Voyage of the Devilfish

** FLEET BATTLE STUDY 93-1169 ** T.O.T. NLACM U.S. EAST COAST ATTACK PURPOSE: TO EXAMINE THE EFFECT, IF NECESSARY, OF A TIME-ON-TARGET NUCLEAR LAND ATTACK CRUISE MISSILE (NLACM) ASSAULT ON THE UNITED STATES BY A FORCE OF ATTACK SUBMARINES DEPLOYED TO THE WESTERN ATLANTIC.

ABSTRACT: THE ATTACK WOULD REQUIRE A MINIMUM OF 100 SSN-X-27 NUCLEAR LAND ATTACK CRUISE MISSILES FIRED FROM AS MANY PLATFORMS AS POSSIBLE TO AVOID UNIT LOSSES. THE T.O.T. ASSAULT WOULD INSURE THAT ALL WARHEADS, REGARDLESS OF FLIGHT TIME, WOULD DETONATE AT THE SAME INSTANT. THE EFFECT OF A TIME-ON-TARGET ASSAULT ON THE EAST COAST OF THE USA COULD ACHIEVE CASTRATION/CAPITATION STRATEGY OBJECTIVE.

Vlasenko slammed the book shut, put back the volume and chart and locked the safe. He looked around the stateroom, to make sure that no trace of his search was visible, moved into the passageway outside and went quickly to the First Officer’s stateroom, slamming the door behind him. He tried to reassure himself with the words “if necessary,” “could achieve.” Novskoyy wasn’t crazy, he just had a contingency plan. Maybe he was planning to target U.S. cities, not actually fire on them — but even that was inevitably dangerous. The admiral, self-convinced of his course as always… Vlasenko could not forget the wanton sinking of the U.S. boat years ago. He was frustrated by the dismemberment of the old Soviet Union and with it so much of his power. He had concocted this operation. For Novskoyy, an enemy was an enemy forever. He was an old man from another era who couldn’t believe he had ever been wrong. No, he wasn’t crazy. It was worse. He was a desperate man, highly skilled, who never doubted his righteousness. Much worse than mere crazy… Novskoyy would have to be stopped.

* * *

Low earth orbit arctic circle The KH-17 Bigbird II satellite sent up that year had been launched into a polar orbit. Such an orbit facilitated looking at the Chinese activity in the antarctic as well as monitoring the Russian naval force strength up north. The latter was the key to the Naval Disarmament Treaty. As Reagan had said years before, “Trust but verify.” The KH-17’s were built to verify. As the twelve-ton spy-platform crossed the Arctic Circle, it trained its high-resolution visual mirror to search to the east of track. The prime-viewing area this orbit was deemed to be to the right side of the Bigbird’s path over the icepack. While the optics trained over, the infrared sensors followed, scanning the same swath, searching for heat attributable only to warm-blooded life or a man-made source in the frigid cold. For the last hundred orbits, only seven arctic heat traces had been scanned. All had been polar bears. Now the Bigbird’s computer found its eighth heat trace, much larger than the others. Twelve meters long, five meters high. The computer searched its memory as its program commanded. Nothing in its flight history to date had been this big. The next program step told the onboard radio to send an alarm message to the Langley CIA Reconnaissance Section control facility. As the alarm message transmitted, the third program command instructed the optical telescope to train over the heat trace and zoom in. The Bigbird relayed the telemetry back to Langley until the images shrank and were lost in the clouds over the horizon. Start to finish, the detection episode had lasted less than four minutes. Four thousand miles away, in the east wing of Langley’s CIA Reconnaissance Center, the four-minute-long optical trace slowly printed out on the high-resolution facsimile machine. The senior duty analyst pulled the image trace from the machine. Probably another polar bear, he thought.

He laid the image out on the table to the side of the fax machine and emitted a low whistle. It was a submarine’s conning tower that had pushed through the ice. A damn big conning tower. He reached for a secure phone and dialed in the code for COMSUBLANT Headquarters, Norfolk, Virginia.

CHAPTER 11

THURSDAY, 16 DECEMBER

NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

COMSUBLANT HEADQUARTERS