Alexander stood wearily. He was in charge. The usual sharpness to his words was gone.
“General Bartholomew, I want a status of comms with NEACP and Looking Glass, and anyone else important. General Thomas, I want you and General Ogden to remain. We’ll convene in the conference van in thirty minutes. Get something to eat.”
The players quietly filed out the door, ducking and disappearing into the night. Alexander addressed Thomas personally for the first time since they left the Pentagon. His sad brown eyes told the story. The usual spark and quick intelligence were gone, replaced by an extreme weariness.
“Bob, I want an accurate estimate of damage. Get me the status of our surviving forces, same for the Russians. Get the best picture you can.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Secretary.”
Alexander gently touched Thomas’s arm before he could leave. “Bob, I’m counting on you.” Thomas stopped dead in his tracks and sighed. His eyes met Alexander’s. “You don’t have to worry, Mr. Secretary.” He turned and left.
Alexander refreshed himself with a deliberate, deep breath. “Any plans for relocation, General Ogden?”
“We’ll remain here for the time being, sir, then evaluate the situation in the morning. This is one of five surveyed sites within eighty miles, so we have options. Fallout is a factor. With the silo fields hit, we’ve got up to thirty hours, maybe more, depending on the winds. If we’re lucky, the majority of the fallout will go due east, missing Virginia. The winds could shift, though. If it’s bad, we’ll have to helo you out. Maybe get you airborne.”
Alexander listened intently.
“No aircraft,” he said. “The Russians will be throwing everything they have at the airborne command posts once they land to refuel and re-crew. They’ll have agents covering every field in the country and an ICBM RV on top in forty minutes. That’s if they don’t shoot them down first.” The life expectancy of NEACP and the other key aircraft was thought to be twenty-four to forty-eight hours at best. If they got the SIOP off, they had done their job.
His energy fading, Alexander sat down heavily. “How secure are these sites?”
“Elements of the Rangers and the 82nd Airborne are scouting the area, looking for agents and any saboteurs. But there’s no guarantee, sir; that’s why we’ll keep on the move.”
“The bunkers?” prompted Alexander.
“If they’re not hit over the next two days, they’re probably OK. We believe the Russians don’t know about either site, North Carolina or Georgia. If forced to, we’ll get you out of ICBM and bomber range for the long haul.”
Alexander looked puzzled. “You mean out of CONUS?”
“If need be, sir. The sites will be ready.” There were things even the secretary of defense didn’t know. Alexander let out a long sigh and slapped his hands on his thighs. “Very well, show me to my tent.”
Thomas stood at the entrance to the command-and-control trailer. Troopers checked his identification. The trailer was marked with the logo of a grocery chain, and except for the recessed topside compartments housing small EHF satellite dishes, even a trained observer would have difficulty distinguishing it from any other eighteen-wheeler cruising the nation’s highways. The inconspicuous entrance was through a small hatch behind the tractor’s sleeper cab. Thomas hoisted himself to the tractor then gripped the handrail and swung his body through the hatch.
His eyes adjusted slowly to the soft white glow. The hum of cooling fans and air-conditioning blowers greeted him. An officer stepped over and reported with a salute. Thomas followed through a cramped passageway between floor-to-ceiling racks of communications equipment, computer CPUs, and multiterabyte disk drives. At the trailer’s rear was a horseshoe-shaped cluster of powerful engineering workstations networked to a database server. Three operators glanced up then went back about their business.
“You can sit there, General.” The army captain pointed toward a vacant seat. His guide knelt unobtrusively, working the mouse with his free hand. He brought up a detailed globe, which hung effortlessly in computer-generated black space. A click of the mouse energized ring after ring of brightly colored satellite tracks circling the globe; the platforms themselves appeared as detailed icons in the same color scheme. The mini-satellites inched along the orbital tracks while the earth rotated imperceptibly beneath. A second click activated day/night shading.
“General Ogden said you want a detailed rundown, sir.” Thomas nodded. The officer used the mouse to rapidly rotate the globe, positioning the United States front and center. A double click zoomed until the continental United States filled the ample screen. He froze the image then popped open a series of menus to query the underlying database. He cocked his head up at Thomas, waiting for directions. Thomas paused to soak up the new view of the world that had unfolded before his eyes.
“Can you expand the view to include Canada and Alaska?”
The officer obliged with an effortless swirl of the mouse. The forty-eight states shrunk to accommodate the expanded landmass. “How’s that, sir?”
“Fine. Start with CONUS-based forces pre-attack.”
The officer triggered hundreds of small icons, which bloomed in bright colors across the map. Bombers sortied or on the ground, ICBMs, submarines in port or near the coast, the entire US arsenal sprang to life in the wink of an eye.
“Overlay C3,” added Thomas.
The previous symbols were joined by almost one hundred others, which marked fixed communications, radar, and satellite control sites and the multitude of command centers, including the dozen or more aircraft.
Thomas pointed to a menu selection permitting a historical replay. “Run the attack at sixty-times normal.” he said, tapping the screen. The first hour of the attack would be reduced to less than sixty seconds. An additional minute would capture the devastating Russian second wave.
In the first twenty seconds, the only movement was bombers and tankers scrambling for their lives. Suddenly red symbols appeared, blotting out targets on the East Coast. Next, the US ICBMs were fired in salvoes from STRATCOM bases. They were countered by hundreds of red icons, which methodically hammered targets across the breadth of the country, moving north to south.
Thomas was stunned by the sheer power of the onslaught. Nearly fifteen hundred weapons had detonated with unimaginable ferocity, yet this was still less than half of the Russians’ arsenal, one-tenth of the peak in the mid 1980s.
Thomas sagged backward in the seat, closing his eyes. His country couldn’t stand any more.
“General?” The young officer had replayed the horror show enough times to be numb.
“Too fast. Slow it down.” The captain obliged. The second go-around left Thomas with a seed of hope. So far only military targets had been hit. Industrial complexes had been spared, as had cities. Collateral damage appeared tolerable. Thomas frowned. The nasty word “relative” had crept into his thought processes, a cold-hearted frame of reference for evaluating human misery.
“Show me Russia.” The globe spun, and the captain clicked the mouse.
Now the Russians were the recipients, pounded with over one thousand US warheads. But the sheer vastness of the former Soviet Union seemed to swallow up the weapons with little discernible effect. Thomas intuitively knew what damage had been done, but the map did show the Russians with impressive numbers of ICBMs in reserve and surviving missile submarines at sea. A sick feeling swept through Thomas. In four minutes, he had seen everything meaningful, all the pie-ces on the board, in space, in the air, on land, and under the sea. The United States was locked in a deadly stalemate, one that threatened to escalate into an unparalleled disaster for the country and the planet.