“Four men inside. Can’t tell their condition. Call the others over here and get some rope from the shelter.” Rapier looked again into the sphere and shook his head. Poor bastards, he thought, wondering how he could feel this way about people who had sunk his ship, killed his mates, but up here, in this freezing hellhole, well, they were all human.
The Navy DC-9 orbited at a point above the continental shelf of the United States. Admiral Caspar “Bobby” McGee peered out a window, watching the scene as the U.S. Navy destroyer, the P-3 Orion ASW turboprop airplane and the destroyer’s LAMPS helicopter danced around a point in the sea, a point that suddenly erupted with white foam, admitting to the surface a nuclear submarine. A Russian attack submarine, easily identified as a VICTOR III by its trademark teardrop-shaped sail, bulbous bow and ellipsoidal pod on top of its rudder aft. It immediately turned northeast, heading home. An aide appeared next to him, watching the scene from an adjacent window.
“This is happening all up and down the coast,” the commander said.
“What’s the tally?” McGee asked.
“This one makes one hundred and five Russian nuclear subs surfaced after President Yulenski gave the orders to come home. That’s out of a force of 120— wait, one was sunk by the Billfish, which leaves fourteen boats to go. Once on the surface they’re covered by at least one U.S. escort unit, either an attack submarine, surface ship. Viking jet, P-3 Turboprop, LAMPS chopper and in some cases Coast Guard cutters and choppers.”
“What about the fourteen left? What if they go sour and tell Yulenski to stick it?”
The aide shook his head. “SOSUS is showing all 119 contacts, including the fourteen not yet on the surface. We don’t know for sure if the fourteen are being trailed by our own attack subs. As soon as one of ours turns over a surfacing unit to a P-3 he goes deep to look for another one. The math is in our favor. Sixty-six American attack boats, fourteen of theirs, with ASW aircraft and helicopters and SOSUS sensors helping them search. We’ve got a curtain of interceptor aircraft airborne along the entire east coast to down any more cruise missiles launched from the sea. We’ve got a line of surface ships pinging active sonar in a sweep from the shallow coastline toward the east.”
McGee nodded and took the message from the communications technician at the forward communications console. He looked up at the commander.
“Four more units just surfaced. Ten to go.” McGee sat down and allowed himself the luxury of shutting his eyes for a moment. It had been a very long morning.
General Herman Xavier Tyler dismissed the staff members, civilian analysts and intelligence officers that had finished briefing him, shaking hands with them. After the last briefer had left he stared down at one of the summary sheets, the intent of the Russian submarines off the coast revealed by the one ship that had launched, apparently prematurely. Tyler took the sheets to his inner office, stared for a moment at the view outside, the best in the whole Pentagon.
He walked away from the window and sat down in his leather chair at his desk, the desktop adorned with memorabilia of a long Air Force career: F-104 fighter, F-4 Phantom, a Minuteman missile, a B-52 bomber. Tyler got out a pen and a calculator, scribbled, finished his calculation. With deceleration from the bone and tissue, with a subsonic muzzle velocity, the bullet would still pass from the bottom of his brain to the top in such a short time that no nerve would have time to register pain. He would feel nothing He put down the pencil and unlocked the bottom right-hand drawer. The Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum revolver felt heavy in his hand. He opened the box of heavy grain ammunition and loaded all six chambers. Five too many, but the pistol would feel more balanced with six rounds in it. He snapped the chambers into the body of the revolver and cocked the trigger.
The barrel, he noted, tasted metallic as he put it to his mouth. He took one mad look out the window, at the panoramic scene of a Washington, D.C, still intact, and pulled the trigger.
In surprise, he realized his calculations had been incorrect.
It seemed to hurt forever.
Dawn. But no sunlight made its way to Flag Plot of COMSUBLANT headquarters buried deep underground. Admiral Richard Donchez looked like he had been in a fifteen-round fight and lost. Deep dark bags surrounded his bloodshot eyes. His favorite Havana had gone out. He pulled a fresh one from his jacket and tried to light it but, of course, the Piranha lighter was out of fuel. So was he. Pooped, was the word. He stood in front of the Arctic Ocean plot that showed the ice cap in green. The graphics were being updated by the computer, and as he watched the red X and the black X were replaced by a black circle and a red circle about 400 miles south of the pole roughly north of Novaya Zemlya. Circles meant sinkings. As he stared in disbelief, the watch officer hurried up to him.
“Sir,” Lieutenant Commander Sam Lockover said, “SOSUS reported two explosions at the positions indicated a few hours ago. They, well, apparently they failed to report the explosions due to the priority of reporting the Russian boats offshore…”
“Go on.”
“The first explosion was conventional. The second was… nuclear.” Lockover paused, Donchez’s looks could kill. “After the second explosion SOSUS heard the breakup of one hull — could have been our unit up north, the Devilfish, or the OMEGA class she was trailing. A few minutes later there was a sound like an emergency-blow or deballasting system. Within another few minutes there was a sound of a collision between one of the hulls and the ice.
The collision sound was so extreme that we don’t think there would be any way a hull could have survived.”
“Lot of god damned theories and hypotheses, you’ve got there,” Donchez said, feeling a shot of hot bile in his stomach. The Devilfish might be down, its crew and Michael Pacino could be dead. Or stranded, surfaced at a polynya with no radio. “Call COMAIRLANT and get a C-130 or a P-3 up there to look around, maybe one of the Keflavik units or one out of Norway or Alberta if they can vector one in quick. Call CIA PHOTOINT and on the next KH-17 satellite pass have the infrared and visuals trained on the SOSUS position of the sounds. Somebody could be up there on the ice…”
“Sir,” Lockover said, feeling damn uneasy to be the messenger of this news, “there’s a bad storm up there, I mean it’s from Greenland to Siberia, gale-force winds, heavy snow. We’re grounded. COMAIRLANT won’t fly anything up there and neither will the Marine Arctic Resupply units flying C-130’s. We could get a jet up for high altitude surveillance but doubtful we’d see through the storm clouds. And we just had a KH-17 pass. Kodiak’s on the phone to CIA now.”
Kodiak hung up and came over to them.
Donchez waited.
“The satellite didn’t see a damned thing, sir. Not even a polar bear. There’s a chance it’s just not seeing through the blizzard… more likely there’s nothing up there for it to see.”
It was 1973 all over again, Donchez thought. Another U.S. submarine sunk at the pole by a Russian. Another Pacino, on the bottom. Unbelievable.
“Was there a SUBSUNK transmission from our boat to the satellite?” Lockover shook his head.
“The Russians? Did one of theirs transmit a distress signal?”
“Sir, we’re trying to find out now through their embassy but things are pretty confused up there. And, sir, even if there was a distress signal I don’t think anybody is going to get up there for a while with this storm. It could last a week, maybe more.”