“Richard! Behave yourself.”
“Yes, yes.” He glanced up at the brooding sky. Clouds were curdling ominously about one another but not yet a solid sheet of gray.
When the phone rang, Georgina jumped, her nerves on edge because of the expected Soviet missile raid, but as she rose to answer it, she pretended to Zeldman her fright was due to her having been absorbed in one of her textbooks.
“It’s for you,” she said, surprised.
As he took the phone from her, their fingers touched. He watched her walk away. The phone call was from Faslane, the village near Holy Loch, informing him the post office was holding a “familygram” for him — a fifteen-word message each submariner was allowed over a month. Did he want it forwarded to Surrey? The question about whether he wanted it “sent on” meant, however, that it wasn’t from home. Instead, it was a message to him that he must report back to the Sea Wolf within seventy-two hours. He had counted on having several more days at the Spences’—at least till Christmas — if things worked out with Georgina, but now his time with her had suddenly been cut in half.
“Have to leave tomorrow,” he said after putting the phone down.
Georgina said nothing.
At 9:17 p.m. the first Russian salvos could be heard several miles away, their distinctive shuffling noise sounding as if they were chopping the air instead of coming at supersonic speed toward their targets. Peter picked up the TV’s remote control and turned the television off, for, as well as the increasing Russian salvos, an electrical storm was coming in from the Channel. “Better not use the phone either,” he said. “Charge could throw you across the room.”
She barely acknowledged his comment, continuing to read in the soft glow of an Edwardian lamp, its light trapped by heavy blackout drapes. Finally the din of missiles exploding came several miles closer. Suddenly the power was out.
“Okay if I open the drapes?” asked Zeldman. She didn’t answer.
Looking outside at the garden pond, neglected through the winter, he could see, reflected in its icy surface, the stalks of searchlights starting to cluster and intertwine high in the sky to the east. Beyond the garden, yellow slits of headlights came to a standstill — everything stopping during the raid except for a blacked-out commuter train rumbling through the nearby culvert, making its run for the nearest tunnel.
“Right,” said Peter. “I’m off for the shelter. Coming?”
“No, thank you.” She said it as if the missile raid were a mere impertinence and that in any event, it was “too bourgeois” by half to go scuttling into the nearest shelter.
“Suit yourself,” said Zeldman, walking out through the wild shrubs of the English garden toward the shelter Richard Spence had dug not far from an old sun house.
In the momentary lighting of the Nike Hercules air defense batteries around Leatherhead, Georgina saw the ugly, leafless vines of morning glory which had strangled the best of the garden, its wild aspect the result of her mother’s neglect following William’s death. Suddenly, oppressively, the red and bluish flashes of the AA missile batteries nearby, the tang of ozone in the air, the decaying garden, seemed to leap at her in a series of strobe-lit pictures of primeval forces victorious not only in having run riot over the garden, the very semblance of civilization, but over civilization itself.
The Russian rockets were crashing closer and closer, and a rain of red-tailed missiles could be seen plummeting down over Leatherhead and nearby in Oxshott, devastating what had been heavily camouflaged army staging areas.
A salvo of Zhukov J rockets, their long crimson exhausts plainly, if only momentarily, visible, their harsh metallic retching sound rending the air, crashed into the nearby culvert, the explosion blowing out most of the Spences’s windows, the living room’s heavy blackout drapes sucked frighteningly inward, swirling about her but stopping most of the flying glass.
Zeldman, in the shelter, heard the implosion — glass shattering. Within seconds, drawing the Nansen slide bolt and wrenching the heavy door open, he was racing up the short flight of sunken brick steps as Georgina, her nerve breaking as more salvos rained about the culvert, fled the house toward the shelter.
In another flash of a Nike Hercules battery and the glow of fuel dump fires, the two of them all but crashed into one another in the garden. It would have been funny but for Georgina’s frantic panic.
Leading her back to the shelter, Peter Zeldman said little apart from a few quietly given instructions, and sat holding her, stroking her hair, trying to calm her down. For a long time her body remained rigid, tense with fear, but then slowly she yielded — all her pretenses shattered by the closeness of death, their mutual longing unreined by the dull thumps of the rockets’ explosions bringing danger ever closer, her fingers tearing into him as he lifted her high against the shelter’s damp wall, penetrating her with equally wild abandon, the fullness of her release sweeping over her time and again, the air raid reaching its crescendo, their joy a reverie.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In Montana, coyotes howled in the foothills of Bear Paw Mountain while in the hardened shelters of Strategic Air Command on the snow-covered Great Plains, an air force instructor was telling Rick Stacy and the other eleven silo cadets not to hesitate. “If your partner goes berserk under pressure, you not only have the right but the duty to shoot him or her.” He paused. None of them showed any surprise — which was good. “Now, the air force has taken great pains to select the best possible people for this job. But none of us knows for sure how we’ll perform if things start coming apart — that is, if it comes to a nuclear exchange — if other silos in your sector were to be hit. You all passed A-okay on the simulators, but tomorrow you’ll be in silo on solo ride.”
Stacy smiled across at Melissa Lange. The instructor saw it, gave no sign of disapproval, but made a mental note that these two were to be kept apart in the two-member team drills. You couldn’t stop fraternization. In fact, it could be a stabilizing factor off duty, but you kept them well apart in training and in the silo. Despite the advancement of women in the forces, the no-mixed-sex rule remained inviolate at “Ground Zero.”
“There’s something else I want to mention,” the instructor continued, neat and tan in knife-edged ironed pale blue uniform and tie. “In any crew, you’ll find there’s a tendency for one partner to become leader by default. Know what I mean, Lieutenant Stacy?”
“Yes, sir. One team member relies too heavily on the other.” Stacy looked pleased with himself.
“Not really,” replied the instructor. “You’re all taught to rely on one another, Lieutenant. The problem, however, is when one member habitually relies on the other so that in the event of a slipup by the one who’s been leading, we are likely to risk either aborting launch or executing an inappropriate release at the critical moment. It is not,” the instructor emphasized, “a pilot-copilot situation down there. In the silo there are two of you with equal responsibility. You’re a team. No one of you can launch. And forget all that BS you’ve read about a ‘string and second key’ game where one of you supposedly goes bonkers, shoots the other, and then catapults us into a nuclear exchange by using a connecting string to turn both keys at once. You can’t. We fixed it. You need a two-key insert to initiate your launch procedure.” The instructor paused. “You got that, Corporal Lange?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay. Let’s recap before you all head off to get drunk.” There was a polite ripple of laughter. None of them were heavy drinkers. The air force had carefully checked that out in the psychiatric profile on each recruit. Besides, everyone knew that if they so much as took an aspirin, it had to be reported. If anyone climbed aboard the pickup van and had taken so much as an antihistamine, they’d have to immediately declare themselves DNIA — duty not involving alert. Not to do so carried the same penalty meted out to a fighter pilot who hadn’t reported himself DNIF — a verbal reprimand, a fine, and confined to barracks. With launch crews of necessity required to live in and around the silos, being CB meant staying in the plusher SAC living quarters. But in the middle of the snow-covered prairie with all calls automatically monitored, the only recreation was to watch TV, get laid — difficult, given the long duty hours — eat, get overweight, and risk a WRC — weight reduction course.