Ian Slater - World in Flames

Stacy was thinking about Melissa. He hoped they could work it out. He took a strange comfort knowing that if they couldn’t resolve their problems and she refused to marry him, he would in any case stay on in SAC’s HQ, the prime target of the Soviets in any nuclear war, more important even than Washington or New York, because it was a nerve center of America’s retaliatory capability. If he died, she’d be sorry. He knew it was childish, but nevertheless it made him feel heroic. More lights signaled a new incoming message.

In Romeo 5A, Melissa and Shirley, checking procedures, were interrupted by incoming letter-for-letter code in groups of five. Both of them buckled up in their high-backed, red-upholstered chairs and slid forward on the glide rails.

“Hands on keys,” ordered Melissa. “Key them on my mark.” “Three — two — one — mark!” Both she and Shirley Cochrane watched the long white second hand sweep around to 2105 hours.

“Light on,” confirmed Shirley. “Light off.”

Another ten seconds passed.

“Hands on keys,” instructed Melissa.

“Hands on keys,” came Cochrane’s confirmation.

“Initiate on my mark,” said Melissa. “Five, four, three, two, one. Now. I’ll watch the clock.”

“I’ve got the light,” said Shirley. “Light on. Light off.”

“Release key,” ordered Melissa.

“Key released.”

Now they waited, their one-crew key-turn having initiated only one vote in the launch process. They needed another which would take the litany further. Melissa prayed it was another drill, waiting for the ILC — inhibit launch command— to be activated instead of the word/numeral/word sequence that would give them a “valid” message, taking them closer to “The First Good-bye.”

“You still have a contact, Sonar?” asked Robert Brentwood.

“No, sir. He’s still hiding in the ice scatter or he’s gone away.”

“Very well. Angle on the bow?”

“Sixteen degrees, sir,” answered Zeldman.

“Very well. Contact fuse torpedo in tube one ready?”

“Contact fuse torpedo in tube one ready, sir.”

“Angle on the bow?”

“Sixteen degrees, sir.”

“Very well.” It would mean that with the sub at two hundred feet below the ice roof, the contact-fused Mark-48 torpedo, leaving it at fifty-four miles per hour, should hit the ice roof several hundred yards away at plus or minus six seconds.

“Fire contact fish.”

“Contact fish away.” There was only a slight tremor through the sub. In five seconds Emerson and Link turned down the volume, having no intention of being deafened for life. The explosion was loud enough, the sub trembling while the preparation for the missile firing sequence continued.

“Torpedo room, you all ready to go?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sonar, I want you to send out active radar bursts to the surface, ahead of the ship.”

The ping of the active mode and the hollow, almost singsong sound of the return echo could be heard by all in Control, and Emerson and Link could see the “fragged” or fragmented echoes, the middle of the arcs missing or segmented as the echo returned. It told the sonar operators that the sound from the active pulse was not returning in the middle of the band, telling them an enormous hole, hundreds of yards across, had been blown in the ice, the segmentation of the return echoes indicating that some surface ice was floating back into the hole blown out by the torpedo.

The Roosevelt’s missile tubes were now open, water rushing in through the narrow spaces between each of the six 114,000-pound D-5 missiles and the elastomeric shock absorber liners that would help stabilize trajectory.

“Sonar to control,” came Emerson’s voice. “Contact! Bearing two-seven-niner. Distance fifteen thousand yards. Speed thirty knots.” It was approximately nineteen miles away. Twelve minutes.

“Con to sonar,” said Brentwood. “I hear you.” Next he called missile fire control.

“Weapons officer here, sir.”

“I want warheads deactivated. I say again, deactivate warhead-arming circuit. Enough gas/steam to clear interface.”

He heard the confirmation from the weapons officer. If there was alarm in Zeldman’s or anyone else’s mind, they did not show it. Everyone was too busy.

“Sonar, sir. Contact confirmed hostile by nature of sound. I say again, hostile!”

Robert Brentwood didn’t hesitate. He ordered, “Firing point procedures…” convinced that it was more than likely that the hostile, whether it previously intended to or not, would now certainly fire its torpedoes within range, interpreting the sound of Roosevelt’s icebreaking torpedo as an attack upon it.

If and when the hostile did this, Brentwood determined he would fire four of his Mark-48 wire-guided homing torpedoes at the hostile, hoping to “triangulate” him so that no matter which way he turned, Roosevelt would get him. Unless he got Roosevelt first.

In the three SAS transports high above the cloud cover, the red “get ready” light came on.

“Stand up!” ordered the jump masters. “Secure oxygen masks. Adjust IR.”

Even without the infrared goggles, the troops could see flashes of light, not from the storm, which they were now well clear of, but from the man-made storm of antiaircraft missile and gunfire opening up on the lower-level diversionary F-111— fighter bomber — attack that was under way on the Likhachev Works and the factories beyond. Over Moscow itself, a rain of Allied propaganda leaflets drifted down with the flakes of snow, the people rushing out of their homes, occasionally risking the wrath of the upolnomochenny vozdushnoy okhrany — “air raid blackout wardens”—in order to collect the propaganda leaflets. These were prized by the civilian population, whose shortage of toilet paper was the most acute in years — so much so that children fought over the leaflets, not only for their families but in order to sell the letter-sized leaflets for several kopecks, many customers preferring the smooth, albeit print-covered, surface of the leaflets to the coarse nazhdachnaya bumaga —”sandpaper”—of the severely rationed Soviet-issue toilet paper.

In the cockpit of the lead transport carrying Laylor’s Troop A, the navigator was watching the flicking green bar lines of his computer square moving closer together over the approaching drop zone. He pushed the magnifier button and the lines spread out again to the periphery of the screen. The square looked much larger now but was in fact covering the smaller area of the drop zone and taking into account wind speed and direction, temperature, and humidity in order to allow the troops the best possible chance of landing, not simply in the drop zone of the Kremlin’s sixty-three acres but within the bull’s-eye of the thirty-acre triangle that formed the northernmost corner.

On the left-hand side of the infrared screen, the copilot could see the long, brutish outline of the arsenal across from the COM, the Council of Ministers, on the eastern — right-hand— side of the screen. The partially treed and opened section, in between them, the designated drop zone. To the south lay the spires of Assumption Cathedral, the Kremlin Palace, and the Moscow River a quarter mile farther south.

In the cockpit the navigator saw the infrared square screen closing on the rough triangular shape. “Now,” he said. The pilot acknowledged and behind the flight deck the red light went to green and the eighty SAS troopers fell, black starfish into the night.

For all their practice, the blast of freezing air always came as a shock, the cold hitting their faces with the force of a blow, screaming about their oxygen masks, infrared goggles, and huge backpacks like a wild banshee, each man seeing the others in his troop clearly as white shapes moving against the gray smear of cloud cover ten thousand feet below, as clearly as they spotted the Ping-Pong-ball-sized blots of whitish light to the southeast as reddish-orange bomb blasts ran in strings of explosions, their sound unheard until several seconds later.