If the order came down it would come by way of the scrambler telephone, melodramatically red, dialless. The phone would buzz and its light would flash and when it was picked up it would speak in a series of code letters which had to match the codes sealed inside the heavy envelopes that lay in the rectangular trays beside the phones. The codes were changed regularly and at the end of each shift the envelope was destroyed, unopened, in a security shredder which made confetti of it, incinerated the scraps and then fed the ashes into an acid bath. Except in training simulation Smith had never been authorized to open a code envelope and he believed he never wanted to, just as those who had designed the ultimate weapon believed they did not want to find out what would happen if it was used.
The system which ended with Silo Six began with the billion-dollar Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) and its ultrasensitive radar scopes designed to single out hostile missiles coming over the top of the world. Once an attack was detected, the warning would be fed into the sixteen-million-mile system of electronic circuits that led into the fourteen vast computers of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), buried in a five-acre command post 1,500 feet beneath the granite summit of Cheyenne Mountain, thirteen miles south of Colorado Springs near Pike’s Peak.
Preliminary Yellow Alert signals would go out instantly to all operational stations—Polaris and Poseidon submarines, airborne SAC bombers, aircraft carriers, military bases on four continents, and the Missile Wing Commanders of each ICBM and Safeguard ABM base. Simultaneously, signals would go out by microwave scrambler to activate the cased radiotelephone that was carried by a Secret Service agent who was never more than ten paces from the President of the United States.
If an incoming attack was confirmed the Red Alert condition would be flashed to all stations. The identity of the attacker would be known by the trajectory of the incoming missiles: NORAD’s computers could analyze paths of approach and decide within milliseconds where the missiles had been launched.
Intercontinental war moved at eighteen thousand miles per hour and under most foreseeable circumstances the President would have little more than eight minutes to order retaliation.
The President’s order would be transmitted directly to NORAD and to Strategic Air Command’s Looking Glass airborne headquarters—an aircraft orbiting in a random flight path and carrying sufficient high-ranking Air Force generals to guarantee temporary survival of the command structure, even if NORAD should be destroyed.
From NORAD or Looking Glass the order would be forwarded electronically through circuit relays to each operational commander on station. In Tucson the order would be received by the Missile Wing Commander, who was on twenty-four-hour call.
Tucson’s missiles were kept in eighteen separate complexes, which were grouped in six Residency Operations Groups. Each ROG had a Launch Commander, whose command post was an underground blockhouse, its horseshoe wall crowded with radar and closed-circuit television screens in tiers above a curved desk where console operators with earphone headsets and chin microphones sat in tilt-back swivel chairs.
Almost everything was turned over to computers; the men in the blockhouse were there mainly to monitor procedures and make sure nothing went wrong. Target information would be coded automatically onto magnetic tapes and programmed into the Minuteman Integrated Command and Control System (MICCS). The Launch Commander and his officers would complete their final drill—verification procedures and double-lock systems—and issue the coded final command over the red buzzer phones of the two Launch Operators in each silo. At any point up to actual ignition the procedure could be halted immediately by a countermand from the President.
The ROG which serviced Silos Four, Five and Six occupied a massive network of space and machinery radiating out from the command blockhouse in low underground caverns connected by ringing concrete corridors and miles of pipes and cables. Ventilator blowers made a soft muted roar and massive machines stood ready to slide back the topside reinforced trapdoors to expose the ICBMs for launching. In Communications, reels of tape poured out of decoding machines. Hundreds of men monitored incoming data. And in Silo Six the two lieutenants hovered over their red telephones.
On Friday, March 29, Jaime Spode left the Rayburn Building and turned his topcoat collar up. A knot of filthy cars went by in the slush, snow tires humming, white exhausts spuming. Spode picked his way across the mess and tramped along the rim of Capitol Hill toward the new Senate Office Building. He could have taken the subway but he wanted to avoid the girl he had seen going down the Rayburn entrance.
The sky was a dense slab of lead and the cold air was viscous as syrup. Breckenyear’s remark still hung vivid in his skull because there was no place to hide it away. “You ought to be able to figure that out for yourself, a smart redskin like you.” Breckenyear had smiled and the crafty aged eyes had disappeared into the wrinkles to indicate he was just joshing but the old bastard had known Spode would take it as an insult.
Spode couldn’t remember two dozen words of Navajo. He’d been only nine years old when his father had packed up the family and moved to Willow Run to help build B-24 Liberators. If he went back now they’d laugh him off the Reservation. But he was still and always an Indian, even if sometimes he almost felt like a white man. Almost.
The girl he had sighted going down to the subway was one of those complaisant blondes who had turned out afterward to be a Groupie and when she had shown him her score card—diplomats and flunkies of every known skin hue—he had politely shown her the door; it had been weeks ago but the bad taste was still in his mouth. It did not please Spode to be a number on a list of Costa Rican chauffeurs and Tanzanian Second Secretaries. In the right company he was prepared to joke about his Dignity as a Noble Savage but neither the blonde nor Breckenyear was right company by Spode’s definition.
He went down the third-floor corridor to Senator Forrester’s door and found Lester Suffield in the outer office eating a cheese sandwich. The secretary’s desk was unoccupied and the door to the Senator’s empty private office stood wide open. Spode said, “There’s three sizes of nuclear bombs. Large, extra large, and where did everybody go. Did somebody set one off in here?”
Lester Suffield gave him a bleak glance of recognition. “That’s a sensitive subject around here. We don’t make jokes about it.” He exposed his wrist watch and shot his cuff. “He’s down on the floor. There’s a flap on.”
“The Court nominee?”
“They’re taking the vote. He’ll be back, I guess, if the Dixierats don’t start a filibuster.”
“I’ll wait.” Spode parked his briefcase and shrugged out of his coat. His brown suit needed pressing. He unbuckled the galoshes. “Les, you wouldn’t have another half-sandwich you could spare?”
“Help ‘self.” Suffield proffered a waxed-paper wedge. “I’m supposed to be on a diet anyhow.” He was a big florid man, shaggy with a soot-gray pelt, but his eyes were clever like a terrier’s.
When Spode walked over to him the open buckles of his galoshes chinked like Mexican spurs. He unwrapped the sandwich and held the waxed paper under his wide blunt chin to catch crumbs while he ate. “Where’s Gloria? Lunch hour?”
“Gone for good. Buying her trousseau.”