“I don’t like you, Harpoon.”
“I know that, sir. I’m sorry, but it’s not important.”
“Didn’t say I didn’t respect you.”
Harpoon was surprised, but he said nothing.
“We’re down to it, aren’t we?”
“Yes, sir. We have about thirty minutes.”
“And now you’re going to ask me to surrender. Can’t do that, you know.”
Harpoon looked at him with both consternation and compassion. “Surrender, sir? No. I want you to try—simply try—to use the pause. Try to turn this thing off till we can talk to the Soviets, talk to our submarines.”
“Talk to the Soviets.” The successor shook his head slowly at the thought, and his drawl disappeared immediately. “Dammit, Harpoon, we have been trying to talk to the Soviets for fifty years, and what good’s it done us? Hell’s bells, mister, we couldn’t even talk to them during the Second World War. And they were on our side then. How the devil am I supposed to talk to them? You say I can’t even talk to Minneapolis.”
“You can’t talk to them now, sir. You may be able to in four or five hours if we don’t blow the ionosphere to smithereens again and suck the guts out of our radios and computers.”
“Harpoon, you amaze me. Downright amaze me. You just said I got thirty minutes.”
“To talk to our bombers. Before they go down to low-level and the best communications system in the world couldn’t get through to them.”
Harpoon paused once more. He felt the beads of sweat pop on his forehead. The map’s blue ovals pulsated at him mockingly. Behind the successor the arms of the Zulu clock formed a haunting smile, the second hand relentlessly sweeping onward. He scanned the faces of his colleagues. All knew what was coming, but none, except the colonel, met his eyes. The colonel stared back in a mix of challenge and curiosity. Harpoon stared at his rival. My God, was this a chess game too? The colonel smiled. It was; now or never. He drew his eyes away and riveted them on the successor, whose blank face seemed to miss the import of the moment.
“Bring them back, sir,” Harpoon said simply.
The words seemed to carom off the fluxing computer maps and echo in the sudden silence of the briefing compartment.
“Bring the bombers back,” Harpoon repeated quietly, trying to keep the pleading out of his voice.
The successor stared at Harpoon, briefly bewildered. Then his face slowly broke into a thin smile. “Now, that’s a real good plan, Harpoon,” he said, his voice cutting with sarcasm. “You want me to call up the Soviet bombers and send them home too?”
“If we’re lucky, very lucky,” Harpoon replied slowly, “the Soviets will do that themselves. If someone is in control over there. If they can see us. There are many ifs.”
“Yes, mister, there damned well are. And the biggest if is if I feel like surrendering. Which I don’t.”
“Surrender?” Harpoon asked, his voice even despite his despair. “How in God’s name is that surrender? You still have your submarines. Sixty percent of our strategic weapons are in those boats. Seven thousand city-killing warheads. Maybe, just maybe, bringing back the bombers would get us a truce.”
“Now it’s a truce. That’s a damned fancy word for surrender. Those uncivilized bastards started this and kicked the pucky out of us, Harpoon. We kicked them back. A relatively even exchange. Except there’s ten million more Americans dead. Except we had a damned sight more to lose than those barbarians did. They just brought the United States of America down to their level, Harpoon. Now they’ll just go out there and rebuild from the same point as us.” The drawl crept back, as if for emphasis. “That means losin’, dang you. And quittin’ means surrenderin’.”
“Good God, sir. Nobody’s going to rebuild without outside help. Who would you rather be, us or them? Would you like to ask Poland for aid? Czechoslovakia? Hungary? Afghanistan?”
The successor looked around the table. The colonel still rolled his eyes. The others looked at him in solemn anticipation. He turned back toward Harpoon.
“Rebuildin’ isn’t the point anyway,” he said. “You tell me we only have twenty bombers left and maybe only a couple will get in. They got a hundred and fifty coming at us, soon to be roaming at will over our country, you say, because we haven’t got any consarned peashooters. You’re the military man. Would you make that trade?”
Harpoon sensed his last chance. “The bombers aren’t the point either,” he said. “Even a couple could take care of Leningrad and what’s left of Moscow, plus odds and ends. The subs are the point. They know we’ve got them. They know we’ll use them. You’re the politician. Would you take a chance to make that trade, saving your country from total annihilation?”
“A damned Indian smoke signal,” the successor said angrily. “That’s what it is. Sounds like we’re back in the nineteenth century already.”
“We are, sir.”
“And that’s the Jericho decision? To call the bombers back and hope the Kremlin follows suit?”
“To use the pause in any way possible, sir, to settle things down.”
The successor slumped. He caressed the Seal, rubbing the lettering as if it were braille. “What lunatic designed this madness?” he asked disconsolately, the words directed at no one. “There’s no way to win.”
“There never was, sir,” Harpoon said quietly.
Harpoon relaxed briefly. Foolishly, he recognized quickly. On the admiral’s flank a clatter interrupted the silence as the colonel rose suddenly, pulling himself up so portentously the eyeglasses slipped on his nose. He cleared his throat in a high wheeze.
Harpoon looked at him with a wan smile. “Looks like the colonel has found the stolen overcoat,” he said.
The colonel glared at him. “Are you, or are you not,” the officer demanded, “going to tell the President about cutting the head off the chicken?”
Harpoon continued staring. “Promised to save that honor for you, colonel. Mister Burr will now yield.” The admiral handed him the light pointer.
Quickly the colonel signaled the projectionist, then turned his full attention to the successor. The map of the Soviet Union fluttered once more, a set of green dots appearing. Many were clustered near Moscow and Leningrad, but others were scattered in more remote regions.
“Unlike the admiral,” the colonel began, “I will keep my words brief, clear, and devoid of defeatist philosophy. Victory is possible, sir, and it is not that complicated.”
Harpoon’s wan smile faded. Little bastard’s got balls, he thought. Too bad somebody planted them between his ears instead of his legs.
“To call back our bombers would not move the Soviets. They would see it as a sign of weakness. They exploit weakness, as they did at Yalta and countless times at Geneva. But what if they did respond and turned their bombers? You observed, quite accurately, that we have lost. The Soviets have reduced us to their level. Their system and their philosophy are still intact. Is that an acceptable outcome for an American President?” He paused, peering in challenge over his glasses.
“Sir, it has been the well-conceived policy of this government to squeeze the Soviets until they collapsed from within. President Reagan predicted that fall. Your predecessor pursued the policy still further. The attack on us is the very proof that the policy has been working. The Premier’s message to your predecessor, intentionally deceptive, acknowledged as much. You, sir, now have the opportunity to put the final nail in the coffin of aggressive Soviet communism.”
Harpoon looked at the colonel in fascinated disbelief, struggling between silence and grim laughter. Nail in the coffin. He’s got his symbols right.
“I predict, sir, as President Reagan did, that the Soviet people will now throw off the yoke of totalitarian dictatorship which has oppressed them so long. They will do it as surely as they overthrew the czars during the First World War.”