World war iii not how yo.., p.24
World War III: Not How you Imagined, page 24
However, when the imagery coming back from the missile labeled TER/6, the operator caught a glimpse of a high-speed aircraft crossing the missile’s path about three miles in front and only slightly above the flight path of the missile. The operator immediately summoned the missile launch officer.
“Sir, TER/SIX has a bogie on its tail. I thought you’d want to watch this,” said Seaman Cozer.
“You’re sure? How do you know?” asked Lieutenant Martin Bellamy.
“I saw it flying low right to left, and I think it’s circling around to hook up with the missile,” explained Cozer.
Both Cozer and Bellamy watched the Sea of Japan passing only fifteen feet under the nose of TER/6 and for a while, all seemed normal. Then, just barely to the left of the nose of TER/6, they could make out the snout of an ancient Mig-21.
“Jesus, this guy can’t be but ten feet off the water,” said Cozer.
“You’re right about that, Seaman,” said Bellamy. “He’s got to be focusing only on putting his wing under the missile’s wing… otherwise he’s too close to the water to play that kind of game.”
“Yeah. I wonder why he didn’t just shoot it down… I mean, he’s right there!” said Cozer.
“I don’t know. Maybe he wants to show us how magnificent he is,” answered Bellamy.
No sooner had Bellamy commented on the pilot’s motivations than they got a split second’s glimpse of the Mig’s nose abruptly rising, and then all imagery tumbled into the sea.
“Shit… splash one of ours,” said Cozer.
“Keep checking the imagery. Let’s see if this is an isolated case,” Bellamy said.
Thinking that was what he’d already been doing, Cozer continued scrolling through the list of missiles enroute. “Another one gone,” Cozer called out to Bellamy, who had stepped away.
Bellamy returned to stand beside Cozer as he flipped from one missile to the next. It didn’t take long before they’d discovered three missiles weren’t returning data.
“That’s TER/SIX, eleven, and twenty-one that have been taken out, and the others still have ten minutes of flight time left,” Cozer said.
“Keep at it; I’ll let the captain know,” Bellamy said, walking away.
Yeah, and make sure you mention my name, too, thought Cozer.
Bellamy approached the submarine’s captain and told him about the splashed cruise missiles.
“Well, they did say this first strike was an experiment to see how many of our low-flying munitions could sneak through. We’ll just have to wait for the final numbers, but so far so good in my book,” said the USS Montana’s captain, Roger Lipton.
“I guess you’re right, Skipper. It’s just that I’m not used to not batting a thousand,” Bellamy said, trying to put it all into perspective.
While the crew of the USS Montana was waiting to see how many of their missiles reached their intended targets, elsewhere in the depths of the waters surrounding the Korean peninsula was a collection of US submarines who had been rehearsing torpedo drills. The North Koreans may have had their Aural Array that temporarily allowed them to own the skies, but the United States Navy owned the oceans… both on top of and beneath the waves.
It was the underwater capabilities that were going to pay off when the shooting started, because they were equipped with an aquatic signal amplifier that allowed for great horizontal reaches of the ocean depths and converted it into a three-dimensional grid. The capability allowed the assignment of grid addresses to any and all enemy vessels, to which munitions would be sent. It was possible to park six Improved Los Angeles-class subs across the waters spanning from China to South Korea and sink any and every ship or submarine attempting to transit their locations. Half that number could have accomplished the mission, but no one was taking any chances with Mr. Murphy always hanging around to prove that his law is immutable.
Their ability to confidently target multiple vessels all at once came about due to a Multi-dimensional Aquatic Trans-positional Targeting System (MATTS). Once a target was locked onto, it kept track of that target for as long as desired. The range of the system was another closely guarded secret, but it could easily handle a body of water the size and depth of the Yellow Sea. Seventeen surface vessels and another twelve submarines—that were so old and noisy to be an embarrassment—had already been targeted.
All that was needed for those doomed North Korean vessels to find themselves sinking to the bottom of the sea was for them to come within range of the subs’ weapons and for the subs to have the authority to fire. The authority to engage any and all North Korean registered ships had already been given, and if the North Koreans wouldn’t come to the United States subs… the subs would go to them.
On the western side of the Korean peninsula, on the surface of the Sea of Japan, American ships from the Pacific Fleet were practicing every drill in their arsenal. They practiced regularly during peacetime, but knowing that a shooting war was only moments away, their drills were more meaningful—and accomplished with just that extra bit of precision and sense of purpose.
But they had their hands tied; the carriers were compromised until the North Korean Aural Array was defeated. Which meant the fleet might have to loiter for days. And since the surface was dotted with many critical pieces of naval hardware, the waters beneath the surface were swarming with Los Angeles-class attack submarines, all of who were aching to lock onto some North Korean targets.
With most of the North Korean naval targets newly residing on the eastern coast, the Pacific Fleet was going to have a field day if the North Koreans were reckless enough to sail into the Sea of Japan. They’d already demonstrated their reluctance to mix it up with the Pacific Fleet by remaining in their ports, but it was assumed that they felt secure due to the protection offered by their Aural Array. But if they had no plan B for when the Array failed or was defeated, then the lifespan of the North Korean Navy could be measured in the flight time of a cruise missile.
All of the assets were in place, and much about their immediate future would be decided by how many of the USS Montana’s cruise missiles made it all the way to their targets.
The North Korean guard standing watch on the dock at the port of Ch’aho-nodongjagn (Chaho) was there to prevent enemy provocateurs from sneaking into their highly guarded naval facility. He’d been a guard for three years and had experienced nothing other than one day of boredom followed by another day of boredom, so it was with no small amount of interest that he watched a small dark dot on the distant horizon, down near the water, slowly growing in size. He wondered if it were a giant fish of some sort. He’d heard stories of giant creatures living deep under the waters, and his pulse quickened thinking he might see something only learned about in legends.
The creature was now growing more quickly in size and he became concerned that it had seen him and measured him a good meal, because it seemed to be coming directly toward him. Just as he was about to panic and run for safer ground, the sea creature suddenly darted straight up into the sky, where it then arced over and began to fall toward the vessels that he guarded. He was amazed that he’d be the one to continue telling the legend of the great flying fish—and then the explosive warhead in the Extended Range Tomahawk cruise missile detonated with enough force to flatten both him and his guard shack flush with the ground… and damage beyond repair two Corvette-class ships that would have had no better chance of survival on the open sea.
The same kind of events happened at sixteen other locations. North Korea was at war with the United States of America, and it seemed that the United States wasn’t as fully crippled as they’d feared—and as the North Koreans had counted on.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
“When rape is inevitable, lay back and enjoy it” . . . A person who’d never been raped
VERY UGLY
President Barton was greatly concerned about the welfare of the American troops stationed along the 38th Parallel. They were committed to stand and defend South Korean interests right alongside South Korean soldiers. The North Korean Peoples Army was well trained, well equipped, large in number, and mentally prepared to wage war.
All while the president worried and US military planners planned, the United States was shipping troops, weapons, and ammunition as fast as C-17s, C-5s and Naval and commercial cargo ships could make the round-trip journeys. But even with the bolstered counts of troops and weapons, General Johnson had warned the President to be ready to deal with significant losses.
“They’ll outnumber us ten to one Mr. President. Our boys are good, but those are dire numbers. Unless we can support them from the air, it will be very ugly,” advised Johnson.
Very ugly. Those two words kept orbiting inside the president’s mind. Like an annoying news ticker that came around again and again, reminding him of how very ugly a war in Korea could become. There’d been a lot of very ugly of late. Ugly events blowing a B-2 from the sky, ugly events on Yang-do Island, ugly attempts on the VP’s life, ugly conversations with inbred leaders of rogue nation states—he’d had enough ugly for several lifetimes. But he knew that what was to come was going to be far worse, and he wondered if he had the strength to bear the burdens. How did Roosevelt do it? Truman? Churchill? Barton wondered. A world at war and the decisions made in the Oval Office would change the lives of many millions of people. The pressure was beginning to feel crippling to the first executive.
Just as he was about to become lost in a descending spiral of too much thinking about bad things, Jennifer Dawson knocked on his door and immediately entered the room as she always did. She saw the president in a state of being that she’d not seen before.
“Mr. President, I’ve got some news, and also wanted to ask if there is anything additional that you’d like me to be doing?” Vice President Dawson asked.
Her original reason for coming to his office was simply to give him the good news about the cruise missile strikes initiated by the USS Montana. But when she saw his face, she decided it might be good if she also attempted to ease his burdens.
Barton looked toward his VP and waved her to sit on the couch. “What’s the news?”
“Seventeen of the twenty-two cruise missiles launched by the Montana made it to their targets,” the VP reported happily.
Hearing of the unexpectedly high success rate, Barton’s mood lifted a level or two. “That’s good news… really good news,” he said with some animation.
“We don’t have after action-reports yet, but I’d imagine there are a few North Korean ships laying on the bottom of their harbors and in the Sea of Japan,” Dawson speculated.
“Yes, I imagine so.”
“Sir, as I said when I came in, if there is anything else you’d like me to do, I can take some of the load off your back.”
Nodding his head and thinking that if this woman decided to run against him in the next election, he was toast. But that was the future and the present day needed as much excellent leadership as was available.
“Yes, Jen, I do have something that I’d like you to do,” he said.
They sat on opposite couches and the president explained his idea.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
“Semper Secura” . . . NCCS motto
NCCS
The National Center Cyber Security is in a twenty-four hour per day, seven days per week, three hundred sixty-five day per year war against forces of cyber mischief from all around the globe. The World Wide Web is exactly as the name describes and is to the Wild West as Streisand is to virtually any other singer. The NCCS was always waging battles in an abstract global construct that had become a very real place—they were warriors in cyberspace.
But the battlefields were otherworldly. Visible only to those who had an understanding of the construction techniques and the architecture that made up an abstract world that was plagued by worms, moles, trojans, spiders, malware, trapdoors, viruses, sniffers, spoofers, and myriad other esoteric intricacies that were beyond the understanding of the average man, the average politician, or the average general.
North Korea was one of the top five origins of cyber aggression as demonstrated in recent years. They had very clever hackers who had attempted, and occasionally succeeded, in temporarily gaining access to some of the nations’ more sensitive databanks… including the Pentagon and the CIA. The only super-large United States government agency that had been able to ward off all hackers had been the National Security Agency, but they’d had leaks from human sources. Thus, a lot of machinery and procedures had been changed over the past few years.
So damaging was the work of North Korean hackers that prior to the war, several United States—based North Korean nationals had been conscripted to work their way out of a potential lifetime of penal tedium, where they’d be away from computers and instead surrounded by muscular, hard-time residents of one of the most notable maximum security penitentiaries in America’s vast population of prisons.
All they had to do to not become a prison bitch was to reverse hack against their homeland, a deal that virtually all of them eagerly agreed to do. To them it wasn’t about patriotic connection to their homeland… it was about the lust for hacking. As long as they could enjoy the challenges of breaking into, and molesting a large computer system, who and why they hacked was of zero interest to them. But now that war with their home country was a reality, they could not be trusted, no matter by whom or, how much they were supervised. The new NCCS protocol was to send them to the same place that Chol Kwon had discovered after downing Marine Two.
Since the B-2 had been blown from the sky, the hacking activity had quadrupled, and the NCCS was barely keeping their finger in the cyber-worlds dyke. They had several locations within North Korea where they’d reverse tracked the source of their problems, and they’d provided those coordinates to the Pentagon, imploring them to give it their highest priority. Thus, three of the initial wave of twenty-two cruise missiles leaving the USS Montana had destinations that were the locations of North Korea’s most intuitive code-writing guru’s.
Patricia “Pat” Roberts had been at the helm of NCCS for only six weeks when the events with the B-2 had taken place. She was deeply respected for her faculties with code and she was also one of the rare code writers that also had social skills commensurate with her position as head of the free world’s cyberpolice.
Roberts was feeling the pressure when she received a call from one of her best analysts.
“Boss, it’s like somebody flipped a switch or shut off a valve. The last attack was over three hours ago, and you know that’s like time measured in dog years considering the pace at which we’ve been assaulted lately,” said the young code-writing genius.
“Keep me in the loop. Let me know as soon as the next mischief takes place,” said Roberts.
She picked up the phone and called her new friend, General John Johnson, who picked up his phone on the first ring.
“General, I owe you a dinner, cigar, whiskey or something special. I think your cruise missiles hit home for us. Our activity has dropped from that of drinking from a fire hose to a trickle,” Roberts said, sounding pleased.
“That’s excellent news. Let me know if there’s any other place in North Korea that you’d like converted from big pieces into small pieces—and I’ll take you up on that steak dinner,” said Johnson.
“Anytime, General, anytime,” said Roberts.
They both hung up their phones—Roberts feeling as if she’d accomplished something sizable, Johnson feeling as if his plate was still overflowing.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
“Never trust a Russian; not even Russians trust Russians” . . . A Russian
GENERAL FUCKOFFSKI
President Barton was turning out to be quite a coalition builder. With one phone call, China was onboard with a plan that made their chairman very pleased, and within the span of a long afternoon, the president gained the allegiance of Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, and most of the European Union. Germany had actually called the White House offering their services, explaining that for once in modern history, they wanted to be on the right side of a global conflict, to which the president remained magnanimously silent. Of course, Japan was a major staging area for United States forces and even France wanted to be included on the roster of good guys going against the rogue nation state. Everyone knew that France was most likely there in name only, but at least with them officially on the side of the democratic nations, they’d not be a public relations headache.
The only real wildcard was Russia. There were several reasons why Russia was holding out, but the main reason was President Vladimir Fukovski, or—as he was called behind his back by those who had experienced his dagger-sharp elbows while head of their Komitet Gosdurastvennoy Besopasnosti (KGB)—General Fuckoffski.
China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea would suffer the worst if North Korea were to turn the conventional war into one using weapons of mass destruction. Though it was believed that North Korea did have operational nuclear weapons, the United States was convinced that they’d only be used in theater. Others agreed—most notably Russia. Even though the prevailing winds would take nuclear debris and fallout to the east, making Japan the first most likely to suffer the effects of North Korea bringing about the second atomic war, it was Russia who used the threat of years of contamination as a lever against the west engaging in a war against North Korea.
