Pullman nodded abstractedly and appeared to go off at a tangent. He said, ‘Your chief’s a good judge of a situation. And of a man too — or he wouldn’t have sent you to see me. He could have gone over my head, to the Secretary of the Navy or even the Secretary of State himself. Latymer’s big enough for them to at least listen to what he has to say, But he didn’t. He chose to send you to me; and it’s because of that and because I was worried already that I agreed to let you come.’ He leaned forward. ‘It’s this way, Commander. He and I, we’re old friends. We met on the China Station, years before the war, as junior officers. He was in a river gunboat chasing pirates, I was in an old heavy cruiser.’ He chuckled suddenly, reminiscently. ‘I’d hate to tell you what we got up to in Weihaiwei and Shanghai! Not that that’s anything more than water under the bridge now. Anyway, I’ll tell you one thing: He taught me, Latymer did, to appreciate cricket, and I guess that talks for itself. Me, I gave him the right slant on baseball and I didn’t mind all that much when he insisted it was only rounders dressed up. He’s like that. You get on with him or you don’t, but if you do, well, you take him whole. I did — and I still do. And I trust him. What’s more, Commander, I happen to trust the British people. I’m on record,’ he said, giving Shaw his keen look again, ‘as being against the current Pentagon policy of withholding certain information, and I guess that old fox knew that very well! I don’t believe it’s in the best vital interests of the West not to pool all we can. Get me?’
Shaw nodded.
‘So I’m going to tell you something that’ll maybe pin your ears back, but first I’m going to give you a word of warning as follows.’ His voice hardened and the mouth went harder. ‘If anything of this leaks out through you, or if you come unstuck along the line, you don’t look to me for help. I don’t mind telling you straight, I’ll deny the lot, and I’ll only open up on that clear understanding. Right?’
‘Right, sir.’
‘Moreover, Commander, I’ll see you’re personally broken if you’re indiscreet. If you’re in this country, you won’t ever see Britain again because I’ll have you behind bars. If you’re in Britain, well, I’ll leave you to Latymer with a strong recommendation to no mercy at all. That sounds God-almighty melodramatic, I know, but it’s gospel just the same. Get it?’
‘Yes, I get it.’ Shaw’s mouth, too, was hard now. ‘But I’m an Intelligence Officer and—’
‘And you don’t leak things!’ Pullman grinned suddenly and good-naturedly. ‘No, I guess you know the penalties without me underlining them,’ he said in a warmer voice, ‘but Britain’s getting a little too notorious for leaks, these days. Now, Commander. I couldn’t tell any of this to your chief over the telephone, not even on a ‘hush’ line, and for obvious reasons it’d have been suicide to put it on paper. I’m taking a risk giving it to you, but I’m taking that risk in all the circumstances because you’ve already started in on this job from the other end, and I reckon you may as well follow right through. Your chief won’t drop it now anyway, and we don’t want to get our wires crossed.’ He paused and then said abruptly, ‘Here are the facts, then, and I’ll start at the beginning. First, does the code name Warmaster mean anything at all to you?’
For no reason whatever Shaw felt a curious cold shiver in his spine. ‘Not a thing,’ he replied.
‘Good. It shouldn’t. But from now on, it’s going to, though that name doesn’t in fact go outside this room any more than anything else I’m going to tell you. And there’s another point. So far as Britain’s concerned, you’ll be the only one who knows anything, and if you want to work on this, you must consider yourself divorced from London and working — unofficially, that is — for me. Okay? We have that clear?’
Shaw hesitated only briefly. It looked as though Latymer would just have to accept this situation. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You can take it we have that clear, sir.’
‘Fine. right, now. Warmaster is the name we’ve given to a brand-new type of missile. Call it an “umbrella”-type missile for want of a better layman’s description. I’ll be as brief as I can and skip the technicalities, but this missile was developed only recently — though it was blueprinted over a year ago — by the Navy and Air Force working in co-operation, and for various reasons, which I won’t bore you with, the Navy was given the job of protecting it security-wise. So to that extent, Warmaster is my baby, if baby’s the word. In point of fact she’s a giant-size baby, a missile with one hell of a punch. I call her “she” because… well, becuase she’s a kind of mother-missile. Follow?’
Shaw shook his head. ‘Not really, sir.’
‘Well, it’s this way,’ Pullman went on, his eyebrows twitching rapidly. ‘When she gets over her target, she kind of gives birth. That is, she releases a number of smaller missiles — smaller, but super-powerful just the same. They and she are armed with a new thermo-nuclear warhead packing an explosive called ARM 64, and each of those daughter-missiles has an explosive force in the fifty megaton range. Mother herself is in the five hundred megaton range. Now, all the smaller missiles, like Mother, have pre-selected and pre-set targets, which can and would include all important military and industrial centres in the target country. The idea is, that an enemy could be virtually put out of any war, sent right down for the count, in one blow — well, maybe two or three at the most. An absolute minimum of launchings, you see, to achieve the maximum saturation. This means, among other things, we can deliver the all-out retaliation in the shortest possible time. Warmaster is far and away a better weapon then Polaris or anything else you could pack into a submarine, and far more secure, I assure you. The latest developments in submarine hunting techniques ensure that every Polaris-carrying submarine can be killed at very short notice — and would be, the moment anything big blew up — we know Russia can pinpoint all those at sea at any given time and that every goddam one is tracked. But Warmaster’s ninety-nine per cent safe in stressed-concrete, bomb-proof, missile-proof silos, and there’s going to be plenty of them soon — I hope! The long-term plan is for them to be sited in batteries in Alaska and all over. Warmaster has an effective range of ten thousand nautical miles — that’s Mother. The smaller ones have another two and a half thousand on top of that. And no power on earth can knock the lot out in time, even if they can penetrate the silos. Once the first flight goes over, it’ll be curtains for the attacking country, mighty soon after.’
Shaw said, ‘You talked about the time element. How quickly can you get them away?’
‘Warmaster has been launched in twenty seconds from the time any alarm’s given, and you can’t move faster than that,’ Pullman answered. ‘So, you see, within a very, very short time of us getting the alert on the Early Warning system, we could have Warmaster over hostile territory. Now you’ll say it won’t be long before a potentially hostile nation knows all this. I’ll come back to that soon but’—he made an expansive gesture—‘if he does — fine! The idea being, he won’t ever send anything over here once he knows what we can send back in answer. In point of fact Warmaster was a very deliberately chosen name, Commander. The missile’s going to be, literally, the master of the war, the ultimate deterrent, which’ll mean peace in our time.’ Pullman’s thin lips tightened. ‘Correction. That’s what it could mean if things don’t go too far wrong.’
Shaw raised an eyebrow. ‘Meaning…?’
‘Meaning this,’ Pullman answered heavily.
‘You’ll probably not remember a physicist of ours, a man called Keiler. Otto Keiler. He’s a German from what since became the Red puppet state. During the last war he worked on Hitler’s VI and V2 projects. He came to us in 1945. He was in what’s now West Germany, and our armies liberated him from a concentration camp. He’d been put inside when he got disillusioned with Hitler. Well — remember what happened to him, do you?’