Trinity's Child

by William Prochnau

  “In the Lord.”

  Harpoon blinked at him.

  “Admiral?”

  “There are no atheists in foxholes, sir,” Harpoon said limply. “We are in one very large foxhole.”

  “Good.” The successor beamed. “I hope you took advantage of this lull to pray. I did. I feel much better.”

  Harpoon looked around the room for help. He found none. The successor shifted gears rapidly. “Okay,” the man said, “now that you gentlemen have finished with the melodrama, how do we win this war?” Harpoon made no reply. His mind spun. He stared into the man's calm and confident face, trying to keep the consternation off his own, and turned slowly back to his maps.

  A deep and foreboding sense of futility swept over the admiral. He felt trapped between the successor's dangerously simple certainty, which had returned so abruptly, and the system's dangerously complex certainty, which never changed. Harpoon was losing to both—and he knew it. He also knew the stakes.

  “SIOP,” he began slowly, “was devised shortly before the Cuban missile crisis. It means Single Integrated Operating Plan and was devised to coordinate all the nuclear forces at our command. We could not have a submarine striking a target that a bomber had struck earlier or a bomber attacking a target that had been destroyed by an ICBM. Over the years, as both the Soviet and our forces became vastly more complex, the system necessarily became highly computerized.”

  The admiral heard an impatient rustle behind him. “Don't need a history lesson, Harpoon,” the successor said curtly.

  “You may need everything you can get, sir.” Harpoon surprised himself with the directness of his reply. He continued without turning from the maps.

  “By the beginning of this decade, we had more than forty thousand targets and innumerable combinations of options programmed into the computers. Clearly, no man or staff of men could possibly handle such complexities in the minutes available in a nuclear crisis. We had serious doubts that a national leader could make a decision to respond at all, let alone order a balanced response, in the time available to him. Indeed, that is what happened. . . .”

  “Are you tellin' me that the President . . .”—the successor fumbled—“my predecessor did not respond . . . ?” His voice had gone sullenly incredulous.

  “I am saying, sir,” Harpoon replied, and now the impatience was creeping into his voice, “that the President had four minutes. He was aware that our early-warning system had sounded many false alarms. He was faced with a somewhat confusing attack without absolute confidence it was real. He absorbed the first missile landings. From our vantage point in Omaha, he responded slowly. In retrospect, I believe he acted reasonably.”

  “Reasonably.” The successor's single word cut through the purr of the engines, and all eyes in the compartment swung toward Harpoon.

  “Yes, sir,” Harpoon replied, his voice unyielding. “We have a partial transcript of a hot-line message—perhaps a disingenuous message—from the Premier. You might want to read—”

  The colonel cut in abruptly. “I would be happy to help you interpret it,” he said.

  Harpoon turned with methodically slow intimidation toward the jarring voice. “Colonel,” he said icily, “I would appreciate it if you would allow me to proceed uninterrupted. The message was quite simple. Perhaps simple-minded. I cannot judge that. I doubt you can, either.” Harpoon shifted his gaze to the successor. “The Premier contended that the more militaristic elements within his government were pushing him into a total preemptive attack on us. He chose a limited attack on military installations instead. For what it's worth, and I certainly don't know what to make of it, he offered to accept an equal amount of damage in the Soviet Union.” Harpoon immediately regretted his phrasing.

  “A relatively even exchange,” the successor interjected caustically.

  “It was a damned foolish and incredibly dangerous thing to do,” Harpoon tried to recoup. “I can't assess his motives. He claimed that our government had squeezed the Soviets too long and too hard and that they couldn't—or wouldn't—accept it any longer.”

  The colonel could not control himself. “You are describing our national policy, admiral,” he blurted. “It surely is not an uncivilized one. It is in man's nature to cage a dangerous animal—to lock up a sociopath, whether a single political assassin or a nation of geopolitical assassins.”

  Harpoon made a half-turn back toward the colonel, leveling his light pointer at him. The beam glittered off one lens of his glasses. “You and I are not politicians,” he said briskly. “I do think we can safely make the observation, without engaging in pseudo-Freudian analyses of long winters, that caging a nation with twenty thousand nuclear weapons was a policy with some risks.” The admiral heard a mirthless chuckle behind him. His shoulders tightened.

  “The colonel's observations seem to make you nervous, Harpoon. I believe I could use the advice of a man who is expert in these matters.”

  Crap. Expert in Dostoyevsky and obscure Kremlin right-wingers. “You are the Commander-in-Chief,” he replied as evenly as he could. “You may have the advice of anyone aboard this aircraft—or anyone we can reach on the radio, damned few that they are at the moment. Would you like to be briefed by someone else?”

  “Oh, no, not at all.” The successor's words cut through the admiral. “I am learning far more than I expected.”

  Harpoon stared into the red splotch that had been Seattle and, across Puget Sound, the Bremerton-Bangor naval complex. He had spent one long shore-duty tour there and his only son had fallen in love with the Nordic beauty of the alpine mountains and the fjordlike waters. After college, the boy had returned. To make missiles for Boeing. And make his only grandson. The missiles had given them a house on the water, a sailboat, annually recycled automobiles, and a carefree future in the place his son called the Land of the Lotus Eaters. Carry on, Gramps.

  “It became clear long ago that the SIOP computer could not be secured from any major attack. Therefore, we began programming it to devise multistage responses that would be carried out twelve to twenty-four hours after its destruction. After the death of the President, for that matter. And after the destruction of most of our means of communicating with our forces. That meant we could issue orders that would be carried out after the disappearance of both our national leadership and our national communications system. It was a major advance. A rather dangerous one. But not all that much more dangerous than the hair-trigger system we already had in place. All our strategy, after all, was a bluff. The escalation of SIOP's responsibilities was the ultimate bluff. The Soviets, as they always did, developed a similar system.”

  Harpoon paused very briefly, taking a deep breath.

  “Tonight, the strategy was relatively simple. Our ICBM's were launched in two waves more than four hours ago. We held our weapons in Europe, awaiting any Soviet move. Those are programmed to go on provocation. Their launching, of course, would mean the total retaliatory destruction of Western Europe. Our bomber forces were ordered into the air as the first wave arrived. They constitute our second strike, a rather limited one. The surviving bombers will arrive on target in four to six hours. The bulk of our submarine forces, in which we carry most of our destructive power, was placed on hold for fifteen hours. They constitute the third strike. Their instructions are to hit their targets massively unless they receive contrary orders, the assumption being that if they can't hear us, we're still at war. That would complete the destruction of the Soviet Union.”

  Harpoon stopped and turned to look at the successor.

  “You find fault in that, Harpoon?” the man asked. “The caged animals, as the colonel put it, attacked us first, did they not?”

  “They have a system of their own, sir.”

  “And?” The successor sounded now as if he were humoring Harpoon, but the admiral decided to ignore it.

  “For various reasons,” he continued, “the structure of their system is somewhat different. They placed the bulk of their nuclear weaponr
y in land-based missiles. Many of those silos remain unused and undestroyed. The Russians are extremely defensive in nature. They spent billions on elaborate defenses against our bombers. This drained off resources for submarines. We abandoned serious air defenses decades ago, spending the money instead on a submarine fleet vastly superior to theirs. Frankly, we thought they were suckers. If the game was a bluff, it was better to bluff with offense than defense. The bombers clearly were the weakest part of our system.”

  The colonel caught a downturn in Harpoon's words and interrupted again. “The Soviets,” he said, with a slight touch of condescension, “have been invaded by Tatars, French, Germans . . .” He turned aggressively toward Harpoon. “You are quite right that they are defensive in nature. We quite wisely exploited that tendency.” He paused for emphasis. “And what you call the weakest part of our nuclear system may prove to be the Soviets' Achilles' heel.”

  Harpoon angrily jabbed his pointer again, knowing what the colonel was approaching. “Colonel,” he growled, “will you please keep your goddamn mouth shut till I'm finished?”

  “I'd like to hear what he has to say,” the successor said quietly.

  “He can wait. He'll make quite certain you hear him.”

  “Unless you harpoon him first, admiral,” the successor said, gesturing at the pointer.

  “The temptation is growing.”

  “I imagine.”

  The colonel smugly sank deeper into his chair. Harpoon continued.

  “The difference in forces somewhat dictates the timing. It means the Soviet second strike, by their bombers, will take our cities first. Our third strike, by the submarines, will take theirs shortly afterward.”

  'Malarkey!” The successor started to rise out of his chair. “Even 1 know the Soviet bombers are so old we could knock 'em down with a peashooter.”

  Admiral,” the colonel blustered in again, “those Model T crates are so vulnerable the Minnesota Air National Guard could do the job.”

  Harpoon finally exploded. “If you're so damned smart, colonel, go to the yellow phone and order 'em into the air. I can't even get through to Minneapolis. Every transistor, every piece of copper communications wire in Minnesota is burned out. We got 150 Model T's coming at us, most of them so old they still have propellers. We can't stop half of 'em and you damned well know it. Every one of them is carrying more than a megaton of thermonuclear weapons. In a few hours they're going to be roaming at will across this country. And they're going to pick off their targets one by goddamned one. New York. Philadelphia. Denver. Minneapolis. Till they get down to Waterloo, Iowa. Waterloo, colonel. You remember Waterloo?”

  “And our bombers will do the same thing,” the successor said. It was not a question.

  “No,” Harpoon answered, trying to calm himself. “Their bombers were in the air when the attack began. Most of our alert force was caught on the ground. We have about twenty bombers flying.”

  “Twenty!”

  “Twenty can do a lot of damage, but—”

  “But what! What other juicy news do you have for me?”

  “At this moment, some of our bombers are under attack by fighter interceptors.”

  “The Soviets can attack our bombers and we can't attack theirs?”

  “Sir, they had the element of surprise. They spent their money on bomber defenses, as we wanted them to. The B-52's are a suicide squad.”

  “So how much of our vaunted second strike will get through?”

  “Maybe a dozen will get past the interceptors. The survivors then have to thread their way through the best bomber defense ever devised. A bit chewed up, but the best. We never expected them to get through. We wanted to mousetrap the Soviets into wasting money on defense for a war with no defenses.” He paused and cast a rueful look at the colonel. “We were successful,” he added.

  “How many?”

  “A couple. A half-dozen if we're lucky.”

  “And we sit idly by while the commies nuke their way through America.”

  “Sir, for God's sake, we're hardly sitting idly by. In the end, it will equal out. Our submarines will do infinitely more damage. There will be nothing of value left of the Soviet Union, just as there will be nothing of value left of the United States. And it won't stop there. The weapons in Europe will go. The remaining Soviet ICBM's. That's the system we built. It really doesn't make much difference, does it? The Russians simply get the first crack. . . .” The admiral's words trailed off.

  “Harpoon, you will roast in hell.”

  “Probably. But not for telling you the truth, sir.”

  The successor stared at Harpoon, his gaze almost hateful. “How many warheads we got in our subs?”

  “About seven thousand, sir.”

  “Launch 'em,” the man said simply.

  Harpoon stared at him silently.

  “SIOP be damned!” the successor thundered. “This is the most cockamamie, defeatist, godless thing I've ever heard. Give the bastards the works. Now!”

  A wisp of an unhappy smile touched Harpoon's craggy face. He put his pointer down quietly. “I understand your frustration, sir,” the admiral said. “I truly understand your frustration. It is a sick system. Even sicker than I've described.”

  The successor's stare turned raw. “You're patronizing me again, Harpoon. I'm your Commander-in-Chief. I've given you an order.”

  “An impossible order.”

  “You refuse a direct order?”

  “I can't order the submarines to do anything. Nor can you. We're rebuilding our communications slowly. But even with prewar communications we couldn't talk to them. They are invulnerable, the perfect final bluff, because no one can find them. Not even us. They received their orders hours ago as the first missiles landed. Those orders were to run silent and deep, away from detection or communications, for fifteen hours. Then the main part of the fleet will come back near the surface to listen. If they hear nothing, they will fire. That's the system. The Soviets know it as well as we do. They know that if their bombers strike, it they send off more ICBM's, they are dead. Because there will be no one and no reason to talk to the submarines.”

  The successor's eyes dropped slowly. For a moment he seemed lost in thought. Then his eyes rose again, avoiding Harpoon, and moved around the conference table at the silent Air Force officers. The successor whipped his gaze back at Harpoon. “You are telling me,” he asked, his words coming in a hauntingly detached cadence, “that the fact of our nation . . . rests in the hands ... of a dead computer?”

  “The fate of the world,” whispered the general whom Harpoon had forced to be both optimistic and pessimistic.

  Harpoon sighed. “That isn't quite true,” he said slowly. “First it is important to understand—and, in our dependence on machines, we often forget it—that SIOP is . . . was ... no more than the accumulation of the wisdom and foolishness of several generations of our brightest men. Almost all of them well-meaning. Almost all of them scared.”

  “Do you believe I am well-meaning?” the successor asked.

  “I believe so, sir.”

  “Do you believe I am scared?”

  “You were a few moments ago, sir. I hope you are now.”

  “I'm scared, Harpoon. But only scared of losin'.”

  “I'm sorry to hear that. I'm so scared I could use a change of skivvies. Few of the men who devised the war plans, on both sides of the world, were total fools. We built the fear quotient, which we saw as our only salvation, into SIOP. The Soviets did the same. Both sides knew that if this mess ever got started, we would have tremendous problems with ego, national pride, animosities, misunderstandings, communications. Why do you think our world, our hemisphere at least, is not destroyed by now? We certainly had the ability to do it faster. It is now almost five hours since Jericho began.”

  “Jericho?”

  “Sorry. Jericho is code for a full-scale nuclear war. When we looked at Jericho, we knew communications would go. We knew leaders would die. We saw a syst
em that could be out of control in minutes. So we built in pauses. To some degree, we even matched the equipment to the pauses. The bombers are very slow, which built a natural pause into the war. We are in that pause. Nearing the end of it, though.”

  “And the pause was designed by these brightest men,” the successor said, derision in his words, “to do precisely what?”

  “To give us time to patch our communications, sir. And to give you and your Soviet counterpart time to stop bluffing and make the Jericho decision.”

  Off to the side, Harpoon saw the colonel rise abruptly out of his seat, wagging his head frantically.

  “The chicken!” he shouted. “Tell him about cutting the head off the chicken or you'll . . . you'll be remembered with Aaron Burr!”

  Harpoon looked grimly at the colonel. Crap, he mouthed silently.

  The Foxbats were on their tail now, fifteen miles back, gaining steadily, holding their six remaining missiles for a certain kill. Kazaklis seemed to ignore them. He gave no orders, said nothing. Only the methodical, droning voice of Tyler broke the radio silence. Okay, high terrain three miles, and it's significant. Up a bit. Down a bit. Little more. Hard left. Good. Kazaklis followed each instruction machinelike. The lightning bolt on his shoulder patch tilted in flawless rhythm with each banking turn around each rolling mountain corner. The white captain's bars rose in perfect harmony with the aircraft as he lifted it over each mountain ridge. His buttocks swayed in their parachute harness to the geometry of each maneuver. He was good. The Foxbats followed his every move.

  “Bandits twelve miles and closing,” Tyler radioed, his voice devoid of emotion. “High terrain at twelve o'clock. Lift it. Dead ahead. Lift it.” Effortlessly the pilot lifted the plane, the captain's bars also rising. In front of her, Moreau's screen filled with ominous red clutter. On the right of her screen the yellow groundtracking altimeter, a little thermometer-like image displaying the plane's height over the ground, plunged rapidly. It bottomed out at twenty-five feet. Ka-whack! The brittle, cracking sound came from the bomber's spine. Moreau shuddered. The thermometer darted back up, even as Kazaklis nosed the bomber down over the other side of a ridge into a long, shallow valley. She glanced quickly at the pilot. His face remained impassive, his eyes glued on his own screen as they had been since the beginning of the ducking, darting roller-coaster ride through the mountains minutes ago. “Too close, pilot,” she said. His eyes held unblinking to the screen. He's part of the damned computer too, she thought. The Foxbats followed. “Bandits ten miles and closing.”