At the door to the Communications Center he plucked his shirt away from his chest and plugged his ID card into the KMS machine and when the door clicked he went inside and nodded to the sentry.
Eight enlisted men manned the phones and radios and although only one of them had had significance for him before today, he now knew that all eight of them were Amergrad alumni. At the end of the narrow chamber the small steel door stood open so that he saw the tangle of cables and wires in the service tunnel beyond. Ludlum had his head in the doorway but the sentry spoke and Ludlum’s back registered Winslow’s presence; Ludlum straightened up, turned and grinned at him with the satisfaction of a workman whose hands were turning out a good job. He had been given an order and he was doing a superb job of carrying it out and that was all that ever mattered.
Ludlum hitched at his trousers with the flats of his wrists and beckoned. “Come have a look.”
Winslow made his way between the radiomen’s stools and when Ludlum climbed into the service tunnel Winslow followed him, folding his body over to fit through the small doorway.
Six men were at work with oxyacetylene torches, cutters, pliers, screwdrivers, soldering guns, wires and cables insulated in plastic of various hues. The smell of the sweat of the men’s tension reeked in the air. One man was canted vertiginously over a bracing strut, reaching and pulling at a cable; Winslow heard gristle snap in the man’s shoulder and saw a drop of sweat drip from the man’s nose onto the knotted wiring below. The men were amorphous shapes in the strange light: the tunnel had ceiling fixtures but the workmen had augmented them with battery floods to get cross-lighting that would mat out the confusion of sharp wire shadows.
“We’re fat on it,” Ludlum said. “Christ it pays to be prepared. Like Boy Scouts, hey Fred? See, the hot-line phones come in right through here along with all the rest of the communications. Those co-ax cables there. We’re taking our time, splicing and tapping into all the phone lines. We’ve got room enough to post our own dummy NORAD and hot-line operators in here when the time comes—they’ll sound exactly as if they’re in Colorado Springs and Washington. We’ve got plenty of time and I don’t figure to cut the real lines until the very last minute. Der Tag. Nobody’s going to have a clue beforehand and nobody’s going to have time to get suspicious once the party starts.”
“What about incoming calls?”
“We’ll be plugged into those too. Our operators will answer as if everything was normal down here. It’s no sweat, Nick got us the codes and signals right on schedule this morning.”
“Isn’t it a bigger headache cutting off the radio net?”
“Not as bad as it looks. It all goes out on underground antenna wire to aerials above ground. Christ some of those outside aerials are forty miles from here so communications won’t get cut off if there’s a direct hit topside. But nobody ever thought about cutting off communications this side of the aerials. Why should they? So we can cut into all the antenna wires right in this tunnel; that’s the beauty of it. We hook into the relay-signal boosters and use the boosters as if they were primary sending and receiving stations. The operators won’t be picking up or sending a single legitimate message on those radios, but they’ll never know it because they’ll be receiving from us and sending to us. When we’re ready to go tomorrow night we just throw a switch and it disconnects everything and the whole wing’s isolated totally from the outside world—without knowing it.”
“How about contact with Dangerfield?”
“I’ve already tested it and it works fine. He’ll be close enough to use a walkie-talkie and at this end we’ll be receiving through one of the aerials we’ve cut off from the rest of the base.”
“In other words the line of contact goes from Dangerfield to you, and then there’s a break, and then it goes from you to me. So you’ll have to relay orders to me?”
“No. I’m hooking a direct line from that red scrambler phone of yours into our receiver. It’ll be voice amplification through a speaker and mike so Dangerfield’s voice will sound metallic to you but you’ll have direct voice contact. It was a little tougher to work it out that way, but Dangerfield said if there’s a last-minute countermand he doesn’t want delays.”
Winslow’s toes curled inside his shoes. “All right,” he said. Doesn’t he ever sweat?
When Winslow returned to his office he found Ramsey Douglass waiting in his chair.
“Shut the door, Fred.” There was something wicked in Douglass’ eyes. “Come on in, sit down. There’s a chair.”
Winslow wanted to seize the offensive but with Douglass he never had learned how. To sit down would be to acknowledge his servility but to remain standing would be even more awkward: it would imply he intended to walk out soon and that was ridiculous since it was his own office.
He sat.
Douglass’ face was venomous but from the way his restless eyes kept combing the walls Winslow began to get the idea Douglass’ venom was not directed at him. Douglass said with a sarcasm that barely masked his utter lack of interest in the question, “I’ve got to check you out on procedure—you want to run through it for me? A nice quick recitation for teacher, that’s a good boy.”
Winslow slid down in the armchair until he was almost sitting on the back of his neck. His tired eyes came to rest on the Matthewson-Ward badge pinned to Douglass’ lapel and he said in a monotone, “We get a yellow alert maybe twenty minutes before ignition. Then the red alert. Then orders from the President. It all comes from Ludlum but our operators don’t know that. I have various people make various calls and the computers start sending out requests for verification by land line and microwave. At the same time I hook the six ROG launch commanders into the central system and order them to unlock their master consoles by key. When we get confirmation in the proper code from Ludlum’s phony NORAD people I instruct the LCs to order their operators to activate their silo consoles. The operators turn their keys in unison and that starts the countdown. After that we’ve got about three minutes to ignition and the only thing that can stop the countdown is a Presidential order—in this case from Dangerfield on my red phone. Assuming we don’t get a countermand the missiles go off and I have something like eight minutes for Hathaway to get all our people rounded up and get them outside. Then Hathaway sets off canisters of gas in the ventilator ducts to render everybody unconscious who’s still inside. We pile into the buses and get over to the airport. Does that cover it?”
“Fine,” Douglass said. “That’s fine, Fred.” It was hard to tell if he’d been listening at all.
“What’s the matter with you?”
Douglass made an abrupt and violent gesture of negation—a semaphore flash, crossing his hands over each other and whipping them apart. “Christ what a trap.”
“I know what you mean. The whole thing is sick.”
“It’s not that. The whole world’s sick; this is only a symptom of the disease. Who gives a damn anyway, Fred? In the long run it won’t matter. The universe will abide with us or without us.”
Winslow couldn’t follow the convolutions of Douglass’ wild swings of thought. Momentarily he shut his eyes and a pulse drummed blood-red behind his lids. “But what’s going to happen, then?”
“I’m not clairvoyant, Fred. All I can tell you is none of it matters. What do you want to do, make a moral crisis out of it? Find some pious rationalizations to justify it so you can score a few debating points with the Almighty? Hell, I’ll give you that for nothing—in war anything’s permissible, most of all murder, and we’re going to war. How’s that grab you? Make everything hunky-dory? Do you want a pep talk to prop up your sagging resolve, some more of the repetitious rhetoric of the party line?”