“What about Arnie van Damm?”
“Fuck!” Ryan snarled. How had he forgotten Arnie? “Where is he?”
“I don’t know. I can have the Secret Service find out real fast. What about Liz?”
“She’s the one who came up with the brilliant idea that Narmonov isn’t there.”
“Bitch,” Durling observed. He’d worked so hard and wasted so much political capital to get Charlie Alden into that job. “Okay, I’ll try to get through to him. Stand by.”
“Right.”
“The Vice President is calling, sir. Line Six.”
Fowler punched the button. “Make it fast, Roger.”
“Bob, you need to get this thing back under control.”
“What do you think I’ve been trying to do!”
Durling was sitting in a high-backed leather chair. He closed his eyes. The tone of the answer said it all. “Bob, you have made things worse instead of better. You have to step back from this for a moment. Take a deep breath, walk around the room—think! There is no reason to expect that the Russians did this. Now, I just talked to CIA, and they said—”
“Ryan, you mean?”
“Yes, he just filled me in and—”
“Ryan’s been lying to me.”
“Bullshit, Bob.” Durling kept his voice level and reasonable. He called it his country-doctor voice. “He’s too much of a pro for that.”
“Roger, I know you mean well, but I don’t have time for psychoanalysis. We have what may be a nuclear strike about to be launched on us. The good news, I suppose, is that you’ll survive. I wish you luck, Roger. Wait—there’s a Hot Line message coming in.”
PRESIDENT FOWLER:
THIS IS ANDREY IL’YCH NARMONOV COMMUNICATING TO YOU.
THE SOVIET UNION HAS TAKEN NO AGGRESSIVE ACTS AGAINST THE UNITED STATES. NONE AT ALL. WE HAVE NO INTEREST IN HARMING YOUR COUNTRY. WE WISH TO BE LEFT ALONE AND TO LIVE IN PEACE.
I HAVE AUTHORIZED NO ACTION WHATEVER AGAINST ANY AMERICAN FORCES OR CITIZENS, YET YOU THREATEN US. IF YOU ATTACK US, WE MUST THEN ATTACK YOU ALSO, AND MILLIONS WILL DIE. WILL IT ALL BE AN ACCIDENT?
THE CHOICE IS YOURS. I CANNOT STOP YOU FROM ACTING IRRATIONALLY. I HOPE THAT YOU WILL REGAIN CONTROL OF YOURSELF. TOO MANY LIVES ARE AT RISK FOR EITHER OF US TO ACT IRRATIONALLY.
“At least we’re still getting these,” Goodley noted.
“Yeah, it just makes things so much better. It’s going to set him off,” Ryan announced. “This one’s really going to do it. You can’t tell an irrational person that he’s losing it....”
“Ryan, this is Durling.” Ryan fairly leaped at the button.
“Yes, Mr. Vice President.”
“He didn’t—he didn’t listen, and then this new one came in, and he reacted rather badly to it.”
“Sir, can you open a channel to SAC?”
“No, I’m afraid not. They’re on a conference call with NORAD and Camp David. Part of the problem, Jack, the President knows he’s vulnerable there and he’s afraid—well...”
“Yeah, everyone’s afraid, aren’t we?”
There was silence for a moment, and Ryan wondered if Durling felt guilty for being in a place of relative safety.
At Rocky Flats, the residue samples were loaded into a gamma-ray spectrometer. It had taken longer than expected, due to a minor equipment problem. The operators stood behind a shield and used lead-lined rubber gloves and yard-long tongs to move the samples out of the lead bucket, then waited for the technician to activate the machine.
“Okay—this is a hot one, all right.”
The machine had two displays, one on a cathode-ray tube, with a backup paper printout. It measured the energy of the photoelectrons generated by the gamma radiation within the instrument. The precise energy state of these electrons identified both the element and the isotope of the source. These showed as lines or spikes on the graphic display. The relative intensity of the various energy lines—shown as the height of the spike—determined the proportions. A more precise measurement would require insertion of the sample in a small reactor for reactivation, but this system was good enough for the moment.
The technician flipped to the beta channel. “Whoa, look at that tritium line! What did you say the yield on this thing was?”
“Under fifteen.”
“Well, it had a shitload of tritium, doc—look at that!” The technician—he was a master’s candidate—made a notation on his pad and switched back to the gamma channel. “Okay ... plutonium, we’ve got some 239, 240; neptunium, americium, gadolinium, curium, promethium, uranium—some U-235, some 238 ... I—this was a sophisticated beast, guys.”
“Fizzle,” one of the NESTers said, reading the numbers. “We’re looking at the remains of fizzle. This was not an IND. All that tritium.... Christ, this was supposed to be a two-stager, that’s too much for a boosted fission weapon—it’s a fucking H-Bomb!”
The technician adjusted his dials to fine-tune the display. “Look at the 239/240 mix....”
“Get the book!”
Sitting on the shelf opposite the spectrometer was a three-inch binder of red vinyl.
“Savannah River,” the technician said. “They’ve always had that gadolinium problem.... Hanford does it another way ... they always seem to generate too much promethium.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Trust me,” the technician said. “My thesis is on contamination problems at the plutonium plants. Here’s the numbers!” He read them off.
A NESTer flipped to the index, then back to a page. “It’s close! Close! Say the gadolinium again!”
“Zero point zero five eight times ten to the minus 7, plus or minus point zero zero two.”
“Holy Mary Mother of God!” The man turned the book around.
“Savannah River.... That’s not possible.”
“Nineteen sixty-eight. It was a vintage year. It’s our stuff. It’s our fucking plutonium.”
The senior NESTer blinked his disbelief away. “Okay, let me call D.C.”
“Can’t,” the technician said as he refined his readings. “The long-distance lines are all down.”
“Where’s Larry?”
“Aurora Presbyterian, working with the FBI guys. I put the number on a Post-it over the phone in the corner. I think he’s working D.C. through them.”
“Murray.”
“Hoskins—I just heard from Rocky Flats. Dan, this sounds nuts: the NEST team says the weapon used American plutonium. I asked him to confirm it, and he did—said he asked the same thing. The plutonium came from the DOE plant at Savannah River, turned out in February 1968, K Reactor. They have chapter and verse, he says they can even tell you what part of K Reactor—sounds like bullshit to me, too, but he’s the friggin’ expert.”
“Walt, how the hell am I going to get anybody to believe that?”
“Dan, that’s what the man told me.”
“I need to talk to him.”
“The phone lines are down, remember? I can get him in here in a few minutes.”
“Do that, and do it fast.”
“Yeah, Dan?”
“Jack, the NEST team just reported into our Denver office. The material in the bomb was American.”
“What?”
“Listen, Jack, we’ve all said that, okay? The NEST team got fallout samples and analyzed them, and they say the uranium—no, plutonium—came from Savannah River, 1968. I have the NEST team leader coming in to the Denver Field Division now. The long-distance lines are down, but I can patch through our system and you can talk to him directly.”
Ryan looked at the Science and Technology officer. “Tell me what you think.”
“Savannah River, they’ve had problems there, like a thousand-pound MUF.”
“Muff?”
“M-U-F, acronym: material unaccounted for. Lost material.”
“Terrorists,” Ryan said positively.
“Starting to make sense,” S&T agreed.
“Oh, God, and he won’t liste
n to me now!” Well, there was still Durling.
“That’s hard to believe,” the Vice President said.
“Sir, it’s hard data, checked by the NEST team at Rocky Flats, it’s hard, scientific data. It may sound nuts, but it’s objective fact.” I hope, oh God, I hope. Durling could hear Ryan thinking it. “Sir, this was definitely not a Russian weapon—that’s the important thing. We are certain it was not a Soviet weapon. Tell the President right now!”
“Will do.” Durling nodded to the Air Force communications sergeant.
“Yes, Roger,” the President said.
“Sir, we’ve just received some important information.”
“What now?” The President sounded tired unto death.
“It came to me from CIA, but they got it from the FBI. The NEST team has identified the bomb material as definitely not Russian. They think the bomb material is American.”
“That is crazy!” Borstein announced. “We do not have any missing weapons. We take damned good care of those things!”
“Roger, you got that from Ryan, didn’t you?”
“Yes, Bob, I did.”
Durling heard a long sigh over the line. “Thank you.”
The Vice President’s hand trembled as he lifted the other phone. “He didn’t buy it.”
“He’s got to buy it, sir, it’s true!”
“I’m out of ideas here. You were right, Jack, he’s not listening to anyone now.”
“New Hot Line message, sir.”
PRESIDENT NARMONOV, Jack read:
YOU ACCUSE ME OF IRRATIONALITY. WE HAVE TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND DEAD, AN ATTACK ON OUR FORCES IN BERLIN, AN ATTACK ON OUR NAVY BOTH IN THE MEDITERRANEAN AND THE PACIFIC....
“He’s close to doing it. Goddamn it! We’ve got the information he needs to stop this thing in its tracks and—”
“I’m out of ideas,” Durling said over the speakerphone. “These damned messages over the Hot Line are making things worse instead of better, and—”
“That seems to be the key problem, doesn’t it?” Ryan looked up. “Ben, you good driving in snow?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Come on!” Ryan raced out of the room. They caught an elevator to the first floor and Jack ran into the security room. “Keys to the car!”
“Here, sir!” A very frightened young man tossed them over. The CIA’s security force kept its vehicles just off the VIP lot. The blue GMC Jimmy four-wheel-drive was unlocked.
“Where are we going?” Goodley asked as he got into the driver’s-side door.
“Pentagon, River Entrance—and get us there fast.”
“What was it?” The torpedo had circled something but not exploded, and finally run out of fuel.
“Not enough mass to set off the magnetic exploder—too small to hit directly ... must have been a decoy,” Dubinin said. “Where’s that original intercept?” A sailor handed it over. “‘Propeller disabled by collision,’ Goddamn it! We were tracking a bad power plant, not a damaged screw.” The Captain smashed his fist down on the chart table hard enough to draw blood. “Come north, go active!”
“Oh, shit, conn, sonar, we have an active low-frequency sonar bearing one-nine-zero.”
“Warm up the weapons!”
“Sir, if we deploy the outboard we’ll get another two or three knots,” Claggett said.
“Too noisy!” Ricks snapped back.
“Sir, we’re up in the surface noise. The high-freqs from the outboard motor won’t matter much up here. His active sonar is low-freq, and that active stuffs liable to detect us whether we’re noisy or not. What we need now is distance, sir, if he gets too close the Orion can’t engage to support us.”
“We have to take him out.”
“Bad move, sir. We’re on SNAPCOUNT status now, if we have to shoot, that takes priority. Putting a unit in the water will tell us just where to look. Captain, we need distance to keep out of his active sonar, and we can’t risk a shot.”
“No! Weapons officer, set it up!”
“Aye, sir.”
“Communications, tell the Orion to get us some help!”
“Here’s the last one, Colonel.”
“Well, that was fast enough,” the regimental commander said.
“The boys are getting lots of practice,” the Major standing next to him observed as the tenth and final RV was lifted off the SS-18 at Alyesk. “Be careful there, Sergeant.”
It was ice that did it. A few minutes earlier some snow had blown into the missile capsule. The shuffling of boots had crushed and melted it, but then the subzero temperatures had refrozen it into an invisible, paper-thin skim of ice. The sergeant was in the process of stepping back off the fold-down catwalk when he slipped, and his wrench went flying. It bounced off the railing, twirling like a baton for a moment. The sergeant grabbed for it but missed, and it went down.
“Run!” the Colonel screamed. The sergeant needed no encouragement. The corporal on the crane swung the warhead clear and himself jumped from the vehicle. They all knew to go upwind.
The wrench nearly made it all the way down, but it struck an interior fitting and went sideways, gouging the skin of the first stage in two places. The missile skin was also the missile tank-age, and both the fuel and oxidizer were released. The two chemicals formed small clouds—only a few grams of each were leaking—but the chemicals were hypergolic. They ignited on contact. That happened two minutes after the wrench began its fall.
The explosion was a powerful one. It knocked the Colonel down, over two hundred meters from the silo. He instinctively rolled behind a thick pine tree as the crushing overpressure wave swept by. He looked a moment later to see the silo topped by a pillar of flame. His men had all made it—a miracle, he thought. His next thought reflected the humor that so often accompanies an escape from death: Well, that’s one less missile for the Americans to bother us about!
The Defense Support Program Satellite already had its sensor focused on the Russian missile fields. The energy bloom was unmistakable. The signal was downlinked to Alice Springs in Australia, and from there back up to a USAF communications satellite, which relayed it to North America. It took just over half a second.
“Possible launch—possible launch at Alyesk!”
In that moment everything changed for Major General Joe Borstein. His eyes focused on the real-time display, and his first thought was that it had happened, despite everything, all the changes, all the progress, all the treaties, somehow it had happened, and he was watching it and he would be there to watch it all happen until the SS-18 with his name on it landed on Cheyenne Mountain. This wasn’t dropping bombs on the Paul Doumer Bridge, or hassling fighters over Germany. This was the end of life.
Borstein’s voice was the sound of sandpaper. “I only see one ... where’s the bird?”
“No bird no bird no bird,” a female captain announced. “The bloom is too big, more like an explosion. No bird, no bird. This is not a launch, I repeat this is not a launch.”
Borstein saw that his hands were shaking. They hadn’t done that the time he’d been shot down, nor the time he’d crashed at Edwards, nor the times he’d driven airplanes through weather too foul for hailstones. He looked around at his people and saw in their faces the same thing he’d just felt in the pit of his stomach. Somehow it had been like watching a dreadfully scary movie to this point, but it was not a movie now. He lifted the phone to SAC and switched off the input to the Gold Phone line to Camp David.
“Pete, did you copy that?”
“I sure did, Joe.”
“We, uh, we better settle this thing down, Pete. The President’s losing it.”
CINC-SAC paused for a beat before responding. “I almost lost it, but I just got it back.”
“Yeah, I hear you, Pete.”
“What the hell was that?”
Borstein flipped the switch back on. “Mr. President, that was an explosion, we think, in the Alyesk missile fields. We, uh, sure had a scare there for a moment, but there is no b
ird in the air—say again, Mr. President, there are no birds flying now. That was a definite false alarm.”
“What does it mean?”
“Sir, I do not know that. Perhaps—they were servicing the missiles, sir, and maybe they had an accident. It’s happened before—we had the same problem with the Titan-II.”
“General Borstein is correct,” CINC-SAC confirmed soberly. “That’s why we got rid of the Titan-II ... Mr. President?”
“Yes, General?”
“Sir, I recommend we try to cool things down some more, sir.”
“And just how do we do that?” Fowler wanted to know. “What if that was related to their alert activity?”
The ride down the George Washington Parkway was uneventful. Though covered with snow, Goodley had maintained a steady forty miles per hour in four-wheel drive, and not lost control once, getting around abandoned cars like a race-car driver at Daytona. He pulled into the River/Mall Entrance to the Pentagon. The civilian guard there was backed up by a soldier now, whose M-16 rifle was undoubtedly loaded.
“CIA!” Goodley said.
“Wait.” Ryan handed over his badge. “In the slot. I think it’ll work here.”
Goodley did as he was told. Ryan’s high-level badge had the right electronic code for this security device. The gate went up, and the road barrier went down, clearing the way. The soldier nodded. If the pass worked, everything had to be okay, right?
“Right up to the first set of doors.”
“Park it?”
“Leave it! You come in with me.”
Security inside the River Entrance was also beefed up. Jack tried to pass through the metal detector, but was stopped by pocket change that he then threw on the floor in a rage. “NMCC?”
“Come with me, sir.”