“Mr. President, your submarines and mine have been pursuing each other for fourteen hours. As good as they are, it was inevitable that a few would be caught like fish in a net. When trapped, they operate on the same principle They fire their missiles before the net closes. Thus far, we have been… it is difficult to say, with so many lives lost… but thus far we have been most fortunate. The submarine commanders have shown great restraint in choosing relatively minor targets and not spraying their weapons.”
Phoenix. Raleigh. Baton Rouge. Minor targets, The President groaned, bringing a nurse rapidly to his side. He brushed her away. “We have created a relentless dragon, Mr. Premier.”
“A most relentless dragon. But to satisfy your curiosity about my situation, Mr. President, I must warn you that the dragon’s breath may be hotter in my cave than yours. My people are aware of the loss of those cities. They are nervous, and many are mourning the loss of families.”
Deep in the bowels of the Cherepovets bunker, the Premier stopped and the translator looked at him expectantly. The Soviet leader pondered whether to tell the President of his own bellicose Condor whom he had to harness in the distant deserts of Zhangiztobe. He knew he also had other rebellious birds, held on a short tether right here in his own nest. The translator cleared his throat to bring the Premier back. “Not all my people are certain of your intentions, Mr. President,” he finished.
“Mr. Premier,” the President said wearily but firmly, “you are aware of my intentions. You overheard my conversation with the commanding general of the Strategic Air Command. You are aware of his intentions, the personal totality of his commitment.” The President paused and took a deep breath. “I have asked you for one hour.”
“Mr. President,” the Premier said slowly, “I believe in your intentions. I will try to grant you your hour—and guarantee my commitment to it with the same totality given by your general. But I must warn you. The control has largely left our hands. If one of your submarine commanders, trapped in a net, decides Leningrad or Moscow is a more attractive target than another Pushkin…”
This time the translator stopped, asking the Premier to repeat his final words.
“…If that happens, Mr. President, I cannot guarantee you two minutes.”
SIXTEEN
• 2000 Zulu
Around the world, on the various clocks set to Zulu, the hands moved silently past twenty hundred hours. A certain lulling fatalism settled in among the players in the last act. The system functioned.
In the cavernous bunker beneath Cherepovets, the Soviet Premier missed the marking of the last hour. His head nodded from exhaustion. His mind skittered in a dozen foggy directions. His heavy eyelids drooped, then snapped back open again, focusing fuzzily on the small red canister over which he had burned the American codes and shredded the ashes through its rarely used and rusted grille.
His eyes moved ponderously to the blur of the huge display screen from which the symbols of his remaining ICBM’s gleamed mockingly. Zhangiztobe, tucked far away in the high plains of Kazakhstan, throbbed rather than gleamed at him. He forced his fatigued eyes away to the next screen, where a handful of computerized white cursors fluttered in a taunting reminder of the tattered remains of his nation’s other, and more exhilarating, use for rockets. He sighed. They had beaten the Americans into space—stunned the world with Sputnik, charmed it with the orbiting of the little dog Laika, awed it with the human triumph of Yuri Gagarin. I am eagle! They had placed stars in the heavens, but now the stars were blinking out, only a few white cursors remaining as testaments to Gagarin’s glory. From its low orbit, Molniya, a survivor, his only link to the American President, winked at him like the setting evening star. Too few others twinkled—a Volna, a Cosmos, another Volna launched into high geostationary orbit in 1980. I am mole, he thought despairingly. His heavy eyelids drooped further. The screen blurred. He reached for another amphetamine. His last one, he told himself ruefully. Of that, and only that, he was certain.
In the smaller bunker beneath Olney, the American President lay in the clinic now, eyes closed, neither asleep nor awake, drifting. Occasionally he emitted a loud moan, bringing the nurses rushing to his side, but the occasional moans were not products of the pain. Those, he suppressed. These ran from a deeper source, wrenched out of the depths of his soul as his sightless eyes drifted into new visions of America, its purple-mountained majesties, its fruited plain, its alabaster cities pockmarked like the moon.
Sedgwick manned the radio room, his bed rolled into the cramped slot vacated by the President. He, too, missed the passing of the Zulu clock’s hands as he pushed the radio operator through futile probe after futile probe—UHF, VHF, HF, LF, frequency after frequency, dead satellite after dead satellite. He picked up an increasing gaggle of world sounds now—curt Europeans, an excitable Portuguese voice out of Brazil, a New Zealander who babbled incoherently about Nevil Shute, an occasional dirge from some unknown and unmanned American radio station. His frustration was total, the flutter of other radio conversations infuriating. He knew the TACAMO planes were there, one having lifted out of Bermuda, the other out of Guam. But they made no sounds.
In the E-4, Condor did not notice the passing of the hour. He rested comfortably, even contentedly. Each man is presented with his moment of truth, and Condor had faced his, meeting it to his satisfaction. The Librarian had moved to the radio compartment. If any American communications center had a chance to reach the TACAMO planes, the E-4’s chance was best. The communication was not necessary, but the Librarian was an efficient man. He could negate any possible breakthrough by creating a conflict, so he worked as diligently as Sedgwick at reaching the planes.
Of the crucial players aboard the E-4, only the pilot was troubled. Just inside the locked cockpit door the Secret Service agent stood cradling his Uzi, the pilot’s security against further madness of the kind that had brought Harpoon down almost at his side. He forced himself to accept that Alice, closing in on him again, suffered from the same battlefield malady. It was difficult to believe of men he had respected, but strong men had cracked under far less pressure. He followed orders—just as he followed orders to no longer avoid radioactive clouds. The fate of his nation was at stake.
In the Looking Glass, Alice felt the pressure. He gazed out the cockpit window at the shimmering plane ahead of him and saw both his nation and the world slipping out of his fingers. The E-4 had become desperately artful, racing at full bore, darting into billowing clouds, maneuvering in the opaque vapor, and then darting out in a different direction. Smitty swerved the Looking Glass onto the surprise course, only to have the E-4 swing again. The Looking Glass measured its gains in feet. It was not enough. Alice wanted a cigarette.
In the placid depths of the world’s oceans, in silently roaming behemoths, American submarine commanders methodically noted the hour. Beneath their feet giant gyroscopes, one of the true marvels of American technology, whirred relentlessly with precision even greater than that of the Zulu clocks. The gyros guided both the submarines and their deadly cargo, inextricably linking the two. With timing measured in microseconds the gyroscopes monitored the submarines’ forward progress, their depth, their direction, their turns and pauses. Through huge umbilicals, the gyros fed the data to the missiles, adjusting their trajectories microsecond after microsecond so they were forever trained precisely on thousands of far-off targets. When the time came, and it was scarcely an hour off now, the commanders would turn simple keys from positions at Hold on the left, to Tactical straight up, to Fire on the right. The gyros would send the last microsecond’s trajectory adjustment, the umbilicals would fall away, and the commanders would feel a lurching whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. The gyroscopes were called the Ships Inertial Navigation System. Aboard the boats, they were known simply as SINS.