‘Captain in the control room,’ announced a petty officer. Driscoll appeared with four keys on dull green lanyards around his neck: the CIP key and three missile launch keys.
The captain took off the lanyard holding the purple CIP key and inserted it into the captain’s indicator panel, turning it and flipping up the Permission to Fire toggle switch. The panel lit up with green and red lights indicating the status of the sixteen missiles.
Driscoll took off the three lanyards for the launch keys, and handed them to me. I hurried at a rapid walk aft to the missile compartment and slid down the ladder to the missile control centre, where I passed the keys on to a missile tech to insert in the gas generators attached to missiles one, two and nine. This would arm them, generating the steam that would propel the missiles out of the submarine and above the ocean’s surface, where their solid-fuel rockets would then ignite and take them up and away through the earth’s atmosphere.
It took about twenty minutes to ‘spin up’ the missiles. ‘Spinning up’ referred to the tiny beryllium balls spinning at thousands of revolutions per second within each missile’s inertial navigation system. During that time a host of other operations were initiated for each of the three missiles. The three-stage solid-fuel propulsion system was activated, and target coordinates and the coordinates of the submarine were fed into the fire control computer, which downloaded the results to each missile. Diagnostic tests were run on everything.
Once the missiles were spun up, the captain would grant the weapons officer permission to launch. The weapons officer would open a small safe in the missile control centre with a combination only he knew. Inside was a grey removable handle on which nuzzled a simple red pistol trigger. The weapons officer would insert the lead from the handle into the launch control console, give the order to prepare the first missile and, once the missile hatch was open to the outside sea, squeeze the trigger. The missile would fly. It would take about a minute to prepare the second missile and then the third.
Launching missiles made a lot of noise. Every Soviet attack submarine in the area would know exactly where we were. So the tactical systems officer would be devising a torpedo evasion plan to go deep, go quiet and hide the instant the birds were away. Except the tactical systems officer was Lars, who was now locked up in the XO’s stateroom; one of the other junior officers would have to do it.
The most dangerous part of the whole process for the crew of the Alexander Hamilton was in the couple of hours after launch.
Unless you counted the inevitable day when we would be forced to surface and face a world poisoned by radioactivity in the depths of a nuclear winter. And you probably should count that.
The time waiting for the missiles to spin up was tense, even in an exercise. It was even tenser now in the missile control centre.
I took my seat in front of the launch control console. The missile control centre was cooler than the rest of the ship, in an attempt to counteract the heat generated by the rows of computers down there.
‘What was the delay?’ Craig asked me.
‘They were discussing the order.’
‘The targeting? East Berlin?’
I nodded.
‘That seemed weird to me,’ said Craig. ‘But they decided to go ahead?’
There were two missile techs near us, who could easily hear what we were saying. I lowered my voice to just above a whisper. ‘Lars objected.’
‘He did?’
‘Yes. He said he thought the order might be an error. They had given us no context. East Berlin didn’t make sense. Only three missiles didn’t make sense. The fact it was the same target package as the exercise they gave us a couple of weeks ago didn’t make sense.’
‘I get what he’s saying,’ said Craig. ‘What did the captain say?’
‘He thought about it. Said we go ahead.’
‘And the XO?’
‘Concurred.’
Craig frowned. He didn’t look as if he agreed with that conclusion. ‘OK,’ he said with a sigh.
He paused as an instruction came through the intercom from the conn. ‘The firing order will be one, nine, two,’ he announced to his team over the missile control centre circuit.
‘Lars took a swing at the captain,’ I said. ‘With a wrench. Could have killed him. He was trying to kill him.’
‘What!’
The missile tech in the seat next to Craig, a petty officer named Morgan, glanced up at me, shocked. But everyone on the boat would know what had just happened in the control room soon enough.
‘He was stopped,’ I said. ‘I stopped him. Now he’s under arrest.’
‘I bet he is. So he cracked?’
I nodded. But as I did so, I wasn’t sure that Lars had cracked. And I knew I hadn’t explained my own role to Craig entirely accurately.
The minutes ticked by. The missile department was a good team. We worked well together. We had practiced this countless times.
This was going to happen.
The missile control centre lurched and tilted as the submarine rose toward launch depth of one hundred and fifty feet.
As I leafed through the checklists in the launch manuals and played my part in the dozens of procedures required to ready the missiles, to check and double check the targeting, my mind was divided in two. One half was concentrating on what I was doing, what I had been trained to do.
The other half was thinking about what the consequences were.
And I knew I wasn’t alone. The team appeared to be entirely focused on their job. But I could tell from the tension in the shoulders of those missile techs hunched over their instruments and in the sneaked glances between one crew member and another, especially those whom I knew were close buddies, that they were all thinking of what was about to happen, what might be happening at that very moment.
The New London Submarine Base would be on the Soviet target list. It was unlikely that families would be evacuated in time. So every crew member with a wife would probably lose her that day, lose their children.
Maybe they would be the lucky ones, dying instantly in a thermonuclear explosion, rather than slowly from radiation poisoning.
The world had finally gone mad.
Or had it? There was a chance, a slim chance perhaps, that Lars was right. That despite the Soviet leadership’s paranoia, the doctrine of Mutual Assured Deterrence was holding. That the EAM we had received was just an enormous screw-up.
Suddenly it was clear to me. If the launch order was genuine, we were already involved in a nuclear war or soon would be. A war no one would win. The Alexander Hamilton’s participation would make no difference one way or another.
But if the launch message was an error? Then what we did would make a very great deal of difference.
This was a problem with only one correct answer. And Lars had found it.
I heard Craig talking into his headset next to me. ‘Conn, weapons. Three minutes to 1SQ.’
I glanced over to the fire control console. There were sixteen columns, one for each missile, but only three were lit up. The bottom four lights were labelled 1SQ, DENOTE, PREPARE and AWAY. All four buttons shone red. Soon, one by one, they would turn to green. The DENOTE and PREPARE launch phases took less than sixty seconds, during which the outer hatch of each missile was opened to the sea one by one. When the AWAY button turned green the missiles would be in the air.
A digital readout above the panel counted down to an estimate of when all three missiles would be spun up. Two minutes and fifty seconds.
Driscoll’s voice came over the 1-MC, echoing throughout the submarine. ‘This is the captain. Estimated time to 1SQ three minutes. Prepare for missile launch.’