Fail-Safe

by Eugene Burdick

  A new voice broke in over Grady’s radio. He recognized it immediately. An involuntary shock went through his body. The voice he heard was that of the President. But it could not be. He glanced at the Fail-Safe box. The “go” signal was clear and reassuring.

  “Colonel Grady, this is the President of the United States, your Commander in Chief. The mission you are flying has been triggered by some mechanical failure. I order you and the other planes under your command to return to your base immediately.”

  Grady sat stunned, disbelieving. He did not speak. His hand moved toward the radio toggle switch, stopped three inches short. He looked at it. The hand dropped to his knee.

  Grady looked at the navigator and then at the defense operator. They had also heard the message. Their eyes were fixed coldly upon Grady. He felt helpless. He was sinking. He wished he were somewhere else—anywhere else. He wanted to cry. His mind moaned a piteous complaint and abdicated; subconscious emotions were welling up within him and he was in their control. He reverted to childlike thoughts. He wanted God. He was a little boy who needed his mother. He wanted to dose his eyes-to dose out this nightmare and open them again as that little boy. He tried. He dosed his eyes. He opened them. No, it was true. The voice came back over the radio at him.

  “Colonel Grady, I repeat. This is the President.”

  Again the distinctive New England accent bored into Grady’s consciousness. But this time it had the opposite effect. His mind focused. He saw dearly it was an enemy ruse. How easy the President’s voice was to mimic, he thought, remembering the many briefing sessions in which this possibility had been discussed. His nerves steeled. He interrupted the voice briskly: “I am not authorized to receive tactical alterations by voice once past Fail-Safe. What you are telling me I have been specifically ordered not to do.”

  “I know that, damn it, but this is—” Grady had reached forward and flicked off the radio, leaving the remainder of the President’s frantic plea dangling in space.

  The War Room was frozen in mid-action like a collection of children stopped rigid in a game of “Statues.”

  “Gentlemen,” said Cascio, ignoring the body of General Bogan at his feet, “I am taking over command of this post at the specific order of the President of the United States. He has long been aware that General Bogan is psychologically unbalanced and he specifically warned me to observe him closely. The negotiations which General Bogan has been conducting with Marshal Nevsky are not authorized by the White House and are the acts of a madman. By the direct authority of the President of the United States I now authorize you to take all orders from me.”

  General Bogan felt a strange sense of wonderment. it was true, he realized dully, that the madman had a great advantage over the sane. Having only moments before walked up to the edge of lunacy himself, Bogan had an almost fatherly appreciation of Cascio’s sure intuition. The colonel was performing beautifully, with the marvelous sensitivity to audience which marked the great actor.

  General Bogan climbed to his knees, then carefully came to an upright position. He moved slowly, careful not to provoke Cascio into striking him again. General Bogan looked around the room. There was a balance so delicate that it was almost palpable. Over the months General Bogan had come to know the personalities of the various officers and enlisted men in the War Room. Some of them already had the red of hatred and rebellion in their eyes. They would be willing to follow Cascio. The middle range, the officers who would serve long tenures as light colonels and retire as full colonels, were vacillating. The brighter of the officers, that small fraction destined for a rapid rise and a generalship, had already started to move. They were moving toward Cascio and against him.

  But their movements were unnecessary. Out of the gloom of a far corner appeared two Air Force enlisted men wearing brassards and .45-caliber pistols. General Bogan had known that they were there, he had known it for months, but today he had forgotten them. They bad become like furniture. He watched with an awed regard for their capacity to remain silent and invisible for months and then to move with such relentless stalking skill. They came like ballet dancers doing a piece of practiced choreography. They flowed by each chair and desk and person as if this were a daily routine. They came up behind Cascio quietly and with an enormous confidence.

  One of the airmen tapped Colonel Cascio on the shoulder. He turned and saw the brassard and at once started to turn his head and to scream into the speaker, but his hand was empty. The other airman, with a blow that was swift and precise, had chopped at Cas. do’s wrist. The speaker had flipped neatly into the airman’s hand. Cascio was screaming into an empty palm.

  “Colonel, if you speak another word, our orders are to render you unconscious,” the first airman said, and his lips broke into a smile at the extravagance of the language.

  “I guarantee you, Colonel, that we can do it quicker than you can speak the next word,” the other airman said.

  Cascio had already fallen silent. In some way he iensed the end of his brief power. His face went suddenly lax. The sharp aquiline-profile which had been rigidly composed for hours now suddenly went idiot. It seemed almost to puff out. General Bogan turned away. He realized that Cascio had gone through the terrible temptation, and yielded-the temptation to which General Bogan had been exposed only a few moments before. The first of the airmen tapped Cascio on the elbow; and turned him with a robot docility. Bogan watched the man, Cascio, cave in as he walked away between the two airmen. By the time they reached the first exit Cascio seemed to be a shrunken, monkeylike version of the commanding figure he had been just thirty seconds before.

  General Bogan turned quickly back to the touch phone.

  “Marshal Nevsky, there has been a slight interruption in our operations here,” General Bogan said. The touch phone had been on continuously. “I am now prepared to give you the longitude and latitude of our bombers, in accordance with your earlier request.”

  “General Bogan, I was aware of your difficulty,” Marshal Nevsky said. “We have had one or two problems like that ourselves. One cannot foresee every situation. I await your information.”

  General Bogan quickly scanned the men in the room. His command was sure now. No need to be concerned about Handel or anyone else. Cascio had, in a perverse way, served his country. He had exhibited what every man—including Bogan himself—felt. His yielding to the insanely mutinous impulse had purged the similar impulses from the rest of them.

  “Colonel Handel, I order you to give your best estimate of the longitude and latitude and the heading of all planes in Group 6,” General Bogan said.

  Colonel Handel read off the longitudes and latitudes and his voice went directly into the touch phone.

  Immediately the planes closest to the Vindicators began to regroup, to dose in. Now the fighters were flying at different altitudes searching for the Vindicators. The decoys were no longer effective.

  Three of the Soviet fighters almost simultaneously linked on to the lead Vindicator. The Vindicator jinked, went into a dive, lost luminosity. So did the Soviet fighter blips.

  “Marshal Nevsky, when the group is down to two surviving planes standard operating procedure is for those two planes to dive to the lowest feasible altitude and continue their attack as dose to the ground as possible,” General Bogan explained. “In this way they hope to escape your radar. The plane which your three fighters are now engaging is a defensive plane only. It has no bombs aboard. It carries only defensive devices.”

  Bogan’s heart sank on hearing Nevsky’s voice. He suspected what the changed tone of the Russian marshal meant. The words from the translator were:

  “Thank you, General Bogan, but we will try for a kill in any case.”

  Even when filtered through the translator’s neutral voice the words carried the impression of mistrust. He knew what Nevsky was thinking. It was what any commanding officer would have to think in Nevsky’s position.

  General Bogan turned wearily to the Big Board. The three blips o
f the remaining bombers were easily distinguishable from the Soviet fighters scattered in their path. No.6 bomber was clearly in the lead. As General Bogan watched, the configuration of Russian fighters changed slightly and veered toward No. 6. Bogan wanted to turn away. He knew the outcome. The fighters conveiged on No. 6’s diversionary run. Suddenly a green blotch supplanted the No. 6 Vindicator as well as the fighters around her. She was gone, but she had served her final diversionary function. She had feinted the Russian fighters out of position. The remaining two Vindicators were now almost certain to make it. As General Bogan watched they had shifted to maximum speed. At their present reduced weight they could approach 2,000 miles an hour and slip through for the Moscow bomb run.

  The sound of a commotion came over the touch phone. Muffled voices in Russian weie interrupted by a louder noise. Then a single Russian voice caine over the line. The translator’s flat English explained: “Marshal Nevsky has just collapsed. It appears to be—I don’t know. He is being carried out of the room. General Koniev is now in command.”

  Simultaneously the voices of the President and Swenson interrupted, demanding an explanation.

  “I think I can explain,” General Bogan broke in. His voice was sympathetic and full of understanding. “Marshal Nevsky sent his fighters after our No. 6 plane, though I told him it carried no bombs. This final diversion let the other two planes through. But he did what any good officer would do. He followed standard safeguarding procedures. He went after all three. Our final approach tactic is based upon the assumption this will occur. Moscow will shortly receive 80 megatons. Marshal Nevsky realized this almost immediately.”

  The Big Board quickly verified General Bogan’s prediction. The two remaining Vindicators went into a steep dive and fifteen seconds later they disappeared.

  The Soviet fighters began to disperse again in a random pattern.

  “The two Vindicators have gone off our screen,”

  General Koniev said. “Do you still have them?”

  “No, General, we have lost them too,” General Bogan said.

  General Koniev paused. General Bogan sensed that he wanted reassurance. General Bogan also sensed that the best way to give it was to remain silent.

  “Can you raise them by radio?” General Konlev asked.

  “No,” said General Bogan. “The bombers resumed silence after the President’s recall attempt failed. However, we’re still trying.”

  “What defensive capacity do they still have?” General Koniev asked.

  General Bogan pushed a lever and the thin mechanical voice from the appropriate desk said, “We are not sure of their defensive capacity. Things got a bit confused for a few minutes there. We estimate it as no less than fifty per cent and no more than seventy-five per cent. They have almost one hundred per cent of their decoy and masking devices, but these are not very great.”

  “We are unable to pick them up on radar and they are traveling so fast that visual sighting by antiaircraft cannon is almost useless,” General Koniev said slowly. “I must assume that the two planes will get through.”

  “I think you are correct,” General Bogan said.

  “We have only one chance left,” General Koniev said. “That is to focus all our remaining rockets in their estimated path and fire them simultaneously at the right moment in an effort to set up an impenetrable the thermonuclear barrier.”

  “It has a chance,” General Bogan admitted admir. bigly. “Let us pray that it succeeds.”

  “I am trying it, but I’m afraid your estimate is right. Two planes will probably get through. And then, however it goes, whether just your four bombs or our thousands of bombs and your thousands of bombs, it is all over. We will have devoted a lifetime to assuring our own destruction.”

  General Bogan rocked back in his chair and looked at the empty seat that had been Colonel Cascio’s. He thought of the other room and the empty chair of Marshal Nevsky. They had both been honest and pathotic craftsmen. Each had worked with courage and determination to win. Each had lost. Everyone had lost.

  “Are there surprises that you have left for us?” General Bogan asked.

  “None, General Bogan,” General Koniev said. “Your people,” he paused, “have been honest with us. The simple fact is that they were also better than we thought. Six hours ago I would have guaranteed that we would have shot down one hundred per cent of a single wing of your planes. If you had sent a massive first strike, we knew our record would not have been so good. But I could not have believed that our forces would prove incapable of handling just six planes, as they seem to have been.”

  There was a heavy silence between these two professional soldiers. Each roughly knew what the other was thinking. They bad never met. They had never talked. They had known of one another’s existence, but only as names in an “order of battle” schedule. But each had a sense of how identical the careers, the risks, the chances, the ambitions, the losses, the gains, and, most telling, the ignorance, on both sides had been.

  “General Koniev, how many minutes do we have?” General Bogan asked.

  “I should say about eighteen to twenty minutes, depending on how much decoy and masking capacity your two planes have,” General Koniev answered. “We are shooting off everything we have. Our antiaircraft rings are having a field day. One of our fighter-bombers fired a rocket into a forest and it has lit up the landscape for miles around. He fired at a short-range radar station which had not turned on its IFF and he thought it was a Vindicator although it was completely stationary. Tomorrow I will have to pass judgment upon the pilot of that plane. If there is a tomorrow.”

  General Bogan mused. This was like the idle conversation that truck drivers used to exchange when he was a college undergraduate and drove trucks during his vacation. The crisis was over, the long haul made.

  They were engaged in shoptalk. It was a way to pass the time until the final decision.

  “General Koniev, what is your location right now?” General Bogan asked suddenly.

  It had occurred to General Bogan that General Koniev might not be in the equivalent of Omaha. He felt a sense of alarm for the man on the other end of the phone.

  “I am several hundred miles from Moscow,” General Koniev said. “It was not an orderly dispersion. When Premier Khrushchev left he ordered a handful of us to leave. I was among the handful.”

  General Bogan was about to speak and then he fell mute. He wondered if General Koniev had left his family in Moscow. But he did not want to know.

  “It is a hard day,” General Bogan said to the translator.

  There was a long pause.

  The word came back from the translator. General Bogan knew the response before it was translated.

  “This is a hard day, General Bogan,” General Kon1ev said. “Good-bye, comrade,” General Koniev said.

  “Good-bye, my friend,” General Bogan said.

  The translator paused, hesitated, and then knew it was unnecessary to translate. Everyone waited.

  which sent them flaming dramatically into the black night sky. Grady turned to the defense operator.

  “How much more speed can you get from the Bloodhounds by putting them on fullblast?”

  “Five hundred miles an hour, but it will increase the fuel consumption,” the operator said quickly. “At that angle they would probably get no higher than 120,000 feet before they ran out of fuel.”

  Grady was doing his calculations by eye and intuition. He estimated that when the Soviet missiles reached 20,000 feet the two Bloodhounds would be 2,500 feet above them. He was gambling that although they had probably been set to explode at 20,000 feet there was also an “overriding command” built into them that if they perceived a target within range that they would pursue it. He knew that they would be keyed to detonate at something less than 2,000 feet from the target. If he could keep the Bloodhounds 2,500 feet above the wave of Soviet missiles, there was the possibility that they would all start to home automatically and senselessly on the Blood
hounds.

  “Give the Bloodhounds just enough extra boost, In little shots, so that they stay at least 2,500 feet above the enemy missiles,” Grady said.

  The operator’s face swung toward Grady and the eyes were full of a savage admiration and a gleam of understanding. His long, sensitive, musicianlike fingers reached for the controls.

  “They’re at 18,000, now 19,000, now 20,000,” the operator sang out. This highly unorthodox procedure seemed to fill him with delight.

  Then they both fell silent and stared at the scope. The wave of missiles was now directly overhead and Grady’s hand, without thought and quite by reflex, went to the lever which controlled the lob device, if the rockets exploded in the next second, he would have

  time to lob the two bombs toward Moscow-just before the Vindicator was beaten to earth by the blast.

  The line of missiles came to 20,000 feet and then passed 20,000. Then the perfect line began to angle off as the outer missiles turned toward the Bloodhounds.

  Instantly Grady recognized that the tactic had succeeded. ,The missiles were now chasing the two Bloodhounds and those that were the farthest away were losing some altitude as they angled toward the two decoys. The operator was whispering to himself as he watched the instruments. He reached for control, pulled it down for a moment, and the two Bloodhounds leapt up ahead. They were still responding to signal.

  The Soviet missiles also automatically boosted their speed. At one end of the line there was suddenly a bright eruption of light. One of the missiles had misfired: The blast wave was picked up by the scope and it temporarily obscured several dozens of the blips around it.

  Grady shook his head and yelled into the intercom.

  “Pull her back! Go for altitude!” He had also pushed the button for TBS so that Turkey 2 would hear him. “Stand by for a ram.” Four seconds later the blast wave hit the Vindicator. It seemed as if the air had suddenly turned hard. The plane was pressed down as if by a giant’s steady smashing power. Grady looked at the altimeter. In the four seconds they had gained 1,200 feet of altitude and now they had been battered back down 1,000 feet. Then the blast passed. The plane shot upward, shuddering as tiny rolling waves hit it.