Power Play (35 page)

They did not need to blast the ice cap to smithereens to make sure the weapon exploded. They’d already nailed that down. This was a routine range and guidance test, and the US satellites were well aligned. Nothing of importance was going to happen in that monastery, on the island of Solovetsky, or in the airspace above the cloisters, without the United States knowing.

 

Admiral Mark Bradfield was doing his level best to become a civil engineer in addition to his day job as head of the United States Navy. Before him were reports and charts of comparable docks and harbors that had been constructed around the world in recent years.

What he needed were costs. The ballpark figure he had in front of him remained at around $l.4 billion, which interestingly was the precise figure Captain Bedford had reached.

The trouble was, there would be two groups who would ultimately approve or not approve the construction of US Navy Base Donegal. The first was the Senate Finance Committee, which might in this case be bypassed by the president of the United States. The second was the Irish government, which would be required to give formal approval for this binding contract with the United States.

All parties would wish to know the cost of the new base before they made a decision. The figure need not be totally accurate; neither would it need to be forever binding. However, it would need to be a hard, definite number, against which all of the parties could work.

Mack Bedford’s $65 million for Killybegs was a bedrock—same kind of construction, same Irish bay, same labor force, same materials. But there were other projects with just as accurate numbers.

Admiral Bradfield had pulled up the details on a huge extension to the harbor at the Scottish port of Inverness, which lies at the mouth of the Moray Firth, just upriver from Loch Ness and that creepy old Scottish monster that no one had ever seen.

The Scottish government had paid almost $14 million to build the extension, a 650-foot steel-sheet pile wall, forming a brand-new quay and all the associated hard-standing area. Apparently, a new marina, almost entirely closed in from the waterway, was included in this cost, and Mark Bradfield thought it was extremely encouraging.

He also referred to Port Talbot, the gigantic tidal harbor that was constructed in South Wales almost fifty years ago, but had revealed a lot of heavy-duty facts—including the information that the harbor could take a hundred-thousand-ton vessel alongside. There was huge construction and dredging activity because the harbor breakwater was one and a half miles long. Even the lee breakwater measured one-third of a mile, and they used 2.3 million tons of stone to do it. Mark noted the breakwater core required stones of up to two tons each, but the main armoring on the south side of the main breakwater needed stones weighing
eight tons each!

Unaware yet of Mack Bedford’s discovery in the town of Mountcharles, Admiral Bradfield raised his eyebrows at the estimates for transportation of the stone. It had to be moved in dump trucks, thirty-five tons at a time.
They actually built, between the quarry and the harbor, a nine-mile road, which they completed in eleven weeks.

Admiral Bradfield also studied plans for Poland’s biggest deep-sea harbor, built on the shores of the stormy Baltic Sea off Gdansk. This construction had a concrete pier that projected eight hundred meters into the ocean and a complete new container port, but it was all on a gigantic scale, nothing like the medium-size naval dock area they planned for Donegal.

The admiral did, however, make one note of a possible difficulty. Around the axis of the quay wall, the soil stratums were not able to support the load, and the huge Polish workforce had to excavate the earth to a depth of almost fifty feet with bucket-ladder dredgers and then pile sand into the gigantic hole to form a strong, hard base.

Mark Bradfield did not anticipate that happening on the rocky coastline of Donegal, but he was glad of the knowledge, glad to have grasped the rudiments of major naval construction of deepwater docks.

He was in no way concerned with the projected costs. All the numbers he was seeing were well short of the $1.4 billion Mack had suggested. Indeed, they had partially built a brand-new seaport off Great Yarmouth on England’s east coast, with two enormous breakwaters, total length forty-five hundred feet, requiring nine hundred thousand tons of rock, and the whole contract was a mere $120 million.

The admiral thought Mack’s estimate was on the high side. Even so, it was truly insignificant in terms of the annual defense budget for the United States of America, which was, for all security spending, $850 billion, and that was almost unchanged for eight years, despite valiant attempts to cut it. That number did, however, include $130 billion for other security-related agencies and an extra $80 billion for various global conflicts involving the United States. The Department of Defense base budget was around $530 billion, almost $300 billion of which was for operations and maintenance.

If a billion-plus was going to be spent on anything, Admiral Bradfield could not imagine a better place to do it than the coast of Donegal. And he summed up the plus side of the equation, the prime asset being, of course, the acquisition of a brand-new US Navy facility on the northeastern Atlantic Coast.

The jutting westward peninsula of Donegal formed a strategic masterpiece, in perfect position for a global naval listening station, a perfect site
for a SOSUS hookup, a perfect retreat for any US warship in need of safe harbor, and a perfect location among friendly neighbors. Not to mention a deepwater base, thirty-five hundred miles from Norfolk, for refueling, repairs, and servicing.

Accompanied by Mack Bedford’s boots-on-the-ground assessment of the local situation, the CNO could construct a terrific report for the project, one that Defense Secretary Simon Andre could present to the political powers with complete confidence in its practicality, accuracy, and viability.

Mark Bradfield took off his reading glasses, leaned back, and asked someone to bring him a cup of coffee. Studying the engineering reports had made his eyes tired, and he sat back and reflected for a few moments the pure chance of their present situation.

It had started way back in late January with Rani’s contact in northern Russia, the suspicions, and the spying and lying, which had ended with the assassination of the Russian Naval officer. And how important was the outstanding mind of Rani himself, who had pieced it all together with his friend and contact, the one who had died for his beliefs?

So much of it was pure chance—the monastery, the visiting foreign rocket men, the Iskander-K, the secret missile tests, the Panama launch site, the suspect freighter from the Black Sea. All watched and observed by America’s shadow operators.

And now there were only two mysteries left: how the Russians proposed to jam the US nuclear football and the date when they would launch their attack on Fort Meade.

Mark Bradfield had already advised the US missile systems departmental chiefs to realign certain defensive measures that would be activated in the event of any incoming missile attack. A response was much more difficult today than it had ever been, thanks to the advanced strategic mind-set of both Russia and China, and, to a far greater extent, the United States.

Gone were the days when great vertical silos connected to a missile-launch-attack control center were the accepted way of storing and launching intercontinental ballistic missiles against an enemy—when places like Vanderberg Air Force Base in California and the facilities in Wyoming and Montana were the prime locations.

Today there was still nuclear weapons assembly in Amarillo, Texas. The critical production of uranium 235 still took place in Paducah, Kentucky;
Portsmouth, Ohio; and Savannah River, South Carolina. And there were ground-based interceptors in Fort Greely, Alaska.

But the science of nuclear destruction, from static ground-based launch sites, had moved on. The United States continued to own a massive and brutally efficient nuclear arsenal, more than fifty-five hundred total missiles, with a comfortable range of eight thousand miles. But they probably would not launch from any of the land-based sites.

Today’s US preemptive nuclear strike, or indeed response, would almost certainly come from a nineteen-thousand-ton Ohio Class submarine carrying twenty-four upgraded Lockheed Trident II Mark-5 missiles, with thermonuclear warheads packing a 450-kiloton wallop—enough to knock out half the solar system. With inertial guidance up to sixty-five hundred miles, these Mark-5s explode into twenty-four separate MIRVs (those are bombs or, more technically, multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles).

One of those Connecticut-built Ohio Class SSGNs was probably capable of keeping America safe, indefinitely, all on its own. However, just to be on the safe side, the United States Navy had fourteen of them, eight stationed in the Pacific Fleet in Bangor, Washington, and six more in the Atlantic Fleet at King’s Bay, Georgia. Refueling, in the event of war, was not a problem. The Ohio Class GE Pressurized Water Reactor S8G (two turbines, 60,000 hp) ran for twenty years before running out of steam.

The deep, silent running of these supreme examples of US engineering gave the United States an indefinite range for its SLBMs (submarine-launched ballistic missiles). Anywhere was within easy range. And in addition to Admiral Bradfield’s nuclear fleet, there were also long-range bombers and aircraft carriers from which the weapons could be launched.

It was, in truth, little wonder that a president like Markova was apt to have a nervous breakdown at the very mention of the word
Trident,
never mind
Trident II.
He knew as well as anyone that the Cold War had never really gone away.

Even after the 1994 Mutual Detargeting Treaty, which President Clinton declared would redefine the meaning of peace to children all over the world, nothing much changed. The treaty had absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the combat readiness of either the United States or Russia. And now, here was a highly intelligent US Navy CNO preparing to hit back at Russia if their secretive plan for a strike against Fort Meade was carried out almost thirty years after the Cold War had supposedly ended.

Mark Bradfield understood the detailed actions the United States must take if the Russians launched. The reprisal needed to be swift and utterly decisive. In the admiral’s opinion, the first major US target, probably for an SLBM, fired from somewhere in the Norwegian Sea, should be Russia’s deep-underground General Staff Command Post, sixty miles south of Moscow in the town of Chekhov.

This modern cyber center of military action represented the heartbeat of any Russian nuclear attack or response, and it’s positioned deliberately away from the main city. The Chekhov Command Center is a colossal state secret, reputedly linked directly to the Kremlin by an underground rail line, Moscow Metro-2, administered solely by the Russian Federal Security Services, or FSB.

Chekhov, as decreed by Mark Bradfield, represented the prime US reprisal target, even though it would require an SLBM with a bunker-busting warhead capable of smashing into the ground and detonating a massive, “shaped,” downward charge, not unlike the Israeli hardware that destroyed the nuclear bunkers in Iran.

The US admiral did not truly believe the Russians capable of closing down the president’s nuclear football, any more than he thought the United States could close down the very similar device carried by the Russian president. But if they did, the US accent would need to be on high speed, nothing less.

The Russians themselves, after years of underfunding, were not the same fighting force as the old Soviet Union. Their nuclear arsenal was no longer well hidden, and the Americans could most certainly destroy a large part of it before anyone knew what had hit them.

These days the old Soviet missiles, while updated, were essentially stored in silos, garages, and dockside. Yes, they understood the need for mobile launchers, and they had their share, but they had nothing to combat the gigantic clout of the US undersea strike force. As such they had geared everything to speed.

The Russians worked against a ten-minute command-post deadline—that’s ten minutes to detect, assess, and arrive at a decision on retaliation. By any standards, that represented a very small amount of time, but their missile launch sites were vulnerable, and Mark Bradfield had already issued a warning to his close associates that America’s nuclear response to Russian aggression should be, in order, (1) the General Staff Command
Post in Chekhov; (2) the destruction of the Northern Fleet in the main yards of Severomorsk, Murmansk; and then (3) the shipyards of Severodvinsk and Archangel.

Only in the face of continued Russian missile attacks should the US Navy unleash an attack on the headquarters of the Supreme Command of Russian armed forces. The historic general-staff building is a Moscow landmark, a granite construction topped by a great square tower, bearing a huge engraved stone Soviet star above the old familiar hammer and sickle. It is situated on Znamenka Street in the Arbat District, just east of the Kremlin, where much of the widespread Russian military complex is also located.

Admiral Bradfield hoped it would not come to that because, like all modern naval and military chief executives, he was loath to inflict civilian casualties. No one was any longer sympathetic to that form of outmoded, outrageous twentieth-century warfare.

Markova was, however, inclined to make an exception in Fort Meade because the workers there might be civilians, but, to him, they were cyber warriors, and that put them squarely in his personal firing line.

While not yet on the CNO’s prime attack list, there was just one Soviet nuclear base that Mark Bradfield advised should be satellite covered and, if necessary, hit and hit hard with a Trident II missile. The place that made him so critically aware was the ultrasecret Cosmodrome at Baikonur, formally a tiny village set in a remote outpost in the heart of the Kazakhstan Desert Steppes, 124 miles east of the Aral Sea.