Power Play (18 page)

Iskander-K left the Land of the Midnight Sun nearly two hundred miles to its port side. Its course now took it over the eastern headland of the neighboring island of Nordaustlandet. Staring hard to the south was the Russian Navy spotter, standing next to a navy helicopter.

Like the other two, the young officer barely had time to focus, never mind act. He took no photograph, and he uttered no words to the copilot before the revolutionary Russian missile had flashed across the sky in the blink of an eye.

The helicopter’s comms were permanently connected to a Russian satellite. His words came through, clear and welcome to the launch group still standing in Bolshaya’s drenching rain. President Markova and the visiting Mr. Wang/Yang were still smiling cheerfully. Iskander had been in the air less than twelve minutes.

Now the missile made a slight course adjustment and headed straight for the North Pole, five-hundred-plus miles and a little more than eight minutes away. An automated Russian weather station was programmed to pick it up and did so with the effortless robot efficiency of these high-tech radar installations.

The missile was logged flying south, past the pole, and now searching for its target, the huge wooden shed parked incongruously on the ice shelf.

From the pole it was another five minutes’ flying time, and by now Iskander-K was locked onto its target, losing height but not speed and streaking through the icy air. Ten miles out, there was no longer a doubt. Russian Naval spotters, just over two miles away in a parked helicopter, saw it in a clear sky, and then it was over.

The ballistic missile hit that wooden shed with stupendous force, exploding with precision, courtesy of its computerized timing device. It actually detonated five feet above the roof, possibly because it was about one-millionth of a second early. Not that this mattered. This kind of weapon would have knocked down Yankee Stadium.

The shed almost went into orbit. Planks, struts, and beams blew into
the Arctic air, over a radius of more than a mile. Timber was blasted into space. Some of it rained down on the tundra; some of it seemed to have vanished forever.

There was a gigantic hole in the pack ice, revealing a “floor” around seven feet thick. When the missile hit, a huge spout of freezing water gushed out of the ocean below and, under breathtaking compressed power, jetted more than a hundred feet high as the shell of the Iskander-K plummeted to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.

If the missile had kept going for another couple of hundred miles, it would have run out of gas somewhere on the ice just west of Canada’s Queen Elizabeth Islands in the extreme North. Gone a little farther, it might have splashed down somewhere near the Amundsen Strait, in the middle of the Northwest Passage, just before Canada’s Beaufort Sea.

It had been a supreme piece of engineering to have sent a new, improved ballistic missile that far, that fast, and that accurately. The Solovetsky team members were immensely pleased with themselves.

There was, of course, no need for the second Iskander to be fired. It had been brought to the launch only in case of a major system failure of the first. And now they were returning to the monastery, that huge Mobile-TEL rumbling across the muddy ground, its industrial-level four-wheel drive forcing it on.

The observation party, in company with the Russian president, plodded along behind, and their spirits were high. The test firing of the new missile had been a resounding success. The Iskander-K had lived right up to the designers’ hopes, and the president of Russia was ecstatic.

For his proposed strike on the United States, his greatest worry had been that he might have to launch from Russian soil—a course of action fraught with danger. Now he could look anew, and a wonderful possibility had opened up—that he could launch from a Central American country aiming straight at a major US East Coast military installation.

No one could possibly accuse him of being the perpetrator, at least not very quickly. That Iskander-K fired from the western Caribbean would accomplish its task in secret and near silence. It could fly over water almost all the way, low across the ocean, and then keep going north after it passed Florida, flashing up the Eastern Seaboard, making four thousand miles per hour—a thousand miles in fifteen minutes.

Nikita Markova had rarely experienced such elation. The words of his
favorite Russian anthem from the eighteenth century cascaded through his mind . . .
Let thunder of Victory sound!
Deep in his soul there awakened the strident chorus of the enormous Red Army Choir and the greatest national music on earth—the sacred music of Alexandr Alexandrov, the anthem of Russian domination, which has reduced her sportsmen and sportswomen to tears of pride on a thousand rostrums in the world’s Olympic Stadia.

Nikita Markova could feel it now as he plodded through the mud, in company with his admirals and his scientists, following the symbolic power of the future—the steel-pointed Iskander-K that would surely smash open the gateway to undisputed world leadership.

At the end of the causeway they stepped back onto the island of Solovetsky, where three army jeeps awaited them for the short ride back to the monastery.

And eighteen hundred miles away, scattered over a vast distance of the pristine white ice cap north of Canada, there were endless hunks of timber of no use to anyone, because no one lived within a hundred miles of the debris. And soon they would be covered, and buried, by the winter snows, and no one would ever know they bore such testimony to the ambitions of a distant president of Russia.

Except, perhaps, for a couple of night-shift technicians working in the air-conditioned photographic section of a US Defense Department complex, in deep, dark countryside, twenty-four miles west of Washington, DC.

 

Aside from a couple of branch offices of the New York and Chicago Mafia, and one or two California pedophile rings, the NRO stands unchallenged as the most secret organization in the entire United States of America.

It was established at huge expense in 1960, and despite a zillion requests from the media to reveal its purpose, it took the US government thirteen years to admit it even existed. And that was an accident perpetrated by a careless Senate committee.

The National Reconnaissance Office, in the broadest terms, is US satellite central. It designs, builds, and operates the US spy satellites, or, more officially, US space reconnaissance systems.

The NRO works hand in glove with the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and US Navy Research in all international matters. It employs three thousand people, and its annual budget would, more or less, finance the whole of Africa south of the Blue Nile.

Among its closest working partners are Buckley Air Force Base at Aurora, Colorado, and Menwith Hill, in Yorkshire, England, both highly classified aerospace-data facilities.

While building the US space grid, the NRO launched more than thirty major spacecraft, a couple of them nearly as big as NASA’s Space-Lab. Each of them contained more than sixty miles of film and was able to photograph the streets of Moscow as if the cameras were two feet above the sidewalk.

These data were for years so secret that the use of any electronic system was strictly forbidden—
outer space to earth,
that is. This represented intensive cloak-and-dagger operations extremely difficult to carry out. The data were dropped down to the Pacific in “space buckets” with parachutes, and huge C-130 US Air Force planes came thundering in and snagged them with grappling hooks.

On one occasion, ten years previous, a spacecraft had failed and had to be returned to earth with all of its classified data. At first, an uncontrolled reentry into earth’s atmosphere, with a warship ocean pickup, was considered, but upon reflection discarded. The data were too valuable to run any kind of risk.

The NRO finally settled for total destruction. The spacecraft was obliterated by a guided missile from a US Navy cruiser on February 21, 2008.

By 2018 there were almost a thousand satellites circling the earth, almost all of the major ones controlled by the NRO, the result of its sudden and aggressive launch schedule conducted in the eighteen months leading up to 2012. For so many years this clandestine branch of the Defense Department enjoyed such universal domination in space that it seemed to develop a driven ego of its own, as if demanding the necessary funds to outclass any and all of the world’s rising nations and whatever power plays they intended.

So the United States continued its huge lead in space technology, and very little occurred on the geopolitical stage to cause it concern.

This changed during the week of August 31, when a series of instructions had come through directly from the Pentagon: satellite surveillance was to be widened in the area of the White Sea in northern Russia.

This applied specifically to the Solovetsky Islands, north of the Onega Peninsula, all the way up to the coastline east of Murmansk. At the same time, there was a very similar request from the CIA, expressly asking for enhanced surveillance in that same area.

Everyone in the satellite surveillance departments “rogered” that—
understood, will comply—
but no one asked why. The creed of all sixteen secret agencies in the US Defense Department is never to ask unnecessary questions and never to provide answers. Except to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the commander in chief.

US satellites were strong in northern Russia. Murmansk and its deep-bay neighbor Severomorsk were “home” to the Northern Fleet and included Russia’s biggest submarine base. Less than four hundred miles to the southeast were the massive shipyards of Archangel and Severodvinsk.

The US satellites, twenty-two thousand miles above the earth, had for years made a half-hourly pass over this area. But the photography only just clipped the eastern edge of the Onega Peninsula, principally because there was hardly anyone there, and it was possible to get better pictures of Arctic bears and reindeer from wildlife magazines.

The satellite cameras now panned over the Solovetsky Islands. Captain Mack Bedford had been comprehensively believed, especially by Rear Admiral Andrew Carlow, commander in chief SPECWARCOM, and Bob Birmingham, the CIA director.

Strings had been pulled at the highest level of the Defense Department, where there was already consternation that one Russian submarine, and possibly two, had penetrated the GIUK Gap without being challenged earlier this year.

Rumors of Russian aggression, with its better-funded twenty-first-century navy and its continued high-income stream from West Siberian oil and gas, had been noted. SOSUS was being tightened up, listening stations reopened.

Captain Bedford’s high-quality information, via a Russian Naval spy and an ultrareliable Mossad field agent, had been acted upon. Director
Birmingham had ordered two more agents into the Shenzhen cyber-warfare plants. Security had been tightened on the president’s emergency communications system and codes changed, which meant a brand-new “biscuit.”

As a direct result of Admiral Carlow’s warnings, Mack Bedford’s observations were widely circulated. US armed forces were all shaken out of the comparative relaxation of DEFCON-5 and ordered to DEFCON-4.

This was most unusual in a time of apparent peace in the free world. The DEFCON system (Defense Readiness Condition) had been America’s alert-posture gauge since it was first developed, by the Joint Chiefs, under President Eisenhower in 1959.

It marked the grades of increased severity. DEFCON-5 is normal; DEFCON-4, Double Take (Green), signifies increased intelligence watch and strengthened security measures, above normal.

The United States went to DEFCON-3, Round House (Yellow), increased readiness, for 9/11, the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and the first day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 22, 1962. On the second day, for the only time in US military history, strategic air-strike forces went to DEFCON-2, Fast Pace (Red), next step nuclear war.

There has never been a call for DEFCON-1, Cocked Pistol (White), nuclear war imminent, maximum readiness. But in 2018, DEFCON had been relaxed for so long, the formal call from the US Defense Department to go immediately to DEFCON-4 was taken extremely seriously. Captain Bedford was given freedom to depart for Europe at will, to touch base with the man from the Mossad.

All this was before Nikita Markova decided on blastoff from Bolshaya Muksalma. And the newly organized US satellites caught the launch almost before the Russian president had time to cheer.

It was nonetheless such a surprise that there was hardly any formal military language or observation commands at the moment of truth, which provoked a total split-second reaction in front of the NRO screens.

“WHAT THE FUCKING HELL’S THAT?”
snapped the duty officer, deep in the surveillance labyrinth of America’s spy-satellite headquarters. It was exactly 4:00 a.m. in sleeping Chantilly, Virginia. And, right before his eyes, the officer could see a tiny blip moving north on the camera of the orbiting White Sea watchdog.

He instantly called for a second opinion. He zoomed way out to get a
better perspective. His screen now showed the entire area from the Solovetsky Islands up to the Barents Sea. The Russian naval port of Severomorsk was now in the top left-hand corner of his screen.

Whatever the “paint” was, it was not a regular aircraft, not at this speed. There was not even the semblance of a landing strip on this tiny island of Bolshaya Muksalma. This was some kind of a missile, or even a spacecraft, because it had been fired into the air from a standing start and was now moving at supersonic speed under its own power.