He paused to catch the breath for which he was straining. “It is now one o’clock. Qaddafi’s ultimatum expires at three. Admiral Fuller, I want the Poseidon missiles on the Mediterranean submarines targeted on Libya. All of them. Do everything you can to minimize fallout from their explosion on Egypt and Tunsia.
“Alex,” he said to his Secretary of State, “prepare flash messages for the Chairmen of the CPs of the Soviet Union and China and for Mr. Begin, Giscard, Helmut Schmidt and Mrs. Thatcher, informing them of the reasons for our action. Make it clear to all of them that in this crisis we expect their full support. Release them coincidentally with our action.”
He looked down the table to his ashen Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The Admiral’s fingertips trembled visibly on the tabletop.
“If by two-thirty our time we have not found and defused that bomb or Qaddafi has not agreed to extend his ultimatum, then, Admiral Fuller, you will destroy Libya with those missiles.”
“Why, Mr. Rocchia! What a pleasant surpise!” The little nun of the Sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul looked at the detective in the hallway of the Kennedy Child Study Center on East Sixty-seventh Street with pleasure and amazement. “Whatever brings you here at this time of the day? Not bad news, I hope?”
“No, it’s not that, Sister.” Angelo shifted his weight from foot to foot in nervous embarrassment. “I got to take Maria away for a couple of days.
To see some of the family up in Connecticut.”
“Well, really, Inspector, that’s a very unusual procedure. I don’t know if Mother Superior-“
Angelo interrupted. “It’s urgent, Sister. This sister of my wife, she came East for two days. She’s never met Maria.” He glanced impatiently at his watch. “Look, I’m in a hurry here. Would you get her things together, please?”
“Can’t you leave her for the rest of the afternoon at least?”
“No, Sister.” The irritation was easing back into the detective’s voice. “I told you I’m in a hurry.”
“All right,” she said. “Why don’t you wait by the playground window while I get her and her things?”
She took the detective into the center, to a bay window giving onto an interior playground. Every time Angelo looked through that window he felt tears rise in his eyes. It was a playground like any other in the city, seesaws and swings, a jungle gym and sandboxes. The children playing there now were a little younger than Maria, probably the class below hers. He watched them, his heart aching for them, sensing the agony in the distorted faces, the pain in their deformed mouths, the frustration raging in those little bodies against fingers that refused a mind’s commands, at legs that tottered uncertainly with each effort at movement. He could read the passing spasms of sadness in those bright eyes, the silent barometer of their revolt against life’s injustices. How often had he seen it in his own daughter’s eyes?
The children inside had seen Angelo, and some of them gathered around in a semicircle beyond the window, gawking at him, bodies twitching under the impact of the gestures of curiosity and greeting they could not perform. He was going to be able to get Maria away, but they were going to stay. And from the moment he had sensed the frenzied, almost hysterical air in the command post he’d realized that this time maybe everything wasn’t going to turn out all right like it did on television, catch the guy in the last two minutes and tune in next week for another episode. Maybe there was not going to be a next week for this town or for those kids.
Five minutes after she’d left, the min returned, clutching Maria’s hand in hers. Angelo was no longer by the playground window. She took Maria into the entry hall, but he wasn’t there either. Impatiently, she went to the door onto Sixty-seventh Street and looked down to the place where he always parked, illegally, his Chevrolet. It was gone.
Far up into the dairy and timber country of northern Minnesota, just a few miles south of the Canadian border near the town of Great Falls, there is a small U.S. government reservation. Its gate is discreetly guarded by armed men identified as belonging to the Department of Forests and Fisheries, and the reservation itself consists of acres of gently rolling land, some wooded, some planted, some, apparently, intended as pasture land; all of it enclosed in a barbed-wire fence.
The guards are in fact employees of the Department of Defense, and those miles of barbed-wire fence are an enormous transmitting aerial servicing the radio from which the thermonuclear-missile-bearing submarines of the U.S. Navy are commanded. It is in a state of constant transmission employing low-frequency, extremely lowwave radio bands, well below 10 HRZ because such long waves are uniquely capable of penetrating water to the great depths at which the submarines lie. Each submarine on station on the ocean floor trails its own aerial, a thin strip of wire as long as the two-mile barbed-wire fence in northern Minnesota from which it receives its messages.
At exactly 1304, less than ninety seconds after the President had issued his order. two submarines, the U.S.S. Henry Clay and the U.S.S. Daniel Webster. one twenty miles southwest of Cyprus, the other buried in a deep ocean trough below Sicily, reacted to a modification in the constantly varied pattern emitted by the fence. The radio operator on each sub brought the signal, automatically decoded by the boat’s computers, to his duty officer, who, in turn, delivered it to the submarine’s captain.
The captains and the executive officers, employing matching keys, unlocked their subs’ war safes and took out preprogrammed IBM punch cards which they inserted into the computers that commanded each ship’s sixteen Poseidon missiles. Those IBM cards bore all the data the submarines’ firing mechanisms would need to launch their missiles and the fourteen warheads each contained onto the Libyan targets set out on them, with an accuracy so precise that none of them would fall more than a hundred feet from its selected impact point. That task completed, the officers, joined now by their gunnery officers, opened their firing control systems with ten rigorously defined fail-safe measures. Seconds later, at 1307, each submarine flashed a return message to Minnesota. “Missiles Armed and Targeted,” it read. “Vessel in DEFCON [1] Red.” “DEFCON Red” was the highest alert posture of the U.S. armed forces, the conditions of readiness that indicated that a state of war was at hand.
At the same time that the submarines’ messages were flashing through the ether, another message was arriving in the White House communications center over the twin Teleprinters linking it to the Pentagon’s terminal of the red line to Moscow.
As always, the communication came in two languages, the first in the original Russian, the second in English as translated in Moscow by a Soviet linguist. In view of the urgency of the crisis, the President rushed into the communications center himself to follow the message as it came in. A State Department Russian expert was beside him, responsible for verifying the accuracy of the Soviet translation and for pointing out to the President any subtle nuances in meaning or language.
There was none in this case. The message was brief and to the point.
Scanning it, the President felt his legs tremble. He placed a hand on the shoulder of the stunned State Department official at his side.