Alternities

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  Inside D-57, Captain Andrei Sorkin moved from compartment to compartment, observing the first shift at their stations, trying at once to measure and lift their spirits. The measuring was an easier task than the uplifting; there was a weariness in the men’s voices, a sluggishness to their movements. It was a disease to which Sorkin himself was hardly immune. After nearly three months on station, his friendly jokes were flat, his fatherly admonitions old and familiar, even to himself.

  He blamed Fleet Operations as much as himself for conditions aboard. Unlike the big blue-water ballistic-missile boats, D-57 was cramped and noisy, burdened with a grab bag of missions. Mines aft, missiles amidships, torpedoes forward, radio electronics everywhere—all stole space from the ninety-man crew. There was little room for physical activity, none at all for luxuries. Only structured, meaningful activity could fight the lethargy and indifference of a long deployment.

  The games of hide-and-seek with the American coastal fleet, the simulated attacks and mine-laying drills, the shadowing exercises, had provided welcome challenge and variety. Predictably, morale had plummeted since the picket fleet had been ordered to withdraw beyond the twelve-mile limit. Here, they had only the rare encounter with a patrol plane to break the monotony.

  Last night’s bloody fistfight between two second-shift seaman engineers was only the most overt sign that crew fatigue was becoming critical. Sorkin feared his crew was coming apart. Of late, even the nagging mechanical problems aboard seemed calculated to aggravate the problem—the foul-tasting rust which had appeared in the drinking water, the generator which sang at a pitch that drilled into the skull.

  Sorkin entered BCh-4, the communications hut, and settled in an empty chair. The problem with BCh-4 was in many ways the most acute, for their work was the most unrelentingly routine. In recent days an ensign had found the chief operator tapping his foot to music broadcast by American radio stations, and Sorkin himself had found an operator asleep on his watch.

  “V more kak doma, da?” he said with a forced smile that no one answered. “At home in the sea, yes?”

  Three miles west of the submarine and four thousand feet above the water, a slender metal arrow reached the apogee of its graceful ballistic journey. The furious white-smoke trail of the solid-fuel rockets thinned as the second stage burned out, and three explosive bolts fired to separate the spent cylinder from its stubby payload. A halo of small vanes opened at the base of the depth bomb, imparting spin that at one stabilized and slowed the projectile.

  “Everything is quiet, Captain,” the senior specialist said dutifully. “Even the American pilots seem bored today. There has been little idle talk between them.”

  Like a gleaming stone thrown by a playful child, the depth bomb fell toward the sea. The splash of its impact sent water twenty feet in the air. The force of the impact armed the hydrostatic trigger and snapped the stabilizing vanes flat. The canister sank swiftly, trailing a fine veil of bubbles.

  “Splash transient, Captain,” the hydrophone operator called out.

  “Our dolphin companions are back,” Sorkin said over his folded hands.

  “No, Captain—”

  Three hundred feet below the surface, the electrical current created by the pressure of the sea against a tiny crystal reached a threshold, freeing far larger currents to pour through the depth bomb’s network of circuits. Shaped explosive charges fired in synchrony, slamming fragments of enriched plutonium together. In one infinite instant of time, neutrons flew like the devils fireflies, shattering atoms and freeing their deadly energies.

  Around the starlike fireball, an expanding bubble of superheated gases and furious radiation violently displaced millions of tons of water. The surface of the sea roiled and lifted up in a great dome, pierced by ferocious jets of steam.

  Caught on the fringe of the bubble, D-57 was shoved sideways and upward as though by a great hand. Plates twisted, welds tore open and bulkheads crumpled, opening dozens of leaks through which poured poisonous steam instead of cold brine. As the pressure inside the submarine soared, eardrums burst, blood ran. The air was like fire, scalding skin and lungs.

  But there was no time to scream. The fireball was dying, the bubble collapsing, and the water which had been displaced came crashing back to fill the vacuum. Swept along, tumbling, like a fragile shell before a breaking wave, D-57 was cast against a wall of blue-green steel and, torn by forces beyond its builders’ conception, vanished.

  The Pentagon, The Home Alternity

  Waiting had worn thin, and the excitement of the successful attack had long dissipated. Robinson drummed his fingers impatiently on the table. “What time is it over there?”

  “It’s 7:35 P.M, in Moscow,” Rauche said “What do you think?”

  “It’s been less than an hour. I’d say they’re still trying to figure out what happened.”

  “You said they monitor the FNS. They must have heard the bulletins.”

  Rauche nodded. “They’re probably trying to get independent confirmation.”

  “Here it comes!” someone cried as a printer started to chatter.

  But it was not Molink, which had gone silent minutes after the submarine was destroyed. Instead, noise came from the Fleet intelligence link. A waiting technician tore off the paper and ran it to the main table. “Sir, the Soviet Atlantic Command has gone on war alert.”

  “Shit.” Three voices said the word at once.

  “Here we go,” another voice said ominously.

  “Bogeys dropping off the board,” the Cyclops operator sang out “Everybody’s cutting loose the buoys and going deep.”

  “We’d better go to Defcon 2,” Rauche said, his expression grim. “Mr. President, this is a soft target. You should go. Your helicopter is waiting at the river entrance.”

  “Tell ’em to turn off the engines,” Robinson said as he came up out of his chair. “I want to talk to Kondratyev. If he won’t call us, we’ll call him.”

  O’Neill leaped up to block his path. “What are you gonna say now? ‘Excuse me, I seem to have stepped on one of your little submarines—’ ”

  “Shut up, Gregory,” Robinson said, brushing past. A Molink translator came running up with a tablet. “No. The hell with the codes and ciphers. I said I want to talk to him. Point me to the right phone and get him on the other end.”

  “Here, Mr. President,” a technician called. “We’re requesting the Premier. Stand by for the green light.”

  Standing beside the radiophone console, Robinson smiled and flashed his eyebrows. “I do hope our friend Somerset is listening in.”

  “He probably will be,” the CIA director said.

  “Green light, Mr. President. They must have been expecting us.”

  “You bet they were,” Robinson said, lifting the receiver. “Mr. Premier.”

  The voice on the other end of the line was terse, the words clipped.

  “Mr. President. Apologies are not enough. You have destroyed the very foundation of international trust with your gangsterism—”

  In the background, the printers were all chattering, the gallery was hushed.

  “I didn’t call to apologize,” Robinson snapped. “Our intelligence shows you at a war alert. Your ships are acting in a hostile and provocative manner—”

  “We did not initiate the hostilities,” Kondratyev growled. “You brazenly destroy a harmless reconnaissance submarine and dare accuse us of provocation. We will answer your brutality. Mr. President, and teach you the lesson of your blindness—”

  “If you find one of our submarines inside Russian territorial waters, you’re welcome to do your best to destroy it,” Robinson said, “But if you order so much as one missile launched toward the United States or one American naval vessel attacked, before yon can start your celebration you’ll find the Kremlin coming down around your ears—”

  ““Empty threats will not deter us from defending the free oceans and avenging our dead. I, too have intelligence reports. Your bombers are hour
s from our borders.”

  “If you underestimate me, Mr. Premier, it’ll be the last mistake you make,” Robinson said. “That’s no empty threat.”

  “Send your planes. Long before they reach our border justice will have been served on the murderers, and when the planes arrive we will shoot them down.”

  “Mr. Premier, you have been misled by your intelligence bureau. I have a squadron of nuclear-tipped missiles within a fifteen-minute flight time of where you’re standing—”

  “Somerset is screaming right now,” O’Neill said under his breath to Rauche.

  “Lies. Lies will not deter us—”

  Robinson turned to the Army Chief. “Targets. Name some targets.” When the Army Chief stared mutely, Robinson called to the room at large. “Quickly. Name some targets the Weasels can reach.”

  A young lieutenant at one of the consoles was the first to find his voice. “Ports and naval facilities at Murmansk, Tallinn, Gdansk, Odessa. Steel plants in the Ukraine—”

  Others joined in. “The command centers at Kiev, Kharkov, Gorki,” Rauche said.

  “The Central Industrial Power System.”

  “Refineries. Rybinsk. Cherepovets.”

  Robinson repeated the names into the phone. “Are you ready to risk all that? Or do you think you can shoot down our missiles, too?”

  “I do not believe these missiles exist,” Kondratyev said coldly. “We will not be taken in by your bluff—”

  “Watch your radar screens, Mr. Premier. Watch your screens and see what a bluff looks like.” Robinson put down the phone and pointed to the Army Chief. “I want a Weasel launched. Now!”

  “Mr. President, we have to go to Defcon 3,” Rauche pleaded.

  “If we launch a missile now their whole Atlantic fleet is going to empty its silos,” O’Neill said angrily. “Back off, Peter. You’ve pushed it too far.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” Robinson said. “Target it toward Greenland, anywhere away from the Reds—but make sure they have a good look at it.”

  “Sir—”

  “Now, you bastard!”

  The Army Chief blanched. “Yes, sir.”

  Moscow, The Home Alternity

  Kondratyev turned slowly from the command display, from the bright green line extending from northern Scotland to the mid-Atlantic north of the Azores, from the track of the American missile. His cold eyes fixed on the director of the GRU.

  “Explain this!” he bellowed. “How can this be!”

  “Premier, I will not deny the facts,” the harried man said. “But they could not have introduced these weapons in squadron strength without our knowledge.”

  “Why not? If one, why not a hundred?” Kondratyev roared. “Now what am I to do?”

  The Chief of Naval Operations stepped forward. “Even if they number a hundred it is only a fraction of what we have at sea. Robinson will not dare to use them. We must answer what they have done.”

  “He dares anything.” Kondratyev said “He is unpredictable, uncontrolled.”

  “He will not risk the destruction of his country over the destruction of one city, one air base,” the Minister of Strategic Rocket Forces importuned.

  “And how do you evaluate what we risk, Vladimir? What is the accuracy of these new missiles, their power? How many will fall to our defenses, and how many will die where the defenses fail? Geidar, tell me what we risk.”

  “That will take time,” Voenushkin said in a small voice.

  “Yes,” Kondratyev said. “But you ask me to risk those uncounted lives for a hundred men and one submarine, for pride. You ask me to trust the restraint of a man who has shown no restraint. You, whose failure has placed on our very doorstep a threat you cannot even gauge for me.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  The Premier threw his hands in the air in disgust and frustration. “What have you left for me to do?”

  The Pentagon, The Home Alternity

  The bell chimed the printer clattered and talking ceased. The officer standing by the machine tore the sheet from the guides and read it aloud.

  “The alert has been canceled,” he said. “The Russian fleet is standing down.” He looked up from the paper and grinned. “They blinked.”

  As the gallery burst into applause, a triumphant smile came onto Robinson’s lips. He stood and clapped O’Neill firmly on one shoulder. “That, Gregory, is how you beard a bear.”

  O’Neill said nothing.

  “Mr. President? Do you want to talk to Somerset now?” the Chairman asked. “He’s hotter than a hornet.”

  Robinson laughed. “I do not want,” he said. “I want lunch. General Rauche, can a civilized plate be had anywhere in this monstrosity?”

  The General’s face was still touched by a mixture of awe, respect, and relief. “You’ve heard of the Chief’s chef, I see. I’ll show you the way.”

  File No. 180351

  STANDARD CANDIDATE

  EVALUATION FORM

  NATIONAL RESOURCE CENTER

  CANDIDATE: Wallace, Rayne Alan

  OK Birthdate: 8-29-1952 Birthplace: Richmond, Indiana

  OK Married: 6-12-1971 to Ruthann Rhea King

  + Children: Katherine Jean, b. 1-15-1975

  CREDENTIALS REVIEW:

  OK Highest Education: Hagerstown Consolidated High School

  OK Graduate? 1970 Rank: 103/268 IQ: 108 (1969)

  OK Brasson National Assay: 41.4 (2nd quartile)

  + NSA Attitudinal Assay: L Scale—91 M Scale—93

  + Interest Groups:

  y Youth Defense Reserve 3 yr.

  Youth Service Corps yr.

  y Tomorrow Camp 2 yr.

  INTERVIEW:

  In standard exercises, candidate demonstrated average-to-good verbal facility, good-to-very-good memory skills, very good visual recognition/‌discrimination. Personality integration fair, resilience high. Adaptability appears high, but eagerness for acceptance poss. masked accurate reading. Negatives: lacks clear sense of his own limitations.

  SUMMARY:

  Candidate is highly motivated due to present financial pressures. History indicates high loyalty, diligence; average intelligence, limited introspection. Exit options minimal. YDR captain describes cand. as follower, not leader. Family climate positive toward national service. Not qualifiable as field agent, but should be a reliable courier.

  Recommendation:

  Reject

  Accept for:   Group M

  Group A

  Group R X

  RECRUITER: M. Hirsch

  CHAPTER 17

  * * *

  Mist on the Mountain

  Bloomington, Indiana, Alternity Blue

  No doubt Wallace believed he had been discreet, Donald Arens thought as he rounded the corner of the alley.

  True, Wallace had left no addresses on scraps of paper, had paid cash wherever possible. But the signs he did leave were nearly as easy to follow. A theater ticket stub recovered from Wallace’s apartment, a first name provided by his roommate, and a telephone number gleaned from the station’s massive billing had been enough to bring Arens to Morton Street and the back stairs of Five Friends.

  The neighborhood was agreeably deserted. Counting Shan’s, there were less than a half-dozen second-story apartments scattered along the block. It was nearly midnight, and curtains were drawn against drafts and streetlamps. The sidewalks were empty, and the streets nearly so.

  But no amount of stealth could make Arens’ approach up the sagging wooden stairs a silent one. He almost wished Wallace would hear him coming and run, and thus restore a little challenge to the chase.

  Arens knew that was too much to hope for. Wallace had already demonstrated his weakness by allowing himself to be controlled by his cupidity. Instead of running or fighting, he would whine and wheedle and whimper that what he did wasn’t so terribly wrong. You understand, he would plead, you especially have to understand.

  Arens understood, and his contempt for Wallace flowed from the unde
rstanding. Putting a woman above the Guard, particularly a woman from this world, was unforgivable stupidity. Nothing a woman can give a man is worth his loyalty. And only a fool would allow a woman to control him with love or sex.

  A short, plain-faced woman wearing flower-print flannel pajamas answered his knock. You sold yourself cheaply, to boot, Arens thought as he looked at her. “Hi,” he said, flashing a smile. “I’m looking for Ray Wallach. Is he here?”

  The woman stiffened and peered at him closely. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m afraid you have the wrong address.”

  “You’re Shan, aren’t you? I’m sure this is the address he gave me.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said and started to close the door.

  Turning sideways, he drove the door open with his shoulder, knocking the woman backward into the little utility room. She retreated before him, her face showing fear, but not panic. “Ray?” he called. “You’d better come talk to me.”

  “I told you there’s no one here.”

  “Then tell me where he is.”

  “I’m just housesitting. I don’t know who Shan sees or where they might be.”

  “I don’t believe you,” he said simply.

  Whether because she sensed the far wall uncomfortably close behind her or merely in defiance, she stopped retreating and stood her ground. “It’s the truth.”

  “Then call her,” he said. “You know where she is, call her.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I don’t know where she is.”

  “I do,” he said “Right here. Right in front of me.”

  A skittering sound behind him spun Arens around and brought the pistol out of his right coat pocket. It was a cat, a gray blur diving for a hiding place beneath the bed. Arens made no effort to halt the reflex that the noise had begun. The silenced pistol hiccoughed and the cat squalled and skidded into a heaving, jerking lump of bloody fur.