Ian Slater: World in Flames

In Japan, because of more favorable atmospheric conditions over the northwestern Pacific, TV reception throughout the Japanese archipelago was exceptionally good, enhanced by the high-density Japanese screens that were now showing pictures of the one-megaton air burst over Detroit, eighty times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, the Japanese people horrified.

The Soviet warhead over Detroit was 1.2 megatons, exploding in an air burst at seven thousand feet above the city, fifteen miles in from Lake Saint Clair and approximately six miles north of the Canadian city of Windsor, which, because of a dip in the Great Lakes border, lies south of Detroit. The hydrogen bomb, detonating 1.3 miles over the intersection of Interstate 75 and Interstate 94, about 3.5 kilometers from the Windsor-Detroit tunnel, created a fireball. Different in shape from a ground-burst mushroom, the halos spreading about the shock front and fireball were extraordinarily elongated, forming elegant oval-shaped smoke rings, the fireball passing through their centers. There was no crater, as there would have been with a ground burst, but the air burst, unlike a ground-zero burst, which would have lost much of its energy going into the ground, was much more devastating. First it created an enormous vacuum over the city, then its overpressure collapsed buildings and people alike, as the firestorm-accompanied pressure rings moved from twelve p.s.i. at the center to one p.s.i. across a twenty-six-mile-diameter killing zone. Over a half million died outright from the blast, blast-related injuries, and from the fires and thermal radiation which injured or killed another 760,000 and reduced the automobile factories to ashes.

Not only were Japanese TV viewers horrified! — their industrialists were sick with concern. The destruction of America’s major auto factories would be a short-term gain for the Japanese auto industry, but the Americans, who could clear and rebuild faster than anyone on earth, would — unless the nuclear exchange became a total holocaust — soon have the newest, most modern and up-to-date auto production facilities in the world, and then Japan would be the country with the outmoded and obsolete equipment.

But they knew, as did Mayne and Chernko, that everything depended on whether or not the Americans found the two Soviet subs. Should Washington and/or New York be struck, the psychological effect throughout the world would be enormous. With the U.S. political and financial capitals in ruins, her loss of prestige, that intangible yet all-important quality in the world of realpolitik, would be disastrous for America, as a ravaged Berlin had been for Germany. America might survive, but her influence in world affairs would never again be the same, and she would forfeit it in favor of Japan.

Ray Brentwood’s discovery that the oil patches revealed the presence of the two diesel-electric Russian subs off the American West Coast had propelled him overnight into the national spotlight, but he knew spotlights could shift very quickly. If you failed, they went out altogether — you would be yesterday’s man — the man who got the scent but lost the hunt. With this in mind, he was concerned that the very size of his twenty-four-ship “armada,” as Vice Admiral Rutgers grumpily called it, while essential to cover the area, could be as much an obstruction to the hunt. If the sound of every one of the twenty-four ships was not read and understood correctly by each ship’s sonar operators, it could be mistaken for the enemy. Ray Brentwood also realized something that he hadn’t dwelt on during the officers’ call — that if any one of the Russian’s four big ballistic missiles exploded in the middle of the task force, it would, in the parlance of the military, “neutralize” them in seconds.

Neither Soviet skipper nor their crews could prove it, but, although the odds of both boats having leaked oil on the same patrol weren’t beyond possibility, given the relatively old hulls of the Golf, it was still highly unlikely. It was, they concluded, sabotage. Not of the kind that would have caused “noise shorts” which would have been quickly noticed in the first hour out of Vladivostok and which could have been corrected quickly in port. Something more subtle — a small oil leak, slow, insidious, which wouldn’t be noticeable immediately, and by the time it was, could not be so easily located or repaired: There were no dry docks on America’s continental shelf. And rather than each going its own way, they’d had to stay hidden and waited together should mutual assistance be necessary. It was the price they were paying for what they believed were “Yevreyskie sabotazhniki” —”Jewish saboteurs”—who had been known to pinprick oil feeder lines. Whether it had been done by the likes of the three Jewish brothers the KGB had arrested in Khabarovsk near the railhead for the Eastern TVD, they didn’t know, only that if they could get their hands on whoever had done it, they would drown them in oil — very slowly.

Ray Brentwood sent ships out over the search sea radiating from the position of the two oil spills he had collected. As well as those naval vessels assigned to his task force, Brentwood commandeered every available ship he saw — even seconding three coast guard vessels en route to San Diego for liberty. As well as the twenty-seven American ships, there were four Canadian frigates, which, though little better than target drones compared to the equipment aboard the American Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates, were, typically, crewed by seamen as brave as those on Brentwood’s ships and especially adept at making do and squeezing the best out of near obsolete equipment. It was from one of these Canadian frigates that a Sea King helicopter took off, towing its yellow MAD — magnetic anomaly detector — below its tail assembly, covering a search grid 258 miles northwest of San Diego. The Sea King thought it detected a magnetic anomaly, but the Canadian chopper, devoid of ASW torpedoes, could do nothing but radio the Americans.

Within twenty minutes U.S. MH-53E Sea Stallions had closed with everything, as a Canadian observer described it, from dunking sonar, MADs, and MK-37 acoustic homing ASW torpedoes to Chateaubriand. The graph traces of the MADs from two of the five-man-crew Sea Stallions instantly concurred with the Canadians’ report that there was a magnetic anomaly and that most likely, “by nature of trace,” it was a metallic hull that was distorting the earth’s magnetic lines of force — in the same way as a magnet drawn beneath a sheet will redistribute the position of magnetic filings on the paper.

But whether the anomaly was caused by a submarine hull, the traces could not tell. Sonars were dunked — so many of the champagne-magnum-size listening mikes being lowered into the sea that Brentwood’s executive officer, Cameron, said it looked like a “salmon derby.” Still, the passive sonar mikes couldn’t add any more to the active traces, unable to determine whether the hull was that of a sub. It could be a wreck — the coastal waters strewn with them. But then again, as Ray Brentwood pointed out to Cameron, the two oil patches had been found together, so that one would have expected a bigger anomaly unless it was the hull of a sub they’d found, the other hiding beneath it, the two traces merging into one magnetic anomaly.

Brentwood was faced with a classic subhunter’s dilemma, if he dropped a torpedo and it wasn’t the subs, the explosion would immediately alert them, whether or not they were in the immediate area. And they could launch within minutes.