“But maybe we can’t. They’re planning something big for tomorrow night and it’s all bound to come out.”
“Not from what Les said. Remember? ‘The world will know what happened but it can’t be allowed to find out how it happened. If the truth came out you’d have a global war.’ All right—first implication, if the truth doesn’t come out we won’t have a global war.”
“Are you saying it’s better to let them go ahead with what they’re doing than to stop them?”
“Not at all, Top. I’m saying we want to stop them without anyone knowing we’ve stopped them—without anyone knowing there was anything that had to be stopped. We don’t want to crowd Belsky into a corner where he’s got no choice. If this news gets out it’ll wreck whatever slim chance we may have to negotiate a withdrawal of these people in secret. If we can reach Belsky before tomorrow night we need a bargaining position and we won’t have one if the public is onto it. We’ve got to leave Belsky an exit—convince him we won’t expose this thing if he’ll back away and get his people out of the country without attracting attention. When he sees the alternative—a likely war between our countries—he’ll have to abort his program and pull his people out. And the public never needs to know a thing about it.”
“It’s a contradiction,” Spode said. “It won’t work unless we can reach Belsky, and we can’t reach Belsky unless we get the whole world out there hunting for him.”
“We’ve got to try it, Top. That’s why I wanted to be the one to talk to your people at the Agency. They’ve got to realize the urgent need to keep this under wraps.”
“They’ll be hard to convince. I mean, what the KGB wants is to keep it covered up and if we played along with that we’d be accused of talking treason. In this game the first rule is never do what the other guy wants you to do.”
“Once Belsky knows we’re onto him it’s no longer a question of what he wants us to do.” Forrester shook his head. “I could get the President’s ear, Top, but if there’s any chance at all of our neutralizing Belsky it’s better if the President doesn’t know a thing about it until after it’s done.”
“It’s a hell of a long shot you want to try.”
“It’s the only shot I’ve got, isn’t it?”
Spode’s eyes widened slowly. “Now I see what you’re doing. You don’t want me to make any phone calls at all, do you? Because right now the Agency only knows Belsky’s here, they don’t know anything else about it, and you’d just as soon it stayed right inside this room because if you can reach Belsky and get him to call if off then nobody at all has to know about it. Nobody. You’d rather never have the President find out at all. The President or anybody else outside of you and me.”
Forrester nodded. In the hall mirror he glimpsed his own face and saw the hard glitter of the yellow-flecked eyes. “You had to see that for yourself, Top. The Agency is already looking for Belsky and maybe they’ll find him and maybe they won’t. I don’t think we’d improve the chances of finding him by telling the Agency what we know. It would increase the risk of exposure without increasing the chance of success.”
“But you’re ready to let me walk out the door anyhow and call them if I want to, if I think it has to be done. Why? Because I’ve got Les’s gun in my pocket?”
“No. Because it has to be your decision, not mine.”
“I don’t see that,” Spode said.
“If you thought you could head off a world war by walking out that door, and if I told you not to walk out that door, and if I told you I was right and you were wrong and by walking out that door you would be starting a world war, not stopping one, and if after all that you were still dead certain you could prevent war by walking out that door, what would you do?”
“Hell, I’d walk out the door.”
“Then if I meant to keep you here against your own judgment I’d have to kill you, wouldn’t I. Because if you thought the fate of the world was at stake you’d take every chance to get away and spread the alarm. The only way I could insure your silence permanently would be to kill you.”
Spode was watching him with fascinated alarm. Forrester said, “It simply isn’t in me to kill you, Top, and that’s why it has to be your own decision.”
There was a long interval with the rain clattering on the porch steps and thunder crashing around the house and finally Top said, “Christ people are always after me to make the stinking decisions.”
“It’s up to you. I can’t decide for you.” Forrester walked away from him, toward Ronnie.
Spode said, “There’s the alternative. Bring Ronnie around. She’s the only thing we have to get close to the rest of them. Try ammonia. Slap her if you have to.”
Forrester looked up and saw Spode belting the slicker on.
Forrester’s head dipped. “You’re going, then.”
“Not to blow the whistle.”
“Then where?”
“Outside. On the hill. I’ll dig a hole for Les. If I bury him before it quits raining the storm should wash away the signs of digging. All right?”
Forrester inhaled deeply and slowly, let it out tightly and said, “All right.”
Chapter Nineteen
Lieutenant Colonel Fred Winslow left his underground headquarters at four o’clock Saturday afternoon and said to the First Lieutenant in the Outer office, “Just going to have a look around. Page me on the PA system if I’m needed.”
“Yes, sir. You’re not going off the base.”
“That’s right,” Winslow replied dismally and went out into the corridor. To his left it sloped upward toward the above-ground entrance a hundred yards and two forty-five-degree bends away. He turned to the right, into the long ringing concrete tunnel that went nearly three hundred yards to the hub from which a spider of side tunnels gave access to the several ROG commands and beyond them the silos. Enlisted men in hard hats saluted him as they went by, holding their ID badges ready for the checkpoints. It was hermetically cool and dry but sweat rolled freely along his flushed face and dark circles stained the armpits of his shirt. Fatigue was gritty in his eyes; he walked flatfooted, his physical exhaustion compounded by the strain. Twenty-six and a half hours yet to go; he popped a go-pill into his mouth, knowing it would make his tongue dry and screw his nerves to a jittery tautness, knowing he would need more pills before it was done, knowing he would survive them (if he survived nothing else) because gradually he was learning that he was capable of doing and suffering things he could barely imagine.
At the door to the Communications Center he plucked his shirt away from his chest and plugged his ID card into the KMS machine and when the door clicked he went inside and nodded to the sentry.
Eight enlisted men manned the phones and radios and although only one of them had had significance for him before today, he now knew that all eight of them were Amergrad alumni. At the end of the narrow chamber the small steel door stood open so that he saw the tangle of cables and wires in the service tunnel beyond. Ludlum had his head in the doorway but the sentry spoke and Ludlum’s back registered Winslow’s presence; Ludlum straightened up, turned and grinned at him with the satisfaction of a workman whose hands were turning out a good job. He had been given an order and he was doing a superb job of carrying it out and that was all that ever mattered.
Ludlum hitched at his trousers with the flats of his wrists and beckoned. “Come have a look.”
Winslow made his way between the radiomen’s stools and when Ludlum climbed into the service tunnel Winslow followed him, folding his body over to fit through the small doorway.
Six men were at work with oxyacetylene torches, cutters, pliers, screwdrivers, soldering guns, wires and cables insulated in plastic of various hues. The smell of the sweat of the men’s tension reeked in the air. One man was canted vertiginously over a bracing strut, reaching and pulling at a cable; Winslow heard gristle snap in the man’s shoulder and saw a drop of sweat drip from the man’s nose onto the knotted wiring below. The men were amorphous shapes in the strange li
ght: the tunnel had ceiling fixtures but the workmen had augmented them with battery floods to get cross-lighting that would mat out the confusion of sharp wire shadows.
“We’re fat on it,” Ludlum said. “Christ it pays to be prepared. Like Boy Scouts, hey Fred? See, the hot-line phones come in right through here along with all the rest of the communications. Those co-ax cables there. We’re taking our time, splicing and tapping into all the phone lines. We’ve got room enough to post our own dummy NORAD and hot-line operators in here when the time comes—they’ll sound exactly as if they’re in Colorado Springs and Washington. We’ve got plenty of time and I don’t figure to cut the real lines until the very last minute. Der Tag. Nobody’s going to have a clue beforehand and nobody’s going to have time to get suspicious once the party starts.”
“What about incoming calls?”
“We’ll be plugged into those too. Our operators will answer as if everything was normal down here. It’s no sweat, Nick got us the codes and signals right on schedule this morning.”
“Isn’t it a bigger headache cutting off the radio net?”
“Not as bad as it looks. It all goes out on underground antenna wire to aerials above ground. Christ some of those outside aerials are forty miles from here so communications won’t get cut off if there’s a direct hit topside. But nobody ever thought about cutting off communications this side of the aerials. Why should they? So we can cut into all the antenna wires right in this tunnel; that’s the beauty of it. We hook into the relay-signal boosters and use the boosters as if they were primary sending and receiving stations. The operators won’t be picking up or sending a single legitimate message on those radios, but they’ll never know it because they’ll be receiving from us and sending to us. When we’re ready to go tomorrow night we just throw a switch and it disconnects everything and the whole wing’s isolated totally from the outside world—without knowing it.”
“How about contact with Dangerfield?”
“I’ve already tested it and it works fine. He’ll be close enough to use a walkie-talkie and at this end we’ll be receiving through one of the aerials we’ve cut off from the rest of the base.”
“In other words the line of contact goes from Dangerfield to you, and then there’s a break, and then it goes from you to me. So you’ll have to relay orders to me?”
“No. I’m hooking a direct line from that red scrambler phone of yours into our receiver. It’ll be voice amplification through a speaker and mike so Dangerfield’s voice will sound metallic to you but you’ll have direct voice contact. It was a little tougher to work it out that way, but Dangerfield said if there’s a last-minute countermand he doesn’t want delays.”
Winslow’s toes curled inside his shoes. “All right,” he said. Doesn’t he ever sweat?
When Winslow returned to his office he found Ramsey Douglass waiting in his chair.
“Shut the door, Fred.” There was something wicked in Douglass’ eyes. “Come on in, sit down. There’s a chair.”
Winslow wanted to seize the offensive but with Douglass he never had learned how. To sit down would be to acknowledge his servility but to remain standing would be even more awkward: it would imply he intended to walk out soon and that was ridiculous since it was his own office.
He sat.
Douglass’ face was venomous but from the way his restless eyes kept combing the walls Winslow began to get the idea Douglass’ venom was not directed at him. Douglass said with a sarcasm that barely masked his utter lack of interest in the question, “I’ve got to check you out on procedure—you want to run through it for me? A nice quick recitation for teacher, that’s a good boy.”
Winslow slid down in the armchair until he was almost sitting on the back of his neck. His tired eyes came to rest on the Matthewson-Ward badge pinned to Douglass’ lapel and he said in a monotone, “We get a yellow alert maybe twenty minutes before ignition. Then the red alert. Then orders from the President. It all comes from Ludlum but our operators don’t know that. I have various people make various calls and the computers start sending out requests for verification by land line and microwave. At the same time I hook the six ROG launch commanders into the central system and order them to unlock their master consoles by key. When we get confirmation in the proper code from Ludlum’s phony NORAD people I instruct the LCs to order their operators to activate their silo consoles. The operators turn their keys in unison and that starts the countdown. After that we’ve got about three minutes to ignition and the only thing that can stop the countdown is a Presidential order—in this case from Dangerfield on my red phone. Assuming we don’t get a countermand the missiles go off and I have something like eight minutes for Hathaway to get all our people rounded up and get them outside. Then Hathaway sets off canisters of gas in the ventilator ducts to render everybody unconscious who’s still inside. We pile into the buses and get over to the airport. Does that cover it?”
“Fine,” Douglass said. “That’s fine, Fred.” It was hard to tell if he’d been listening at all.
“What’s the matter with you?”
Douglass made an abrupt and violent gesture of negation—a semaphore flash, crossing his hands over each other and whipping them apart. “Christ what a trap.”
“I know what you mean. The whole thing is sick.”
“It’s not that. The whole world’s sick; this is only a symptom of the disease. Who gives a damn anyway, Fred? In the long run it won’t matter. The universe will abide with us or without us.”
Winslow couldn’t follow the convolutions of Douglass’ wild swings of thought. Momentarily he shut his eyes and a pulse drummed blood-red behind his lids. “But what’s going to happen, then?”
“I’m not clairvoyant, Fred. All I can tell you is none of it matters. What do you want to do, make a moral crisis out of it? Find some pious rationalizations to justify it so you can score a few debating points with the Almighty? Hell, I’ll give you that for nothing—in war anything’s permissible, most of all murder, and we’re going to war. How’s that grab you? Make everything hunky-dory? Do you want a pep talk to prop up your sagging resolve, some more of the repetitious rhetoric of the party line?”
“That’s Nicole’s department, not yours.”
“Nicole is dead,” Douglass breathed, and closed his eyes and wrapped his two hands together and kneaded them violently.
“Dead?”
Douglass straightened his jacket with methodical care, cleared his throat, and answered: “She got a pistol from somebody. She stuck it in her mouth and blew the back of her head off. Yes, dead is the right word. She looked as if she’d never been alive.”
Winslow watched Douglass’ face twist up.
“God knows why I should care. She had lousy posture and she was always complaining of headaches and cracking fingernails and backaches and corns and the state of the world. She had a face like a rhesus monkey and for Christ’s sake I’ve kicked better ass than her out of bed. She never gave me the time of day. She used to look at me as if she was measuring me for a box.”
Winslow still didn’t say anything but it was becoming clear that Douglass was asking for something—beseeching. And finally Douglass stretched both arms forward along the top of the desk and looked him in the eye. “You know I’m lying, of course. The truth is when I took my clothes off and got in bed with her I had my climax before I touched her. She laughed every time.”
Winslow squirmed and tried to look away but the bleak desperate eyes pinned him. “Oh, hell, Fred.” And it came to Winslow quite suddenly that Douglass had come here to unburden himself because there was no one else to whom he could turn. Winslow, who had always hated him and feared him, was the closest thing to a friend Douglass had.
He said clumsily, “I’m sorry, Ramsey, I wish there was something I could do.”
“Maybe there is.”
Winslow immediately regretted having said it.
“Dangerfield’s on my ass,” Douglass said. “I’ve got to take over
Nicole’s job—rounding up all our people in the area and getting them out to the airport. I won’t be able to be here tomorrow so you’re going to have to take over for me. You’ll have to double-check Hathaway to make sure absolutely everybody gets on those buses. Nobody gets left behind, Fred. Nobody. That was supposed to be my job. Shoot anybody who balks.”
Winslow blinked.
Douglass said, “They’ve got dossiers on every one of us. Anybody who doesn’t get on that plane can figure on being dead in twelve hours.”
“I see. Yes.” His mind whirled.
Douglass got to his feet. “Tell the bus drivers not to run any traffic lights but if a cop stops them, shoot him. You understand, Fred?”
“I understand that. I’m not sure I understand why you care any more whether I do it or not.”
“Because it comes down to survival, doesn’t it. All I want to do is keep them convinced that I’m beneath consideration. As long as they don’t notice me I’ll survive. If you trip up, it’ll be my fault and they’ll nail me for it. I need your help, Fred.” He looked hard at Winslow. “Nobody cares what we intended, Fred—nobody cares what our motives are. We’re judged by the consequences of our acts, not by our intent.”
“Yes,” Winslow said, and nodded, and Douglass strutted out.
Alone in the office he picked up the phone. “Get my wife for me, will you Lieutenant?”
He sat absolutely motionless, hardly breathing until the telephone buzzed.
“Celia?”
“Hello, darling.”
“About tomorrow night. We were thinking about not going to that damned party but I guess we ought to go.”
The silence was long and ragged but in the end she said, “All right, Fred,” and all the life had drained out of her voice.
“I probably won’t be home tonight.”
“I know. I’ll see you tomorrow evening then. At the party.”
“At the party.” He closed his eyes and his grip tightened on the receiver until the knuckles ached.
“Take care, darling.”
Deep Cover Page 34