In the darkness Alex couldn’t see much, but he knew what was there.
“They’ll never get through that,” he said. “We should know, eh? We learned the hard way?”
“Yes, sir,” said the engineer sergeant.
The air was crisp and cold and above them the stars towered, spinning firewheels, clouds of distant cosmic gas. All around it was quiet, except for the press of the breeze through the trees and the occasional mumble or shiver of a man in the dark.
“And just in time too,” Alex said. “They’ll be coining soon, and in force.”
“No signs yet?”
“No, it’s all quiet down there. They brought some trucks up a few minutes back.”
“Reinforcements,” somebody said. “We hurt them bad, they needed more men.”
“Sir!”
The call arose from a dozen places on the perimeter. Alex turned with his binoculars, even as he heard the roar. At first he could see nothing, but then someone screamed, “The road! The road!”
He lifted his binoculars and watched, and even at this distance could make out the spectacle. A plane came down and even though it was only a phenomenon of landing lights, glowing cockpit, and blinkers at the wingtips, it seemed heavy in the air as it floated awkwardly down, touched the straight-running line of the highway, bounced once, twice, skidded a bit as a braking chute popped, and then slowed.
“C-130,” Alex said.
The plane eventually halted to let out its men; then it simply taxied off the roadway and into the fields, where it fell brokenly into a ditch to make room for another plane, which in seconds followed the same drunken path downward to the highway. Then another, and finally a fourth.
“Very neat,” said Alex. “Nicely done. Good pilots, brave men, landing on a roadway.”
“More visitors?” said one of the others.
“Elite troops. Rangers, I suppose. Well, well, it’s going to be an interesting next few hours.”
He looked at his watch. Midnight was coming. But would it come soon enough?
1900
There wasn’t much to it, really: Dick Puller was a great believer in simplicity and firepower, not ornamentation and cleverness. What he’d come up with seemed like something out of World War II, say, the Pointe du Hoc assault at Normandy, a Ranger legend.
Here, as there, the Rangers would carry the primary site assault responsibility, moving over the same ground as Bravo earlier in the day. There were more of them, and they were much more proficient. Their commanding officer, ah old Puller buddy, had already dispatched the men directly from the planes to the mountain. They were already moving up the hill. They would be supported on the right by Third Infantry, which with its longer-range M-14s would provide accurate covering fire, before moving in after the Rangers had reached the perimeter. On the radio the Rangers would be Halfback, Third Infantry Beanstalk.
“Lieutenant Dill?”
“sir?”
“Dill, congrats. You and your people get to sit this one out. I want you on the left, separated from the main assault force, as high up the crest as you can get. Point being, we may need stretcher bearers if casualties are high, we may need runners if these guys can jam our radios, and we may need the extra firepower if they’re pressed and try to break down the hill in your direction. I make it map coordinates Lima-niner-deuce, have you got that? You can find that point in the dark?”
“Got it,” said Dill, trying to keep the elation out of his voice.
Meanwhile, Puller continued, the Delta Assault Team, the actual shaft-busters whose job it was to rappel down the elevator chute, break into the corridor, fight their way to the launch control center, and disable it, would be choppered in when the launch control facility was taken. Along with them would be Peter himself, ready to do battle (he hoped) with his nemesis, the door.
“Any luck on the door, Dr. Thiokol?”
Peter smiled wretchedly. His tweed coat was rumpled, and sweat soaked through his dense blue shirt. The white delta of his T-shirt showed in his open collar.
“I’m working on it,” he said, too brightly. “Confidence is high.”
The party would start at 2200 hours, Puller continued, as the various units continued to move into position until that time. Peter had told them that given the key vault’s construction, the earliest the people inside could get through it was midnight.
“You’re sure of that?” Puller asked for what must have been the millionth time.
Yes, he was. It was the only thing he was sure of. Peter nodded.
Puller turned to the group.
“Any questions?”
“What’s the go code?” somebody asked.
“We go on ‘Heaven is falling.’ From an old poem. Got it? ‘Heaven is falling.’”
An officer wanted to know about medical evacuation; he was told that the Delta insertion choppers would double as medevac ships, but they wouldn’t be active until after the insertion.
Tac Air?
Two of the Delta choppers had been fitted with Emerson mini-tats, that is, rotary-barreled 7.62-mm General Electric miniguns on carriages that looked like a 1934 Johnson outboard motor and hung beneath the skids. In the early moments of the assault, these ships, call-signed Sixgun-One and Sixgun-two, would he available to provide suppressive fire on enemy strong points. But since there was a premium on the choppers, they wouldn’t close within one thousand feet of the targets and their target-time would never be more than twenty-five seconds, because of the Stingers, a devastating SAM, as demonstrated earlier.
“We lose more than two helicopters, then we have trouble getting all our Delta people in there in time,” Puller said. “It’s like the Iranian rescue mission. We need X number of birds to get the job done and there’s not a lot of redundancy in all this. Sorry, that’s just the way it is. You’ll lose some people because we can’t get ’em medevacked out and you’ll lose some people because our air support isn’t top rate, but the alternative is to wait until more stuff can arrive. And that’s no alternative. We go with everything we’ve got.”
“Everything?” somebody wanted to know.
“Yes. In the assault reinforcements I’ve asked the state policemen to join. Anybody know any boy scouts?”
There was some hollow laughter.
“What about our fire restrictions?” the Ranger executive officer asked. “Can we use grenades with that computer up there?”
“Dr. Thiokol?”
Peter cleared his throat.
“I’m sorry, this has to be a gunfight. The titanium casing ought to be able to withstand any number of small-arms hits, up to 7.62 full metal jackets, but I can’t sanction explosives. If you could stick with the gunfire and forgo the explosives, we might get out of this. If that computer goes, it’s all over.”
“Suppose they mine the computer to blow?”
“They won’t,” said Peter. Of this one thing he was absolutely positive. “No, not Aggressor-One. There’s just a little part of him that thinks he’s smarter than everybody. The limited-try code will keep us out, because that’s the way his mind works.”
And because that’s what I designed it to do. He wants to use my stuff to beat me.
Peter tried to think about the man.
What have I clone to deserve such an enemy? How did I become his Moby Dick? What did I do to him?
“What about in the shaft? Can we use explosives?”
“Negative again,” said Peter. “I know you’ve got to use explosives to get down there. But once you get close to the command center, I’m sorry to tell you you can’t. We just don’t know quite what would happen if you blew the wiring. You might make it impossible for me to abort the launch if they’ve gone to terminal countdown, which is tricky enough anyway; and you might even cause a launch. You’ve got to do it with guns once you’re close to the place.”
“Is there any late word on what’s under that canvas?” an officer wanted to know.
“Our analysts in the Pentagon think i
t might be the emplacement of a heavy artillery piece,” said Puller. “In Nam, we used 105s to fire fléchette canisters at the NVA. It’s possible they brought a heavy piece up there disassembled. Or maybe it’s a Vulcan or one of those fast-firing Czech 23-mm cannons. You’ll know soon enough.”
When he wasn’t talking, Peter sat with a kind of rigid politeness through all this. He knew it wouldn’t do for these guys to see into what he was thinking. But there was a joke in it all, and he thought of the line, all dressed up and no place to go, for that’s exactly what it might work out to be if he couldn’t get them through the door.
“And then Dr. Thiokol opens the door, and Delta goes in, and it’s all over but the cheering,” said Puller. “Right, Dr. Thiokol?” Peter nodded.
Right, he thought, nodding politely, except he had no idea in hell what the door code could be and so knew only one terrible truth: Aggressor-One had done it.
Welcome to Armageddon.
Bells were ringing, men were hopping around.
Peter looked up from his daze. He heard them shouting, a lot of nos, and no ways. The general discipline of the briefing was completely disintegrating.
“What’s going on?” he asked the man next to him.
“Didn’t you hear, man?” said the fellow, a helicopter pilot. “They got an ID on these guys. They say they’re Russians.”
And he heard Skazy talking about something called a Spetsnaz Silo Seizure team, but others were saying no, no, it couldn’t be, why’d they want to blow away their own country, what the hell did it mean?
And then there was silence.
Peter saw they were all looking at him.
“Dr. Thiokol, here. You make some sense of this for us, will you please?”
He handed Peter a yellow teletype sheet, with the words PRIORITY: FLASH across the top. He read the contents swiftly.
FBI hq believe team leader of aggressor forces at South Mountain to be PASHIN, ARKADY Colonel-General, GRU, First Deputy of GRU, head of Directorate V, Operational Intelligence. Subject PASHIN according to CIA records has primary responsibility in GRU the past decade for penetration of U.S. strategic warfare compounds. He is a graduate of the Intelligence Faculty of the General Staff Academy; the Training Centre of Illegals; the Military-Diplomatic Academy; the Military Institute of Foreign Languages, where he learned to speak brilliant English; the Special Faculty of Higher Communications; the Kiev Higher Military Command School; the Special Faculty of the Second Kharkov Higher Military Aviation and Engineering School, and the General Staff Academy. He spent a decade in United States attached to the Soviet U.N. mission. One identifying peculiarity is that he is only high-ranking Soviet command-staff figure on record to have formally rejected the use of his patronymic. In November of 1982 ARKADY SIMONOVICH PASHIN formally notified his headquarters that he would henceforth be known simply as ARKADY PASHIN. No information is available as to the reason for such an unprecedented decision. None of our sources have any idea as to its meaning. One last item: Subject PASHIN has been twice named as possible sponsor of group known as PAMYAT (Memory), thought to be a collection of right wing thinkers agitated into action by Gorbachev’s apparent willingness to meet with West, sign an INF, and to permit policy of glasnost. PAMYAT has senior analysts worried; information on it, however, is scant. More follows.
Peter put it down.
“Is it some kind of coup?” asked Dick Puller. “Would the Soviet military, or this nut-case PAMYAT outfit, be taking over the country, and they want their finger on a nuclear trigger somewhere for a certain period of time?”
“No,” said Peter. He realized in a second what it was all about. He saw it. He had been pulled along the pathways of the same argument, knew its temptations, its hypnotic allure. He knew how it could seduce a man into believing in the moral good of pushing the button.
“No, it’s not a coup. It’s simply logic, or rather strategic logic, and the willingness to follow it to the end.”
He gave a grim little smile. He knew Pashin, knew how his mind worked, because it worked the way his own did.
“You see,” he said, “it’s really very simple. This Pashin … he’s done something no one else has ever done. He’s figured out how to win World War Three.”
He felt the power of Pashin’s mind, its reach, its grasp, its subtleties and, most of all, its will.
He took a deep breath.
“Pashin believes that MX is a first strike weapon, and that when it is fully operational and we have the advantage, we will push the button and blow them away—furthermore, that by our own logic, we have to. That’s where these missiles take us. And since the MX is so clearly superior in terms of accuracy and silo-busting capacity and since our own command, communication, and control system is so fragile and so unable to withstand a Soviet first strike, we’ve got to use it. It’s use it or lose it, and he thinks we’ll use it. That’s his first position: it’s unassailable, and I can’t say—no man can say—that it’s not a distinct possibility. It’s not that we want to, it’s that we’ll be afraid not to.”
There was silence.
“So from his position the choice isn’t between peace and war, it’s between losing and winning an already inevitable war. That’s all. Once you accept that, it all follows, particularly if he’s of a conservative bent, as his membership in this PAMYAT thing would indicate. There’s going to be a nuclear war. It will be fought as soon as our system is operational, in six months to a year, via an American first strike with clear weapons superiority, and a complete victory for the United States, with all their cities ruined and all their birds fractured in their silos and all their command bunkers turned to barbecue pits. Or it will be fought now, tonight, in a few hours, and”—he paused, letting it sink in—“and they will win.”
There was silence in the room.
“This is how it works. He fires our MX into the Soviet Union. But it’s important to understand the targeting of this particular missile. Those ten warheads are zeroed on what we call third and fourth generation hard targets, as opposed to soft targets such as cities, people, that sort of thing. Our W87s are sublimely accurate; they never miss; they’re sure as death and taxes. And because of their accuracy the bombs can be quite small. So the ten warheads deploy against three key long-range radar installations, the Soviet air defense command, a deep leadership bunker thirty miles outside Moscow—the point is to decapitate their leadership—and five Siberian missile silos, which, by the time they strike, will be empty. The reason, of course, is that once the Soviet radar identifies the ten incomings, the Russians go crazy and punch out with everything they’ve got. Our ten nukes detonate with a total megatonnage of thirty-five; they take out the installations I’ve named and they kill—I don’t know, tops maybe thirty thousand people. Seven to nine minutes later, they hit us with four thousand megatons; they tag all our cities and missile silos; they EMP our radars and computers to craziness, they kill maybe three hundred million of us; they effectively wipe us out. That’s it. Game, set, and match, Soviet Union. Essentially the point of this Pashin’s exercise is to goad his own country into what amounts to a first strike, because the premium on a first strike is so high. But of course neither the Politburo nor any sane command group would push the button. So he does it himself, maybe with the help or under the inspiration of this Pamyat thing, and with this little commando unit, based on his intelligence. See? It’s easy. It’s more than easy, it’s brilliant. And when it’s over, he climbs out of the mountain, a chopper picks him up, and he’s tsar of all the Russias.”
“But our subs, with our subs we can—”
“No,” said Peter, “sorry, but they’ve got our subs zeroed. They can take some of them out in the first few minutes of the spasm. Then they can hunt down and kill the Tacamo VLF aircraft that are our primary sub links and are set to deliver the retaliation message. They’ll go straight for those babies, jam them, EMP them, or just blow them away. The subs will be out of contact, and will wait to fire while the
Russians hunt them down in the following couple of weeks. At the worst, they’ll have plenty of time to evacuate their cities. They can outlast or outsmart the subs if they have to and Pashin has forced them to. That’s all; he’ll make them beat our subs. They aren’t going to want to fight that fight, but he’s taken the element of choice out of it. And he’ll make them do it. And in a terrible, deep way he probably thinks he’s cleaning up the mess the rest of his leaders have made. He’s the cleaning lady.”
“Why didn’t he take over a Russian missile compound and get his first strike that way?” somebody asked.
“Because this is the only independent-launch-capable silo in the world. It’s the only one he could take where he himself could push the button. He’s made the hardest choice of all, but by his lights, it’s the logical one. I suppose by a certain moral system it’s even the right choice. He’s not a madman, really, he’s just operating within the rules of the game, the game that his country and ours invented.”
“Who are those men with him?” somebody asked.
“Washington’s sure it’s Spetsnaz,” said Major Skazy. “Soviet Special Forces. In the control of the GRU, not the regular Army, and remember this Pashin is a big-time GRU heavyweight. Anyway, they’ve been trained in silo-seizure and blooded in Afghanistan. That explains those tans and the false teeth, meant to cover up their foreign origin. And there were sixty? That’s four fifteen man teams, which is the operational unit in the Spetsnaz organization. And it explains where the goddamned Stingers came from. We’ve shipped Stingers to the Muhajadeem, to take out the Soviet MI-26 gunships. These guys must have bounced a shipment, and they’ve turned the stuff around on us. These are very, very good guys. That’s why they’ve been so tough.”
But Puller hadn’t been listening. He’d been thinking. He’d gotten close to the last wrinkle. “Dr. Thiokol,” he said suddenly, “doesn’t your theory fall apart on the issue of our response to their launch? As soon as our radar sees the Russian birds coming, we launch. And they’re blown away. And the world dies in the rad—”