O'Toole stood mesmerized by the steel-blue eyes glinting out of the soft red halo of Moreau's helmet. His lips began to move wordlessly.
“The key.” The penny rattled up the vacuum tube.
“Suh . . . cur . . . uty,” O'Toole mumbled. “Security vi . . . lay . . . shun.”
“Then do it yourself, lieutenant. Do your duty. Now. Right now.”
“Mama,” O'Toole reverted.
“Jesus,” Kazaklis interrupted. “Kick him in the gonads. I'm not kidding, Moreau. Kick him in the balls.”
Moreau edged closer to O'Toole, slid the helmet visor down so her head was almost fully encased, and placed the penlight on her chin, shining the red rays up inside the visor. Halupalai took a step back at the vision.
“Give me the key,” Moreau repeated, her voice turned softly singsong.
O'Toole stared, his eyes widening in fear.
“Give me the key,” the haunting rhythm of her voice insisted.
“Angelus mortuorum,” O'Toole murmured.
“The key, lieutenant,” the words danced.
He gave her the key, his ungloved hand touching hers with the burning bite of dry ice.
“Give me the combination.”
He mumbled a short, simple sequence of numbers.
Moreau then tugged at Halupalai, bent over the code box, and they entered the keys, turning them simultaneously. She nodded at him and they spun the twin combination locks. The top of the square gray box popped open and she reached in for two code folders. She handed one to Halupalai, pulling at him so his ear was near her mouth.
“Strap him in,” she shouted above the full pitch of the engines. “We'll get him out of here soon.”
Then she threaded her way through the dark, narrow walkway back to her seat. It was as cold as a meat locker in here, she thought. Colder.
The President's eyes lingered on the end of the message. He struggled with the urge to hand it to someone. Of the group surrounding him, he was not sure to whom he should hand it. Sixteen hours earlier he had sat in this same room with the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, his national security adviser, the head of the CIA, all the king's men discussing all the king's horses—the missiles, the submarines, the top-secret plans to deploy laser weapons in space. The next meeting was scheduled in eight hours. He chuckled, without mirth. Bit of a wait, considering the circumstances.
He looked up and saw the young duty officer, Sedgwick, staring at him strangely.
Something would have to give . . .
The words surged through the President.
Shrewd buggers, aren't they . . .
The duty officer held the phone.
No humanly acceptable response . . . Therefore it won't happen . . . Don't kid yourself. . .
The duty officer's eyes pleaded.
Won't lose any sleep . . .
The duty officer placed the phone in his hand.
That's too bad . . .
The duty officer lifted his hand to his head.
That's too bad . . .
The duty officer shook his arm gently.
“How long?” the President asked bleakly into the phone.
“Forty-five seconds,” the general answered.
“The warhead is aimed at Andrews.” The President's words seemed to come from outside him. “Surgical ground burst. Symbolic.”
“Horse pucky,” the general said angrily.
“The missile is aimed at Andrews.”
“I doubt very much the missile was aimed at Andrews,” the general said, biting off each word. “I know it will not land there. Its trajectory already has taken it beyond Andrews.”
“The missile is aimed at Andrews.”
“This is no time for delusion, Mr. President.”
The President's shuddering stopped. He had to believe. No humanly acceptable response. His mind cleared.
“Put SIOP on this problem,” he said to the general. “I want a responsive attack designed as closely as possible as a carbon copy of the Soviet attack. Take out all the Russian surface-to-air missile bases, or some equivalent, plus token ICBM installations and a submarine base. . . .”
The President paused, ever so briefly, just long enough for Icarus to understand that his leader grasped the nature of the next trade, a knight for a knight, Icarus being his knight.
“Take out their primary command facility.” The President grew giddy at the simple brutality of the trade, flippantly adding, “Drop a little one, surgically, into the can in the Premier's dacha in Sochi.”
The President shook his head sharply.
“Sorry. Forget that. Put the same kilotonnage coming at Andrews on Vnukovo Air Field outside Moscow. Leave the rest of their strategic system intact. Under no circumstances is the scenario to kill more than nine million Soviet citizens. Not one more. Do you understand?”
The President could feel the hostility seethe through the silence.
“Do you understand?” he repeated sternly.
“Mr. President,” the general said coldly, “you are being conned on a level unprecedented in human history. The disaster will be equally unprecedented, your role in it parallel to that of Nero's foolishness.”
The President sighed. “General, I will hear no more of this. I want the response designed immediately. Instruct your computer. When the response is programmed, I will activate the codes through the civilian authorities and the Joint Chiefs, who will transmit them to you instantly, as the law requires.”
The President handed the phone to the duty officer with a look far more persuasive than any military command the young naval officer had ever received. The President, seconds away from the answer to part of his riddle, slumped into an armchair in which he had been briefed daily on tribesmen crossing far-off frontiers, on British ministers jeopardizing NATO secrets through liaisons with European heiresses, and countless other international crises, large and small. He closed his eyes. In the background he could hear the Premier's words repeated mechanically into the phone. A teletype was clattering. He took absolutely no heed of either. He held a small blue-and-red card, encased in plastic like a fancy credit card. It said “Sealed Authenticator System” and contained various coded numbers and letters. It identified him as the man who could unloose the weapons. It rested loosely in his limp hand.
Two minutes after Harpoon emerged from the bowels of Omaha, twenty-two minutes left on the clocks Icarus watched, the blue alert truck squealed to a stop on a darkened runway outside SAC headquarters. The engine roar of the giant E-4 command plane, a specially refitted Boeing 747, deafened the admiral. He glanced quickly at the words “united states of america” stripped across its side. It was an exact replica of the plane that might still be waiting for the President at Andrews.
The admiral leaped out of the truck, scurried up the stairs into the plane, and snap-saluted a handful of Air Force officers waiting near the hatch. He said nothing, hurrying toward the front of the windowless plane, double-timing it up a spiral staircase to the quarters a President would use. He looked at a bank of multicolored phones and a small table inside a square of four blue swivel chairs. He sat down, placing his satchel to the side, and picked up a white phone with twenty-two button lights. He pushed one, connecting him to the pilot, a major who wore a black eyepatch. “Get this bird moving,” he said.
He paused for a second, trying to get the chill out of his bones.
Then he picked up a yellow phone, with buttons connecting him to the outside. He punched one. “Diogenes,” a voice responded instantly, although the voice was a thousand miles distant in a bunker buried beneath the winter-brown horse country of Virginia. “Harpoon,” the admiral said.
“The list is tentative.”
“Come on, I know that.”
“Looks like Number Eight.”
“Jesus, that far down?”
“Afraid so.”
“Location?”
The admiral listened carefully and frowned. “Good for him,” Harpoon said aft
er a second. “Not so good for me.”
“Maybe you won't need him.”
“Maybe.”
The admiral hung up the direct-line connection to the civilian Presidential Successor Locator, an underground unit that coordinated the location of potential successors with missile-impact areas. He knew the first Soviet submarine-launched missiles were just now landing. He also knew the successor locators had to make their calculations before all the missiles, especially the ICBM's, landed. Afterward would be too late. Communications would go. The locator probably would go.
Number Eight. Good God, for a limited attack, we're going to lose one helluva lot of bigwigs. He tried to remember which Cabinet officer was eighth in the constitutional line of succession. Then, without coming up with an answer, Harpoon felt the huge aircraft lift ponderously off the strip and away from Omaha.
Kazaklis flicked the red terrain-monitoring radar on and off again in front of him. The computer converted the handful of ground personnel and the flight hangars outside the plane into sharp-edged pinnacles that moved from right to left across the screen, like a wildly gyrating stock-market chart. When the ragged obstructions reached the left edge, they reformed and raced left to right. He could read their crazy jumble the way a concertmaster reads musical scores, catching every inflection. In the corner he checked the elevation reading for the Fairchild runways, coordinating it to sea level on another altimeter.
“Two. Four. Five. Seven,” he said.
“Two. Four. Five. Seven,” Moreau repeated, reading the numbers off her own instruments.
“Los Angeles moratorium?” he asked.
“Angelus mortuorum,” she replied brusquely, not liking the interruption of the routine.
“What the hell is that, college girl?”
“Grade-school Latin, commander. It means 'angel of death.'“
Kazaklis glanced sideways at Moreau's ghostly image reflected in her red radar screen. He laughed. “So you put the wrath of the church in our haunted Irishman. Spooked it out of him. Not bad. I figured you'd like the ball-breaking approach better.”
“Fuck off, Kazaklis . We need to get the poor bastard out of here. You're the one who thinks all this is real every time we're out here. Get your fucking job done.”
“You'd better think it's real, angel. It's simpler that way. That means the missiles are on their way down. And you, death bird, have the codes.”
Kazaklis returned to his routine, hunching over the yellow clutter of his flight-panel lights, nudging the engine revolutions carefully, checking the flaps, spinning past scores of routine oil-pressure, water, fuel, altimeter, oxygen gauges he normally would be doing in tandem with Moreau. Hastily he ran a final check on the bright yellow squares at his right, just beyond the throttles. “Bomb Doors Not Latched,” read one. “Bomb Doors Open,” read the next. “Bomb Doors Not Closed and Locked,” read the fourth. The third, which remained dark, read: “Bombs Released.” One by one the yellow lights blipped off as he secured the doors. He felt tense, but good. From the babble coming from outside the plane he could tell that despite the trouble, he remained in flight sequence. First. As squadron leader.
“Code check ready, commander,” Halupalai's formal voice cut in.
“Code check ready,” Kazaklis repeated.
Halupalai began methodically. “Zero. Zero. Alpha. Hotel. One. Nin-er. Zero. Three. Quebec. Nin-er. Quebec.”
Kazaklis repeated the calls carefully, punching each into the new decoder to which Omaha flashed the sequence during each alert. The hair crawled on his arms.
“Sequence two,” he requested of Halupalai.
“Zebra. Zebra. Zebra. Six. Zero. Two. Nin-er. Nin-er. Fox-trot.”
Kazaklis froze. Something was wrong. Sequence two was one digit off a go. They never made them that close, unless SAC was into one of its cockeyed new PRP tests.
“Copilot,” he ordered. “Recheck sequence two.”
“Zebra. Zero. Zebra—” Moreau began.
Kazaklis interrupted her instantly. “Code word!” he demanded of Halupalai.
“Trinity.”
Gawd, the pilot's mind raced, thirty years of daily code-word changes, and he got Trinity.
“Voice confirmation,” Kazaklis said into the direct channel to the tower. “Sequence one, go. Sequence two, go. Code: Trinity. Confirm.”
“Confirm Trinity,” a solemn voice, touched with a Bronx accent, replied. “Confirm go.”
Inside the Buff, the radio went deathly silent. Then Kazaklis placed his hands on the throttles and began the crew check.
“Copilot ready?”
“Ready,” Moreau replied.
“Nav ready?”
“Ready,” Tyler responded.
The voice from the control tower cut in, its tone hysterically different. “Go! For God's sake, man, go! Get your bloody ass out of here. Go! Go! Go! This one is no shit!”
The voice almost wept. Kazaklis stopped the crew check and hit the throttles. He was calm, feeling the dance of danger he loved.
“Melech hamafis,” the tower voice whispered.
The words sailed past Kazaklis. He was rolling now, the engines growing deafening in their roar.
“Any questions?” he radioed to his crewmates, the tone commanding and nonchalant.
“Any jokes?” he asked.
B O P H U . . .
The President opened his eyes slowly.
THAT...
He strained to focus, lost everything in a blur, then focused again.
S W A N A
The lettering, in large black capitals, formed fuzzily in front of him in a slightly skewed, dream-world eye chart reading vertically. His legs felt leaden. His head seemed propped high on a soft pillow. He tried to move and felt the pillow ripple like Jell-O. He turned and immediately became violently sick. His head rested on his appointment secretary's belly. A huge gray file cabinet, still locked tight with its contents marked “top secret” in stark red, lay across his old friend's face and chest. Red also seeped out from beneath the cabinet, rivulets edging across the pillow toward the President's head. He tried to wrench away, but Bophuthatswana, and years of American intelligence on the tiny all-black African nation, pinned his legs to the floor in a similar gray cabinet. Sedgwick, the duty officer, was pulling at the file cabinet to free him.
“Hang tough, Mr. President,” the duty officer said. “Have you out in a minute.”
As Sedgwick heaved at the file cabinet, the President scanned the Situation Room. His last formal briefing here had been confident and absolutely secure, with elaborately locked doors sealing off the rest of the world. Now the chairs were scattered about, the conference table cracked, files scattered, the main door sprung closed, jammed on its hinges. Pieces of acoustical ceiling wobbled loosely above him, as if caught in a breeze. The Zulu clock was frozen on 0608—eight minutes past one in the morning. Still, the room was far from destroyed. In one corner the Emergency War Orders officer stood unruffled, his suit hardly mussed, his black briefcase intact. He wore his usual blank expression. Others were moving about the room methodically.
“So where'd we get it?” the President asked.
“Not exactly sure,” Sedgwick replied, finally rolling the cabinet off his legs. “Somewhere northwest of here. Definitely not southeast at Andrews. Not close. Not far. Coupla miles.”
“Why are we alive?”
He immediately regretted the question, for he knew his old friend, who seemed to be the only casualty, was not. A wave of dizziness hit him. But his mind was clearer now. He struggled painfully to pull away from the body.
“Take it easy, Mr. President. The explosion was relatively small. I think they were telling the truth about a ground burst, which, as you know, digs a big hole but concentrates the damage. Not like Hiroshima. They were trying to be surgical. That's for sure.”
“So we've got a big hole a couple of miles from the White House. What else?”
“Well, unless it landed in the park, it had to strike
a residential area, upper Northwest Washington probably. Out near the cathedral, I'd guess. Maybe as far as Chevy Chase, but I doubt it.”
“And killed a lot of people.”
“At this time of night, probably fifty thousand, maybe more. Hard to say. The big apartment buildings absorb the shock wave fairly quickly. That's why we're okay.”
The President did a quick mental tally. The area was old, established Washington. He had lived there as a young congressman. He guessed a fourth of the Congress lived in the area. So did several members of his Cabinet. And a helluva lot of the national press corps, he thought ruefully. They loved the old oak-lined streets, the quick access down Connecticut and Wisconsin avenues to the power centers of the capital.
“What's upstairs?”
“We haven't been up. Part of the old place must be standing. But the concussion would have made quite a mess.”
“Was I out long?”
“No, just seconds, really. Can you move your legs? They don't seem to be broken.”
The President struggled to his feet. He felt as if he had been trampled by a horse. He tried not to show it. He also tried not to show the fear.
“What's next?”
“Communications are out. Briefly. The long lines are down, naturally, but the patch will be through quickly. We'll have Omaha back up any second. We could go downstairs to the shelter. I don't see much point, frankly. We really should get you out of here.”
Sedgwick paused. Then he added: “You have an interrupted message from the Soviet Premier. It was arriving as communications went down.”
The President sighed. “Give it to me.”
The telegram was brief.
“Andrews missile malfuntioning. Deep regrets. Target military. Repeat: Target Andrews. All at stake in your belief in my intentions. Our combined will crucial. Other unexpected complications causing . . .”
The message broke off there. The President rubbed his temples, his head swimming again. A minute ago he had seen nothing to lose in waiting. Deep regrets. Good God.
“Omaha's back,” Sedgwick interrupted, handing him a phone.
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