electronics, television monitors, and computers, was large enough to
accommodate sixty people.
Some fifty men and women were gathered here at the moment.
Officially designated the Presidential Crisis Management Group, they
weren’t managing so much as they were floundering in a veritable sea of
information coming through from the worsening Kola situation. At the
moment, Admiral Scott had the podium at the front of the room, as he ran
down the list of American and British assets in the region … and the
possible Russian response.
Admiral Magruder leaned back in his chair, his attention less on
Scott–he’d helped the head of the Joint Chiefs prepare his briefing so
he already knew its contents by heart–than it was on the wall at
Scott’s back.
There, the richly ornamented wood paneling had been rolled back to
reveal a giant computer screen. Run by three VAX computers hidden in
the room beyond, a digital information and display system, or DIDS,
could project on that screen complex maps, graphic representations of
data received from around the world, or displays repeated from the
National Military Command Center.
Currently, the screen showed a computer-generated map of the northern
half of the Kola Peninsula, the Russian coast as far east as Nosovaya,
and most of the Barents Sea. Bear Station was a bright blue racetrack
oval north of the Norwegian border, but dozens of other U.S. and NATO
assets were displayed as well.
P-3C Orions, big, four-engined ASW aircraft, were patrolling the entire
area from Svalbard to Nova Zemlya and south almost to the Murman coast.
Fifteen American attack subs, plus four British Trafalgar-class SSNs,
were already in the area, though their exact positions could not be
known with certainty. And II MEF was racing northeast just off the
Norwegian coast, its ASW air and sea pickets spread across ten thousand
square miles.
As many red graphics dotted the map as blue. The forty air bases in the
Kola Peninsula were all tagged with data lines indicating that they were
on full alert. Fortunately, all of the Russians’ Northern Fleet was in
port, except for some of their submarines. Over thirty of their subs,
however, dotted the waters of the Norwegian and Barents seas … and
those were just the ones that had been picked up by Western ASW forces.
During the past ten hours, the British, Norwegian, and American sea and
air sub-hunters had been dogging the Russian subs, pressing them,
rattling their hulls with active, high-frequency sonar, letting their
captains know that the NATO forces knew where they were and could kill
them at any time. It was a deadly game. The Russians–or rather, some
Russians–had already attacked American forces, and no one could say for
sure how their subs would act, what their orders were or which side of
their country’s civil war they’d joined. There’d been one incident
already, when a Russian Alfa off Iceland had launched a torpedo at the
Bolan, a Perry-class frigate dogging its wake.
The frigate had been blown up and sunk with terrible loss of life in
those frigid waters; five minutes later the Alfa had been hit by two
Advanced Lightweight Torpedoes dropped from the Bolan’s SH-2F Seasprite
helicopter and was listed now as a probable kill.
It was beginning.
Admiral Magruder was dead on his feet. He’d been up for most of the
past two days, briefing aides, reviewing intelligence updates, even
going over computer graphics data with the Crisis Management Group
staff. Most of the men and women in the room with him had been keeping
similar hours, snatching naps when they could on office sofas, or going
home, only to be called back a few hours later by another twist in the
ongoing crisis.
His primary duties as a senior military aide attached to the White House
consisted of acting as liaison between the White House staff and the
Joint Chiefs. Technically, he still worked for the Pentagon–that
“six-sided squirrel cage across the river,” as he liked to call it–but
in practice he worked out of an office in the White House basement.
God, but he wanted to go home.
As he studied the array of colored lights on the DIDS map, Magruder felt