Randall responded quickly: “What the hell for? The Vice-President’s in Manila. He can’t help us, and you know he’s argumentative in a conference situation, even long distance. He’d only get in the way.”
“I know, but if things go downhill, he’ll be the last one to know.”
“If things go downhill, it won’t matter a bit. He won’t have any country to come back to.”
Stark did not feel like pressing the issue. He had never liked Terhune anyway. The man had been forced on him and ever since had proved to be an irascible adjutant, diametrically opposed to most of his programs. The decision had been made early to muzzle him, send him away on good-will trips and hope that Stark stayed healthy.
Stark dropped the subject.
Randall interrupted. “The UN adjourned without a final vote on censure.”
Stark waved his fist. “Screw the UN! It’s a goddamn disgrace! Let’s get back to reality.”
The President now spoke with evident distaste: “We might as well discuss the possibility of surrender. I’ve been avoiding it for the past week, but it’s time I faced it and analyzed just what it means to this country.”
Sam Riordan sipped his bourbon and branch water and watched Morris Farber scribbling furiously in the corner. Impeccably attired in a lightweight chocolate-brown suit, Robert Randall just sat quietly as the President began his purgative exercise.
“It would be so simple. Just haul down the flag, send a hot line, and wait for their representatives. I can’t believe they would physically occupy this country. The logistics of it are too staggering. Is it possible once we gave in, the Russians would become more benign and leave us alone?”
He looked for an answer from the advisors. Randall jumped in.
“Did Hitler become more benign in victory? Did the Czechs get any great deal from the Russians when they decided on a new form of government? Unless I’m dead wrong about the American people, they won’t knuckle under to foreign domination any more than they did in 1775. Freedom is inbred now. That’s what makes us so different from the rest of the world. That’s why we’re more flexible, more creative, and bigger pains in the ass to our own establishment. The Russians will send occupation troops. I can’t see anything but hostages being killed every day, whole towns eventually being wiped out like Lidice, and all officers in the military being eliminated like the Poles were in the Katyn forest.
“Stalin may be gone from Moscow, but those birds there now are obviously every bit as ruthless as he was. Only this time they’ve got the capacity to make the whole world a slave state. Even Hitler didn’t make it that big. It would be nice to believe that if we surrender, the Russians would merely defuse our capacity to make war and then leave us alone. But let’s face it, it wouldn’t work that way at all. The commissars would move in, the KGB would fan out, and we’d be in for a reign of terror worse than the Gestapo. We all know there’s very little difference between the old SS and the Soviet form of intimidation. The only people who don’t realize it are those in this country who have been radicalizing the campuses and the streets for the past ten years. Somehow they think Mao and Che and Ho were really wonderful men, all Don Quixotes fighting the entrenched horrors of capitalism. I even heard some professor on TV the other night saying that China was a Utopia, where human dignity was pre-eminent and the future a paradise for the workers. He forgot to mention the bodies that have floated down the river into Canton over the years, bodies of those who disagreed with the Party’s plans for the peasants. Mr. President, giving up this county to a totalitarian system would be signing the death warrants of those millions you’ll hope to spare by not going to war. You’re not solving anything. In the long run, the American people would be as good as dead. As slaves, they’d be living the life Solzhenitsyn wrote about and suffered for afterward. The Russians would not be generous with those who disagreed with their system. And except for some radicals and ultra-leftists in this country, no one would survive the transformation as a whole man or woman. We’d have sold out our country.”
Randall stopped suddenly and reached for his own drink.
Stark looked at him searchingly. “Bob, you’re saying I’d be committing a peculiar kind of murder by giving in. I’d be kidding myself I was saving the world while at the same time consigning everyone outside the Curtain to living in a giant concentration camp for the rest of his life.”
Morris Farber wrote it all down and wished he had been able to call his wife one last time.
“What about you, Sam? What do you think I should do?”
The CIA director had no desire to make a speech. The others knew he would be loath to surrender and that he felt the nuclear strike from Turkey, if properly carried out, could annihilate the Soviet installation. But because the President had asked him, Riordan gave his opinion:
“In an occupation we’d have the usual complement of collaborators with the enemy. Every nation had them, and, God knows, we’d be no exception. There are more would-be communists running around railing against the Establishment than I care to imagine. They’d welcome the deliverers with open arms until they realized the utopia they figured on was only the product of their fragile link with the real world. They would be shattered and destroyed by the very people to whom they pledged allegiance. But for me the major worry has to be the extreme right, the overzealous flag-wavers who would go into the hills and snipe at the occupiers. These elements would not give in peacefully, and they’d bring down the full wrath. These men would never forgive you for selling their birthright. They’d fight. And the Russians would crush them like mosquitoes. In the process, America could become a giant Auschwitz, a camp of dead and soon-to-die. The ones in the middle would suffer the same fate as the extremists, and every state would be a battleground. Even nuclear weapons might be used to snuff out the rebellion. So the question is, do we risk a holocaust now when we have the means to win, or at least bluff, or do we hand over the weapons and wait for the purge?”
William Stark drained his Scotch and sat down.
“Call a cabinet meeting right away.” He checked his watch. It was 10:24, fifty-four minutes to zero hour. “We’ll have a brief final discussion and go from there. I’ve got to have a few minutes to myself in the meantime.”
Morris Farber had run out of paper. He went out into the map room, asked a colonel for a notebook and saw General Austin Roarke enter the chamber. Roarke strode purposefully toward the television screen and said in a loud voice: “So that’s where the bastard lies.” He pointed to the laser complex, caught in the giant eye of the Samos satellite, hovering eighty-seven miles above it. The general watched the picture carefully, noting the movement of trucks and the blatant display of SAM missiles around the perimeter. Shaking his head he murmured: “And we expected a man to blow that? Jesus, we must have been crazy. He was a dead man the minute we picked him.” The general nodded to his fellow members of the Joint Chiefs and walked into the Cabinet Room, where Martin Manson was detailing plans that could initiate World War III.
In Moscow, the time was 6:30 A.M. The deadline would occur at 7:18. Marshal Moskanko, who had gone to the defense command northwest of the city, was calling Dr. Serkin’s office to make sure that the order to set the laser on Los Angeles had been carried out.
The professor was not immediately available. His assistant Glasov told the defense minister that Serkin had not been in his office for five or ten minutes. The marshal roared: “Find him and tell him to call me.”