“Local damage?”
“Well — there are a lot of casualties. Otherwise, not bad. Surface contamination is within acceptable limits — inside shielded vehicles, anyway.” She signaled an orderly for a coffee refill and added, “Too early to tell about long-lived isotope capture, but most of the Corn Belt looks okay. So’s Mexico and the Pacific Northwest. We did lose the Imperial Valley.”
“So we’re not bad for now.”
“I would say so, yes, God.”
“For the next twenty-four hours. Then they can start to redeploy.” She nodded. It was a known fact that every major country had squirreled away missiles and components. They were not at ten-minute command like the ones in the silos or on the subs. They could not be launched by pushing a button. But they could not be taken out at long range, either, since you didn’t know where they were hidden. He added, “And we can’t look for them, because the satellite busters have half-blinded us.”
“We’ve all-blinded them, Godfrey. They don’t have an eye in orbit.”
“Yes, yes, I understand,” he said testily. “We’ve won the exchange. The damn fools. Well, let’s get to work.”
Menninger’s “work” was not directly related to the exchange of missiles that was remodeling the surface of the earth to a facsimile of hell. That was not his responsibility. It was only a precursor, like a friend’s retiring to the bathroom to fit in her diaphragm while he slouched, waiting, on the edge of the bed. She would not need his advice or his help at that stage, and neither would the Chiefs of Staff while the actual fire fight was going on. His involvement would be central immediately thereafter.
Meanwhile, one of the damn fools had finished the pro gramming and was trying to round up enough of a crew for the launch. It wasn’t easy. The neutron bomb had done just what ERW weapons were supposed to do — penetrated the carelessly scant meters of water and the steel tube of his submarine and knocked out most of the crew. The Libyan vice admiral himself had taken nearly five thousand rads. He knew he had only hours to live, but with any luck his target would have less than that.
Three hours’ sleep was not enough. Menninger knew that he was quick-tempered and a little fuzzy, but he had trained his people to know that too, and they made allowances.
At five-minute intervals the map disappeared and the likris screen sequenced itself through a round of ten-second displays: profiles of industrial capacity destroyed and remaining, curves of casualties, histograms of combat-effectiveness estimates. In the Ops Room next to God Menninger’s command post, more than fifty persons were working on overdrive to correct and update those figures. Menninger hardly glanced at them. His concerns were political and organizational. Rose Weinenstat was on the scrambler to the Combined Chiefs every few minutes, not so much to give information or to get it as to keep them aware, every minute, that the most powerful unofficial figure in government had his eye on them all the time. His three chief civilian liaisons were in touch with state governments and government agencies, and Menninger himself spoke, one after another, with cabinet officers, key senators, and a few governors — when they could be found. It was all US, not Fats; the rest of the Food Bloc was in touch through the filter of the Alliance Room, and when one of them demanded his personal attention it was an intrusion.
“He isn’t satisfied with me,” General Weinenstat reported. “Maybe you should give him a minute, Godfrey.”
“Shit.” Menninger put down his pen at the exact place on a remobilization order where he stopped reading and nodded for her to switch over.
The face on his phone screen was that of Marshal Bressarion of the Red Army, but the voice was his translator’s. “The marshal,” she said, sounding tinny through the scrambler, “does not question that you and the Combined Chiefs are acting under the President’s orders, but he wishes to know just who the President is. We are aware that Washington is no more, and that Strongboxes One and Two have been penetrated.”
“The present President,” said Menninger, patiently restraining his irritation, “is Henry Moncas, who was Speaker of the House of Representatives. The succession is as provided in our basic law, the Constitution of the United States.”
“Yes, of course,” said the translator after Bressarion had listened and then barked something in Russian, “but the marshal has been unable to reach him for confirmation.”
“There have been communications problems,” Menninger agreed. He looked past the phone, where Rose Weinenstat was shaping the words “in transit” with her lips. “Also,” he added, “I am informed the President is in the process of moving to a fully secure location. As the marshal will realize, that requires a communications lid.”
The marshal listened impatiently and then spoke for some seconds in rapid-fire Russian. The translator sounded a good deal more uptight as she said, “We quite understand, but there is some question of lines of authority, and the marshal would appreciate hearing from him directly as soon — hello? Hello?”
His image faded. General Weinenstat said apologetically, “I thought it was a good time to develop transmission difficulties.”
“Good thinking. Where is the son of a bitch, by the way?”
“Henry? Oh, he’s safe and sound, Godfrey. He’s been ordering you to report to him for the last hour or so.”
“Um.” Menninger thought for a moment. “Tell you what. Send out a radiation-safe team to escort him here so I can report. Don’t take no for an answer. Tell him he’ll be safer here than in his own hole.” He picked up the pencil, scratching the pit of his stomach. Which was complaining. He wanted orange juice to build up his blood sugar, a stack of flapjacks to give a foundation for the next cup of coffee, and that cup of coffee. He wanted his breakfast, and he was aware that he was cranky because he was hungry. “Then we’ll see who’s President,” he added, to the air.
On the edge of the Bahia de Campeche the Libyan vice admiral had got his crew together and his submarine up to two hundred meters, running straight and level. None of them were functioning well, with prodromal diarrhea and vomiting often enough so that the whole ship smelled like a latrine, but they could serve. For awhile, at least. They did. Libya’s naval doctrine called for one big missile instead of a few dozen little ones. As this one big one broke the surface of the gulf it was immediately captured by a dozen radars. The scared but as yet untouched tourists on their lanais in Merida saw bright, bad flashes out west, over the water, as a Cuban cruiser locked in and fired ABMs. None of them caught it. It was a cruise missile, not ballistic, easy to identify but hard to predict as it drove itself north-northwest toward the Florida panhandle. A dozen times defensive weapons clawed at it as it crossed the coast, and then it was lost to view. There were plenty of installations along the way charged with the duty of detecting and destroying just such a weapon, but none that were functioning anymore.
The latest picture from Margie showed her with one foot on the shell of a dead Krinpit, looking tired and flushed and happy. It was as good a picture of his daughter as God had had since her bearskin-rug days, and he had it blown into a hard print for his wallet. General Weinenstat looked at it carefully and passed it back to him. “She’s a credit to you, God,” she said.
He looked at it for a moment and put it away. “Yeah. I hope she got her stuff. Can you imagine her mother? I told her Margie wanted some dress patterns, and she wanted me to put in about a thousand meters of fabric.”
“Well, if you’d left her raising to her mother she wouldn’t be getting the kind of efficiency ratings you’ve been showing me.”