The President felt very tired. Already, in his few weeks at the White House, he had realised he would never again be able to live a life free from worry and responsibility of the heaviest, most killing kind. He knew now why previous Presidents had aged so quickly, and been so subject to failures of health. The grotesque thought passed through his mind of an advertising camapaign of the before and after photograph type, to dissuade ambitious politicians who saw in the Presidency only a chance for self glorification. He offered Zorubin a cigarette, and lit it for him, as the small bulb in the pedestal of Keppler’s phone winked on and off.
The burly general took the phone in a big fist. "Keppler here," he growled, and then listened in silence to the message. Fifteen seconds went by before he said, "Wait," and covered the mouthpiece with the palm of his left hand.
"Mr. President, they’ve run into trouble at Sonora. They’ve taken a lot of casualties, and the battalion commander reports he’s pinned down. He has to put down smoke to give him a chance of breaking through without getting his troops murdered. It’s going to take time to do."
The President glanced at the wall clock. It showed eleven twenty-one. Again, he had to make an unpleasant decision. With less than forty minutes left there was no time to spare. "How long will it take?"
Keppler shrugged. "It depends on the state of the wind. Five minutes, possibly ten. He’s already started to put it down."
"Order him to advance immediately," the President said. "He is to regard his troops as expendable. I want them in control as fast as possible."
Keppler nodded, spoke briefly into the phone. His eyes were sad. The ranger units were his personal charges. It is hard to assist at the execution of one of your children.
Zorubin was pleased. The President meant business, clearly enough. He began to feel a faint hope that triumph might yet be plucked from disaster. "In Russia also, we would not allow military operations to be influenced by sentiment," he said approvingly.
"In Russia you wouldn’t know what the damn word means," Keppler snarled, his face purple.
"General!" The President’s voice cracked like a whip. "You will control yourself, if you please."
Keppler glowered at the table. He muttered something which might have passed as an apology. Strangely enough it was General Franklin who came to his aid.
"The general’s remark was understandable," Franklin said coldly. "He feels the same way about his troops as I do about my crews. And His Excellency forgets we are all well informed about Russia not allowing military operations to be influenced by sentiment. As in Hungary, no doubt."
"Now that will do," the President said flatly. "Franklin, however justified you may consider your remarks, they were uncalled for. We are here to resolve a crisis, not to continue…" The President halted abruptly. He realsied he had been about to put in a reference to the futile bickering which had made nonsense of international conferences in the past decade. He smiled suddenly, as the absurdity of the situation gripped him. "Franklin, you’ll apologise to His Excellency," he ended.
"That will not be necessary," Zorubin said quickly. "General Franklin, like General Keppler, is a soldier. He says what he means, from the heart. Not like we diplomats, Mr. President. Please, I am the guest here, and I have the privileges of a guest. I insist, no apology is necessary." His voice was convincing and sincere.
Franklin smiled. "It is kind of His Excellency," he said formally. "But he’ll find he has to apologise if he goes on calling me a soldier. I don’t think General Keppler would agree at all with that description."
"Well," Keppler said, "I don’t know. After all, you started in the Army." His tone was warm and friendly. He was pleased by the way Franklin had risked the anger of the President to stand by him.
An orderly was escorted into the room by a white helmeted M.P. Mugs of steaming coffee were served to the men round the table. The orderly and the M.P. withdrew. The hands of the wall clock moved on to eleven twenty-four.
Outside, in the War Room proper, the staffs were at work. The target routes of every individual bomber had been faithfully relayed to the Russians. The heights and speeds which the bombers would be flying had been passed on, together with the information about the 52K’s defence system. Signals had done a first class job in providing channels of communication, and their counterparts in Moscow had surprised everyone by the speed and efficiency with which they had handled the hook-up at their end.
Soon questions began to come back, to supplement the information already supplied, and clarify points of difficulty. Most commonly these questions were easily dealt with after a mistake in translation had been rectified. Nine tenths of the queries raised were due to translation errors. The other tenth was not.
When a dozen or more staff officers are asking questions simultaneously without any central control of their questions, the intelligence officers can soon distinguish and isolate any recurrent pattern of thought, and interpret its significance. Now, as the questions came in, an Air Force colonel and his two assistants subjected them to scrutiny. They detected a pattern, isolated it, considered the constant stream of new questions in the light of that pattern. Very soon, they had arrived at a definite conclusion. The report of the first contact between the Russian defences and an 843rd bomber confirmed that conclusion.
General Steele, the Air Force Chief of Staff, picked up his telephone in response to the insistent winking of the call light. "All right," he said, "bring it on in."
A few moments later the Air Force colonel who had evaluated the Russian questions came into the room. He whispered to Steele, pointing out things on the clipboard he was carrying. "O.K., leave it with me," Steele said finally. The colonel left the room.
Steele stood up. "Mr. President, the intelligence boys have come to certain conclusions There is also a report of contact between the Russian defences and one of our bombers."
"Well, let’s hear it." The President’s voice was eager.
"First, a bomber flying south towards Kolguev Island has been hit. They don’t say whether it was destroyed. Intelligence thinks it was certainly the result of a weapon fired from a guided missiles trial ship in the Barents Sea. No other contact with our attacking forces has been reported.
"Intelligence feels this weapon was one which embodied some form of guidance system other than purely electronic. From the questions the Russians have been asking they feel sure that most of the Russian missiles, if not all, will be susceptible to interference by the electronic brains carried in the bombers. We already know, of course, that there is little a fighter can do to evade the infra-red guidance missiles carried by the bombers." Steele sat down.
"Then it appears likely they will be able to penetrate to their targets, even with the information we have supplied?"
"It appears so," Steele said.
"It is so." Zorubin spoke flatly and definitely.
"You mean," the President asked, "that your defences do not include ground to air missiles of a type other than radar guided?"
"To the best of my knowledge, no." Zorubin looked round the table. "I am not a military expert, but naturally I know roughly where we stand. I have heard that missiles using other types of guidance were put in hand last year when we happened to hear about the brain you were building into your bombers. I would not think they were ready yet."