‘Now you get back to Command, Mr Vaduz, and tell them of a signal we have received which purports to come from Admiral Holliwell—and you tell them, boy, that it is unorthodox and irregular and that I’m fucking suspicious. Now you just tell them that.’
‘Captain,’ said Daniels, ‘we have already received two coded and security-idented signals via SATCOM and we have, on your specific orders, failed to acknowledge either. Both signals have told us to move away from the Soviets, both have urged us to de-escalate the situation.’
Captain Hanks still held the binoculars to his eyes and Daniels stepped closer to him.
‘Sir, it’s plausible that Command are under the impression we cannot reply for technical or even security reasons, and Admiral Holliwell is anxious we move south. So he has broken routine security procedures to get through to us. And sir, I think it’s also possible the Admiral has deliberately sent his signal this way so that the Soviets out there can pick it up and know we do not want confrontation. I really do think that’s a possibility, sir.’
For half a minute, Captain Hanks said nothing. He held the binoculars to his eyes and scanned slowly from the main Soviet fleet ahead to the second convoy moving port. And then, to the dismay of his officers watching, he let the binoculars fall and hang the length of their short straps on his chest, and picked the black rubber ball up off the fire extinguisher rack. Lieutenant Vaduz saw his jaw muscles begin their angry contortions.
‘Radar, sir, Minsk steady at two and a quarter miles.’ Captain Hanks turned to them raised his chin and spoke. ‘Gentlemen, I appreciate the concern. I understand your explanations. I also remember less than two minutes ago telling Vaduz here to send a signal.’
In anxious reflex the young lieutenant backed painfully into the chart table again, saluted and left the bridge for the Satellite Communications Room.
‘You talk of de-escalation,’ the Captain continued after Vaduz had closed the bridge door. ‘D’you not think that this is exactly what I am trying to do? De-escalate. Do you not think that allowing twenty-two Soviet warships into the Persian Gulf would lead to an immediate escalation of hostilities? Do you not see we are guarding the entrance to a little piece of sea that’s suddenly vitally important to the United States? We know it, and so do those bastards out there, and why else d’you imagine it’s coincidence? Were they not, those twenty-two ships, a hundred miles south of us, three days ago, on warm-water exercises? Then there’s a coup and a new government and a shut-down of oil to the US and suddenly the Minsk leads her task force right in here.
‘I’m a simple sailor with forty-two years’ service and I know nothing of politics except that they double-deal us whether they’re Democrats or Republicans. But I’ll tell you one thing. The flags that are being waved on the streets of Riyadh today are of the same colour as those flying from those ships out there. I guarantee it. You heard the President. You heard what he said. I’ll use his words again, because they are indelible on my mind. “Communist ambition,” he said, “will attempt sooner or later to take it for itself. Because it is the Soviet’s economic and military strategy to deny the United States Saudi oil.” D’you remember him saying that? By God you should! What kind of world do we want to live in in five months, or five years from now?’
‘Second convoy stopped, sir, bearing 124 degrees—one and a quarter miles.’ The voice from radar control was quickly followed by a second urgent call from Lieutenant Vaduz.
‘Sir. The Minsk is signalling, a one-liner. “CLEAR CHANNEL IMMEDIATELY.” And we have a problem.’
‘Problem? What problem? What problem Mr Vaduz?’
‘I’ve lost SATCOM sir. All channels. I’m getting them but they can’t get us. They’re calling, but I can’t answer.’
‘Is the fault ours, Mr Vaduz?’
‘Hard to say, sir, it’s only just happened and we’re on book check now. But the signal’s leaving us strong so the fault could be at any of Wimex’s relay computers.’
‘Did you get my signal to Admiral Holliwell away?’
‘Can’t be sure, sir, but I think you must assume no.’
‘No it is.’
‘Sir, how shall I answer Minsk?’
‘You just stand by, Mr Vaduz. You’ll give them an answer when I have one for you to send.’
‘Captain,’ said Commander Daniels. ‘With respect, sir, we are breaking all the laws of the sea and putting this ship in peril. We must answer the Minsk. This is the fourth signal in two days we’ve ignored.’
‘You keeping count, Mr Daniels?’
‘But sir, we just can’t . . .’
‘You can, d’you hear. So can you all. Goddammit, you are officers of the United States Navy and you will obey your Captain at sea!’
‘But, sir, this is gross . . .’
‘You’ll do as you’re fucking well told and you will not question me in the presence of junior officers and ratings, d’you hear? Do you hear me? For God’s sake, I am your Captain.’
His eyes were suddenly wide and bulging, his face had become quickly very white and his forehead glistened with sweat under the peak of his cap.
‘We will not acknowledge the Minsk,’ he shouted. ‘We will not acknowledge any other signal without my permission because I do not believe they are being sent by our people.’
‘Our people?’ Daniels and Ginsberg said together.
‘Our people—and God help your rotten deafness!’ His voice had gone to a higher pitch still, there was spittle in the corners of his mouth and the squash ball was distorted in the fury of his fingers.
‘Can’t I make any of you understand? Don’t you realize what they’re doing? The other side?’
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Ginsberg, ignoring Daniel’s gesture to move back. ‘Are you saying you believe the signals ordering us to move south have been sent by the Soviets?’ Captain Hanks nodded and smiled. A trickle of sweat ran down the side of his right temple and into his eye, but he didn’t seem to notice.
‘Sometimes, Mr Ginsberg,’ he said, his voice suddenly quiet again, ‘I am able to persuade myself you understand English.’
Lieutenant Ginsberg looked at his Captain, and there was shock in his young face.
‘D’you suppose,’ said Captain Hanks, ‘that the President of the United States would stand up and say what he did, issue an ultimatum to the Communists and then order his only warship in the area to run south? Does that make sense to you? Didn’t even the chicken-livered Carter, faced with the Iranians, send in his warships? Wasn’t the Coral Sea and the Nimitz and the Kitty Hawk immediately ordered in? Carter was yellow with fright, but he did that. And this President’s a hawk, a goddamned marvel and you suppose he would order us away? No sir, not in a million years. Wouldn’t he instead be planning reinforcements? Don’t you think that is exactly what is being prepared at this moment in the Pentagon? Is that so fucking preposterous?
‘So we’ve had a breakdown in our satellite communications link, a faulty computer maybe, there’s a lot of things to go wrong. Well, let me tell you it’s the first time it’s happened on this ship in all the years I have been in command. Just another coincidence? Balls! I’m telling you those motherfuckers out there have done it, jamming us, and I will not let those bastards through so they can put down their men and their planes for the fucking crippling commissars to deliver Saudi Arabia and its oil to the Kremlin. Let me tell you, when this is over, this ship will sail to Norfolk, Virginia to be scrapped—and so will I—but as God is my witness, the traditions of the United States Navy will not be buried with us. You want an answer for theMinsk? Very well, Mr Ginsberg, I’ll give you one. You will fire two rounds dead centre of the Minsk, and the Ivan Rogov—dead centre, mind you, and well short, so there’s no provocation. D’you hear? None!’
Lieutenant Ginsberg left the bridge, unsure suddenly of what was real and what wasn’t, of what he thought he had hear
d and what perhaps he might have imagined. Was it possible that their cut-off from the Pentagon was simply a communications failure, another defective computer? Or could he believe in a Soviet conspiracy?
But Lieutenant Ginsberg was only twenty-two years old, ever-doubtful, and a stranger to crisis on sea or on land. However his conscience advised him, whatever his instinct warned him of, he climbed down the steel rungs to the flight deck and, as ordered, went across to Gunnery Control. It was the nearness of the waiting aircraft that began it: a memory of something long past, a film years ago, a late-night television movie about a B-52 bomber armed with an H-bomb on its way to blast a Russian city and all because something had gone wrong with the computers in the Pentagon. The bomber pilot had ignored all contra-measures, had switched off radioed orders from the President himself, ignored even the pleading, sobbing voice of his wife telling him to return to base, because he thought it all a Soviet trick.
Lieutenant Ginsberg got into his control booth, strapped on his harness and switched on the intercom relay connecting him directly with his gun and missile stations. He remembered the end of the film, but he couldn’t remember the title. The pilot had dropped his bomb, on Kiev or Leningrad or some Soviet city and half a million people were annihilated. Admitting the mistake, and to prevent retaliation and a nuclear war, the US President ordered the destruction of Philadelphia. Or was it Maine?
He began the preliminary standby calls—alerting station five to load and prepare to fire. He leaned forward to the master switch which provided the electrical power to the missile launchers—a switch that controlled the current to every item of fire-power on board. It could not be overridden, and the square of fine steel mesh covering it could be unlocked by only two men on board the Okinawa—the Captain and the Gunnery Officer. And he was Gunnery Officer.
By the mesh, painted in red, were the two words: FAIL SAFE, and Lieutenant Ginsberg remembered the title of the film. Then he cross-checked the computer printout giving him the range and exact position, and held the relay switch.
‘Station five, prepare two rounds on co-ordinate 98— repeat 98—at one thousand yards. Acknowledge 98 at one thousand.’
WASHINGTON
‘In the next war the survivors will envy the dead’
Across the United States the reality of what was happening and of what the President had threatened would happen if he did not get his oil was only now beginning to be appreciated. Only now did people wonder whether they really were about to enter the Age of Less.
Little by little items of news filtered into the White House contributing to a growing pile of macabre and impossible happenings that in the President’s mind added up to global pandemonium.
Like the riots at Narita, Tokyo’s new airport, when demonstrators set alight four JAL airliners in protest, according to news-agency reports, against wastage of fuel—destroying in the process eighteen of the demonstrators, fourteen airline staff, and twenty thousand gallons of Avgas.
Or the demonstrators in Turin, Northern Italy, who rampaged through a geriatric hospital, smashing isolation wards and the operating theatre and throwing refrigerated bottles of blood-plasma out on to the streets because of erroneous reports that old women had died through hypothermia because of the lack of fuel for the central-heating system. The leaders of the rampage, members of an outraged local Communist party, later preferred to ignore the post mortem evidence and conclusions that the women had died of an uncommon virus and that the temperature of the wards had never fallen below the normal comfortable 62 degrees Fahrenheit.
Or like the convoy of five petrol tankers on their way from Le Havre to Paris, that were hijacked just after midnight on Autoroute de l’Ouest near Vauvray, each carrying two thousand gallons of fuel. The drivers were ordered at gunpoint to drive their tankers to a disused strip mine fifty miles away then drive one at a time into the shaft that ran four hundred yards deep in to the side of the workings. The five drivers were shot through the head as they sat in their cabs and the entrance to the mineshaft was blocked with boulders, leaving a supply of over ten thousand gallons of high-octane fuel hidden and waiting to be collected and distributed as soon as the prices had risen high enough to make the operation properly profitable.
The French police found out about it by the sheerest fluke. One of the hijackers, a man who had shot dead two of the drivers, had returned home to Le Havre in the early hours to find his wife had given birth to a boy child three weeks prematurely. Overwhelmed with gratitude, the hijacker went to his church for prayers and thanksgiving. Kneeling there on the floor before the altar and the icon of the Holy Mary, he also thought it right and proper, as a good Catholic, to confess his overnight sins, which he did at some length and out loud. The dominie, sitting out of sight by the organ and quietly polishing brass, was astonished at what he overheard and quickly did his duty to the laws of God and France.
All these things and more found their way back to the President in short precise reports edited by the Press Secretary, Schlesinger, together with reports from State Governors and the FBI, causing the President to wonder if perhaps too much had been done too soon, if ultimatums too early delivered gave no room and no time for manoeuvre and whether he had pumped adrenalin into the system at a time when it perhaps needed a depressant. He had asked for calm and he had got hysteria. He had appealed for sacrifice and he had got greed. He had asked them to rally and instead they had run.
‘There’s been a shoot-out in Dallas, Mr President; three National Guardsmen dead and a helluva lot of casualties. The hospital is refusing to accept any more. Seems they went for another tanker convoy with shotguns.’
‘Explosives have been thrown at the Egyptian Embassy here, sir, and at their Consulate in New York. Seems people don’t know yet who are friendly Arabs and who aren’t. Far as we know, only five dead. Happened fifteen minutes ago.’
‘Our Ambassador in Tripoli has had to be helped out. Still twenty people inside the Embassy, sir, and Gaddafi’s ignoring us.’
‘Oil tankers have been lost—possibly hijacked, Mr President. Air Force have been searching at sea for slicks and flotsams, but they’ve come up with nothing yet. It’s a big area, sir, could take days.’
‘FBI reckon it’s East Coast Mafia, Mr President. There’s been a sudden petrol supply surplus in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Maine. They say it’s selling for five dollars a gallon and still they’re queuing for it.’
‘Truckers have packed their tankers against pumps in some of the big stations in Connecticut, sir, to prevent the sale of fuel. They’re demanding it’s for them. We’ve also had a report from the Houston, Galveston area of people dying from poisoning after syphoning petrol from car tanks.’
‘The oil pipelines from Galveston have been blown up. It’s the second attack in two days and we just don’t have the personnel to guard every yard of that line, sir. Same old story. Sunbelt against Snowbelt.’
‘And more campus riots, Mr President. North Western University in Chicago, Right versus Left. And there’s been some blood at the University of Michigan, Arab students attacked. Strung two of them up from a lamp-post. By their necks.’
The President sat there and slowly stroked his nose with his forefinger. Then with his wide fingertips he covered his eyes and massaged them. The men stood around him waiting. There was no noise in the Situation Room except for the low hum of the air conditioning fans and the occasional flick of a faulty condenser in one of the strip lights. The chair scratched across the rubber-tiled floor and the President stood up and walked slowly to a wall-map of the United States. He turned and leaned back against it. Then he said very quietly—in a whisper almost, ‘We couldn’t have known it would go this way. No way could we have known.’ He rested his head back against the map and looked up at the ceiling.
‘D’you know the most sickening thing I’ve yet seen? Did you see it? On the newscasts tonight? A Vietnam Veterans’ demo at
the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Christ! Less than half a mile away, guys in wheelchairs with plastic arms and legs—some for me, some against— men who only a few years ago had given all but their lives fighting together. And now fighting each other in wheelchairs, turning them over, pulling out power cables, slashing the tyres. My God!’ He suddenly pushed himself away from the wall-map and faced them, his eyes wide in anger.
‘I asked them to help me, and instead I see sprawling, legless Veterans fighting on the sidewalks of Washington. I addressed the nation, remember? When the chips are down, I said . . . what was that phrase? “The path we have chosen is full of hazards but it’s the one most consistent with our character and courage.” Shit! Character and courage, my ass! Killing National Guardsmen just so they fill up their lousy tanks . . . blowing up pipelines to let the bastards freeze . . . lynch rule on the campus, mob rule in the country. Jesus! I feel lousy with them . . . lousy d’you hear? I am ashamed, goddamned ashamed to be their President.’
His face was white and his jaw worked from side to side, and softly, very softly, he punched his left fist into the palm of his right hand. He looked at them each in turn, menacingly, like a drunk at a bar waiting for any response, any excuse, to hit them. But no one looked back. They looked at the floor, they looked at their finger-nails, at their shoes. No one looked at him. He went on in the same dangerous tone.
‘While I was up at Camp David yesterday, looking through the great speeches of great American Presidents, I read a lot of JFK’s, and I came across something I thought I’d forgotten, and my God, it hit me hard. “To recognize the possibilities of a nuclear war in the missile age without our citizens knowing what they should do or where they should go if the bombs begin to fall, would be a failure of Presidential responsibility.” I was temped to use it last night, just to warn those people out there what we might be up against. But I thought it might create a little panic. D’you hear? I was worried it might cause a little panic. And God help me now, but I really do believe that if the bombs began to fall, they’d still be running after gasoline.’ The neon light flicked again and the President’s hands were still. He sighed. His shoulders drooped. He turned on one foot, gently punched the wall-map of the United States, turned again and walked to his chair at the head of the long metal table. He sat down and beckoned the others to do the same. When the scraping of chairs had finished, he spoke again and quietly—the anger gone.
December Ultimatum Page 17