The Seventh Angel - Страница 41

The national security advisor sighed. “Which brings us back around to the original question,” he said. “How is Zhukov’s submarine shooting through the ice?”

“We don’t know yet,” the Chief of Naval Operations said. “All we can do is speculate.”

“Fair enough,” the president said. “Speculate.”

The admiral nodded. “Sir, our best guess is that they’ve got explosive charges pre-positioned at various locations around the ice pack. When they need to launch, they sail to a spot at a safe distance from the nearest prepared position, and trigger the explosives. As soon as the spray and debris settle, they’ve got a nice big hole in the ice. They pop off a missile through the hole, and get out of the area before anybody comes looking for them.”

He shrugged. “It’s only a guess, Mr. President. But if the charges are the right size and they’re properly placed, we think there’s a good chance that it would work. We don’t know if that’s what they’re actually doing, but it’s one way they might be doing it.”

“Could they be torpedoing the ice?” Vice President Wainright asked. “Then they wouldn’t have to limit themselves to a few pre-positioned locations. They could make a hole anywhere they wanted.”

“I don’t think so, sir,” said the CNO. “A torpedo explosion is fairly concentrated. It does a lot of damage in a relatively small area. It would take a lot of torpedoes to make a big enough hole to shoot through. If our guess is correct, they’re using multiple explosives packages spread out over a comparatively large area. The demolitions experts over at Spec Warfare think it would take about five or six shaped charges, drilled into the ice in a big circle, and all wired to a central detonator. The detonator would be connected to some type of external receiver that the submarine can trigger from remote.”

“How many of these prepared spots do you think they’ve got?” the president asked.

“We have no idea, sir,” the admiral said. “But everything that’s happened so far indicates that Mr. Zhukov has been planning this for a long time. He’s had months to line up his assets, while nobody was watching. He might have three or four shooting spots prepared. Or a dozen. If we knew how many, and where they were, it would make catching that sub a lot easier. But we don’t know. At the moment, we’re not even sure if our theory is correct. They may be using an entirely different method to shoot through the ice. Something we haven’t thought of.”

“We’re not going to solve the mystery right now,” the president said. “But we still need a plan for getting to that submarine.”

“Sir,” the admiral said. “We really only have one option. For the reasons we’ve already discussed, we can’t send ships or aircraft. We’re going to have to go after K-506 with another submarine. That would have been my first choice anyway. The best way to kill a submarine is with another submarine.”

He checked his briefing notes. “USS Tucson is operating near Japan. I can have her through the Kuril Islands and into the Sea of Okhotsk in about six hours. I can get the Seawolf up there in about 12 hours, and the Bremerton about three or four hours after that. I’d like to have one of the other Seawolf class boats, but the Connecticut and the Jimmy Carter are both too far out of position. So we have to make do with one Seawolf class and two Los Angeles class boats. I don’t see that as a problem, though. The Los Angeles class are top-notch boats. Born hunters. They’ll get the job done.”

“Are three submarines going to be enough?” the president asked. “The Sea of Okhotsk looks like a big piece of water.”

“It is, sir,” the admiral said. “It’s over 600,000 square miles. Roughly two and a half times the size of Texas. But we’re fairly confident that the K-506 will keep to the eastern half of the sea. Governor Zhukov isn’t going to want his ace in the hole to get too close to Mother Russia. He doesn’t want to risk losing it. Also, the farther west that submarine moves, the more U.S. targets he puts out of missile range. If he wants to keep his strike options open, he can’t stray too far west. I think three attack subs are about right to search the eastern end of the sea. Any more, and they’ll start getting in each other’s way.”

The president nodded. “What’s your fall-back plan?”

“We’re going to try to figure out how Zhukov is communicating with his submarine. If we can interrupt his channel of communication, we can keep him from sending launch orders to the sub. That won’t necessarily help us kill the K-506, but it should prevent any more nuclear strikes while we track it down.”

“So you have to zero-in on their radio frequency, and break their encryption?” Secretary Solomon asked.

The admiral shook his head. “No, Madam Secretary. Ordinary radio waves only penetrate a few feet into water. A submerged submarine can’t transmit or receive radio unless it extends an antenna above the surface, or floats what we call a trailing wire. Neither one of those options works under ice. To transmit through water and ice, you have to use extremely low frequencies, with long enough wavelengths to penetrate. Our navy uses this method, and so do the Russians. We call our system ELF. They call their system Zevs. We use slightly different frequencies and transmission technologies, but the basic idea is the same. But Zhukov can’t access the Zevs system. There’s only one transmitter station, and it’s located near Murmansk. The Russian navy controls it, so there’s no chance that Zhukov is using it.”

The Secretary of State rested her elbows on the table. “Could he have built his own transmitter station? For Zevs, or ELF?”

‘No, Madam Secretary,” the admiral said. “The facilities are enormous, and far too expensive. The entire economy of Kamchatka for twenty years wouldn’t cover the cost. In any case, the antenna feed lines have to be about thirty miles long. You can’t hide a construction project that large. Not in the Congo, not in the arctic, not in the Sahara. Not even in Kamchatka. We don’t know what method they’re using, but do know that it’s not Zevs or ELF.”

“ONI is looking at this right now,” he said. “So are DARPA, and the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins. There’s got to be an answer. We’ll find it.” He faced the national security advisor. “With your permission, Mr. Brenthoven, I’d like to put the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office on the problem as well. Those guys spend all their time peeking over fences and listening at keyholes. They might have some ideas about how Zhukov is talking to his sub.”

Gregory Brenthoven nodded. “I’ll put them on it.”

The president looked around the table. “We deploy the Tucson, Seawolf, and Bremerton into the Sea of Okhotsk to locate and destroy the K-506. We simultaneously investigate Zhukov’s method of communicating with his missile submarine. Does anyone have any objections to the plan, or any refinements to add?”

No one spoke.

The president pushed back his chair and stood up. “Go with it, Admiral. And keep me informed at every step.”

He paused, and was about to speak again when the door opened and a Secret Service agent walked in, escorting White House Communications Director Roger Chu.

The man crossed quickly to the head of the table. He was visibly trembling. “Please forgive the interruption, Mr. President, but there’s a breaking story on CNN that you need to see immediately, sir.” His eyes darted to the screen and then instantly back to the president. “My assistant is burning the clip onto disk right now. It should be here in a couple of minutes.”

“Thank you, Roger,” the president said. “While we’re waiting for the video, why don’t you give us the short version?”

Chu swallowed. “Yes, sir.” He looked around the table and saw that every face was turned in his direction. His voice wavered. “Mr. President, Governor Zhukov has just made another public statement to the media. Actually, it was a demand — issued to the United States, the Russian Federation, and Japan. He wants every submarine in our collective military inventories on the surface in the next three hours. He says he has agents in numerous countries, monitoring commercial imaging satellites. He says he knows exactly how many submarines we have at our disposal, and he wants every one of them out in the open, where he can see it. Attack subs, missile subs, all of them. Then he wants us to put them all in port, and keep them there. But first we have to bring them all to the surface, where he can see them.”

“That’s crazy,” the Secretary of Defense snapped. “Mr. President, we can’t do that.”

“The deadline is 6:00 AM, Greenwich Mean Time,” Roger Chu said. The man was close to tears. “Governor Zhukov says if a single submarine from any of our nations is not clearly visible on the surface, he’ll launch nuclear weapons against …” Chu looked down at a piece of paper in his hand. It was shaking so badly that he had trouble reading the list he had copied there. “Moscow, Vladivostok, Saint Petersburg, Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Denver.”

Chu lowered the paper, still clutched in his trembling hand. “Mr. President … Governor Zhukov said something about a surprise package, sir. He said he would also hit three cities that are not on the list. But he didn’t say which country those three cities were in.”