town.” He put the phone to his ear. “Donchez here. Mister President…”
Colonel Dretzski had had a contingency plan in case Novskoyy’s plan failed. Now that the Novskoyy plan had stumbled, with one missile in the sky and the rest of the deployed ships apparently having decided not to fire, Dretzski decided to reveal his hand to the President. Now the emphasis should be on keeping Russia from getting hit with a retaliatory strike.
Dretzski wondered what had happened, why Novskoyy had decided to launch instead of strong-arming both superpowers as he had promised. Further, once he did elect to shoot, why had the fleet refused to fire, why did only one boat decide to launch? Was it a problem with the radios? Ironic if Novskoyy’s grand, ego-driven plan had ended up being undone by a faulty circuit chip.
Dretzski had been encamped at Yasenevo, headquarters of the photographic intelligence raw-data section, monitoring the photo-reconnaissance satellites. He had been there all weekend, napping a few hours between satellite passes, awake for the coverage of the U.S. east coast. He was exhausted. The conference room he was in now bore little resemblance to the Spartan qualities of the FED. The room was fit for an old-fashioned American Robber Baron: the huge hearth big enough to roast a pig in, logs crackling and warming the room, a table stretching on and on in mahogany splendor with deep leather chairs set about it, the high ceiling inlaid with gold, the walls panelled with hand carved wood, the furniture seemingly from the days of Catherine the Great.
Dretzski sat near the end of the table near the President.
On the other side were General Pallin, FED chief, who looked ready to kill Dretzski, and Maksoy, head of the KGB, who looked abstracted. Admiral Barisov was, strangely, on Dretzski’s side of the table, as well as Defense Minister Fasimov. Foreign Minister Kirova was absent. What a meeting to miss, Dretzski thought.
Dretzski began. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, turning to the President, “this is an emergency. Just moments ago, in our monitoring Admiral Novskoyy’s deployment exercise we detected on a satellite infrared scanner an actual cruise missile launch off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia, USA …” Dretzski paused. He had the room’s full attention.
“Dretzski,” the President said, his face suddenly tense, “are you saying there was an accident? That someone accidentally launched a missile?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Must be an exercise weapon,” Maksoy said, coming awake. “We destroyed our warshots, the U.N. monitored it.”
“That thought occurred to us also,” Dretzski said, and considered that they would know soon enough what Novskoyy had been up to, that his plan was falling apart… better for Ivan Ivanovich Dretzski if they heard it from him, as if he himself had been the hero who uncovered the conspiracy. He would not be popular but at least he should escape being imprisoned. “Just after our last meeting,” he continued, “I ordered an FED team to check the disposal sites of the SSN-X-27 missiles that had supposedly been dismantled by the U.N.—”
“And?” the President demanded.
“We found, sir, that the warheads destroyed, the presumably plutonium nuclear warheads, were not plutonium. They were clay, doped with alpha and gamma and neutron radiation sources. The solid rocket fuel turned out to be clay also, with special granules and coloring so it looked to be the real thing. The team leader personally put a match to some of the rocket fuel. It should have exploded and killed him. Instead… The word from the inspection team, unfortunately, just reached us moments ago, as the missile was launched.”
“So where did the warshots go?” Admiral Barisov put in.
“Aboard the Northern Fleet’s attack submarines. And they are, as we speak, cruising at hold positions less than two-hundred kilometers off the American Atlantic coast.”
“Does this mean what I think it does?” the President said, face not only tense but growing red.
“It means, sir, that Admiral Alexi Novskoyy’s fleet is armed with warshot SSN-X-27 nuclear land-attack cruise missiles, armed for an attack on the eastern United States…”
The President’s mouth opened and shut several times, and for a moment Dretzski wondered if he was having a heart attack. After a moment, he seemed to get hold of himself, at least to demand recommendations. Dretzski was ready. “Sir, I suggest getting on the hotline to the American President. Tell him you were deceived, which is the truth. Tell him what Novskoyy has. Suggest his navy blow the Northern Fleet to the bottom of the sea for all our sakes. I recommend you do not send our aircraft or ships in that direction — it would just seem an added threat. I would also, sir, recommend a radio message to the fleet telling them that Novskoyy has made himself an international criminal and that they are to reject any plan for hostilities, surface and head home.”
The President, without a word, motioned to Fasimov and Admiral Barisov to follow him and hurried out of the room, apparently headed for the Communication Center. They don’t always shoot the messenger, Dretzski thought.
Commander Henry Duckett looked at the OPREP-3 message from COMSUBLANT ordering Allentown to prepare to fire, then handed it to the OOD, who read it and looked up in astonishment.
“Man silent battle stations,” Duckett said, wondering if this were for real and trying to suppress the thought.
OOD Lieutenant William Mills stepped to the firing panel and called up the firing-and-targeting-mode menu for launch-tube number one, paged down to tube two and on down the list to the last three tubes — ten, eleven and twelve. Ten miles off a major Russian naval base was the firing position. After the first missile a radar was bound to find them, a destroyer or cruiser bound to come and depth charge them into scrap metal. Mills thought. It seemed Allentown had just become a new word for expendable.
CHAPTER 19
Lieutenant Commander Todd Nikels fastened both latches of his oxygen mask to his flight helmet. The weapon-loading team had just completed the Mongoose missile-loadout. There had been only time to load two of the air-to-air heatseekers — both missiles were aboard, one below each wing of the F-14 supersonic fighter. Nikels waved to the Weapons Officer and keyed up the throttles. His engines had been idling during the loadout in violation of navy ordinance-loading procedures but this was an emergency.
“Oceana Tower, this is Valley Forge,” Nikels said into his radio set. ‘Taxiing to zero eight now. Request takeoff clearance and a vector to the northwest.”
“Valley Forge, roger, cleared for takeoff runway zero eight, climbout on three two five.” Nikels was almost reckless with the big jet fighter as he turned the taxiway corner. He had never taxied the aircraft this fast before, but he understood he had only minutes, maybe seconds.
Nikels’ backseater, the radar intercept officer, was Lieutenant Brad Tollson, a Virginia native. Tollson had just returned from a tour at Pax River’s Test Pilot School, a rival to Nikels’ own most recent school. Top Gun. The products of each school seemed to think they were God’s gift to aviation. Normally the crew of an F-14 Tomcat was the best two-man team in the Navy, but so far Nikels hadn’t been able to figure out the stony Tollson.