Free Shattered Bone by Chris Stewart Page B

turned oppresively hot. No one moved.
    The picture slowly faded out, and the lights in the room flickered on once agam.
    â€œOver the next few months, I want you to think of Tasha,” Fedotov ordered as he took three steps toward the head of the table. “I want this image forever engraved in your brains.
    â€œBecause comrades, I vow to you now. I make you this solemn promise.
    â€œBy my life, by my heart, by my soul, things are going to changc. You are going to change. I am going to change. Our nightmare has come to its end. It is time to rebuild our nation. It is timc to reclaim our power.
    â€œSo, remember Tasha, comrades, and know this one thing. Beginning right here. Beginning right now. Things ... are going ... to change.”

SIX
    ___________________________ 
    __________________________       
    BOROVICHI SS-18 MISSILE FIELDS, NORTHWESTERN RUSSIA
    F IFTY-SEVEN KILOMETERS SOUTHEAST OF B OROVICHI , R USSIA, BURIED deep under the rolling hills, lay “Satan’s bedroom”—the launch facilities for the SS-18/mod 5 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. Built very early in the 1990s, the missile complex was comprised of one hundred missile silos and four central launch facilities spread out over a thousand square kilometers of the sub-arctic tundra. The silos extended more than thirteen stories into the rock and soil and were capped by thick steel doors. Enormous bundles of buried wires and fiber-optic cables linked the silos and the launch facilities. The whole complex was an incredible engineering marvel, to the tune of more than a hundred billion rubles.
    Yet, to the casual observer, the complex doesn’t even exist. The wet tundra extended for miles around, with no buildings or fences in sight. The rolling, treeless hills showed no scars of construction, and a man could walk for days over the complex and never suspect that billions of rubles in technology lay just underneath the wet soil. The native herdsmen, with their goats and their sheep, walked among the unseen missiles every day. There were stories and rumors that tried to explain why they had not been allowed to graze the tundra for several summers, but the theories that the natives came up with were not even close to the truth. The herdsmen never had any idea that they were living atop the most powerful weapons on earth.
    Nicknamed “Satan” by western intelligence, the SS-18 was capable of dropping each of its ten nuclear warheads to within just feet of their targets. Each of the ten warheads had the same destructive power as one million tons of TNT. The enormous Sukhoy rockets had a range of over 11,000 miles, placing virtually every target within the Northern Hemisphere at risk. Its sheer potential for destruction, coupled with its pinpoint accuracy and range, made “Satan” the most feared weapon the Soviets had ever developed.
    But it wasn’t the mass destruction of its cities that the Americans feared, for they knew that the missiles were only pointing at strategic targets. The thing that made the SS-18 so destabilizing was the fact that it could destroy the United States’ ICBMs before they could be launched from their silos. It could destroy all of the manned bombers that were sitting alert before they could get in the air, as well the entire fleet of nuclear submarines, even as they sat in their protective pens.
    This had the effect of forcing the U.s. to lean forward during an international crisis into a “use them or lose them” mentality.
    For this reason, the SS-18 was one of the major sticking points between the U.s. and the Soviets during the START II negotiations. The Russians were unwilling to completely destroy one of their crowning technological achievements, while at the same time the U.S. was unwilling to accept their continued existence.
    Finally, an acceptable compromise was reached. It was decided that the SS-18 missile silos would be breached and rendered