“Okay, let’s give her a wave.” The pilot turned the yoke to the left, taking the Orion directly over the barge-carrier. He waggled his wings slightly as he passed overhead, and two men on the bridge waved back at them. The flyers couldn’t pick out the two men tracking them with handheld SAMs. “Good luck, fella. You might need it.”
MV JULIUS FUCIK
“The new paint scheme will make visual spotting difficult, Comrade General,” the air-defense officer said quietly. “I saw no air-to-surface missiles attached.”
“That will change quickly enough. As soon as our fleet puts to sea, they will load them. Besides, if they identify us as enemy, how far can we run while they call up other aircraft, or simply fly to their base to rearm?” The General watched the aircraft depart. His heart had been in his throat for the whole episode, but now he could walk out to where Kherov stood on the open bridge wing. Only the ship’s officers had been issued American-style khaki uniforms.
“My compliments to your language officer. I presume he was speaking English?”
Andreyev laughed jovially, now that the danger was past. “So I am told. The Navy requested a man with his particular skills. He’s an intelligence officer, served in America.”
“In any case, he succeeded. Now we may approach our objective safely,” Kherov said, using the last word relatively.
“It will be good to be on land again, Comrade Captain.” The General didn’t like being on such a large, unprotected target and would not feel safe until he had solid ground under his feet. At least as an infantryman you had a rifle with which to defend yourself, usually a hole to hide in, and always two legs to run away. Not so on a ship, he had learned. A ship was one large target, and this one was virtually unprotected. Amazing, he thought, that anything would feel worse than being on a transport aircraft. But here he had a parachute. He had no illusions about his ability to swim to land.
SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA
“There goes another one,” the chief master sergeant said.
It was almost boring now. Never in the colonel’s memory had the Soviets had more than six photographic reconnaissance satellites in orbit. There were now ten, plus ten electronic-intelligence gatherers, some launched from the Baikonor Cosmodrome outside Leninsk in the Kazakh S.S.R., the other half from Plesetsk in northern Russia.
“That’s an F-type booster, Colonel. Burn time is wrong for the A-type,” the sergeant said, looking up from his watch.
This Russian booster was a derivation of the old SS-9 ICBM, and it had only two functions-to launch radar ocean reconnaissance satellites, called RORSATS, that monitored ships at sea and to loft the Soviet antisatellite system. The Americans were watching the launch from a newly launched KH-11 reconnaissance satellite of their own, sweeping over the central region of the USSR. The colonel lifted the phone to Cheyenne Mountain.
USS PHARRIS
I should be sleeping, Morris told himself. I should stockpile sleep, bank it away against the time when I can’t have any. But he was too keyed up to sleep.
USS PHARRIS was steaming figure eights off the mouth of the Delaware River. Thirty miles north, at the piers of Philadelphia, Chester, and Camden, ships of the National Reserve Defense Fleet that had been held in readiness for years were getting ready to sail. Cargo holds were loading with tanks, guns, and crates of explosive ordnance. His air-search radar showed the tracks of numerous troop transports lifting out of Dover Air Force Base. The Military Airlift Command’s huge aircraft could ferry the troops across to Germany where they would be mated with their prepositioned equipment, but when their unit loads of munitions ran out, the resupply would have to be ferried across the way it had always been, in ugly, fat, slow merchant ships-targets. Maybe the merchies weren’t so slow anymore, and were larger than before, but there were fewer of them. During his naval career, the American merchant fleet had fallen sharply, even supplemented by these federally funded vessels. Now a submarine could sink one ship and get the benefit it would have achieved in World War Il by sinking four or five.
The merchant crews were another problem. Traditionally held in contempt by Navy sailors-a truism in the U.S. Navy was to steer well clear of any merchantman, lest he decide to liven up his day by ramming you-the average age of the crews running the ships was about fifty, more than double that in any American naval vessel. How would those grandfathers take the stress of combat operations? Morris wondered. They were quite well paid-some of the senior seamen made as much as he did-but would their comfortable, union-negotiated salaries devalue in the face of missiles and torpedoes? He had to erase the thought from his mind. These old men with kids in high school and college were his flock. He was the shepherd, and there were wolves hiding under the gray surface of the Atlantic.
Not a large flock. He had seen the figures only a year ago: the total number of privately owned cargo ships in operation under the American flag was 170 and averaged about eighteen thousand tons apiece. Of those, a mere 103 were routinely engaged in overseas trade. The supplemental National Defense Reserve Fleet consisted of only 172 cargo ships. To call the situation a disgrace was to describe gang rape as a mild social deviation.
They couldn’t allow even one to be lost.
Morris wandered over to the bridge radarscope and looked down into the rubber eyeshield to watch the aircraft lifting out of Dover. Each blip contained three to five hundred men. What would happen when they ran out of shells?
“Another merchie, skipper.” The officer of the dock pointed to a dot on the horizon. “She’s a Dutch container boat. I expect she’s inbound for military cargo.”
Morris grunted. “We need all the help we can get.”
SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA
“It’s definite, sir,” the colonel said. “That’s a Soviet ASAT-bird, seventy-three nautical miles behind one of ours.”
The colonel had ordered his satellite to turn in space and point its cameras at its new companion. The light wasn’t all that good, but the shape of the Soviet killer satellite was unmistakable: a cylinder nearly a hundred feet long, with a rocket motor at one end and a radar seeker antenna at the other.
“What’s your recommendation, Colonel?”
“Sir, I am requesting unlimited authority to maneuver my birds at will. As soon as anything with a red star on it gets within fifty miles, I’m going to do a series of delta-V maneuvers to screw up their intercept solution.”
“That will cost you a lot of fuel, son,” CINC-NORAD warned.
“What we have here, General, is a binary solution set.” The colonel responded like a true mathematician. “Choice one, we maneuver the birds and risk the fuel loss. Choice two, we don’t maneuver the birds and risk having them taken out. Once they close to fifty miles, they can achieve intercept and negate our bird in as little as five minutes. Maybe faster. Five minutes is only the best we’ve observed them to do. Sir, you have my recommendation.” The colonel had a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Illinois, but that was not where he’d learned to back generals into corners.
“Okay. This one goes to Washington, but I’ll forward your recommendation with my endorsement.”
USS NIMITZ
“Admiral, we’ve just had a disturbing report from the Barents Sea.” Toland read the dispatch from CINCLANTFLT.
“How many more subs can they throw at us now?”
“Perhaps as many as thirty additional boats, Admiral.”
“Thirty?” Baker hadn’t liked anything he’d been told for a week now. He especially didn’t like this.
The NIMITZ battle group, in company with Sarotoga and the French carrier Foch, was escorting a marine amphibious unit, called a MAU, to reinforce the ground defenses on Iceland. A three-day run. If the war started soon after they made their delivery, their next mission would be to support the GIUK barrier defense plan, the critically important link that covered the ocean between Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom. Carrier Task Force 21 was a powerful force. But would it be powerful enough? Doctrine required a four-carrier group to fight and survive up here, but the fleet had not yet been fully assembled. Toland was getting reports on frantic diplomatic activity aimed at averting the war that appeared about to start, much as everyone hoped it wouldn’t. How would the Soviets react to four or more carriers in the Norwegian Sea? It seemed that no one in Washington wanted to find out, but Toland was wondering if it would matter at all. As it was, Iceland had approved the reinforcements they were escorting only twelve hours before, and this NATO outpost needed immediate reinforcement.
USS CHICAGO
McCafferty was thirty miles north of the entrance to the Kola Fjord. The crew was relatively happy to be here after a tense sixteen-hour run from Cape Svyatoy. Though the Barents Sea was alive with antisubmarine ships, immediately after making their report they had been withdrawn from the entrance to the White Sea for fear of fomenting a major incident. Here there was a hundred thirty fathoms of water and room to maneuver, and they were confident in their ability to keep out of trouble. There was supposed to be a pair of American subs within fifty miles of Chicago, plus a Brit and two Norwegian diesel boats. His sonarmen couldn’t hear any of them, though they could hear a quartet of Grisha-class frigates pinging away at something to the southeast. The allied submarines here were assigned to watch and listen. It was a nearly ideal mission for them, since they only had to creep along, avoiding contact with surface ships, which they could detect from a good, long distance.