“Leave it for now,” Alexeyev said. “Watch Officer, recover from the rig for fire and get ventilation restarted.”
“Yes, sir,” Shvets said, his voice sounding shaky.
“Madam First,” Alexeyev said, “please stop me if I ever want to fire a Gigantskiy at something closer than ten miles out. Preferably twenty. We got lucky this time.”
“Do we have any contact on Hostile One?” Lebedev asked. “The American submarine?”
“Sonar, status of Hostile One?” Alexeyev asked.
“We hold Hostile One on rudder pod sonar behind us, broadband, sir, a repeating transient,” Sobol reported from the port side sonar lineup. “Seems to be a screw noise every revolution.”
Alexeyev looked at Kovalov. “A screw rub? Virginia-class doesn’t have a screw. He has a water turbine propulsor.”
“Could be a bearing problem inside his hull or the shaft seals,” Kovalov said. “Just accept the good news. Now we have the American even on the weak beam of the rear-facing rudder pod sonar. Which means if we’re facing him, we’ll have him on the conformal and the sphere. We no longer need to ping active at him.”
“We won’t have a range on him, though,” Lebedev said. “Not without a passive parallax maneuver. Which isn’t easy under ice.”
“We’ll have to judge his range by his signal strength on the shaft rub, or whatever that noise is,” Alexeyev said. “If I have to fire on him, I’ll hit him with an active sonar pulse to confirm range.”
“If he’s outside ten miles, sir,” Lebedev said, smirking.
“As you said, Madam First, we still have a Shkval. I know from experience, they are quiet effective,” Alexeyev said absently, leaning over the navigation plot. “Navigator, distance to the ice target?”
Vice President Michael Pacino arrived at the secure SCIF conference room adjacent to the White House Situation Room. He placed his pad computer on the table and grabbed a coffee cup from the sideboard and filled it up and glanced at CIA Director Margo Allende, raising an eyebrow.
“No coffee for me, Mr. Vice President,” she said formally. “I’ve had about six cups by now.”
“Let’s start,” Pacino said, taking his seat. He took his presidential daily briefing from CIA alone, rather than with Carlucci, who liked to rush through it, usually multitasking by reading memoranda when CIA was trying to brief him on overnight developments, but Pacino wanted all the details and the opportunity to ask questions. “Any news from up north since the nuclear explosion?” He’d been startled to learn that a nuclear detonation had been detected near the north pole. Startled and filled with a sudden anxiety about Anthony. Was he okay? Had the Omega fired at the
“It happened four hours ago, Mr. Vice President,” Allende said.
“Call me Patch down here,” Pacino said.
“Yes, sir,” Allende replied. “Anyway, the blast created a complete loss of sonar at its target point. A million bubbles from the explosion, so no submarine can approach it using active sonar to feel their way. They call it a ‘blue-out.’ Navy thinks the Omega was probably firing at the ice, trying to break through an ice pressure ridge, but they won’t be able to see if they can get through for another few hours. Admiral Catardi says the explosion also opened up the ice above it to open water, and if that’s the case, the
Pacino took a sip of his coffee, wondering what they could do if there were silence from the
“Okay, we’ll revisit this at the Poseidon committee meeting at sixteen hundred,” he said. “What else is in the news?”
“Most of today’s briefing is about the rapprochement of Red China and White China. After the civil wars, Red China became a commercial colossus, with a positive trade balance with every nation it trades with. At the same time, White China developed some of the world’s foremost technology. The White Chinese semiconductor industry is in high gear, and their advancements in AI rival what our Silicon Valley can do. With a new generation of leadership on both sides, much of the memory of the bloody fighting of their civil wars is largely faded. Diplomatic initiatives began in earnest two years ago, and there are rumors coming out of Shanghai and Beijing of a conference on the idea of reunification. They’re setting up a monthlong set of meetings in Geneva, to start next week.”
“Good God,” Pacino said. “That’s all we need, a reunited and monolithic China. But how will they reconcile the communists in Red China with the democracy of White China?”
“Decades later? The communists became less ideological and more capitalistic. Meanwhile, the democracy of the White Chinese became more socialistic. They’re not as far apart as they were twenty years ago. With the Red’s commercial prowess and the White’s technology, they decided they had deep mutual interests.”
