“Try to imagine what it would be like,” he said. “You can cut corners on reactor shielding, eliminate protective mechanisms, minimize safety margins, and utilize technical solutions that are hazardous or even lethal in the long run. Nobody gives a shit if the sailors all keel over dead after their mission is complete. Emphysema, silicosis, lead poisoning, radiation exposure, toxic encephalopathy, or the galloping fucking never-get-overs. Whatever. No EPA monitoring for environmental contamination. No OSHA looking down your neck. No attorneys lining up to sue your ass off when the crew members start dropping like flies. What kind of propulsion system could you design if you didn’t have to worry about any of that crap?”
Quinn shrugged. “I’d have to think about it.”
Catlin reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a folded piece of graph paper. He unfolded it and smoothed it out on the table top. It was a pencil sketch marked up with numerous formulas and notations. “I have been thinking about it,” he said. “And it damned well is possible.”
CHAPTER 30
The transporter erector launcher was stationed in a clearing about sixty meters west of a winding forest road. The ruts left in the soft soil by the vehicle’s ten massive tires had been carefully covered up, and the displaced foliage had been replaced for the first few meters, to make the departure point from the road difficult to spot. Not that the road was heavily trafficked.
Like all of the launch sites, this one had been chosen with the help of Rafael Garriga, General de Ejército of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces. It was an area rarely travelled by the locals, and the vehicle’s woodland camouflage job blended in fairly well with the forest undergrowth.
If a random passerby happened to catch sight of the big machine, the Cuban populace had long ago learned that it was not healthy to pry into the dealings of the military. In the unlikely event that anyone was foolish enough to leave the road and investigate, they’d come face to face with heavily-armed North Korean soldiers.
At the moment, there were no locals within several kilometers of the site. No one but the missile crew heard the four minute succession of hydraulic whines and mechanical groans as the vehicle’s erector arm lifted the missile out of its horizontal cradle and elevated it to the upright firing position.
Then the fueling process began. A pump whirred into action, slowly transferring 9,200 kilograms of red fuming nitric acid from a reservoir inside the vehicle to the missile’s oxidizer tank. When this transfer was 70 % complete, a second pump cycled on line, sending 3,700 kilograms of unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine coursing into the missile’s fuel tank.
The fueling operation took almost exactly an hour, and the three man missile crew used the time to pack up their gear and prepare their three Chinese-built Haojin dirt bikes for a quick departure. By the time anyone came to investigate the source of the launch, the Korean soldiers would be well out of the area, on their way to another missile site.
Five minutes before the scheduled launch time, Lieutenant Jo Ju-won, the officer in charge of the missile crew, unlatched the lid of the firing control module and engaged the power breaker. Tethered to the main circuit bus of the launcher vehicle by a long black electrical cable, the module was a rectangular steel-skinned box, about a third of a meter on a side, painted in the same woodland camouflage scheme as the rest of the mission equipment. Like the vehicle itself, the module was much sturdier than it needed to be — the product of a brute force engineering ethic that had fallen out of use in western countries by the start of the nineteen-sixties.
The electronics in the module took a couple of minutes to warm up, but the lieutenant had allowed time for that. Finally, the double row of status lamps began flipping from red to green as various components of the missile and launcher reported themselves ready.
The final lamp, Warhead Pre-Arming Complete, seemed to be taking much longer than usual — as if the weapon was trying to decide whether or not to take part in the coming mission of destruction.
Ten seconds passed, and then twenty more. The lamp remained stubbornly red.
Lieutenant Jo was now faced with a dilemma…
He could override the warning and proceed with the launch, trusting to luck that the malfunction was in the status lamp wiring rather than the warhead. If he was wrong, the missile would arrive on target unarmed and his government would likely attribute the failure to incompetence on his part, or maybe even sabotage. In either case, his life would be forfeit.
Alternately, he could shut the missile and launcher systems down, and then power them back up in the hopes that the balky circuit or component would reset itself. He would miss the planned launch window by a few minutes, but surely an effective attack was more important than a timely one.
Or was it? He had been given a precise launch window, timed to the second. What if other events were dependent on the timing of this attack? What if a delayed launch caused the failure of some critical plan? Again, his life would be forfeit, but that wasn’t the important thing. He would let down the People’s Army, and possibly even embarrass the Supreme Leader. The very thought made him feel unworthy to live.
The seconds continued their relentless march and Jo was no closer to knowing what to do. He had two courses of action, both of which seemed to lead toward disaster.
The launch window was now less than ninety seconds away. He had to do something. Anything.
He laid his finger on the override switch. An instant before he pressed the switch, the final status lamp flicked from red to green. The warhead had decided to cooperate after all.
Lieutenant Jo shifted his finger to the launch button and watched the last minute trickle away. Sixty seconds… Forty… Twenty…
Five seconds later he pressed the button, dropped the firing module, and ran for the dirt bikes.
The firing module cable was designed to be long enough to put the operator outside the thermal and overpressure area of the missile’s launch footprint. As an added precaution, the ignition sequence had a built-in fifteen second timer, allowing the operator to move farther away from the missile’s exhaust zone.
Jo didn’t waste a single one of those precious seconds. He was on his bike, weaving through the underbrush when the Rodong-2 missile belched fire and blasted through the opening in the forest canopy on its way to the sky.
Despite the glitch, the launch had gone off exactly on schedule. Even as the three Korean soldiers were turning left on the road, the exhaust trail of the missile was curving northwest, toward its target on the American mainland.
CHAPTER 31
President Bradley broke away from his Secret Service detail at the elevator, and hurried through the open blast doors into the PEOC. He spoke to the only person he saw, an Army major who was tapping the screen of a tablet computer. “Have we identified the target?”