Darubin made his way to the building’s communications room and ordered a message sent to Moskanko. The radio operator hesitated: “Sir, this channel will be monitored. Do you want me to code it?”
Flushed with success, Darubin wrote down a few words. “Send this in the clear. They’ll never know what I mean.” Addressed to Uncle Vanya, it said: “Dinner party a success. Chicken plucked skillfully.”
His cup of mischief running over, Darubin weaved back to the celebration, which looked more and more like an election-night party for a landslide winner. Sinking into his chair, he reached for champagne to wash down his black bread and caviar.
In the Kremlin, Marshal Moskanko’s forehead furrowed as he read the cablegram. Darubin may have performed brilliantly at the UN and plucked the chicken skillfully, but Moskanko could not share his effervescence, nor did he really approve of it.
The capture of the officer Safcek had made the defense minister uneasy. He had not thought the Americans would send in a ground team to destroy the laser works, and the marshal had begun to wonder whether Stark was finished. Nor had the hot-line bluff about the American laser given him any comfort. Perhaps it was Stark’s final gambit, but the defense minister was no longer sure. He unbuttoned his tunic and began to write out a hot-line message for transmission. When he finished, he sent another message to Serkin in Tashkent.
The hot line gave William Stark the answer he feared. Moskanko had not believed his bluff about the laser:
…WE WOULD ADVISE YOU TO CONCENTRATE EFFORTS ON COMPLYING WITH ULTIMATUM IN TWO HOURS. THE TIME HAS COME FOR SERIOUS CONSIDERATION OF REPERCUSSIONS IN THE EVENT YOU FAIL TO RECOGNIZE IMPOSSIBILITY OF YOUR POSITION.
Stark went to Pamela and told her to join him at the helicopter pad on the South Lawn in fifteen minutes. She did not ask what had happened in the past few hours. His face warned her that her husband was reaching the limits of his endurance. With Safcek’s failure, with Darubin having laid the groundwork for the Soviet attack, the President was coming swiftly to the decision he had hoped to avoid. On the runway at Incirclik, Turkey, the SR-71 was fueled and armed, the pilot waiting word from General Ellington to take it across the Soviet border. Stark knew he had only one other choice: surrender. All this was in his eyes as he smiled at Pamela sadly and left for the Oval Room and a last-minute check.
Robert Randall gripped a suitcase in his right hand as he walked briskly into the nearly vacant press room. Morris Farber of The New York Times was curled up on a couch and did not hear the foreign-policy advisor approach. Randall called gently: “Morris, up and at ’em.” Farber came up with a start, shaking his head. A little sheepishly, he offered: “Got pretty dull around here. No one will talk to me.”
Randall came to the point quickly. “Where’s your family, Morris?”
“My wife’s in New York visiting the folks, and the kids are in school in Virginia. Why? What’s going on?”
“We want you to come with us. The President’s going on a little ride, and we’d like you as a witness to the next few hours. Sort of our own historian. OK?”
Farber was wide awake. “Sure, let’s go. But I have to call the bureau to let them know.”
“No, you can’t. Sorry, but that’s the way it has to be. You’ll understand later when we fill you in on all the sad details.”
The mystified and apprehensive newspaperman followed Robert Randall from the press room through winding corridors and rooms to the South Lawn, where a Marine helicopter sat, its lights blinking. Another chopper was making an approach from the direction of the Capitol. William and Pamela Stark hurried out from the White House and ran up the gangway. Sam Riordan and Martin Manson followed. Randall waved his hand for Farber to come along, and the two men joined the passengers in the cramped quarters. At 9:35 P.M., an hour and forty-three minutes before the end, the helicopter lifted into the sky and headed northwest over the city. Down below, very few headlights marred the blackness of the main streets. The lights at the base of the Washington Monument burned brightly, but no one was there to look up at the shaft’s grandeur. The massed flags surrounding the shrine waved listlessly in the warm air. In Lafayette Park, across from the White House, there was no one to see the figure of a man hanging by his own belt from the limb of a stout tree. His neck broken, Commissioner Herbert Markle had stilled the voice of his conscience.
In the helicopter, Morris Farber stared at the people with him and wondered what the hell was going on.
In Tashkent, Dr. Anatoly Serkin was by now a desperately unhappy man. He had spent much of the night beside the laser gun going over the final checklist of components. There had been a flurry of excitement on the grounds just before two, but no one had bothered to inform him what it was about. Even the director learned from the state security police at the complex only what they wanted him to learn. Then, between 6 and 7 A.M. had come Moskanko’s calls. Now at 8:35 A.M., he held in his hand the latest message from the Kremlin.
CHANGE TARGET FROM WASHINGTON TO LOS ANGELES. WITH WASHINGTON EVACUATED, DEMONSTRATION NECESSARY OF EFFECT ON LARGE POPULATION. INITIATION ORDER WILL COME FROM ME ALONE.
Serkin was sickened. The men who directed him had already broken Parchuk. They had made Serkin a murderer of Jews in the Middle East. Now he was being ordered to incinerate several million people half a world away.
Serkin sat immobile. Then with a jerky motion, he reached into his desk and pulled out a Beretta. For a long moment, he looked straight into the pistol’s short barrel. He was startled by a knock on his office door. Hastily, Serkin slipped the gun back into a drawer.
“Come in,” he called, and one of his assistants entered. “What do you want, Glasov?”
“Sir, you rang for me ten minutes ago.”
“Oh, yes, I’m sorry. We’ll need new coordinates — for Los Angeles in the state of California.”
Glasov left. Serkin reached again for the drawer. He was not afraid to die, but he wondered how his family would survive. Could Nadia manage?
The physicist remembered how difficult it had been for him to face his family since the weapon had been turned upon human beings. The Presidium was using him as a puppet, to kill in its name. The death of an American city would make Serkin equal to Hitler in his own eyes, and for that he would have to answer to his fellow man or his God.
He looked steadily into the barrel of the automatic and moved his finger over the trigger. Bringing the gun up to his face, he steadied it between his eyes. The muzzle was cold and impersonal; the bullets inside merely waited to be unlocked and sped on their mission. It was so simple. The master bending the slave to his will. Serkin thought of the deadly comparison between himself and the gun. Once an explorer, an adventurer into new realms of pure science, he was now merely the tool of earthbound masters.
“That’s our curse, my dear friend,” Parchuk had said one memorable night during those happy years when they would sit after dinner, listening to music and talking of books and science. “Every time we have the exquisite pleasure of discovery, we become victims of the basic lusts of man, which warp and defame our achievements. I could never be a party to such a calamity.”
Parchuk had been unusually animated that night as he talked about an exciting development. At the latest conference of the International Physics Society in Paris, French researchers had disclosed that they had been able to initiate a controlled explosion and energy release of the plentiful isotope, tritium, a by-product of hydrogen that is distilled from water. By concentrating an intense laser beam on a tiny bottle containing the isotope, the Frenchmen had managed to release its energy for a brief instant.