Authors: Joe Buff
J
effrey grabbed the intercom handset next to
Carter
’s XO’s desk. He wasn’t sure how to reach the Special Operations briefing space, so he called the control room.
“Messenger of the Watch, sir.”
“This is Commodore Fuller.”
“Yes, sir. Captain Harley asked me about ten minutes ago if I knew how much longer you’d be, but then he said I shouldn’t disturb you.”
“Have Captain Bell and Lieutenant Meltzer see me now.”
“In the XO’s stateroom, sir?”
“Yes. Inform Captain Harley that I’ll be needing him here, too, in private. I can’t say when yet, so give him my compliments and ask him to please continue waiting.”
“Understood, Commodore.”
Soon someone knocked on the door. Jeffrey got up and unlocked it, letting Bell and Meltzer in.
Jeffrey sat, Bell took the one guest seat, and Meltzer stood politely.
He studied the two of them, his flagship captain and his part-time executive assistant. He sized them up, measuring for himself whether they could handle the difficulties that Jeffrey now knew lay ahead.
“I’m not sure quite where to begin.” He tiredly rubbed the bridge of his nose. “There’s a major counterespionage effort going on back home that’s all too relevant to us. There’s an Axis mole
somewhere
in undersea warfare planning. . . . A remark Commander Nyurba made to me, that
Carter
’s mission to Norway had been compromised in advance, resonated strongly with a cautionary warning in my orders here.”
“Why do we need to know about this?” Meltzer asked.
“There’s danger of undetermined degree that our present mission was also leaked by the mole.”
Bell opened his mouth to say something; Jeffrey held up a hand to not interrupt.
“That’s why our current tasking has been organized and coordinated by a group of senior people selected by the President. Extraordinary compartmentalization was used to implement each detail. Even more than usual, those outside the President’s closed group have only very tiny pieces of the puzzle, with elaborate cover stories to justify activity they saw going on, those same cover stories spun so as to hide the special security measures. This gives only partial reassurance, as we proceed, that we haven’t been compromised. . . . My strike group has been provided with a cover story to use ourselves, explaining why we’ll be where we’ll be once we get there.”
“In case we’re detected, sir?” Bell asked.
“This is where it goes byzantine. Part of
Challenger
’s job, but not
Carter
’s, is to be detected. More than just detected.”
“Sir?”
Meltzer blurted out.
“Patience. I want Captain Harley involved for that part. One difficulty is the battle with the Amethyste-Two. The Amethyste being there to begin with might have been the work of the mole. Let’s pray that compartmentalization kept the actual reason for the rendezvous, and the specific identity of our two ships, hidden from the Axis. If so, but
only
if so, our sinking the Amethyste, and surviving, have largely negated the work of the mole. Pray I’m right on that. If I’m wrong, and our adversary knows the actual reason why we’re coming, we’re heading into a terrible trap.”
Jeffrey reached for the intercom. “Tell your captain I’m ready for him.”
In two minutes Harley knocked and came in. Meltzer scrunched to make room; the compartment was packed. Bell offered Harley the guest chair. He shook his head. He stood instead, in a proprietary manner, arms folded, leaning against the bulkhead. Jeffrey sensed he was feeling slightly violated—from his angle, a close-knit clique from
Challenger
had been caucusing alone, in a subordinate’s stateroom on
his
ship. Harley could tell that the caucus had not been fun.
“Everybody listen up,” Jeffrey said, “and listen good. The President wants our mission to be accomplished in a hurry because we have to forestall the next major German move, whatever that might be, and our own forces globally are becoming too worn out. In particular, the delivery of the next Eight-six-eight-U nuclear sub from Russia to Germany is scheduled very soon, and from what we know of its capabilities we
must
forestall that delivery.”
“We sink it?” Harley asked. “Blockade it?” He seemed game for the fight.
“It’s far more complicated, I’m afraid, because far more is at stake. There’s the unlimited supply of oil and natural gas, aircraft, tanks, other arms of all different kinds that Russia keeps supplying to the Axis. . . . Our assignment is probably the single most important and dicey mission ever attempted in this war or any shooting war. It’s a last-ditch chance to halt the brinkmanship once and for all, before humanity incinerates itself. . . . We need to squelch our ethical reservations, we dare not flinch, because an objective observer could easily argue that what we’ve been ordered to do is a war crime.”
“Huh?” Harley’s guard was down now, so Jeffrey eyed Bell and Meltzer, then began to hit the three with the conclusion he’d been leading to.
“We’ll go into details with Lieutenant Colonel Kurzin and Commander Nyurba and their people in a few minutes. I want to set this up by asking you a question first, Captain Harley. It isn’t a trick question.”
“Go ahead, sir. Commodore.”
“How do you think this war will end?”
“With Allied victory, I hope.”
“Even though the Axis has nuked several populated islands, including Diego Garcia, very painfully for us? Even though they attempted to get two South American countries embroiled in tactical atomic combat with each other,
on land,
while trying to make it look like the U.S. was to blame? And even though, failing in that by a fraction of an inch, they then launched an offensive in the Middle East that could easily have unleashed Israel’s nuclear arsenal? With staggeringly catastrophic consequences if that had happened, which it very nearly did?”
“The oligarchy in Berlin are desperate dictators.”
“With no intention whatsoever of surrendering to avoid an apocalypse. They’ve proven that time and again. Like desperate dictators everywhere, they care nothing for the lives of their own citizens. Their intention all along has been to
use
the threat of apocalypse to get the U.S. to back down.”
“Would we do that? Back down? Ever?”
“If events continue as they have, voters may force Congress to offer an armistice. Let the Axis have Europe and Africa. Let the United Kingdom fend for themselves and go under. That’s exactly what Berlin and Johannesburg have been gunning for all along. Their envoys in Sweden prod ours, then they talk to the international media when we refuse, make Washington look like the heavies, the ones who drag out the war. Put enough pressure on the American public, that pressure gets passed to Capitol Hill. They’d override the President’s veto, we’d have peace of a sort, with our war leader gone from the White House in disgrace. Forget Election Day 2012. Armistice means impeachment. Escapist pacifism quickly takes firm hold.”
“That’s a grim picture.”
“Especially since the Axis wouldn’t be satisfied to just keep what they got. They’d use that lopsided peace to squash the U.S. economically, flush our remaining prestige down the toilet, put a noose of diplomatic isolation around our neck, build up their military might, and eventually have another major stab at the parts of the world they don’t yet control.”
Harley scratched his jaw. “Agreeing to an armistice is a snare, an illusion? It only delays the inevitable?”
“Very much so. Thorough wargame simulations have been performed in the past few months, to see where things could possibly go from here.” Jeffrey tapped the thick hard-copy orders on the desk. “Several independent sets of players and computer models were used, including at the Naval War College. I was assigned to their simulations department before I wangled a transfer to
Challenger.
I can testify that those folks do objective, reliable, conclusive work. They’re the best.”
“I know. They have a world-class reputation.”
“Other war colleges, private think tanks, consulting firms, were also involved. They all came up with similar results.”
“Which were? . . .”
“Suppose we continue the war, with the aim to unseat the Axis leadership. How do we do it, and what happens when we try? A D-day-like assault across the English Channel, after a big buildup in Great Britain, is out of the question with tactical nukes in play. Ditto for an amphibious push from North Africa using the Med. And a land-route invasion of Germany, through the Middle East or Asia, will certainly cause the German regime to introduce widespread tactical nuclear weapons on land to defeat our oncoming offensive, no matter how broad the front along which we and our allies attack, and no matter how severe the collateral damage and civilian deaths.”
“Lord.”
“Worse. Following a period of armistice with America if one is indeed arranged, their second wave of aggression would be just as murderous. The juiciest prizes left for grabs, with Russia continuing as Germany’s pseudo-neutral friend, would be the big countries in the Middle East and Asia. With a whole different lineup of targets and objectives then, cross-ocean sea lanes wouldn’t have today’s significance. Tactical nuclear weapons would come into use offensively and defensively, unlimited, on land. . . . In either of the two potential scenarios, continuing to prosecute the war or granting an armistice, according to our planners the ultimate outcome remains the same. With so many countries getting involved and so much destruction and slaughter in main population centers, the conflict is certain to escalate into wholesale thermonuclear war. The U.S., Russia, China, Israel, Japan, everybody else. Hundreds of millions dead right away, maybe billions, and billions more not long after that if there’s a nuclear winter. The end of modern civilization, maybe the end of humanity.” Jeffrey tapped his orders again to emphasize the reality of what he’d been told in such harsh terms in writing.
“So what do we do?” Harley asked. “Why doesn’t the Pentagon glass Germany right now? Preempt?”
“Because Russia brought Germany under her own thermonuclear umbrella. Even if Russia broke
that
promise and held her fire, us glassing Germany would kill tens of millions of innocents outside German borders from fallout alone. Because Russia’s command-and-control systems are so gimpy, they might think our missiles were coming at
them,
and launch a massive retaliatory strike . . . at America. Because Germany has cruise missiles with fission warheads hiding at sea, which would come in low and fast and nuke the whole U.S. East Coast, and Gulf Coast, and reach inland past the Mississippi. Tens of millions more dead.”
“So what do we do?” Bell repeated Harley’s question.
“We perform our mission. There
is
a third scenario. One and only one alternative to Apocalypse Soon or Apocalypse Later. We take Kurzin and his men to Siberia, where they pretend to be Germans pretending to be Russians, infiltrate a missile silo field, take control of several brand-new SS-Twenty-seven ICBMs with one-megaton warheads, and launch them at the United States.”
B
ell and Harley were horrified.
“What?”
Meltzer blurted.
“I have documentation, Captains Harley and Bell, which you can authenticate with your own emergency-action-message codes. This way you can satisfy yourselves that these are valid, legal orders from our commander in chief. . . . The goal is to appear to try to start a nuclear exchange between Russia and the U.S., and leave ironclad forensic clues that German operatives, disguised as Russian extremists, did it.”
Harley fidgeted nervously. Bell squirmed in his seat. Meltzer chewed his lip so hard that Jeffrey thought his teeth might break the skin.
“There’s finely reasoned method in this madness. If the commando squadron, and I, succeed in our assigned roles, and
Carter
’s stealth holds up, the missiles that take off from Siberian silos, fully armed by technicians from Kurzin’s team, will detonate long before they actually land on American soil. Instead, the warheads will be set to go off outside the atmosphere over Russia. The radiation from the blasts will dissipate into the already-radioactive Van Allen belts surrounding our planet, and from there be blown by the solar wind safely away into deep space. The Greater Moscow area will be blanketed by a nonlethal but extremely damaging electromagnetic pulse. This much we know from tests performed in the late nineteen-fifties and early sixties. . . . Russia, hurting, panic-stricken at the thought of American vengeance and outraged at German treachery, will at a minimum withdraw all support from the Axis, and she might well, of sheer necessity, join the Allied side. That would leave Berlin isolated, cut off from strategic sustenance. On the ropes, with the Boers withering on the vine at the far southern tip of Africa. The Axis leaders, knowing that they’re not at fault but being unable to prove to Russia that we so cold-bloodedly framed them, would also have been sent a stinging message. One with plausible deniability, but unmistakable, about what ruthless risk-takers Americans are once sufficiently provoked, thus destroying the Axis sense of control and undermining their power. An amnesty, if the oligarchs step down at that juncture, could neatly wrap up the war.”
Harley sputtered. “Would we give those sons of bitches an
amnesty
after all this? Let them
walk,
after starting a premeditated tactical nuclear war?”
Jeffrey smiled sweetly. “Oh, I suppose the amnesty might be broken eventually, maybe by hit squads from Israel’s Mossad.”
“I like that part,” Meltzer said.
“For one stage I’ll need to go to a base in Siberia, as a back-door emissary to convey America’s extreme displeasure by making certain deadly threats, and also pretend to test Russia’s good faith, since most of Moscow will be knocked out of the loop by the EMP, including our somewhat ineffective diplomats stationed there. By then the President will be on the Hot Line to Russia’s president, assuming the Hot Line isn’t knocked out too. And if it is still working, Washington will cause temporary outages at crucial times, for ‘technical reasons,’ to help underscore my discussions and suitably tweak and tune the psychological chaos likely in the Kremlin by then. Part of my job will also be to quickly get inside Moscow’s reaction and decision time scale, to keep them from doing something precipitate, something irrevocably disastrous for the world.”
“And if you can’t?” Harley demanded.
“If things backfire? If Kurzin’s team can’t sneak and fight their way into a highly restricted area, then bypass booby traps and override software safeguards properly, or their and our strike group’s subterfuges are seen through or my bluffs are called, or we get sunk and identified, then Russia will surely become a wholehearted member of the Axis. Our commandos might even by accident nuke a few U.S. or Russian cities for real.”
“But—” Bell tried to object.
“Then the only way out of apocalypse isn’t even a negotiated armistice, it’s fast and abject Allied surrender. We kiss good-bye to the American way of life, confront enslavement instead, and learn to speak German or Russian or Afrikaans. That’s if we’re lucky. If we’re unlucky, the missiles Kurzin launches are only the first of many, and then more, and more, from Russia, the U.S., and other places. You could call that outcome, the worst-case mission failure result, Apocalypse Now.”
Jeffrey knew how his subordinates felt, because his own head was swirling with unanswered questions and troubling what-ifs. “Captain Harley, I think we ought to be getting to the briefing session.” Bell stood, and Meltzer let his seniors precede him.
Harley, not so crisp and detached as when Jeffrey first met him, led the way, around sharp corners and down steep ladders, then through a long, straight corridor. He said, with pride, that this was the wasp waist in
Carter
’s Multi-Mission Platform. The pressure hull narrowed to eighteen feet, creating ample garage space inside the forty-two-foot-diameter outer hull.
They came to the full-width aft part of this specially added pressure hull section. Some doors here held security warnings, and were protected by electronic and mechanical combination locks. They went up a ladder and came to another door, open. Inside was a briefing room. Jeffrey did a double take.
Except for officers and chiefs from
Challenger
and
Carter,
who wore khakis or jumpsuit blue, several dozen men were dressed in Russian Army uniforms—mostly urban- or forest-pattern camouflage fatigues—and they talked in small groups in fluent Russian. Their short haircuts, the set of their features, the ways they moved, were subtly foreign, not American. Some had shirtsleeves rolled above elbows, and even their forearm tattoos—the motifs, the colors, the alphabet used for the words—bore an alien look. Jeffrey also saw battle scars, from shrapnel, bayonets, or bullets.
Their mean and emotionless faces gave the appearance of street gang members, ones who’d had the individuality beaten out of them by a merciless mental and physical thrashing that left these, the survivors, tougher and more ruthless for it. What distinguished each were their ethnic features, body types, and hair color, blond or brown or frizzy red or glossy jet black.
One man at the front of the room stood up. Jeffrey thought he bore a close resemblance, in bearing and attitude as well as in his build and appearance, to a youngish Leonid Brezhnev, the reactionary Communist Party General Secretary who led the USSR during its violent repression of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the genocidal invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
“Sergey Kurzin,” this strange apparition said to Jeffrey, shaking his hand. “A pleasure to meet you, Commodore.” His English was unaccented. He said he grew up in Chicago.
Jeffrey glanced around the briefing room. “You have quite an outfit here, Colonel.” Then Jeffrey saw Commander Nyurba approaching. He too looked different, like he really was a serving officer in the Russian Federation’s armed forces.
“Don’t mind us, Commodore,” Nyurba said. “We need to stay in character.”
“Where are the rest of your team?”
“I decided to send them by squads to eat,” Kurzin stated, “or to use our exercise equipment, since you were even
longer than I expected reading your orders.”
“Can we get started now?”
“After I talk to you and Commander Nyurba in private.”
Jeffrey eyed Bell, Harley, and Meltzer. “Introduce yourselves around to . . . to our new friends in the meantime.”
“Boy, this is weird,” Meltzer said under his breath.
“I know it,” Bell responded. “These guys look like Spetsnaz or something.” Spetsnaz were Soviet-era special forces sabotage and assassination troops, which continued to exist under the Russian Federation with different roles. “Like they’d slit our throats if we gave them half a chance.”
“They would do so quickly and silently, I assure you,” Kurzin said. He wasn’t smiling.
He led Jeffrey and Nyurba past the battle management center, full of mission-planning and communications consoles, some of them manned, and over to a compartment whose watertight hatch said “
SMALL ARMS LOCKER. CAUTION: EXPLOSIVES AND PYROTECHNICS
.” Kurzin undogged the heavy hatch and flipped on a light switch, and they went inside. A narrow aisle led down the center. The compartment was filled with safes, locked storage cabinets, and racks on both sides of the aisle holding many dozens of wicked-looking Russian assault rifles—each shrink-wrapped in clear plastic. Kurzin shut the hatch behind them.
He saw Jeffrey’s curiosity. “Nikonov AN-Ninety-fours. Nicknamed Abakans. Successor to the AK-Forty-sevens and AK-Seventy-fours. Russian elite units use them. Beside the usual one-shot and full-auto selector modes, they fire special two-round bursts at a cyclic rate of eighteen hundred rounds per minute. That’s almost three times as fast as an M-Sixteen. More accurate, too, trust me. These have time-shifted recoil action, so the user doesn’t even feel the gun go off until after the pair of bullets leave the barrel. Both slugs hit the same spot at a hundred yards or more, one a thirtieth of a second behind the other. Great way to tear through body armor. Extreme lethality.”
“These are real? I mean, made in Russia?” They were all a solid gun-metal gray, including the fiberglass-polymer folding stock and fore-grip—Jeffrey saw none of the wooden or brown-colored plastic parts as on the venerable AK-47.
“We have ways of obtaining the genuine article.”
“What about ammo?”
“Caliber is five-point-four-five millimeters, slightly narrower than the NATO standard five-point-five-six bullet. They take sixty-round box magazines, short but thick, rounds stacked four in a row. Those, we have foreign-made.”
“Won’t that be a giveaway?”
“A metallurgical analysis will show that the bullets and shells were produced at a munitions plant in Germany.”
“So that the raiders will seem to have come from there. Okay, I follow that, but how did you get the ammunition from Germany?”
“You don’t need to know. You don’t want to.”
Kurzin switched into rapid-fire Russian, bombarding Jeffrey with it, catching him off guard.
Jeffrey tried to keep up, stammering.
Kurzin cursed in Russian, then turned, enraged, to Nyurba.
“ ’Vy skazaki chto on byl gotovy!”
You said he was ready!
“Grazhdanin, ya dumal chto on byl gotovy.”
Sir, I thought he was ready.
Kurzin reverted to English. “Forget it. This is hopeless. You’ll need to go back to
Challenger
until the next rendezvous, and work with Commodore Fuller much more.”
“Yes, sir,” Nyurba said.
“What’s the problem here?” Jeffrey asked, trying to reassert his authority.
“Commodore, don’t pull rank on me,” Kurzin said in a sharp, nasty way. His eyes showed cold fury. “Have you any
idea
what you’ll be up against?” He didn’t let Jeffrey answer. “For purposes of this mission, Commander Nyurba and I are your training officers. Your rank means nothing. Nothing. Your
readiness
is all that matters.
All.
Your Russian stinks, you’ll have to do a lot better than that. And I saw you blink, you were flustered.
Unacceptable!”
“But—”
“Do
not
talk back to me. If you let on just once during this mission about what you really think inside, how you really feel, you’ve screwed the pooch big-time. My men will have risked their lives,
given
their lives, for nothing.”
“Now wait a minute, Colonel.”
“No,
you
wait a minute.” Kurzin moved in close and loomed over Jeffrey. “What did I just tell you?” he said in a loud, angry voice.
“That I’m in training.”
“Christ Almighty, don’t you realize the Russians will be recording every word you say? Running it through stress analyzers? They’ll have hidden video cameras
everywhere.
Every facial inflection, the way you inhale, the way you fidget, they’ll be watched again and again by a team of the FSB’s best experts!”
“Why can’t I just bring a translator?”
“Because the whole act hinges on your personal command presence, your prestige, your image as Axis nemesis, your tactical nuclear warrior’s worldwide fame. An aide, an assistant, a translator, in this context they’d dilute your impact. You
must
go alone. The President made that decision.”
“Won’t the Russians have translators?”
“Of course, you fool! Do you think that for one moment you can trust
them
? Who will they be loyal to?”
“The Russians.”
“Whom you’re supposed to confront as an enemy, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Whom you’re
supposed
to think have just tried to nuke the United States,
correct
?”
“Yes.”
“Role-play it out. You’re nowhere there yet. Thank
God
you’ve got ten days more to work on your part.”
“All right,” Jeffrey conceded. “Lay it on as thick as you need to.”
“Don’t worry, I will, and I
don’t
need your permission.”
Jeffrey was starting to think that he was in boot camp, lower than dirt—in some bizarre through-the-looking-glass netherworld of lies embedded in other lies.
That’s an accurate summary.
The rows of AN-94s all around him gave the compartment, and the discussion, a surreal quality. Added to the browbeating by this Kurzin-cum-Brezhnev persona confronting him, Jeffrey started to feel disoriented.
Kurzin came so close that Jeffrey smelled the onions lingering on his breath. “Be glad, be
very
glad, that it’ll probably be the Russians who feel defensive, conciliatory. Your job is to convey wrath and resolve, not merely your own but your nation’s, and your nation’s commander in chief’s. A commander in chief who by then will have full power to push the button.
Use
that.”
“Uh, right.”
“And leave your moral qualms out of it altogether. Deception and bluff in a war situation aren’t lies, they’re necessary tools, and part of your duty!” Kurzin jabbed Jeffrey in the chest with his index finger, so forcefully it hurt. “Have you ever
not
done your duty?”