“I am saying, sir,” Harpoon replied, and now the impatience was creeping into his voice, “that the President had four minutes. He was aware that our early-warning system had sounded many false alarms. He was faced with a somewhat confusing attack without absolute confidence it was real. He absorbed the first missile landings. From our vantage point in Omaha, he responded slowly. In retrospect, I believe he acted reasonably.”
“Reasonably.” The successor’s single word cut through the purr of the engines, and all eyes in the compartment swung toward Harpoon.
“Yes, sir,” Harpoon replied, his voice unyielding. “We have a partial transcript of a hotline message—perhaps a disingenuous message—from the Premier. You might want to read—”
The colonel cut in abruptly. “I would be happy to help you interpret it,” he said.
Harpoon turned with methodically slow intimidation toward the jarring voice. “Colonel,” he said icily, “I would appreciate it if you would allow me to proceed uninterrupted. The message was quite simple. Perhaps simple-minded. I cannot judge that. I doubt you can, either.” Harpoon shifted his gaze to the successor. “The Premier contended that the more militaristic elements within his government were pushing him into a total preemptive attack on us. He chose a limited attack on military installations instead. For what it’s worth, and I certainly don’t know what to make of it, he offered to accept an equal amount of damage in the Soviet Union.” Harpoon immediately regretted his phrasing.
“A relatively even exchange,” the successor interjected caustically.
“It was a damned foolish and incredibly dangerous thing to do,” Harpoon tried to recoup. “I can’t assess his motives. He claimed that our government had squeezed the Soviets too long and too hard and that they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—accept it any longer.”
The colonel could not control himself. “You are describing our national policy, admiral,” he blurted. “It surely is not an uncivilized one. It is in man’s nature to cage a dangerous animal—to lock up a sociopath, whether a single political assassin or a nation of geopolitical assassins.”
Harpoon made a half-turn back toward the colonel, leveling his light pointer at him. The beam glittered off one lens of his glasses. “You and I are not politicians,” he said briskly. “I do Slink we can safely make the observation, without engaging in pseudo-Freudian analyses of long winters, that caging a nation with twenty thousand nuclear weapons was a policy with some risks.” The admiral heard a mirthless chuckle behind him. His shoulders tightened.
“The colonel’s observations seem to make you nervous, Harpoon. I believe I could use the advice of a man who is expert in these matters.”
Crap. Expert in Dostoyevsky and obscure Kremlin right-wingers. “You are the Commander-in-Chief,” he replied as evenly as he could. “You may have the advice of anyone aboard this aircraft—or anyone we can reach on the radio, damned few that they are at the moment. Would you like to be briefed by someone else?”
“Oh, no, not at all.” The successor’s words cut through the admiral. “I am learning far more than I expected.”
Harpoon stared into the red splotch that had been Seattle and, across Puget Sound, the Bremerton-Bangor naval complex. He had spent one long shore-duty tour there and his only son had fallen in love with the Nordic beauty of the alpine mountains and the fjordlike waters. After college, the boy had returned. To make missiles for Boeing. And make his only grandson. The missiles had given them a house on the water, a sailboat, annually recycled automobiles, and a carefree future in the place his son called the Land of the Lotus Eaters. Carry on, Gramps.
“It became clear long ago that the SIOP computer could not be secured from any major attack. Therefore, we began programming it to devise multistage responses that would be carried out twelve to twenty-four hours after its destruction. After the death of the President, for that matter. And after the destruction of most of our means of communicating with our forces. That meant we could issue orders that would be carried out after the disappearance of both our national leadership and our national communications system. It was a major advance. A rather dangerous one. But not all that much more dangerous than the hair-trigger system we already had in place. All our strategy, after all, was a bluff. The escalation of SIOP’s responsibilities was the ultimate bluff. The Soviets, as they always did, developed a similar system.”
Harpoon paused very briefly, taking a deep breath.
“Tonight, the strategy was relatively simple. Our ICBM’s were launched in two waves more than four hours ago. We held our weapons in Europe, awaiting any Soviet move. Those are programmed to go on provocation. Their launching, of course, would mean the total retaliatory destruction of Western Europe. Our bomber forces were ordered into the air as the first wave arrived. They constitute our second strike, a rather limited one. The surviving bombers will arrive on target in four to six hours. The bulk of our submarine forces, in which we carry most of our destructive power, was placed on hold for fifteen hours. They constitute the third strike. Their instructions are to hit their targets massively unless they receive contrary orders, the assumption being that if they can’t hear us, we’re still at war. That would complete the destruction of the Soviet Union.”
Harpoon stopped and turned to look at the successor.
“You find fault in that, Harpoon?” the man asked. “The caged animals, as the colonel put it, attacked us first, did they not?”
“They have a system of their own, sir.”
“And?” The successor sounded now as if he were humoring Harpoon, but the admiral decided to ignore it.
“For various reasons,” he continued, “the structure of their system is somewhat different. They placed the bulk of their nuclear weaponry in land-based missiles. Many of those silos remain unused and undestroyed. The Russians are extremely defensive in nature. They spent billions on elaborate defenses against our bombers. This drained off resources for submarines. We abandoned serious air defenses decades ago, spending the money instead on a submarine fleet vastly superior to theirs. Frankly, we thought they were suckers. If the game was a bluff, it was better to bluff with offense than defense. The bombers clearly were the weakest part of our system.”
The colonel caught a downturn in Harpoon’s words and interrupted again. “The Soviets,” he said, with a slight touch of condescension, “have been invaded by Tatars, French, Germans…” He turned aggressively toward Harpoon. “You are quite right that they are defensive in nature. We quite wisely exploited that tendency.” He paused for emphasis. “And what you call the weakest part of our nuclear system may prove to be the Soviets’ Achilles’ heel.”
Harpoon angrily jabbed his pointer again, knowing what the colonel was approaching. “Colonel,” he growled, “will you please keep your goddamn mouth shut till I’m finished?”
“I’d like to hear what he has to say,” the successor said quietly.
“He can wait. He’ll make quite certain you hear him.”
“Unless you harpoon him first, admiral,” the successor said, gesturing at the pointer.
“The temptation is growing.”
“I imagine.”
The colonel smugly sank deeper into his chair. Harpoon continued.
“The difference in forces somewhat dictates the timing. It means the Soviet second strike, by their bombers, will take our cities first. Our third strike, by the submarines, will take theirs shortly afterward.”
“Malarkey!” The successor started to rise out of his chair. “Even I know the Soviet bombers are so old we could knock ’em down with a peashooter.”