Novskoyy moved to go to Chekechev but dizziness enveloped him and he fell, landing on Katmonov’s control seat. He ducked his head between his knees and hoped the blood would return, and finally the dizziness did ease and his senses returned. The pod, he thought. Get to the pod. He limped across the tilted room and found the pod-control panel. He hit the toggle switch that would open the massive motor-driven hatch. Nothing happened. Fighting dizziness, he looked for a pry bar, any piece of long metal. Nothing. The room was not designed to require pry bars or primitive valve-extension handles. If the deck wasn’t so tilted he might have gotten the wrench that Vlasenko had dropped, the wrench the captain had brought to kill him with. He climbed back to the hatch and started to bang on the lower hatch with a flashlight, hoping Vlasenko would hear and open the pod from inside. No response.
CHAPTER 21
Admiral Caspar “Bobby” McGee, CINCLANT, exited the helicopter and hurried up the ladder rungs to the door of the DC-9 idling at the end of the runway. He had barely gotten to the top of the ladder when his aide pulled in the ladder and shouted go to the pilot. McGee had nearly been knocked off his feet as the pilot throttled up, the concrete of runway zero five immediately blurring outside the still open door as the aide struggled to shut it.
McGee had never taken seriously the notion of an attack on the U.S… Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, moves in the political chess game far away. That is, until a half hour before when the call came that a missile was on its way in.
The helicopter had landed in his front yard moments later, startling his sleeping neighbors. Now McGee listened to his aide’s briefing of the current threat — the positions of the enemy submarines, the status of the U.S. units tracking them. His conversation with Admiral Donchez replayed itself in his mind. How could he have not thought that a nation… or some renegade in it… with 27,000 nuclear weapons, a nation fractured apart, would never be tempted to use weapons one last time? How could General Tyler in particular so badly have misread the situation? A question for another day.
The NESTOR UHF satellite secure-voice circuit blooped, the crypto-gear making the strange noises that indicated its awakening. And as the DC-9 continued climbing to the east at full throttle, McGee took the call from the White House…
The President’s accent, clear even through the scrambled voice phone, grated on Admiral Donchez’s nerves. Particularly when the voice was saying something he disagreed with.
“Sir, we’ve got one-hundred-twenty covert Russian attack subs off the coast. One of them just launched a nuclear cruise missile, headed for me and—”
“Admiral, my advisors tell me you’re having it shot down, there’s no danger. And there won’t be any more missiles launched. I’ve just received assurances, and I believe them, from President Yulenski that this is a mistake… the deployment, the launch… He’s ordering the fleet back home right now, said he’d order the subs to surface—”
“Can he bring back the dead? Sir, I’ve been warning about this sort of thing now for days, no one wanted to hear it. General Herman X. Tyler didn’t want to hear any doomsday talk out of me. Shooting down this missile isn’t exactly a done deal, sir.”
“Dick,” Admiral McGee’s voice said on the three-way connection, “better listen to the President—”
“Donchez,” the President ordered, “tell your submarines not to fire on the Russian units. Have them call the Russians on underwater telephone-sonar and tell them to surface. If they won’t, well, then you can bump or collide with them, but do not shoot them. Clear?”
“Sir,” Donchez said, “we have a Los Angeles Javelin vertical-launch sub off the Russian northern coast right now. I have her on missile alert. One word from you and she’ll have twelve Javelins on their way.”
“Admiral, recall that submarine. Now, god damnit.”
“Admiral, McGee here. The situation is coming under control, don’t make it worse—”
“What’s your ETA to Pattern Charlie?” Donchez wanted to know when operational control of the fleet would pass to McGee, when he’d be 100 miles out of Norfolk.
“About ten minutes. I’ll contact you on NESTOR.”
“Roger, ten to Pattern Charlie, and will comply with your orders,” Donchez said, trying to keep the anger from his voice. “I’ll recall the Javelin sub. But I still recommend reconsidering retaliation—”
But the President had already hung up.
When the shock wave had hit the ship and the pod, Vlasenko had been bounced around hitting every surface in the pod. For a moment he wondered if he was blind, felt a warm drip and realized blood was flowing into his eyes.
The pod was turned on its side. The ship, he decided, must be in a terminal velocity dive for the ocean bottom. The rumbling sound of another weapon explosion in the first compartment indicated he had less than a few seconds to try to get into the control compartment and load anyone he could into the pod and detach. He wondered if they were close enough to thin ice for an attempt to escape. It was the only chance he had.
Vlasenko pulled the pod-release lever from the control panel and inserted it between spokes of the hatch-control wheel, then with a grunt pulled on the lever, using it as a pry bar until the wheel broke away. Now he pulled the steel rod out of the wheel and was shocked to see the wheel furiously rotate by itself. The rotating mechanism pulled the hatch-dogs — each a thick banana of steel holding the hatch shut — clear of the pod hatch jamb. He had to jump out of the way as the hatch flew sideways and into the pod. And Vlasenko found himself staring into the eyes of Admiral Alexi Novskoyy, whose arms were occupied holding the ladder. Vlasenko balled his fist and smashed it into Novskoyy’s face, and the admiral collapsed, falling away into the darkness of the shattered control compartment.
As the radioman handed Commander Henry Duckett the flash message, he felt the eyes of the crewmen on him, awaiting word to launch the Javelins. When he read the message the breath went out of him, partly relief, partly disappointment. He handed the message to Mills, the OOD.
“Goddamn, sir, first they want us to hightail it up here, then they want us to cock the gun, then they want us to forget it and come on home.”
Duckett shook his head. “Secure battle stations, spin down the Javelins and bring us around to course three zero zero, all ahead two thirds. We’re getting the hell out of here.”
The speaker monitoring the radio communications of the F-14 had just tolled its unhappy message.