‘Not ready? What kind of operation are you running here, Mister? Sverre will have your pips on a plate.’
Now Grass did salute. He used the wrong hand. Marching up to George, he presented a conspiratorial wink. ‘Aren’t you the one they tried to blow into the water last week? Pretty funny.’
They followed Grass into the cavernous, echo-laden room.
‘I nearly suffocated,’ said George.
‘I believe that was the point,’ said Grass.
Overbearing in their size, dazzling in their metallic sheen, the thirty-six launch tubes rose toward the ceiling like rows of ancient Egyptian pillars. Indeed, the missile compartment suggested nothing so much as a technological incarnation of the Temple of Karnak. George advanced at a stoop, cowed by the overbearing majesty of national security. There were worshipers in the temple. Perched on scaffolding, sailors swarmed up and down the tubes, unbolting the access plates and lowering them to the deck via steel cables.
‘Why are they opening the tubes, Mister?’ Brat demanded.
‘To get at the nosecone shrouds,’ Grass replied.
‘Why get at the shrouds?’
‘To reach the bombs.’
‘Why?’
‘To uncover the arming systems.’
‘Why?’
‘To smash them to pieces.’
Brat stuck a finger in his ear and swizzled it around. ‘Excuse me, Mister, but the EMP from that Omaha explosion must have shorted out my hearing. Sounds like you’re defusing the warheads.’
‘Those things are dangerous, General. If one detonates during launch, somebody could get hurt.’
A cluster of bomb-carrying reentry vehicles was visible at the top of the nearest tube. Each vehicle looked like a witch’s hat: black, conical, smeared with strange oils.
‘You’re shooting off unarmed missiles?’ said Randstable, eyebrows arching with curiosity. ‘Some part of your strategy is eluding me, Lieutenant.’
‘As you no doubt know, Dr Randstable, on a submarine every cubic inch carries a premium.’ Grass smiled boyishly. ‘Once I clear out all these boosters and payloads, I’ll be free to use the tubes for cultivating orange trees.’ He winked. ‘Project Citrus.’
‘Orange trees!’ Brat’s voice echoed through the great glimmering temple. ‘Orange trees, my left nut!’
The sailors stopped working. They stared down from on high.
‘As you might imagine, General, fresh oranges are difficult to come by at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean,’ said Grass. ‘If you ask me, fruit tree conversion is the wave of the future.’
The sailors went back to their disarmament duties, busy as ants on a Popsicle.
Lieutenant Commander Olaf Sverre had an apocalypse collection. His hobby was the end of the world. When not stunned by gin or engaged in naval activities, he would ransack the ship’s library for a new vision of doomsday, and, finding one, write a bad epic poem about it. Fire, ice, famine, flood, drought, pollution, war – Sverre had collected them all. In his Noah and Naamah the captain had written of the forty-day flood in which earth’s sinners drowned, of Noah sending out a white raven to seek dry land, of the snowy bird finding instead a floating corpse and feasting on it, since which time all its feathers have been black. For Yima Victorious Sverre had written of a fierce endless winter, of Yima receiving instructions from the Zoroastrian God of Light, of the great enclosure into which the hero brought the seeds of men and animals. No humpbacks’ seeds, the God of Light, an early eugenicist, had counseled Yima. No impotents, lunatics, lepers, or jealous lovers.
Sverre sat down at his writing desk and, after thrusting his quill pen into a skull-shaped ink pot, attacked the paper with bold flourishes. Noah’s raven peered at him – an alabaster knickknack, white as a scopas suit. The captain wrote of the sea monster Jormungandr, hidden in the icy depths, a serpent so long it girded the mortal world, Midgard. The Norse god Thor had once hunted the Midgard serpent using a chain baited with the head of an ox. Jormungandr bit. Thor hauled the serpent from the sea, raised his hammer for the deathblow. The chain snapped. But Thor and the serpent were destined to meet again, at Ragnarok, World’s End, and this time—
A pounding halted Sverre’s progress of the Saga of Thor. He inserted his pen in the raven’s mouth, swallowed some gin, staggered across his cabin.
‘These evacuees insisted on seeing you,’ grunted Lieutenant Grass as Sverre yanked open the door.
Brat offered a hostile salute. ‘Captain Sverre, an activity that could seriously erode our security – evidently it goes by the code name Citrus – is presently under way in your missile compartment.’
‘You may leave, Mister Grass,’ said the captain in a foreign accent that refused to declare itself.
Certain that nothing good was about to transpire between Brat and Sverre, George attempted to absent himself by surveying the captain’s elegantly anachronistic cabin – dark wood walls, plush carpets, puffy sofas, antique globe. Perched on the writing desk was an alabaster raven that Holly would have liked.
‘I see you fancy my pet, Mr Paxton,’ said Sverre. ‘His name is Edgar Allan Poe.’
‘Somebody once asked me a riddle,’ said George. ‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’
‘I’ve heard that one,’ said Sverre. ‘It has no answer.’
‘I’ll go to work on it,’ said Randstable, happily perplexed.
‘You’ll be wasting your time,’ said Sverre. ‘Now here’s one that does have an answer – when is a first strike not a first strike?’
‘When?’ asked Randstable.
‘When it is an anticipatory retaliation,’ said Sverre.
‘Hmm…’ said Randstable, sucking on his eyeglasses frames. ‘Right. Good.’
Brat’s face had acquired the color and proportions of a ripe tomato. ‘I am told that this Project Citrus carries your authorization, sir,’ he hissed, rapping loudly on the launching pad of his man-portable thermonuclear device, ‘and I wish to register the strongest possible objection!’
A smile stole out from Sverre’s black beard. ‘Those Multiprongs just slow us down, and the sooner Grass replaces them with a hydroponic orchard, the better.’ His eyes were glittery black discs. His nose, a noble pyramid, threw a quarter of his countenance into shadow. ‘What’s the matter, General, don’t you like oranges? The fact is, this war doesn’t interest me much any more, and neither does the United States Navy. Anyone want a drink? We serve gin around here.’
Brat twisted his mouth into the quintessence of contempt. ‘I know your breed, Sverre. You’re one of those renegades, aren’t you? You’ve got your emergency-action message, you’re supposed to take out some targets, and now you’re getting all philosophical or something.’
The captain set out four Styrofoam cups on his writing desk and procured a grungy bottle from his claw-hammer coat. ‘The Brazilian Indians foresaw all this,’ he slurred as he poured. ‘They believed the earth was suspended over a fire, like a chicken on a spit.’ He served the gin, then gestured his three guests onto a sofa with scrolled arms and a rosette that put George in mind of tombstone Design No. 8591. As Brat seethed, Sverre wandered back to his desk and took down a slide projector. ‘Before you start leading a mutiny, General’ – the oak paneling on a bulkhead parted to reveal a screen – ‘I want you to see some damage assessments.’
Flicking a switch, Sverre brought utter darkness to a room that had never seen the sun. He turned on the projector, and a bright wedge of light shot forward, hitting the screen. No specks hovered in the beam; the City of New York was a world without dust. Sverre stood before the rectangle of light, his silhouette gesturing broadly. ‘The transmissions we monitored from the National Command Authority suggest that the Soviet Union started the war. The first evidence reached NORAD via airborne look-down radar. A flurry of Russian Spitball cruise missiles was flying over Canada on a trajectory for Washington. Grounds for preemption, the Joint Chiefs argued. And so a surgical counterforce strike was launched against a few selected Soviet ICBM fields and bomber bases. And so the enemy… shot back.’