Without a further word, the two of them resumed their walk down the corridor, around a comer, and up a spiral staircase where Harpoon opened the door to the baby-blue presidential compartment, directing the man, then the others, toward seats inside.
Losing. Harpoon had known fear—that skin-crawling moment of sheer panic when a submariner feels the awesome power of the sea pressing down on him, his delicate mesh of men and machines failing. But he had never known anything like this, a fear that settled in the marrow and stayed there, gnawing. The world had built a similar mesh of men and machines, holding back a power far more awesome than the sea in a fragile balance that could never fail. It had failed and the mesh was unraveling like a dime-store sweater.
Harpoon had always had nagging doubts, sometimes raging nightmares, about a survival system that called for a never-ending balance of terror. Few men walked away from SlOP at night thinking the nuclear chess game would stay inside a computer forever, year after year, generation after generation. But the men—and then the machines that held the final thread in the weave—had failed so suddenly and so totally. In many ways the machines had been the greater faith of his generation of military men. They had asked for larger, more sophisticated submarines. And got them. Faster, more ingenious airplanes. And got them. Smarter, more deadly missiles. And got them. Then they had asked for more sophisticated, faster, smarter machines to control their machines. Computers to do the instant calculating and communications satellites to pass the instant orders. Encrypters to veil the orders and decoders to unveil them. Radios to talk underwater and through space. Scramble phones that, at the touch of a finger, instantly connected commanders and troops, friends and adversaries, on opposite sides of the globe.
Now, at the touch of another finger, all the machines that controlled the machines had died. SIOP had died predictably along with Icarus, vaporized in one of thousands of explosions each brighter than a thousand suns. The others had gone less predictably. Inside the greatest surviving communications machine in the world, this airplane, the admiral had watched the computers die, the radios go dead, the telephones fall silent, the mechanical eyes go blind. His staff had patched desperately and brought part of the system back to life for the man now sitting across from him. Losing. You bet we are, Mr. President. But not the way you mean it. Harpoon glanced at his watch—1012 Zulu. They were running out of time.
The successor watched Harpoon nervously look at his watch, then glance up at him. The man’s mind spun in a clutter of nagging, clawing, personal questions. Was his wife alive? Were his kids okay? Had the radiation already begun to burrow into his bones, chew into his lymph nodes? Every fiber of the man’s soul demanded answers. But he would not ask. In the agony of his journey through the Louisiana backwoods he had steeled himself to take control as quickly and decisively as Harry Truman. If a haberdasher could do it—a simple, unprepared tailor from Missouri—he could do it, too. History demanded it. His country, bushwhacked by godless tyrants in the middle of the night, demanded it.
The man shuddered involuntarily, tried to hide it, and sank deeper into his bright blue swivel chair, seeking some comfort from its fresh luxury even as the aircraft bounced erratically on the runway. He brushed at a cobweb tangle of wispy but tenacious Spanish moss still clinging to his jeans. The silken moss refused to dislodge, so he turned his attention instead to a bur snagged in his shirt. He tugged it loose and flicked the little irritant away, propelling it to a landing between the high-gloss black of the shoes across from him. Lord Almighty, losing’s not the issue. Truman would have ass-kicked this guy farther than he booted MacArthur.
Harpoon ignored the flight of the bur, taking in the strange scene around him. It was not reassuring to a man accustomed to military order. The takeoff delays were less reassuring. The plane bumped violently, then stopped, the engine whine falling off to a low rumble. He reached toward the white telephone console, so many of its button lights connected to dead ends now. The engine whine accelerated again and the plane edged forward. He thought better of a call to the cockpit—the pilot had enough troubles—and setded back into his seat, one of four clustered near the phone in the command plane’s presidential quarters.
On the admiral’s right sat the backwoods judge who had rescued the successor from obscurity with a Bible and a quick oath and whom the successor had insisted on rescuing from the bayous. On the successor’s left sat the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, an old friend. He looked a mess, his face flushed, his pudgy fingers tapping their grime nervously onto an armrest, his belly heaving in irregular swells over a barely visible silver-and-turquoise Indian belt buckle.
Behind the Louisiana judge and the admiral stood two Secret Service agents, the survivors of eight sent out from the Baton Rouge Treasury office to collect the man. Their business suits, the discounted flannels favored by young stockbrokers and government agents, were disheveled and torn. Mud caked their trousers, and splotches of dry dark red spattered their jackets and shirts. They clearly had been quite efficient. They still held their Uzi submachine guns at what passed for port arms. The guns made Harpoon still more edgy. The plane bumped again.
“How bad’s bad, admiral?”
The man’s words seemed to carom out of nowhere, breaking an awkward conversational lull and jolting Harpoon out of his temporary preoccupation. He struggled to put his thoughts together.
“Come on, man,” the successor said, the drawl back. “Come on.”
The plane cut left, then right. The pilot was zigzagging around the aprons like a drunken driver. Harpoon wanted to wait now, give up a few precious minutes to get the plane in the air and the man downstairs where he could be led with detail rather than misled with the awful, abbreviated facts.
“You still there, admiral? I do think we got a war goin’ on.”
“Sorry, sir,” Harpoon said slowly. “You are in acute danger. I want to get airborne.”
“Been in acute danger for four hours, admiral. It’s mean outside. People are like animals.”
“I know, sir.”
“Well?”
“Sir?”
“How bad’s bad, admiral?”
“Sir, it’s extremely complex and technical. You need the fullest briefing possible.”
“Psshaw!” The successor pulled angrily upright in his seat. “Complex. Technical. Full briefin’. Doggone you, admiral, you sound like every cotton-pickin’ bureaucrat in Washington. We got no time for that kind of talk.”
Harpoon winced. It took them months to break in a new President. How did he do it now in minutes? “No, sir,” he said cautiously, “we have very little time.”
“Then get on with it, man. Just give it to me. One. Two. Three. I’m not stupid. How many warheads did the commies hit us with?”
“About two thousand, sir.”
“Two thousand.”
Harpoon searched the man’s face for a reaction. “Yes, sir. Probably twenty-five hundred megatons.” React, damn you. “One megaton is about fifty times the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb.”
The successor stared at him coldly. “Don’t patronize me, admiral. I know damn well what a megaton is. What did we hit them with?”
“About the same, sir. Somewhat less megatonnage.”
“Our stuff’s better. Always was.” The successor prided himself on the show of knowledge.
“More accurate, sir. It was a relatively even exchange.” Harpoon shifted uncomfortably. The engines ebbed again. Harpoon started to reach for the intercom button.
“How many dead?” the successor asked.