Cresak nodded. “It’s been swept.”
The President loosened his black tie. “I don’t like this early hours stuff, but what can we do? What are we doing?”
Bellarmine said: “I informed the British Prime Minister, and the Presidents of France and Germany, as you instructed. They sent us a couple of specialists Monday morning. I now have a team of seven trying to locate the asteroid. They’re being run by a Colonel Noordhof, who’s with USAF Space Command. I assigned him to 50 Wing, Falcon Colorado. Special Projects, which covers no end of sin.”
“Look, one whisper and we’re fried. Who are these seven samurai?”
“We have McNally, the NASA Administrator. The rest are top scientists, for example Shafer, the CalTech genius.”
“Shafer. The hippie scientist?”
Bellarmine said: “With two Nobel Prizes. He was on the cover of Time last month.”
“I don’t trust these superbrains: you don’t know what they’re really thinking. And what are we doing with Europeans on the team? That sounds to me like a couple of loose cannon.”
“We want the top people whoever they are. We’re in a life-or-death situation here.”
“They know the timescale we’re working to?”
Bellarmine nodded. “Consensus is the chances of success are very slim.”
The President held the palms of his hands towards the fire. “Sam, where in your opinion will the Russians hit us?”
“Kansas. First, they maximize their chance of hitting land. Second, they get Omaha, Cheyenne Peak and the revamped silos. If you believe this Sacheverell they’ll roast the States in less time than it takes to roast a chicken.”
“Kansas is a reasonable guess,” said Cresak. “But so is California. Maybe they’re going for our economic base. They don’t even care if they miss because a Pacific splash would submerge the West Coast.”
“And an Atlantic one would decapitate us,” said Hooper. “But who cares? We’re dead wherever it hits.”
“Okay.” Grant took a deep breath and visibly tensed. He looked like a man about to jump off a cliff. “Now say we don’t find Nemesis in time.”
Hooper said, “Sir, in that case the parameters define a very narrow envelope.”
“Sam, I’m a tired old man. If you mean we have limited options just say so.”
“We have to assume the worst-case situation.”
“Which is?”
“A blue sky impact. The asteroid comes in from daylight. The first we know about it is when it hits the upper atmosphere at sixty thousand miles an hour and we get a two-second warning.”
“Excuse me, but did you say a two-second warning?”
“Yes sir. Two seconds.”
“As His Royal Majesty expressed it to me, in his very British way, it would freeze the balls off a brass monkey in here.” The President poked at the fire and threw in a couple of logs. “Anyone want a hot chocolate?” Cresak leaned over to a work table next to the fireplace, pulled a telephone from a drawer and muttered an order.
“Now in those two seconds,” Hooper continued, “while it’s punching our air away, it seems it will also generate a massive electric current overhead. So it screws up our C-cubed systems.”
“I thought we had fibre-optic cables from here to Omaha,” the President said.
“A few, not a complete network. The real trouble is, the optical links still need electronic relays to boost the signal every so many miles. If the EMP zaps the relays, then the optical links go dead. Of course our satellite links collapse and we get cut off, isolated from everything at the critical moment.”
“Well now that’s just dandy. A few thousand engineers spend a few gigabucks of public money trying to fix it so we maintain integrity of command while the nukes are falling, only when it comes to the crunch you tell me what we really need are smoke signals.”
Hooper remained impassive. “The links might survive through a nuclear war, Chief, but the asteroid, now that’s a new ballgame.”
Bellarmine said, “So we lose contact with our counter-strike forces at the moment of atmospheric entry, and impact takes place two seconds later?” The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff nodded.
“I like your technique, Nathan,” Grant said, turning his palms once again towards the rising flames. “I like the casual way you slipped the word counterstrike into the conversation.”
An elderly man, wearing a dark blazer with the presidential seal on the breast pocket, came in, followed by a young maid. A table was set up with four steaming mugs. They left without a word.
Bellarmine turned to Hooper. “Could we counterstrike?”
The soldier shook his head. “Not effectively, Mister Secretary. When Nemesis cuts loose we’ll turn into a snake without a head. Even at Defcon One we couldn’t contact our silos, and our bombers would be torn to bits even if we got them aloft.”
“We still have our submarines,” Bellarmine said.
“How do we contact them? VLF, blue-green lasers and ELF. Very Low Frequency needs a wire a kilometre long trailed behind a TACAMO bomber. But all our command posts would be overwhelmed even before we contacted the bomber. The blue-green lasers beam down from the ORICS satellites. But”—Hooper checked off the points with his fingers—“One: the subs and satellites have to be in the right positions. Two: you have Kansas up there in the stratosphere giving us an umbrella of red-hot ash over the States. Three: you have an ionosphere gone crazy. So the signals don’t get up to our satellites in the first place.”
“And ELF?”
“We use a forty-mile antenna buried under Wisconsin. The radio pulses vibrate the whole Laurentian Shield. The vibration can be picked up from anywhere on Earth.”
Grant grunted. “So? That’s Nemesis-proof.”
“We still have to be alive to send messages.”
Bellarmine said, “Not necessarily. If we keep broadcasting Condition Red with the ELF, and other communications channels break down, standing orders are for submarine commanders to launch their nuclear weapons.”
The soldier leaned forward intently and said, “There’s a problem with that.”
“You may as well lay it on, Sam,” said the President.
“If we launch missiles they’ll run into Kansas on the way up and disintegrate. It’s like Brilliant Pebbles in reverse, a sort of natural Star Wars destroying our own counterstrike. Anyway, our submarine fleet carries only a small fraction of our megatonnage. Even if we get off a few Tridents the new ABM rings round Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad and so on could handle them. Mister President, it’s simple. If they get Nemesis in first our capacity to respond is smashed. Russia will incur acceptable losses, but we’ll be dead and gone.”
The President sighed. “Okay Nathan, get it off your chest. What are our options?”
“They’re stark. We can accept the annihilation of America and do nothing about it. We can wait for the impact and then try to hit back with our offensive capability smashed. Or we can beat them to the punch. Launch a nuclear strike now.”
“Uhuh.”
The President closed his eyes. Hooper wondered what thoughts were running through the old man’s head. The soldier said, “Only the third option has military credibility.”
A surge of fear suddenly went through Cresak’s nervous system like an electric shock. It was more than the fact that the unimaginable prospect of a nuclear war had entered the discussion; it was the fact that it had slipped in, by stealth, almost without conscious reasoning. “Crap,” he said, his voice unsteady. “The Russians would hit back. Then Nemesis would come in and finish off whatever was left of us.”
“The time for the Major Attack Option has never been better,” Bellarmine said. “They don’t expect it, their political system’s in chaos, and we have a dozen Alpha lasers in orbit to handle any Russian missiles that do get launched.”