by James Philip
The man was her height unless she was wearing high heels. Tonight, she was wearing sensible, stylish flat heels, so her angry glare bored directly into his face.
“Of course I’m okay!”
This bounced off Dan Brenckmann. He was silent, wisely and patiently giving her a moment to exhaust her angst.
“I hate enclosed spaces, that’s all!”
“Me, too,” the man sympathised. “I don’t know how Walt can stand being locked up in a tin can for weeks at a time. It would drive me loco!” He added this last thought with a wan smile. He looked around unhurriedly. “Maybe it was just another false alarm. Everybody’s a bit twitchy after what’s been going on down in Cuba lately. The TV and radio networks haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory by the way they’ve been ‘talking up’ the crisis.”
Gretchen was starting to feel bad about losing her composure in front of so many people in the cellar.
“I parked my car a couple of blocks away. We can catch the news.”
“Okay,” the man agreed, falling into step with Gretchen.
“No funny stuff,” she said churlishly, as a barbed afterthought.
“Of course not,” Dan chuckled. He knew Gretchen Betancourt was way out of his league. Her father, Claude, had been one of old Joe Kennedy’s hot shot attorneys in the twenties and a respected and feared scion of the New England Democrats for over thirty years, having been one of the wealthiest and most feared litigators in Massachusetts most of his adult life. They said when Claude Betancourt rang the White House the President always took the call. Dan’s father had worked for Claude Betancourt when he came back from World War II but he never talked about it; Pa was the most discreet man on the planet. His Ma had once let slip that it was only old man Betancourt’s help that had kept Pa’s practice ‘turning over’ when he joined the Navy in 1940, and was called up again in 1950. In recent years his Ma had been an occasional member of Claude Betancourt’s third wife’s – Gretchen’s step-mother’s – circle but Dan got the impression that she had never been comfortable in that company. Either way, the Betancourt’s were twentieth century American aristocrats and Dan’s family, was not. He understood that a woman like Gretchen was far too busy looking for her prince to entertain the advances of frogs like him. Such was life. He had been delighted to be her chaperone at Yale three times since the summer, each time he had felt incredibly good about himself and oddly, vaguely inadequate, and a little empty afterwards. The reality was that Gretchen needed somebody around to keep the other frogs at bay so that she could relax while giving every appearance of enjoying campus life, and playing the game the way she was supposed to play it. “Perish the thought.”
Gretchen gave him a sharp look, otherwise they walked in silence.
Dan had seen her driving the pale blue 1960 Dodge Lancer around New Haven several times in the last couple of months; on their previous assignations she had told him where she would meet him and he had – like a dumb schmuck – obediently been waiting at the appointed place when she arrived, invariably ten to twenty minutes late.
He had expected her to be driving something flashier.
Sexier.
Perhaps, daddy’s money still came with strings attached?
Gretchen might have been reading his thoughts.
“I drive a car to get from one place to another,” she sniffed, unlocking the driver’s door. “It’s only men who regard cars as symbols of virility.”
“Not me,” Dan retorted mildly. “I’m broke all the time. I get to drive Ma’s station wagon when I’m back in Boston. Pa won’t have anybody driving his Chrysler.”
Gretchen dropped gracefully behind the wheel and leaned across to flick the lock on the passenger side door. She was twirling the dial of the radio before the man got into the car.
Static came in thrumming bursts.
“Check the aerial,” Gretchen commanded.
Dan got out again. Presently, he reported back: “it looks fine.”
He settled anew, trying to avoid involuntary physical contact with his companion’s elbow as she searched the frequencies.
“...South Boston...Quincy...initial reports only...”
Gretchen turned up the volume to painful levels. The speaker squawked and spat static, and from far, far away words filtered from the background mush.
“...Reports from Canada...Vancouver area...and Seattle...”
The man and the woman looked at each other.
The announcer on the radio was not rattled, he was shocked and very, very afraid, his voice was dry and choking as if he was swallowing mouthfuls of water between each syllable to keep going.
“No word yet from the White House...”
“NBC is reporting Galveston, Texas City and southern Houston devastated by a big bomb earlier today...”
“In Florida, residents of Tampa and Orlando report a large explosion in the swamps between the cities...There are no reports of casualties in the Sunshine State at this time...”
Gretchen fired up the engine.
“Where are we going?” Dan asked.
“Out of town. Anywhere!”
Dan doubted the Soviets would waste an A-bomb on a sleepy little port like New Haven, or that they would attach prioritisation to universities and colleges on their target lists in time of war. However, he did not judge that Gretchen was in any mood to be amenable to this line of argument.
Gretchen drove north out of town following the signs for Wallingford and Meriden.
Dan wondered where they were going, not believing for a moment that Gretchen Betancourt would just go ‘anywhere’ on the night the World came to an end.
Chapter 6
23:59 Hours Zulu (Washington DC Time)
Saturday 27th October 1962
NORAD, Ent Air Force Base, Colorado Springs, Colorado
No new incoming ICBM track had appeared on the main ‘battle board’ for thirty-one minutes. However, it was still far too early to start hoping that the Soviets had shot themselves dry; the first Tupolev Tu-95 turbo-prop and Myasishchev M-4 jet long-range bombers – codenamed Bears and Bisons - were over northern Canada, their tracks marked like the flickering tendrils of a silky spider’s web, were beginning to criss-cross the screens of the Air Defence Controllers. Several interceptors were already rising to meet the enemy intruders and others were standing – hot and ready – at quick reaction alert hardstands across the North American Continent. Land-based and ship borne surface-to-air missile systems were locked into the NORAD command net. Phase two of the nation’s battle for survival was about to commence.
The tracks of the incoming missiles targeting Colorado Springs had vanished off the ‘battle board’ four minutes short of impact. There were two possibilities; they might have been radar ‘ghosts’, or the incoming missiles might simply have broken up or crashed.
Carl Drinkwater, the duty Burroughs NSCAC – Network Systems Communications Analyst Consultant – was fighting fires of his own, attempting to correlate the known strikes and the likely damage on the ground so far, with the disproportionately widespread disruption to and impairment of the giant, hideously complicated dispersed SAGE, or Semi-Automated Ground Environment, network. The system had been built with massive inbuilt redundancies with each individual node overlapped by as many as three or four others, but it had not been designed to counter, cope with, or to remotely withstand an attack mounted with inter-continental ballistic weapons. SAGE was created to protect the continent from an attack by enemy bombers, not by ICBMs.
The ambitious, somewhat speculative and obscenely expensive Nike-Zeus Project was in hand to shoot down incoming rockets with two or three stage very long range surface-to-air missiles tipped with one to three hundred kiloton warheads; but that was still pie in the sky even assuming the project eventually bore fruit. Most people at NORAD were unconvinced Nike-Zeus would ever work; and for the time being wise men took the promises of the Nike-Zeus project team with a pinch of salt and would continue to do so until exten
ded trials proved conclusively that it was capable of actually intercepting incoming ICBMs. In any event such a system would take years to integrate into the SAGE command and control system. For the moment NORAD could do nothing but watch the Soviet ICBMs hurtling down from space; other, that is, than to issue expertly calculated circular error probability predictions about each weapon’s imminent ground zero.
One thing was now abundantly clear.
From the observed evidence of the targeting and the accuracy of the enemy’s retaliatory counter strikes the Soviets had not been caught with their pants down. Well, not down around their ankles, leastways. To have flushed so many ICBMs – as many as fifteen so far – those missiles must have already been standing ready on their pads at less than thirty minutes readiness for launch. The evidence of the Soviet counter strikes was unambiguous. Given that Soviet missiles were much bigger beasts than their US counterparts and could not be left fuelled on the pad for any length of time, it followed that the Soviets must have been partially prepared for the worst some hours before they detected the first incoming Atlas, Titan and Minutemen over the Arctic. Moreover, since none of the Soviet missiles were hidden away in silos – they were too big – the execution of Strategic Air Command’s ICBM targeting intelligence and target acquisition must have been, at best, spotty.
Back in the 1950s the inadequacy of the United States’ intelligence gathering organs had been gratuitously exposed first by Sputnik, and then by the first manned space flight by Yuri Gagarin, so it probably should not have come as a great shock that SAC had no idea where many of the USSR’s ICBMs were located.
However, the reasons why would have to wait for the post-war inquest.
Right now tens of thousands, possibly millions of Americans had died and were dying in the ruins of half-a-dozen cities because the CIA and the United States military’s immense and unbelievably profligate intelligence gathering community had comprehensively failed the American people.
Carl Drinkwater carried on burrowing through the reams of printouts spread across the long table at the back of the control room. The other big post-war inquest – more likely an ‘inquisition’ which would inevitably closely resemble a mediaeval witch hunt – would be into the highly questionable system-wide resilience and survivability of the SAGE network. SAGE had dropped off line in areas hundreds of miles from the nearest nuclear strike. Theoretically, the system was supposed to be hardened against big bombs going off within thousands of yards of key installations; and yet multiple distant nodes were down and the numerous built-in network redundancies had failed to compensate for the lost connectivity. Either the SAGE communications links ‘hardening’ specifications were faulty, or the hardening had been botched by AT&T. The mainframes in the Air Direction Centres ought to be more or less immune to anything but a direct hit, but clearly parts of the communications net – thousands of modems, buried dedicated lines and probably every other microwave communications tower – had apparently been taken out by the EMPs, the electromagnetic pulses, generated by relatively distant air bursts. Almost as troubling was the realisation that widespread general failures in the power and telephone grid in the immediate vicinity of nuclear strikes had shorted out large sections of the national network, which ought not to have been possible because SAGE ought not to have been just plugged into the mains, anywhere!
The great American defence contractor scam had struck again!
Unconsciously, Drinkwater had crumpled a sheet of paper and thrown it across the room. He kicked over a wastepaper basket.
“Fuck!” He spat angrily. If one of those approaching bombers got through – or was not tracked through the cloud of chaff it, and every other attacking aircraft was scattering – it might simply be because a few dozen contractors who did not know, or care, what they were building had padded their ‘bottom lines’ by failing to bury vital cables, modems, switching gear and relays deep enough or by pouring less concrete than specified.
The ‘battle board’ was tracking seventeen incoming bombers.
The Soviets had almost certainly known what was coming; they just could not do anything about it. In recent exercises to test SAGE in a purely air defence role combating a simulated Soviet attack by Strategic Air Command B-47s and B-52s several of the attacking aircraft always ‘got through’ to their targets. However, SAC had employed every electronics counter measure in the book, swarmed newly operational Air Direction Centres, routed bombers around and between ADCs, flown high and very, very low level sorties and had previously been in receipt of the latest SAGE readiness reports. The Soviets were in no position to ‘swarm’ SAGE, they did not know – leastways, they should not know - any of its ‘weak points’, or possess electronic warfare capabilities remotely on a par with SAC’s most modern B-52 bomb wings.
Somebody had put a mug of black coffee in front of Carl Drinkwater.
He decided that he had been angry long enough.
He snatched up the phone: “This is NSCAC,” he growled, “connect me to the duty NSCAC at CC-ONE-TWO.”
CC-02 was the Air Defence Centre at McChord Air Force Base less than forty miles from the first of the two airbursts in the Seattle area. McChord was ‘live’ but off line and without its real time update NORAD’s coverage of the north-west was dangerously threadbare.
“Is that you Carl?” Inquired the harassed voice at the other end of the secure land line.
“Yeah, it’s a long story.” Solomon Kaufmann, Carl’s deputy was out of town, his father having passed away in Albuquerque a couple of days ago; and Carl’s senior network analyst, Max Calman’s wife was about to produce twins. “You’ll hear about it sooner or later.” He got straight down to business. “Are you still in one piece up there?”
“No local damage,” the man in Washington State reported. “We think the second airburst shorted out half the state and started god knows how many secondary explosions and fires across the switching network. A couple of the ADC generators shorted out at the same time but we should be back on line in a few minutes. The controllers are working in manual mode so we’re fully operational but you won’t be seeing what we’re seeing or uploading anything from us in real time for a while. So far we’ve plotted an airburst across the border in the Fraser Valley, one in the vicinity of Dabob Bay, that’s way west of Seattle and north-west of Bremerton, and another east of Seattle at Sammanish. That last one will have done a lot of damage in the city itself; we’re locating ground zero as ten to fifteen nautical miles from the Central Seattle waterfront. The blast will almost certainly have taken out Bellevue...”
Carl Drinkwater was not intimately acquainted with the layout of the suburbs of Seattle. Right now he did not care. If he was still alive in the morning the Air Force was going to be looking to put somebody’s arse in a sling because significant pieces of the SAGE jigsaw were not talking to each other. His head would be the first on the block because he was the guy standing in front of them; not the traitors who had cut corners building the telecommunications infrastructure of the continental networks.
“Oh, shit!” This from the man at McChord Field.
“What?” Drinkwater demanded.
“You seeing what I’m seeing, Carl?”
Carl Drinkwater’s head jerked up and he looked at the ‘battle board’.
Two more ICBMs were tracking towards landfall in Nebraska and warnings were automatically being re-sent to Grand Island, Norfolk, Freemont, Columbus, Omaha and Sioux City, Iowa. The ‘battle board’ was already painting Omaha and Grand Island as the most likely targets. Omaha made perfect sense, Offutt Air Force Base; the Headquarters of Strategic Air Command was nearby. But Grand Island?
Another track appeared on the displays.
And suddenly disappeared somewhere over northern Alberta.
“Another Ghost?” Somebody complained.
The incoming bombers had to be jamming across the spectrum as well as dropping chaff to fog to the radars. SAGE ought to be able to compensate for that but then parts
of the network were too impaired, too compromised by EMPs, and up around Seattle there would be physical damage to power and phone lines, and several radar stations were off line.
Drinkwater told his counterpart at McChord Air Force Base about the ‘ghost’ ICBM track.
“I saw that, too,” the other man declared. “Maybe, it burned up during re-entry?”
Or it just malfunctioned.
Drinkwater killed the connection.
And watched the tracks of the two incoming ICBMs inexorably zeroing in on the cities on the Nebraskan plain.
Okay, so the Soviets had not shot themselves dry just yet...
Chapter 7
22:01 Hours Mountain Standard Time (00:01 Eastern Standard Time)
Saturday 27th October 1962
Bellingham, Washington State
When the lights went out the man and the woman had reached for each other and fucked on the hall floor. They had both known they would end up fucking that night the moment Judy had joined the stranger at the bar down the street from the Mount Baker Theatre. However, neither had imagined that their initial coupling would be so primal or so frantic; in the darkness the man had pulled down Judy’s panties, she had fumbled at his belt and fly; and he had taken her fast and hard. It was over in seconds, not minutes.
‘Sorry, I must have hurt you,’ Sam Brenckmann gasped. He was ashamed of himself. He had treated her like a piece of meat and that was so wrong. ‘I don’t know what...’
Judy sucked in a breath.
And giggled.
She had crossed her ankles behind his back and was clinging to him so hard he could not have withdrawn from her even in the unlikely event he had wanted to. She moaned, enjoying him big inside her a little longer before she decided the floor was very hard and cold.
‘It is cold in the basement,’ she had sighed. ‘Let’s do this again upstairs. In the bedroom.’
They had gathered up the quilts that Judy had discarded at the foot of the stairs and groped their way to the big first floor front room in the near stygian darkness. They had thrown their clothes in heaps on the floor and dived beneath the sheets.