“Harpoon,” the successor said, suddenly breaking his silence, “you do seem to have a propensity for waitin” for World War Four.”
All eyes turned toward him and he drew the Presidential Seal in tighter, like a shield, certain that his fear and uncertainty had screamed out of their hiding place and into his voice. To the others the words sounded as if they had been fired from a cannon. The colonel stifled a chuckle.
Harpoon felt ill again. World War Four? Maybe he should be laughing along with the colonel, he thought bleakly. That was the first joke he’d heard all night. “Major,” he said to an unseen officer in a separate cubicle, “will you dim the Soviet Union and the world so we can take a closer look at the United States?”
The compartment grew slightly darker, but the United States loomed boldly in a crazy quilt of red and blue splotches that made the successor’s skin crawl, partly because he knew what it must mean, partly because he didn’t understand at all. Harpoon stepped slightly to the side, so the entire country was in view, and brushed the light pointer across wide regions.
“What you are seeing, sir, gives you a fair representation of the present condition of the United States,” Harpoon began. “In a moment you will see that the Soviet Union is in roughly the same condition. The red markings indicate targets that have been hit. In the first exchanges, all of which took place within the first hour, both nations expended about a third of their arsenals but exercised some restraint. The objective was to do our best to disarm each other, concentrating on missile fields, military installations, and communications facilities. Of course, we could not disarm each other. Therefore, both nations also randomly hit some cities that were not primary military targets. The theory is that randomly striking a few major cities, like New Orleans, which you were near”—the pointer skittered several hundred miles south of their present location—“makes the threat of the next strike more intimidating.”
The successor’s eyes froze on Baton Rouge. To the north, Shreveport, the home of a bomber base, was red. To the south, New Orleans was red. He began to sweat. He could feel the crud eating at him.
Harpoon sensed the man’s fear, it being so normal. “It is unlikely that the radiation harmed you, sir,” he said quietly. The successor slumped, humiliated. Damn you, admiral. “Major, bring up the Soviet Union.” The top of Asia sprang back into the room.
“For New Orleans, we took Odessa,” Harpoon said quickly, flashing the pointer at a red starburst at the top of the Black Sea. Then the pointer fluttered back to the United States. “We were surprised by the attack on Los Angeles, because it is such an attractive hostage for the second strike. When it became clear Los Angeles was lost”—the pointer skittered to Asia again, and the successor’s mind began to wobble with it—“the computer suggested we take out Kiev. Some cities were military targets or so near them that the distance was irrelevant. That accounts for the destruction of cities such as Seattle and Vladivostok. So, as you can see, both nations have a few areas of almost total destruction, other pockets of major destruction, but large regions mat remain basically untouched.”
Harpoon paused and looked at the man. His eyes were riveted on the United States, his face blank. To Harpoon, he did not appear to be listening closely. Harpoon was wrong. He was listening quite closely. But he was confused. He saw far too much blue, and he didn’t understand.
“The blue ovals…” the successor began haltingly. “The blue represents cities that were not struck?” His voice was disbelieving and slurred.
“That is correct, sir,” Harpoon replied. “Not struck in the first attack.”
Harpoon watched the man’s eyes flicker across the map, left to right. On the West Coast the Puget Sound area was a red mass, as was the eastern part of the state of Washington near Spokane. Oregon was untouched. The red continued again in the Bay Area, spreading from San Francisco east beyond the B-52 base at Sacramento. Los Angeles was red. The destruction began again, with a few gaps, in Montana and the Dakotas, spreading in intensity through the missile fields of the Plains states south into Texas. To the east, New England, an advance staging area for the bombers, was a checkerboard of red. Washington, D.C., was a muddle of red and blue, as if the Soviets had tried to carve parts of it away while leaving other parts. Still, throughout the country, blue dominated. Denver was blue, although a huge red starburst glistened just to the south in Colorado Springs. Minneapolis, Chicago, Indianapolis, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Miami, many major cities including New York, all were blue.
“New York…” The successor’s voice was dull and distant. “What’s happening in New York?”
Harpoon’s white eyebrows rose uncertainly. “You saw Baton Rouge, sir,” he replied. “Same thing, I imagine, except much worse. We have to assume civil disorder is rampant in the blue areas.”
“We can just as easily assume,” the colonel cut in abruptly, “that our civil-defense program is efficiently evacuating the blue areas at this very moment.”
Harpoon shot an amazed glance across the compartment. “Jeezuz, colonel,” he rasped. “New York? In the middle of the night? With no electricity?”
“Just as we should assume the Soviets are evacuating their cities, rapidly and efficiently,” the colonel continued undaunted.
Grunts emerged from the generals. The successor seemed to miss the entire exchange. “But it wasn’t hit…” his dull voice interrupted the grunts. “Why?”
“New York is a hostage city, sir,” Harpoon answered simply. “The blue cities are being held hostage.”
“Hostage?” The voice went from dull and disbelieving to incredulous.
“Sir, American cities are being held hostage and Soviet cities are being held hostage. That is the system we built. We are holding each other mutually hostage, just as we were before the war. We left Leningrad, holding it hostage. We are saying to them: You take New York and we will take Leningrad. In the second strike. Or the third strike.”
“Leningrad is standing?” The voice turned guttural. He had not yet focused on the map of the Soviet Union. “Four hours after a sneak attack on the United States, we have left Leningrad”—the voice broke in anger and dismay—“untouched?”
“That is the system, sir.” Harpoon swore under his breath. He was sounding like a damned New England schoolmaster. But he didn’t know how else to answer.
The successor’s eyes darted past Harpoon to the map of the Soviet Union. Across the top of the Eurasian continent, the same mix of red and blue dotted the landmass. He had fewer reference points in a land he had never visited, but the middle of the continent, from east to west along the Trans-Siberian Railway line, was a long red string where the main missile fields had been. Red staibursts blossomed out of Kamchatka and the Arctic coast near Murmansk, which he assumed were submarine bases. He knew from Cabinet meetings that Plesetsk and Tyuratam were missile-and satellite-launching centers.
They were red. So were Vladivostok and Odessa, as promised, as well as Sverdlovsk, Tbilisi, and a handful of other major Soviet cities. Moscow was dotted in red, but blue interrupted the blood color. Leningrad, Minsk, Smolensk, Riga, and other metropolitan areas remained blue.
The successor moved his eyes away from the map and toward Harpoon. Shakily, he started to rise, clattering the Seal to the floor. He sat back down. His face was ghostly white and his mouth moved several times before the words came out. ‘Treason…” he muttered grotesquely. “Ungodly… insane…” The words trailed off.
Harpoon felt the plane tilt slightly as the pilot maneuvered in the random pattern of evasion he had been taught. Around the briefing table, the officers swayed with the aircraft, eyes cast downward, light coughs interrupting the rhythmic silence of the moment. Only the colonel, outranked by all but here because he was the command plane’s expert in Soviet thinking, nodded almost imperceptibly.