He remembered the black day when the Soviet advance in Europe had ground to a halt. He remembered the crippled major who had spoken to them so boldly of that first Sling attack. That major had the gift for understanding technology and its consequences. He would look at these facts, and he would know—
A discreet knock at his door interrupted his train of thought. “Yes?” Yurii snapped with poorly disguised frustration. These continuous interruptions represented another flaw in the support system for the Soviet General
Secretary: how could you even complete a thought between interruptions? No wonder the old goat Sipyagin had had such trouble keeping his attention focused!
General Mangasarian leaned into the room. “Have you heard about the newest crazy American plan?”
“What?”
Swaggering into the room now that he had Yurii’s puzzled interest, Mangasarian waved a video cassette in the air. “President Forstil just made a speech. Nothing new in that—but he explicitly wants you to see it.” His voice turned exultant. “We may have won the war.”
“What?!”
Mangasarian loaded the tape in the Chairman’s deck. “I hope you enjoy it.”
Yurii turned to watch the tape.
The image flickered for a moment, then settled on a scene Yurii had seen before. The emblem of the American Presidential Seal glared from the podium in the foreground; the muted blue wall faded into the background. Trapped between these two extremes, between the bold and the bland, stood the most powerful man in the world.
A week ago, the American President had been the second most powerful person in the world. Yurii ground his teeth in quiet fury.
The presidential face had changed so many times in the recent past—from Mayfield’s face of a plastic puppet to Carson’s face of a schoolteacher, and now to Forstil’s face of a … Yurii’s thought stumbled. Forstil had a look of stone, carved by lashing sea spray. An unyielding confidence lay upon him—the confidence of one who might not always win, but who always gave everything he knew how to give. And because he knew how much he had given, he had no guilt, no matter what the outcome.
This guiltless image of a president spoke. “Good morning, people of the world. I have good news today—news even better than the end of the recent war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Today I am here to tell you about America’s plans to make the whole world safer.” He paused, eyes glistening. “At least some of you have been watching us with baffled suspicion as we have called our Trident submarines into port. Even more of you have wondered about our motives as you have watched us blow back the seals on ten percent of our missiles, exposing them to the eyes of any nation with a scanning satellite.”
The stony face softened with a smile that seemed to surprise the president himself. “Some of you have wondered, What are those Americans doing this time?” His smile held a healing joy. “Well, wonder no longer.
“We Americans have set forth on a unilateral reduction in nuclear arsenals.” The camera zoomed out, to encompass both the president and a television monitor. The monitor held scenes of sabotage of such grandeur as a KGB agent might dream of in his wildest fantasies.
An American soldier stepped to the edge of a Minute-man III silo and peered into the half-light of the deep shaft. With a theatrical flourish, the soldier fondled a grenade, pulled the ring, and dropped it over the edge. A flash of light, and a short puff of smoke, announced the end of the grenade, and the end of the life of the missile now damaged beyond flight repair. Yurii’s eyes bulged.
Forstil continued to speak, as though nothing unusual had happened. “As you can see, we are destroying these missiles and their silos. We will be destroying ten percent of our strategic nuclear forces every month for the next nine months, reducing our nuclear stockpiles to one tenth their current size.”
The camera zoomed back in on a now-radiant president. “General Secretary Klimov, I urge you to launch a reconnaissance satellite of your own an hour from now, so you can see for yourself our sincerity and dedication to the plan of unilateral disarmament.”
Yurii stared at the president with a complete loss of comprehension. Forstil’s country had just won an extraordinary victory, yet now Forstil was going to throw it all away! It seemed insane—but then, Yurii remembered that Americans had thrown world domination away before, after World War II, when they had discharged over three-fourths of their men from the Army. Within a few short months of achieving total victory, they had enfeebled a military force of twelve million men down to a pathetic collection of less than two million soldiers.
Of course, at that time, the Americans had depended on a trick gadget to ensure their ascendancy: the new nuclear bomb, their precious monopoly.
Forstil continued speaking. “How can we dare to dis-mande our defenses in this way? The answer is simple. In the past few weeks, we have proved an important concept. We have proved that reliance on brute power does not strengthen its holder, it weakens. The nuclear forces of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union endanger us more than they protect us. For if we were so foolish as to use them, even if no one lived to fire back at us, we would still be hurting ourselvesl Just the fallout and weather changes would hurt our own citizens. Does that make sense? Of course not. It is absurd.
“Henceforth, the United States shall depend on nonnu-clear, Information Age weapons to defend itself. We will retain a small nuclear force: even in the Information Age, brute force remains dangerous if not counterbalanced. But this force will be the minimum necessary. We will never need enough firepower to destroy an aggressor s civilization more than once.” He paused. “Perhaps the full absurdity of our Industrial Age arsenal can be seen in the extent to which it exceeds that need. We must learn to defend ourselves with rational means, before the irrational destroys us all.”
Yurii found himself gripping his chair with wild excitement, an excitement like lightning, that jerked him upright and discharged through him to the ground. So this was the purpose of the HighHunters flooding the sky! Forstil thought they could become the new trick gadget, the next-generation solution to cheap security that would replace the nuclear bomb in their thinking.
As the excitement discharged, Yurii relaxed in his chair. His worries and fears about America’s Crowbars had been discharged swiftly and painlessly by the American President.
Of course, Forstil hadn’t promised to destroy America’s whole arsenal. America would not be at the unquestioned mercy of Yurii’s missiles, but they would be so close… . If the Americans really did reduce their nuclear stockpile to one or two hundred missiles, a preemptive first strike became quite possible … no, the submarines would still pose a problem. Nevertheless, Yurii felt sure this would work to Russia’s advantage.
Yurii jerked in his seat as Forstil used his name again. “We of America have now taken the first, largest step toward making our planet a safe place to live. I now ask General Secretary Klimov to join us in our casting aside of self-destroying weapons. In a few months, the Soviet Union will be the only country in the world able to bring down nuclear devastation upon Soviet land. Join us in protecting your own country.” It seemed as though Forstil’s eyes locked with Yurii’s, despite the distance in both time and space. The weary shock of Russia’s recent humiliation pressed upon Yurii with a desire to stop struggling, to do as the president suggested, to dismantle his own nuclear forces.
But that would mean throwing away a huge lever, even as it was put into his hands. Yurii grimaced. Such an abdication of advantage could not be considered.
Not all Soviet citizens would agree with his opinion. No doubt this broadcast was penetrating Soviet airspace, reaching his people despite the Army’s efforts to jam it. Oh, well. The Pravda discussion of Forstil’s speech would require careful editing. And perhaps it might make sense in the upcoming months to destroy a token number of Soviet missiles. They could eliminate a few obsolete weapons and thereby solidify American public opinion behind Forstil’s new course. Yes, he could see considerable merit in t
hat plan.
The tape ended. Yurii savored the victory for a moment, then reflected on his suspicions. Could this be some kind of hoax? With a quick phone call, he orbited a satellite to watch the Americans destroy their own missiles.
Two hours later, he knew without doubt the extent of the American insanity. The 120 missiles in exposed silos had been destroyed—utterly, unquestionably, and irrevocably.
It was funny how, in a quiet, darkened room, one could be crushed with a sense of terror. Hilan had lived several nights in an exact duplicate of this room in the Pentagon.
This war room where he now stood lay buried under Mount Weather, Virginia.
Though he had spent some time in that Pentagon war room, most of his mental images of this room came from trips made in dreams and nightmares—trips through thoughtworks, wherein he sweated his way across burning visions of Armageddon.
The reality now seemed inconsequential compared to those nightmares. Here, methodical discipline muffled the raw emotional undertone: the light and glare of the hotline telecomm with Moscow lay in the Current Actions Center, behind the glass-walled control area where technicians swarmed. Here, separated from the clatter, Hilan sat at the long table with the Joint Chiefs and a variety of aides. Of course, no windows broke the walls of this quiet place buried beneath a mountain; the wall-sized display screen at the far end supplied a more relevant contact with the external world.
Hilan looked up at the display again. He did not shiver. As calm as this setting seemed, he wondered how calm he himself appeared. Any calm he might project was pure facade: He felt like a self-contained nuclear burst, the detonation surging in his body, trapped within the authority of his black pinstripe suit.
The war room would have been a dangerous place to hold this meeting before the war for Europe, now known as the Flameout. Before the Flameout, Soviet submarines cruised within six minutes of an attack on Washington—six minutes from obliterating the war room in the Pentagon. Had the subs not been destroyed already, the fragile plan Hilan would now execute could not exist.
The long table held too many faces. Hilan picked out the key ones, unconsciously. Foremost was General Hansen of the Air Force, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was a tall man, prone to sudden-breaking smiles, with silver hair. He had been a fighter pilot, and he still wore the ostentatious watch that was once so popular among the flyers. He sat serenely at the far end of the table.
Soft light came from the ceiling, eliminating shadows. A couple of people smoked; the ventilation drew away the smoke with brisk efficiency.
The display wall was an oversized version of the screen used by the Zetetics to hold decision duels. The technology here was more primitive, Hilan realized: the software for the display did not allow such flexible zooming and windowing. The absence of powerful software explained why they needed the entire wall for this setup. Despite the huge display, however, the commander in chief had less access to useful information than did a second-year physics student probing the atom for the first time. Plenty of information would come across that display, but little of it would be useful.
What did Hansen think of the plan they had come here to execute? Hansen might be turning purple inside, but that was submerged here. He was a soldiers soldier, calmly competent. He had objected to the plan at first as too risky. But a day’s reflection, and the weight of the ideas, had made him a believer. He would never bet everything on a single turn of the wheel, he had said. But here the alternative was to bet everything on the turn of the wheel, not once, but many times—every time a weak president confronted Yurii Klimov.
General Hansen evoked in Hilan a sense of security—a delusionary feeling, to be sure. But Hilan had by now listened to too many Zetetic lectures to deny the delusionary feeling: those who refuse to admit their own prejudices will remain forever enslaved by them.
Hilan turned away from Hansen to look at the lower left-hand corner of the display. In that corner, photos of the Soviet Union flicked methodically from scene to scene. Over 300 SkyHunters were sending those pictures of critical targets. A checklist adjacent to the images marked off the targets as, SkyHunter by SkyHunter, they accounted for each and every one.
The photos showed the sites of deeply buried headquarters, and buildings cast with meters of reinforced concrete. They seemed impregnable. But the targets being assessed were not the buried and reinforced buildings. The targets were the thin, delicate antennae serving those mighty bunkers. The men would survive, and in a few hours, they would reestablish communication with the world. But for several precious hours, they would be blind and mute. By the time they recovered, there would be no missiles or bombers to command.
The words to begin a war seemed so simple. An Air Force captain announced: “Ready to dispense.”
Hilan closed his eyes for a moment,,then looked into the captains. He held his breath, as if waiting for someone else to make the decision, knowing that no one else could.
In this last moment before sending humanity hurtling toward clear survival or clear destruction, Hilan did not think about the careful rope of logical thinking that had led him here. He had inspected it from every possible direction, examined every fiber, every mar in its surface, every kink in its depths. The rope had kinks; it could snap; the world could fall from it. But he had examined the other ropes at hand with equal care, and though the rope he had chosen might snap, the others were even more likely to break. The logic of the rope fibers rested in a corner of his mind, but did not command his attention.
Nor did he think of his wife in Washington, his children in New Haven, or his aunt in Cincinnati. Earlier, he had fantasized about moving them to places of safety in case the rope broke. But without the rope, no place could prove safe. If he would not risk his own family, what kind of fool would he be to risk all mankind? His family, he had decided in his earlier analysis, would be among the hostages he would hold over himself to make sure his decision was the right one. He had moved himself beneath the mountain mostly for the proximity to the hot line.
He did not think of the Zetetic Institute, or Nathan Pilstrom, who had devised this ingenious solution to the problem of thermonuclear missiles. Nathan had presented him with this dilemma. But he did not fall into the trap of laying all the blame for the future on the people who first saw that such a future was possible. Some of the blame—or some of the credit—did belong to them, but at this moment, neither blame nor credit seemed important.
He did not think of Yurii Klimov, or the possible outcomes of this evenings efforts. He had thought about the outcomes too much already, and he would need to think about them again soon anyway. Nothing could be gained by wrapping up his mind in a tight coil around the hideous possibilities that might ensue; he would need a clear mind to deal with whatever possibilities did materialize.
None of these people or events could capture his attention. Rather, a simple feeling held him, now that the decision-making was over, and only the actions to solidify the thought-stuff remained. It was a feeling of relief.
One way or another, the terrible uncertainty would end by morning. The terror that had hung over his whole life, over the lives of all the other people in America and Russia and the rest of the world, would fade into history. “Do it,” he nodded to the officer.
They watched the display.
The HighHunter dispenser carried its own camera, and through this viewpoint, the roomful of generals, admirals, and presidential advisors saw a thousand tiny points of light come to life above the Soviet night sky. The points streaked along majestic arcs, with the grace granted by gravity’s guiding hand.
The captain who had initiated the dispensing of the SiloHunters muttered in awe, “It’s like snow—or maybe sleet.”
General Hansen, boss of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, grunted. “A sleet of steel, falling through the night.”
A murmur rose around the room. Admiral Jenson frowned, along with General Plunket of the Army. Neither of them liked today’s mission, and Hila
n agreed with their anxiety completely.
The camera view switched to an optically amplified image, which came from a reconnaissance satellite. It focused on the fate of a simple disc of concrete, thousands of miles away from both the satellite and the watchers.
The full thickness of the Earth’s atmosphere shimmered above the disc, making it seem to waver, insubstantial and anemic. Its grayish-white substance seemed more like a ghost than an implacable enemy—something that would swish away with the wave of a hand.
A streak of light cut the image and struck the ghost, shattering the illusion of both. The streak disappeared as quickly as it had come, leaving a shallow, darkened pit in the platter, beneath a pale cloud of dusty shadows. A Crowbar had hit the silo cover.
Another streak of light cut the image, then disappeared from the far edge of the picture: a miss.
Another streak of light hurtled down, and dug a second pit into the disc’s surface: a hit.
Another one missed.
Another struck, near midpoint between the other two hits. Now the whole surface of the disc disappeared under a rubble cloud that settled a moment later. The hair-thin fractures left by the first two hits, too fine to be seen even with the crystal-precise instruments of the recon satellite, now showed clearly in the chewed surface of the silo cover.
But that cover still held intact; no hole yetpenetrated its full depth to the terror lurking beneath. This silo required at least two more hits to fulfill the mission—one to clear the broken shield, one to fall cleanly into the pit, to brush the monster missile with kinetic destruction. Only one more Crowbar fell toward that target, however. Helpless, Hilan watched as the last streak of light crossed, and missed.
They had allotted six shots of sleet for each silo—two to break the cover, one to break the missile, one to miss, and two more just for safety. Here three had missed, and four had been needed to break the cover. The failure was too painful to feel: the agony numbed the mind, rather than piercing it.
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