“Admiral,” the colonel blustered in again, “those Model T crates are so vulnerable the Minnesota Air National Guard could do the job.”
Harpoon finally exploded. “If you’re so damned smart, colonel, go to the yellow phone and order ’em into the air. I can’t even get through to Minneapolis. Every transistor, every piece of copper communications wire in Minnesota is burned out. We got 150 Model T’s coming at us, most of them so old they still have propellers. We can’t stop half of ’em and you damned well know it. Every one of them is carrying more than a megaton of thermonuclear weapons. In a few hours they’re going to be roaming at will across this country. And they’re going to pick off their targets one by goddamned one. New York. Philadelphia. Denver. Minneapolis. Till they get down to Waterloo, Iowa. Waterloo, colonel. You remember Waterloo?”
“And our bombers will do the same thing,” the successor said. It was not a question.
“No,” Harpoon answered, trying to calm himself. “Their bombers were in the air when the attack began. Most of our alert force was caught on the ground. We have about twenty bombers flying.”
“Twenty!”
“Twenty can do a lot of damage, but—”
“But what! What other juicy news do you have for me?”
“At this moment, some of our bombers are under attack by fighter interceptors.”
“The Soviets can attack our bombers and we can’t attack theirs?”
“Sir, they had the element of surprise. They spent then-money on bomber defenses, as we wanted them to. The B-52’s are a suicide squad.”
“So how much of our vaunted second strike will get through?”
“Maybe a dozen will get past the interceptors. The survivors then have to thread their way through the best bomber defense ever devised. A bit chewed up, but the best. We never expected them to get through. We wanted to mousetrap the Soviets into wasting money on defense for a war with no defenses.” He paused and cast a rueful look at the colonel. “We were successful,” he added.
“How many?”
“A couple. A half-dozen if we’re lucky.”
“And we sit idly by while the commies nuke their way through America.”
“Sir, for God’s sake, we’re hardly sitting idly by. In the end, it will equal out. Our submarines will do infinitely more damage. There will be nothing of value left of the Soviet Union, just as there will be nothing of value left of the United States. And it won’t stop there. The weapons in Europe will go. The remaining Soviet ICBM’s. That’s the system we built. It really doesn’t make much difference, does it? The Russians simply get the first crack…” The admiral’s words trailed off.
“Harpoon, you will roast in hell.”
“Probably. But not for telling you the truth, sir.”
The successor stared at Harpoon, his gaze almost hateful. “How many warheads we got in our subs?”
“About seven thousand, sir.”
“Launch ’em,” the man said simply.
Harpoon stared at him silently.
“SIOP be damned!” the successor thundered. “This is the most cockamamie, defeatist, godless thing I’ve ever heard. Give the bastards the works. Now!”
A wisp of an unhappy smile touched Harpoon’s craggy face. He put his pointer down quietly. “I understand your frustration, sir,” the admiral said. “I truly understand your frustration. It is a sick system. Even sicker than I’ve described.”
The successor’s stare turned raw. “You’re patronizing me again, Harpoon. I’m your Commander-in-Chief. I’ve given you an order.”
“An impossible order.”
“You refuse a direct order?”
“I can’t order the submarines to do anything. Nor can you. We’re rebuilding our communications slowly. But even with pre-war communications we couldn’t talk to them. They are invulnerable, the perfect final bluff, because no one can find them. Not even us. They received their orders hours ago as the first missiles landed. Those orders were to run silent and deep, away from detection or communications, for fifteen hours. Then the main part of the fleet will come back near the surface to listen. If they hear nothing, they will fire. That’s the system. The Soviets know it as well as we do. They know that if their bombers strike, if they send off more ICBM’s, they are dead. Because there will be no one and no reason to talk to the submarines.”
The successor’s eyes dropped slowly. For a moment he seemed lost in thought. Then his eyes rose again, avoiding Harpoon, and moved around the conference table at the silent Air Force officers. The successor whipped his gaze back at Harpoon. “You are telling me,” he asked, his words coming in a hauntingly detached cadence, “that the fate of our nation… rests in the hands… of a dead computer?”
“The fate of the world,” whispered the general whom Harpoon had forced to be both optimistic and pessimistic.
Harpoon sighed. “That isn’t quite true,” he said slowly. “First it is important to understand—and, in our dependence on machines, we often forget it—that SIOP is… was… no more than the accumulation of the wisdom and foolishness of several generations of our brightest men. Almost all of them well-meaning. Almost all of them scared.”
“Do you believe I am well-meaning?” the successor asked.
“I believe so, sir.”
“Do you believe I am scared?”
“You were a few moments ago, sir. I hope you are now.”
“I’m scared, Harpoon. But only scared of losin’.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I’m so scared I could use a change of skivvies. Few of the men who devised the war plans, on both sides of the world, were total fools. We built the fear quotient, which we saw as our only salvation, into SIOP. The Soviets did the same. Both sides knew that if this mess ever got started, we would have tremendous problems with ego, national pride, animosities, misunderstandings, communications. Why do you think our world, our hemisphere at least, is not destroyed by now? We certainly had the ability to do it faster. It is now almost five hours since Jericho began.”
“Jericho?”
“Sorry. Jericho is code for a full-scale nuclear war. When we looked at Jericho, we knew communications would go. We knew leaders would die. We saw a system that could be out of control in minutes. So we built in pauses. To some degree, we even matched the equipment to the pauses. The bombers are very slow, which built a natural pause into the war. We are in that pause. Nearing the end of it, though.”
“And the pause was designed by these brightest men,” the successor said, derision in his words, “to do precisely what?”
“To give us time to patch our communications, sir. And to give you and your Soviet counterpart time to stop bluffing and make the Jericho decision.”
Off to the side, Harpoon saw the colonel rise abruptly out of his seat, wagging his head frantically.
“The chicken!” he shouted. “Tell him about cutting the head off the chicken or you’ll… you’ll be remembered with Aaron Burr!”
Harpoon looked grimly at the colonel. Crap, he mouthed silently.
The Foxbats were on their tail now, fifteen miles back, gaining steadily, holding their six remaining missiles for a certain kill. Kazakhs seemed to ignore them. He gave no orders, said nothing. Only the methodical, droning voice of Tyler broke the radio silence. Okay, high terrain three miles, and it’s significant. Up a bit. Down a bit. Little more. Hard left. Good. Kazakhs followed each instruction machinelike. The lightning bolt on his shoulder patch tilted in flawless rhythm with each banking turn around each rolling mountain corner. The white captain’s bars rose in perfect harmony with the aircraft as he lifted it over each mountain ridge. His buttocks swayed in their parachute harness to the geometry of each maneuver. He was good. The Foxbats followed his every move.