Fail-Safe

by Eugene Burdick

  The operator turned and looked at Grady. He winked. His eyes were alight with success and a hard pride. Also, there was something else in the eyes, a kind of dread knowledge. He knew that the three of them would soon be bombarded by a lethal dosage of neutrons. They would die, but not before their mission was accomplished.

  The scope cleared. The Bloodhounds were now at 100,000 feet and the converging pack of Soviet missiles had taken the form of a vast arrow of pursuit. A few seconds later the Bloodhounds would reach 150,000 feet.

  The defense operator chuckled to himself. “They’re getting more range than I thought,” he said. “Maybe they’ll go 200,000 feet.”

  In fact, they went to 220,000 feet. Then abruptly they began to slow down and the great pursuing arrow of missiles streaked toward them. Suddenly the entire scope seemed to erupt in an enormous explosion as all the Soviet rocket warheads went off simultaneously.

  Without orders the navigator had fought for altitude ever since the first blast wave had passed. They were now flying at close to 10,000 feet. When the shock wave from the explosion came it was much less severe than the first one. The awful physics of time and distance had weakened its thrust. The Vindicator was shaken savagely and the wings dipped. But when the pressure passed, although an ominous groan came from where the wings joined the fuselage, they held.

  “We’re making like a fat-assed bird,” Grady shouted. Through their masks the navigator and defense operator eyed him cautiously.

  “How many minutes to Moscow?” Grady asked.

  “Seven minutes,” the navigator replied.

  There remained only one decision for Grady to make. At the present altitude, their chances of being shot down by orthodox antiaircraft were negligible. But when they dropped the bombs, even if they made an abrupt rise of 1,000 or 1,500 feet they would be destroyed by the blast. If they climbed to 25,000 or 80,000 feet, a safe altitude, they would simplify the problem for conventional antiaircraft and increase the chances of their being shot down. But in a real sense the decision had been made. Grady felt a kind of mild euphoria. His mind raced back to the old informal days of flying where pilot and crew knew, and sometimes even loved, one another. There was no reason under current procedures why he had to talk to the other two men in the plane at all. If he wanted, he could carry out the mission completely by himself. They would, he knew, not even look at him as he gave the order to drop the bombs. But every man should have tome say in the matter of how he is to die. Anyway Grady wanted to talk.

  “Look,” Grady said. “We’re not just walking wounded, we’re walking dead men. That first blast must have given us enough Roentgens to shrivel the marrow in our bones. We’d have a couple of days at best. So I intend to take her in at 900 feet and then when we are over the target to climb to 5,000. The bombs are set to detonate at 5,000 so we’ll go with them.”

  He glanced at the two men. The two pairs of eyes stared levelly at him. Then Thompson spoke.

  “O.K., skipper,” he said. “There’s nothing to go home to anyway.” He laughed.

  The American Ambassador and the Soviet delegate to the United Nations reported on the conference line before Khrushchev came on.

  “Where are you, Mr. Ambassador?” the President asked.

  “On the top floor of the American Embassy in Moscow in my library,” the American Ambassador said.

  “Where are you, Mr. Lentov?” the President asked the Soviet delegate.

  “In the UN building in New York,” Lentov replied. “Whatever happens I would like both of you to stay precisely where you are until I release you or Premier

  Khrushchev releases you,” the President said. Then, slowly and calmly, he told them what had happened. When he had finished both of the men were silent for a moment. Buck glanced at the President. He knew what all of the men on the line were thinking:

  the American Ambassador was exposed, without protection if the Vindicators got through. All of the men on the line except Buck were experienced diplomats. They had run risks before. They were calm.

  Buck could hardly believe what he heard next. The Soviet delegate began to discuss baseball scores. He was surprisingly knowledgeable. He confessed that his favorite team was the New York Yankees.

  “I know that it is somewhat like rooting for the aristocracy,” he said with a laugh. “But I cannot resist them. The first year I was here was the year that Mantle and Maris tried to beat Babe Ruth’s homerun record. It is a question of the power and the grace. I admire both qualities.”

  “In that case if you had been an American you would have become a Wall Street lawyer,” the President said.

  “Oh, now, Mr. President,” the Soviet delegate answered, “remember I said power and grace. Your Wall Street people have the power, but they are still lacking in grace. No, if I had been an American, I would have been a designer, probably of cars. The only thing in America which equals our Communist party in naked power, grace, and the ability to take adversity is the American car. Its exterior is often hideous, as is our Communist party, but inside it is rugged and durable.”

  “I agree with you, Ambassador Lentov, about power and grace.” It was the American Ambassador speaking.

  A voice from the grave, Buck thought, casual remarks from a man about to be burned alive. A clear and steady voice, not a tremor in it. Buck’s hand began to shake violently as it denched the phone. He could not bring himself to look into the President’s face. The voice went on. “It is a combination of power and grace which makes for top success in baseball as in politics. In both games the very best are a class apart. You can tell them from the first day in a training camp. Their objective is beautifully simple. It is the top. Once they have made the decision, their energies, their intelligence, their muscles, everything, give their naked power the additional virtue of grace. The multitude of the second-best often have as much power drive, but they lack the thing that Mr. Lentov calls grace.”

  “But no, Mr. Ambassador, it has little to do with natural endowment,” the Soviet delegate said. “I once served in Mexico and came to love the bullfights. Often the best torero would be a scrawny, chicken-breasted fellow. But once in the ring, there he would possess what you call grace.”

  There was a long silence. The American Ambassador was well-bred, wealthy, married to a beautiful woman, was reputed to be a good father, and a tremendously hard worker. But it was not until this moment that Buck realized he lacked a single quality, “grace.”

  “There is a grandeur about such a life,” the President said. “But there is also a desolation about it. Take Babe Ruth. I never saw him in action but I saw him after he had retired. He was like the husk of a man. Once the husk had been filled with a desire and a will and a pride of accomplishment. When I saw him there was a dullness to the eyes, a flacddness to the muscles.

  I remember my father had a collection of pictures of people like Herbert Hoover, John Nance Garner, Bernard Baruch, Eisenhower, and Truman, which he kept in fine oak frames in his study. He regarded them as tragedies. Men cut off from power while they still had the grace and the desire to exercise it. They were somehow like puzzled old bulls.”

  “Maybe our way is better,” the Soviet delegate said dryly. “In my country there are old cows and there are old steers, but there are no old bulls who still have potency. As long as the old bull has power he fights, he is useful. There is only one kind of retirement for the virile old bull: death. In a way it is better.”

  The connection with Khrushchev was made in utter silence. Buck jumped when he heard the voice come up on the conference line.

  “Comrade Lentov, you have become a philosopher,” Khrushchev said. Instantly all of Buck’s mind and intuition went into alert. There was a marked difference in the voice.

  “Mr. Premier, this is a time for philosophy,” the Soviet delegate said.

  They all waited. Khrushchev did not respond. Then he spoke on a different matter.

  “I was told that you had invited your Ambassador to Moscow and my
delegate to the UN to join us,” Khrushchev said. “I assume there is a reason.”

  Buck found the word he wanted to describe Khrushchev’s tone-finality. He reached over and scrawled on the President’s pad: “Finality. Tone heavy, final. K. has decided.”

  The President read the message without change of expression.

  “There is a reason,” the President said. “First let us know how it is going with the Vindicators.”

  “My experts tell me that two of them will probably get through and will bomb Moscow,” Khrushchev said heavily. “Your estimate was correct, Mr. President.”

  “I take no pleasure in it, Premier Khrushchev,” the President said.

  Buck thought suddenly of Khrushchev’s family, the daughter and the wife with her baggy clothes and plain face who had somehow endeared herself to Americans when the Khrushchevs had visited years before. Were they in Moscow?

  “Let’s get on with it,” Khrushchev said roughly. “In a few minutes the bombs will be falling. I have brought my whole retaliatory apparatus to full readiness. If we cannot satisfy one another in the next few minutes I must release that apparatus. What do you propose, Mr. President?”

  The President sat straight in his chair. With his left hand he held the phone to his ear. With his right hand he drew a straight black slash of a line down the precise center of the note pad in front of him.

  “First I will tell you what will happen, Mr. Premier,” the President said firmly. Suddenly the flesh around his mouth turned white, but his voice did-not falter. “Then I will tell you what I intend to do to demonstrate our sincerity.”

  “Proceed, Mr. President,” Mr. Khrushchev said. “But make it as brief as possible, if you please.”

  “The two planes will drop four 20-megaton bombs on Moscow; There is a possibility that our Ambassador will hear the sound of jet engines a moment or two before the bombs drop,” the President said. “In any case, he will be aware of antiaircraft fire from your guns and, perhaps, the sound of your defensive missiles blasting off. A few seconds after be hears this noise, the bombs will explode. When they do, even if our Ambassador cannot say anything, his telephone will give off a distinctive shrill sound as it melts from the heat of the fireball. We know; we have tested.

  When we hear that sound we will know that the American Ambassador to Moscow is dead.”

  A grunt came over the line, as if someone had taken a hard blow in the stomach. Buck thought it came from Khrushchev but then he was not sure. For a moment there was silence on the conference line.

  “Do you understand, Mr. Ambassador, that you are to stay precisely where you are?” the President asked.

  “Yes, sir,” came the Ambassador’s voice.

  “Mr. President!” Khrushchev’s voice fairly exploded over the telephone. Involuntarily Buck winced and looked at the President. There was neither sorrow nor sympathy in the voice now, only rage. “Is this your grand plan? To sacrifice one American—the good Ambassador—for five million Moscovites?” The voice literally choked with anger, then rumbled on. Buck wrote the word “rage” on the President’s pad and watched his hand shake as he did so. A simple scene swam into Buck’s mind and it was captioned “End of the World.” It was, he realized, the way he had always pictured it. There were rows of buttons on a board-blue, green, and red buttons-and a thick peasant hand with stubby fingers hovered over them, seemingly about to plunge. At that moment, with Khrushchev’s voice babbling now incomprehensibly in his ear, the hand started on its final murderous downward arc. A terror, pure and simple as anything Buck had ever felt, clawed at his guts.

  The President’s voice, high-pitched and urgent and barely under control, snapped him out of it. Buck’s translation rode over Khrushchev’s voice and he found he was shouting, repeating phrases, banging the table with his fist. “No, no, Mr. Premier. That is not what I had in mind. You must listen to me, listen to me. At the moment that we hear the shriek of the melting telephone in Moscow, I will order a SAC squadron which is at this moment flying over New York City to drop four 20-megaton bombs on that city in precisely the pattern and altitude in which our planes have been ordered to bomb Moscow. They will use the Em. pire State Building for ground zero. When we hear the second shriek over the conference line we will know that your delegate to the United Nations is gone and along with him, New York.”

  “Holy Mother of God,” Khrushchev said. His voice seemed almost like a pant.

  Then there was a deep silence. Suddenly, like a mechanical mockery, there was a flare-up of static on the line. It sounded like some macabre laugh, something torn from the soul of the mechanical system.

  “There is no other way, Mr. Premier, that I could think to demonstrate to you our sincerity,” the President said softly. “We will each have lost our largest city. But most of our people and our wealth and our property and our social fabric will remain. It is an awful calculation. I could think of no other.” He paused and his voice dropped low. “Unless, unless you think it unnecessary. Unless you feel the offer itself is enough. Showing our intentions-” He stopped in mid-sentence and Buck saw cross his face a look of physical pain, of some kind of extreme agony, and in his eyes the last flickering hope.

  There was silence on the line for a full ten seconds. “I would like to say that this is unnecessary,” Khrushchev finally said. “I cannot. We have worked ourselves into a position of suspicion and hatred so great that the only way out is to proceed with what you suggest. My people would liquidate any leader who allowed the destruction of Moscow to go unavenged. My successor would be forced to take a greater vengeance. More than just New York would be destroyed. Then you would retaliate… No, this is tragic, but it must be so.”

  “We must sacrifice some so that the others can survive,” the President said and his voice was weary. “I do not know how the Americans will take my action. It may be my last. I hope they will understand.”

  There was another pause. Each of the men on the conference line realized the weird inappropriateness of mere words. Also, each was in his own particular kind of shock. They sat quietly.

  “Jay, I am grateful,” the President said to the American Ambassador. “I am also grateful to you, Mr. Lentov.”

  “I thank you both,” Khrushchev said. He paused,

  “I also admire you.”

  “Thank you,” the Ambassador and-the delegate said almost simultaneously.

  They waited quietly.

  “I must tell my people at the Pentagon and Omaha of my decision,” the President said finally. “I will speak so that you can hear what I say.”

  It took only a few seconds for the White House switchboard to make the phone connections. When the President spoke, the War Room in Omaha and the Big Board room in the Pentagon had been added to the conference line. In those two rooms the President’s voice came over the loudspeaker system.

  “Gentlemen, I have had to make a terrible decision,” the President said. “It is the hardest I have ever made. I have not asked your advice because this is not a decision on which one needs or can use advice. I want the responsibility to be entirely mine.”

  General Bogan listened to the words with his body tensed. He knew fatigue in every bone, but he also knew that in the next moment he might have to direct the attack of hundreds of SAC bombers against the Soviet Union. He felt a basic and immense confusion. He could not conceive of how general war could be avoided. Yet in all of the hundreds of conferences he had attended no situation just like this one had ever been anticipated. He felt crippled, oddly disabled.

  In the Pentagon Groteschele whispered to Stark as the President paused.

  “He’s going to send in a full strike,” Groteschele said. “He has to. There is nothing else he can do.”

  Stark looked at Groteschele and then he licked his lips, cleared his throat. Groteschele realized that Stark was frightened. The fact amazed him. It also started a tiny root of fear twitching in Groteschele. Suddenly it was no longer an elegant and logical game. Real men in
real bombers and real missiles carrying real thermonuclear warheads would soon be in motion. Their targets would be millions of unprotected people. Long ago Groteschele had stopped thinking of war in terms of flesh and blood and death and wounds. He thought in terms of neat strategies and impeccable rules. Now, quite suddenly, in a physical way, he understood what might happen. His mind resisted, but his body trembled with a series of small shocks.

  “Two of the Vindicators will, apparently, get through to Moscow and will deliver four 20-megaton bombs on that city,” the President said. “Moscow has not been alerted. Premier Khrushchev estimates that it would cause panic and would not save lives in any case. When the bombs fall on Moscow we will know that fact because our Ambassador’s phone will give off a distinctive sound as it is burned by the explosion.”

  The President paused. Buck felt that he should look away, but he could not. The President was about to outline the most sweeping and incredible decision that any man had ever made, and it was a decision which he hated. But he was boxed in, cornered by some accident of history, trapped by some combination of mechanical errors not even fully understood.

  “I have attempted to persuade Premier Khrushchev that this was a mistake, a tragic error,” the President said. “I have made available to him all of the classified information which his defensive forces required. Premier Khrushchev has not launched his retaliatory forces but he will unless he receives some dramatic evidence of our sincerity. The scales must be balanced—and right away. The discussion we had is not important. The result is. If Moscow is bombed by our bombers, I must order a group of Vindicator bombers now circling over New York to deliver four 20-megaton bombs on that city. That is all, gentlemen.”

  Congressman Raskob was the first person at Omaha to respond. For a long moment he was as rigidly uncomprehending as the rest of the men in the room. Like them he stared at the loudspeakers, not sure that he had heard correctly. Then Raskob got to his feet and walked over to General Bogan. He still had the walk like La Guardia, but the cockiness had gone.