“Seven miles,” Harpoon whispered into the phone. Then he barked: “Hard right! Full power, hard right!”
Suddenly, the presidential compartment turned on its side. The admiral quickly lowered his head into his lap. He felt a weight slam into the back of his seat, a body tumble over his back. Next to him he heard a thud, a whoosh of air, and a muffled chugga-chugga-chugga. He shuddered, but he was counting. Three… four… Someone screamed. Five… six… He felt the first ripple, like a sudden squall at sea, and the plane lurched up, then down, metal groaning. He braced himself and waited for the next. Five seconds passed. Ten. Fifteen. Metal ground against metal as the pilot struggled to level out. Twenty. Twenty-five. Without raising his head, the admiral reached for the loose telephone receiver. “What gives?” He slowly pulled himself upright, eyes closed in relief. “I’ll be damned.” Then he said, “Take her all the way up.”
Harpoon sighed. As if to himself, he said, “We got the empty chamber.” For a moment he was oblivious to his immediate surroundings, the tension oozing out as he tried to absorb just how lucky they had been. They had survived a dozen rounds—World War Three rounds at just under a megaton each. Then the awful other reality struck him, the low, undulating airport moan echoing in his memory. Baton Rouge had just paid an incredible price for tonight’s strange and unheralded presidential visit.
Harpoon opened his eyes slowly. Across from him an unconscious agent, apparently the one who had tumbled over his seat, lay limp over the successor’s knees. At Harpoon’s side, the judge still slumped forward in the crash position. The new blue fabric of his swivel chair was shredded, white stuffing edging out of three small craters. The seat padding, absorbing some of the impact of the bullets, had saved the aircraft from a perhaps-fatal skin-piercing decompression. The padding had not saved the judge. The back of his shirt was red. The Bible had skittered just out of reach of a hand that dangled loosely to the carpeted floor. Behind the judge’s chair, the other agent rose shakily from his knees, staring numbly at the machine gun he had jammed into the back of the seat as he fell.
Harpoon felt ill. Being a submariner himself, he doubted the Soviet commander had fired on direct orders from Moscow. The poor bugger must have been cornered, an American sub on his tail. The orders had come out of sealed contingency plans written years ago in some Soviet think tank, just as similar contingent plans had been created by bright young Americans in the sterile offices of the Rand Corporation and the gingerbread rooms of the Hudson Institute. Harpoon’s mind drifted to his last undersea command and the sailing orders he had carried. Don’t sink with the nukes. Cornered? Fire. At any available target.
Harpoon finally looked at the successor and saw dumbfounded shock and horror. Damn. He wanted the man scared, but not this way. Leaders were not supposed to see blood. It made them erratic and irrational, stalling some, drawing a need for vengeance out of others. Computer dots representing neutered millions were much safer. The innocent-looking dots insulated the mind. Harpoon shuddered. He had a helluva sales job ahead of him.
“Incognitos like hell,” Kazaklis snapped. “Not up here. Them’s bandits.” He adjusted his helmet. “Distance,” he demanded. “Velocity.”
“Hundred miles,” Radnor snapped back. “Fast. Mach two-plus. Darned near Mach three.”
“No, no. Check again.” The pilot’s voice sounded dubious, not alarmed.
“Affirmative. Eighteen hundred miles an hour. Three, correction, four bandits.”
“Battle stations!” Kazakhs ordered. “Helmets! Oxygen! Defense!” He did not wait for responses. “Jamming! Chaff! Shovel that stuff like hay, gunner. Decoys ready?”
Kazakhs glanced quickly at his copilot. “Honored?”
“They cared enough to send the very best,” Moreau responded, snapping her oxygen mask.
“Too good. Too fast for an old bucket of bolts like us. MIG-25 Foxbats. They must be very hungry. And suicidal. No way those gas-guzzlers can get back home.”
“Makes ’em meaner.”
“Meaner than us? You got hemlock in your canteen, too, pal. This is the joust of the kamikazes.”
In the softened lights of the corporate-bland and distractingly spotless briefing compartment, three computerized maps glowed on the wall behind Harpoon’s chiseled features. One showed the United States, another the Soviet Union, and a third displayed, in Mercator map distortion, the world. The vibration of the aircraft, and the tiny imperfections of the computer’s microdot drawings, caused small but mind-bending warps in such familiar outlines as the Florida spit and the Puget Sound cut. Less familiar outcroppings and indentations such as Kamchatka and the Black Sea also wobbled slightly out of tune with reality. But the Mercator distortion, that mapmaker’s deformity that enlarged the northernmost parts of the world by creating a squared globe, was the greatest. The landmass of Asia seemed to overwhelm the rest of the world. The successor saw that first.
Harpoon had led him silently down one level into the half-light of this room. The man had been unable to speak during the introductions to half a dozen somber Air Force generals and a single prim colonel. To cover, he had stared stonily into each set of grim eyes and clasped each outstretched hand too firmly.
The officers sat now at an oval boardroom table, the generals seeming to stare at him like vultures in the gloom, the colonel’s eyeglasses glinting eerily. The successor had seated himself intentionally to the side, away from them. In his lap he held the portable Seal, which the uninjured Secret Service agent had carried from the other room. In front of him Harpoon seemed to glow luminously in front of the maps. The maps confused him. They pulsed at him—circles and starbursts and pinpoints, some in blue, some in red; clusters of starbursts in some places, huge blank pieces of nothingness in others.
Harpoon struggled for a place to begin. He had stood in front of these maps a hundred times, confidently talking the modem-war code language of Counterforce and Countervailing strategies, of Slickems and Tercoms, of ICBM vulnerabilities and Circular Error Probables. He had listened to experts, talked as an expert, poising nudets against Moscow in the twentieth century’s greatest bluff. Until a few hours ago the pinpoints and starbursts and circles had been no more than shrewd computerized chess moves. Now the game’s pawns were grandmothers in Boston, school kids in Tucson, peasant farmers in Staraya Russa, pink-cheeked students in Gorki.
Harpoon stared for a moment longer into the successor’s expectant face. He had to take time to flesh out the awful realities—give this unprepared man more than knee-jerk knowledge, knee-jerk knowledge being deadly dangerous. How could he explain that all the blustering talk of the past thirty years meant nothing now, that the few elite insiders had worried about just one thing: how do you turn the monster off once you’ve turned it on? How could he explain that, even now, both nations still were bluffing? Bombers bluffing submarines, submarines bluffing Soviet ICBM reserves in a plan started and not stopped by dead computers? That each new call of the bluff raised the stakes until the last of the world’s fifty thousand nuclear weapons took out the last pea patch in Arkansas, the last hog wallow in Uzbekistan? How did he explain that the blue chips were great cities? That the cities were hostage to each other? New York for Leningrad? And New York would go first because that was the way they had built the system? In planning it had seemed to have a certain bleak logic. In reality it took on a grotesque surreality.