Panic Switch полностью

“It makes the most sense, Mr. President,” Pacino said. “Waiting for the Omega to drop off these bombs in American ports, even if he’s just making some kind of a statement, could go horribly wrong. What if, while being placed, a circuit shorts or the weapon’s AI wakes up and decides the detonation protocols are correct and just blows a ten megaton hole in Norfolk Harbor? Shooting down the Omega might not be a good idea in open water, but under the polar icecap? No satellites can see or hear it, no overhead aircraft will detect it with their sonar buoys or magnetic anomaly detectors, no helicopters with dipping sonars will find it, no antisubmarine warfare ships will detect it on sonar. The water under the icecap is the most isolated location on the planet. And we have an asset a few football fields away from him with armed weapons, ready to take him out. If you give the order, this miserable crisis ends.”

“From a practical point of view, how would this happen?” Carlucci asked. “I was made to understand that subs under the ice are out of radio communication.”

“Not completely, Mr. President,” Jeremy Shingles, the Secretary of the Navy said. “The Navy implemented a four-letter code group for communications with the New Jersey while she’s under ice. These letters are transmitted in extremely low frequency, Mr. President, so they take a long time to receive, but these radio waves are powerful enough to be received by a submerged submarine. Even under the ice. The transmitters require antennae the height of skyscrapers and take power from dedicated power plants, each of which could light up a small town. It takes up to twenty minutes for a single alphanumeric character to be transmitted and received aboard. The four-letter code group would be preceded by that day’s two letter callsign for the New Jersey. So six letters in total. Two hours to receive the directive, which is a long time, unfortunately, but the transit under the ice will take weeks, or longer.”

“What are these pre-arranged messages?” Carlucci asked.

“There’s an entire codebook of possible messages. For example, one was to break contact and come home. A second was to try to provoke the Omega — bang into its hull or ping at it with active sonar. A third was to order the deployment of swimmer-delivered mines to the hull of the Omega, mines that could be detonated by an algorithm like with the attack on the Kursk, or by a particular sonar signal. A fourth code to shoot at the Omega with torpedoes and take her down.”

“Wait, you can set off a mine placed on the Russian’s hull with a sonar sound?” Carlucci asked.

“Sure,” Allende said. “That’s how we detonated the munitions on the Russian Nordstream pipeline. We placed the explosives under the cover of a Baltic NATO naval exercise with a detonator programmed to go off on receipt of a particular sonar sound. Then, a month or so later, a P-8 antisubmarine plane was sent by Norway to drop a single sonar buoy with a one-hour time delay before it pinged the detonate command. By the time the P-8 landed, boom. Pipeline blew up with none of our fingerprints on it.”

“Ah, I remember now,” Carlucci said. “I was briefed on that. But still, Admiral Pacino, shooting at a Russian submarine carrying all those megatons of nuclear weapons, it’s a little disturbing. Couldn’t they go off? Or scatter radioactive plutonium all over God’s green earth? And the explosion from your torpedoes, particularly if they cause the Omega’s own weapons to blow up, won’t that be detected by seismologists? And won’t the Russians become aware that we killed their submarine? What will they do then?”

“I believe the Russians will stand down,” Pacino said. “Anything else would be a crazy overreaction. Vostov won’t send nuclear missiles over the pole because we put his submarine on the bottom. A submarine that was on a nefarious mission to sneak nuclear munitions to the American coast.”

“How do you know?”

“Because the Russians didn’t do anything in retaliation when we sank the first Omega under the icecap. Nor did they take action when we sank three of their Yasen-M attack submarines this summer.”

Carlucci paused. “Unless losing a fourth submarine is the last straw for Vostov. Secretary Hogshead, what say you?”