Harpoon floundered. He looked at his watch. Damn. “Insane, perhaps,” he said wearily. “Ungodly, for sure. But not treason. It is the system we built to protect ourselves. It is the system the Soviets built to protect themselves.” He paused very briefly. “It isn’t working very well.”
“Isn’t working very well,” the successor repeated in a drone. His mind was weaving with the aircraft. “Loco,” he said, the word momentarily jelling his thoughts. He spat the next words: “We runnin’ this war from some ward at St. Elizabeth’s, Harpoon?”
Harpoon sagged, then drew himself up again. “Sir,” he said plaintively, “it is crucial that you quickly learn the system so you have some chance of dealing with it. If all of America is destroyed, the Soviets have no hostages and we have nothing to protect. The Soviets don’t want that. If all the Soviet Union is destroyed, we have no hostages and they have nothing to protect. We can’t possibly want that. Then there is no reason to stop. Ever.”
“Stop,” the successor repeated.
Harpoon watched the man closely. He had watched men go crazy dealing with this in peacetime.
“Who started this, Harpoon?” he asked.
Damn. There’s no time for this crap. “The Soviets, sir.”
“How long ago?”
“Four hours. Almost precisely 0600 Zulu.” Harpoon felt his fears tum to exasperation. “That’s Greenwich mean time, sir. One a.m. in Washington. Midnight in Omaha.”
“Winter morning in Moscow. Dark.” The successor’s words were detached. “Out of darkness. Into darkness.” His eyes drifted, too.
Now Harpoon felt woozy. Out of darkness, into darkness? Was he quoting from the Bible? He struggled through misty childhood memories of Revelation and Matthew and John. He shook his head.
“Wintertime,” the colonel intoned seriously. “A time when the Russian psyche is its darkest, its most depressed, its most paranoid. They are so preoccupied with the cold darkness of their long winters that Russian authors have written novels about the theft of an overcoat. Tells you a lot.” Harpoon looked at him in amazement. The colonel paused and then intoned seriously, “It also tells us that if those people were paranoid enough to start this, they are paranoid enough to go down to the last missile.”
The admiral stared at the Librarian. You little prick. Spent your whole life burrowing through Russian papers looking for the most belligerent statements to use as ammunition. Then Harpoon cursed himself again. They had all used men like that, kept them around to pry more money out of Congress. Just as the Russians had kept men busy collecting the rashest of the American statements, crap from the John Birch Society, nutty statements from half-baked right-wing congressmen with no more influence than Jerry Falwell. Damn. Harpoon continued to stare at the colonel, but he wasn’t sure whom he was damning most. The colonel stared back.
Harpoon shook his head once more and turned toward the successor. The man’s face was gone again. He felt like he was wrestling with Jell-O. Harpoon tried to fight down the wisp of a memory, the kind he had successfully suppressed during the total involvement of the past four hours. His eleven-year-old grandson pulled at his sleeve, tugging him back into playfulness after one of those periodic lapses far off into his SIOP world. Earth to Gramps, the boy said. Come in, Gramps. The admiral’s grandson had been in Seattle. He winced. The admiral fought back the memory. Earth to the President. “Sir, can we please get on with this?”
The successor saw the wince. “I see no point,” he said.
“No point?”
“I want our remaining ICBM’s fired at the blue circles immediately.”
“Sir, please…”
Even the colonel was shaking his head now, and a pang of fear flashed through Harpoon. The Librarian had no respect for this man at all. For years the colonel had been the used. Now he was going to be the user.
“Fire them,” the successor said.
“All our ICBM’s were launched or destroyed hours ago,” Harpoon fumbled.
“Why don’t you just get to the point, admiral?” The colonel cut in.
“Because he needs to know what is at stake, dammit!” Harpoon flared.
“At stake?” the colonel bored on. “We were attacked. The sovereignty of the United States is at stake. We can give up, or we can use the bombers. To cut the head off the chicken.”
“Shut up, colonel,” Harpoon said flatly. They were talking as if the successor had left the compartment. But the successor was not listening anyway, tracking on his own course now.
“Precisely how many Americans are dead?” the man interrupted.
“Twenty to thirty million,” Harpoon said, swiveling his glare away from the colonel and into the blank face. “More will die from radiation, riots, disorder. Maybe forty million total. If we can stop now.”
“Russians?”
“Fifteen, twenty million. Maybe thirty million with the side effects. If we can stop.”
“So we have lost.”
Harpoon sagged in despair. “Sir,” he said desolately, “this isn’t victory by body count. Can’t you understand? It isn’t over, for God’s sake. Our bombers are under way for a second strike. Our submarines have been given predetermined orders for a third strike. We can’t talk to our submarines. We can’t talk to the Russians. Between us we have more than forty thousand warheads left. We don’t know how to stop it.” He slumped further, feeling trapped and helpless. “It isn’t over,” he repeated hauntedly. “It’s out of control.”
“Eighty miles,” Radnor’s voice droned into the cockpit. “Seventy.”
“Foxbat!” Kazakhs demanded the specs on their adversaries.
“Top speed, Mach two-point-eight,” Moreau replied. “Range fifteen hundred miles. One way. Toughest in high-altitude dogfights. Most sophisticated—”
“Armaments?” Kazakhs interrupted. He knew the Foxbat was sophisticated—maybe too sophisticated—and he already had begun calculating that to his advantage, the tortoise plotting against the hare. The fighters were three minutes away. If they missed on this run—and they could, because they were approaching too fast—their speed would take them on a long looping tum, giving him invaluable time.
“Four AA-6 ACRID air-to-air missiles,” Moreau replied immediately. “Warheads nonnuclear. Heat-seekers, range fifty miles. Radar-guided, range twenty miles. They’ll try ’em both ways. Gun pack, two twenty-three-millimeter machine guns.”
“Sixty miles.”
“Evasive action,” Kazakhs ordered. His words were distant now, as if they were trailing several moves behind his mind. “Close air intakes. Hokay, buddies, let’s see how the cossacks like their eggs fried in their own grease.”
Moreau began the swaying, groaning maneuver back into the radioactive cloud. “Fifty miles,” Radnor said. “Forty miles. Missiles launched! One. Two…” He paused. “Six launches!”
“Decoys out!”
“Decoys dispatched.” Halupalai instinctively placed his hand on the Gatling-gun trigger, the Vietnam reflex, and then pulled it back.
“Thirty miles.”
“Clouds?” Kazakhs wanted the red crud badly, not only because it would spook the racing MIG pilots but more importantly because the dancing radioactivity might clutter the missile guidance systems.
Downstairs, Radnor stared at his radar. He saw six little blips racing at him, four larger ones swooping ahead of the missiles and climbing. From the other direction the fog was creeping slowly across his screen, nearing the center. ‘Twenty degrees left,” he said. “Countdown?”