He looked up at her.
“This sergeant—can you believe that—dropped by for a visit with two of his MP pals on the order of Colonel Nichols. He sat me down in my own living room while one MP stood by the door and the other in front of the hallway. Scared my wife to death. They wanted to know if I were using drugs. I said no. This sergeant apparently had spoken to that crazy lady who’s running around town like chicken little but if the sky is falling, it’s falling on me. She told them I was acting funny when she saw me. It was a hot day. I was dehydrated. A little light-headed when I stood up. No drugs. I told them no drugs.
“They asked if they could search the house. What am I supposed to say? They were pretty damn thorough. They even found a Playboy I’d hidden in the basement. They took my computer. I had to give them the password.
“You know, maybe they were just looking for drugs, but I got a little lecture from the sergeant about keeping fit for our mission. What did he mean by that, I wondered? Doing well on the tests? You haven’t mentioned anything, have you?”
Washington hesitated. She had yet to tell anyone—beside her father and mother and Edna O’Hare—about the cheating. But keeping this a secret was grating on her. She had planned to do so soon, risking both her career and any acceptance on the base. As a newcomer to Minot, she’d have few people on her side.
“No. But to be honest, I’ve been thinking about it. Not naming you, of course. Just…just. I’m not sure what I’m going to say or how.”
The conversation ended at 9:49 a.m.. Washington sat flanked on her left by three columns of drawers of electronics and on her right by a printer, a screen, and numerous switches, nobs, and dials. She faced a console labelled Missile Group Status Board with a row of ten square white buttons aligned under a row of ten thimble-shaped red lights.
At 10:03 she began a routine check. As she pushed the white buttons, the corresponding red lights went out, all but one, accompanied by a soft whistling alarm at her console.
“I’ve got a warhead alarm on number 8.”
“Flick it with your finger,” said Calderone.
When Washington tapped the red light, it went off. She expelled a puff of air.
“Allow reset,” said Calderone.
Washington pushed a toggle switch. The computer screen now showed the number 8 rocket, viewed from below before the camera scanned the missile from bottom to top.
A klaxon sounded. Loud. Jarring. Insistent. Then, over the loudspeaker, a man with a sober, amplified voice spoke.
“Sapphire, this is Moon Rock with a Blue-dot knife-edge message in two parts. One. One. Blue Dot. Alpha.”
Oh, no thought Washington. They’d never run drills without warning that one might be in the pipeline in the next few weeks. She took a deep breath and exhaled.
“Stand by to copy message,” ordered Calderon. They opened their respective loose-leaf notebooks to a transparent red plastic envelope covering a page with designated spaces for codes. They wrote on the plastic with felt tipped pens as the disembodied voice continued: “Blue-dot. Oscar. Tango. Alpha. Lima. November. Romeo. Romeo. Alpha.”
Washington had a fleeting urge to look at Calderone, but the voice was still providing code.
“Authentication follows: seven seven five five zero Blue-dot.”
As he stood Calderone said, “The message is valid. Stand by to verify.”
“I agree with verification,” said Washington, also rising from her chair.
This didn’t feel like a normal drill, but maybe the cheating had been discovered and someone planned this little shake-up drill. Yes, that had to be it. This was to shake everyone up. And it sure was shaking her up.
They moved to either side of a double-locked red steel box affixed to the wall.
Washington turned the dial on her combination lock to clockwise to 15, back one full turn to 25, then clockwise to 6. They opened their respective combination locks almost simultaneously.
Calderone lifted the lid. From the box, each took their respective credit-card-sized verification cards, their biscuits. Washington returned to her chair, snapped open the plastic biscuit, and compared the code on the card with the one they’d just received. They matched.
“Enter launch code,” ordered Calderone.
“Joe,” called Washington. “This is a strange way to run a drill. What do you think’s going on?”
“Hell if I know.” said Calderone. “Enter the launch code.”
“Entering launch code,” called Washington as she began typing it on her keyboard. The screen now read, LAUNCH ORDER CONFIRMED.
“My God!” said Washington softly before continuing. She sat stiffly staring as the screen, reading aloud the phrases as they appeared.
“Target selection complete.”
Of course, neither she nor any launch control officer knew what the targets were. They were certainly military targets, but Moscow was surrounded by such targets. Twelve and a half million people.
She continued reading from the screen.
“Time on target sequence complete.”
“Yield selection complete.”
“Begin countdown,” said the speaker voice. “T minus 60.”
“It’s that time,” said Calderone. “Insert launch key.”
Simultaneously they inserted their keys.
“Launch key inserted,” said Washington. A six hundred pound Bengal tiger about to attack her could not have released more adrenalin into her blood stream than was now being released.
“On my mark” said Calderone, “turn launch key to set. Three. Two. One. Mark.”
The loudspeaker called, “T minus 50.”
Washington pictured blast doors sliding open over silos spread across vast stretches of the upper Midwest. She saw hundreds of nosecones shining in the sun. She saw U. S. AIRFORCE stenciled on the rockets.
“Enable missiles,” said Calderone after reexamining the screen for a moment.
The loudspeaker called “T minus 40.”
She should have talked with Tyrone. She should have told him she loved him. Did it take the end of the world to make her realize this? What had the Russian’s thought before they launched their missiles? Had they wanted to speak with their loved ones, too.
Like an automaton, though incongruously trembling, Washington began flipping switches, “Number one enabled. Number two enabled. Number three enabled… Number eight enabled. Number nine enabled. Number ten enabled. All missiles enabled.”
Overcoming her machine self, she blurted, “I want to call wing command.”
“That’s not in the protocol, Lieutenant.”
“I’m not going to kill millions of people until I’m sure this is for real.” She dialed the phone number but got no answer.
The speaker called, “T minus 20.”
“I don’t get anything. It’s not working,” said Washington.
“They’ve probably all been had. We’ve got to do this now. On my mark turn launch keys to launch.”
She grasped her key. She stiffened as if electrified as a panoply of visions raced through her head. Her mother singing a lullaby. Her father running behind her as she wobbled along on a two-wheeler. Tyrone in the water below as she shows off on the diving board…
The Chicxulub crater marked the collision of an asteroid in the Yucatan sixty-six million years ago that dimmed the skies with dust, cooling the earth and killing the dinosaurs. A great many more craters were about to come into existence and hundreds of towering firestorms smothering the firmament with unearthly quantities of black soot.
Chapter Fifty-Two
The young officer at the reception desk in Colonel Nichols’s anteroom displayed no discernable expression when he asked Lieutenant Washington to take a seat. She had only a few minutes to wait before a buzzer went off and the colonel asked through the intercom that the lieutenant be shown in.
Nichols, a vigorous fifty-two-year-old, short-tempered man, compensated for frontal baldness with a walrus mustache thick as fur.
He was stocky but quick on his feet. Washington sat in a heavy wood chair placed directly before his desk, where he sat, hunched forward as if eager to get at her.
“Is something wrong with you?” asked Nichols as soon as she was seated. No greeting. No return salute. “Are you sick? Death in the family or something?
“No, sir.”
“Do you know why you’re here, Washington?”
“I think so, sir.”
“You’re here because you failed to follow launch protocol.”
“It was a false alarm.”
“You didn’t know that. It looked like the real thing, didn’t it? It wasn’t aborted until the last few seconds.”
“Yes, sir but—”
“Are you arguing with me?”
“No, sir. Of course, not.
“You breached protocol. You will receive remedial training. You are dismissed.”
Washington was smoldering. What kind of madness was this? She was being reprimanded for questioning what was indeed a false alarm. Reprimanded for not wanting to start WWIII.
“Sir, did anyone else breach protocol?”
“I can’t discuss that, Lieutenant.”
She spoke more firmly now, having rehearsed the words in front of a mirror. She was fully at ease with her decision, and given Nichols’s attitude, she was going to get some personal satisfaction from it.
“I request transfer out of the launch control service, sir.”
Nichols, who’d been sitting back in his chair, moved forward, leaning his elbows on the desk. He looked worried. And his attitude did a summersault.
“Now, just a minute, Washington. You’re a good officer. You’ve never scored less than a hundred percent on your proficiency exams. There is probably no need for remediation. I just called you here to ask if there was anything I could do for you.”
“Thank you, sir. You can transfer me to the 91st maintenance group. I cannot fire those missiles at millions of innocent people.”
Nichols assembled the 91st missile wing’s operations group, maintenance group, and security group, eleven squadrons in all, sixteen hundred persons, including enlisted airmen, officers, and civilians.
Only childlike naïveté would allow one to believe that word of the false alarm could be kept from Minot or, for that matter, from North Dakota, from the country, from the world. And yet Nichols, far from naive, felt obliged to caution the assembled about how to speak of the error, never referring to it as a near catastrophe.
“I know some of you will wish to talk about the error,” said Nichols, “and I’m not saying you shouldn’t, but I want to remind you to tell your listeners that the 91st has again won the Omaha Trophy making us the best missile wing in the country. And remember to emphasize that we found the error and corrected it. The public was never in danger.”
Washington swallowed hard. The public was never in danger? Bull shit. All of humankind had been in danger.
Nor was Washington the only one taken aback by this statement. Many of the launch control officers on duty that day had seen their lives flash before their eyes moments before the attack order was aborted.
Colonel Nichols did not explain the source of the error: that a foreword station in Greenland had bounced radar waves off the moon coming up over Norway, interpreting the signal as an attack by dozens of Russian missiles. The last time the Russians had fired nuclear armed missiles at the United States they’d been a flock of geese.
Inevitably, however, the truth oozed its way out. Washington was one of the first to learn about it and immediately planned to tell Mrs. O’Hare.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Compared to the end of civilization, cheating on an exam dwindles into insignificance, except if one makes a connection between the two. An inadequately trained officer, a higher up, making a mistake. Did the generals have to take an exam? What if they cheated? Washington’s dilemma was unresolved, though she’d gone over it again and again, until she decided she must act, or she’d get sick.
Washington and Calderone were on duty together again. Calderone was reading a book in the late afternoon after all the systems checking had been completed. The tone of her voice alone told him something serious was on her mind.
“Joe, I need to talk with you.”
He lay the book down and swiveled in his chair to face her.
“What’s up?”
“I have to tell Nichols that there is cheating on the exam. I’m not going to mention any names even if he threatens me. I wanted you to know so you wouldn’t be surprised if he discovers your one-time indiscretion.”
He felt the onset of a stomachache. Indeed, he briefly placed his palms over his abdomen, before clasping his hands together and resting them on his lap. He only very briefly considered trying to reassure her that it had all ended, but that was untrue and, just as bad, he hadn’t worked up the courage to tell the kingpin of the test coaching business, that the jig would be up soon.
“When are you going to tell him?”
“In a couple of days. I need to get some sleep first.”
“Make it three days. I want to speak with my wife about it.”
“Three days it is. I’m glad you didn’t try to talk me out of it this time.”
Calderone nodded gloomily.
Soon after arriving home the next day, Calderone told his wife he had something important to discuss with her.
“I can make you a cup of coffee. We can talk in the kitchen.”
He started talking while she was still standing at the machine, meticulously measuring out the coffee and adding it to the filter.
“You know how important that monthly exam is, well I fell behind in my studies… And I… I got the answers to the test ahead of time and used them. Just once.”
Despite her care with the coffee Maria had been listening closely. She closed the machine and pushed the start button before seating herself at the table across from him.
“You cheated on the exam?”
“Yes. I was worried I’d mess it up.”
“But Joe, that’s not like you.”
“It really isn’t. I regret it and I’ll never do it again but it’s too late. Nichols is going to find out about the cheating, that it’s going on. He won’t be given any names. I don’t know how he’ll find those who cheated. There are a lot of us.”
“Oh, he’ll find a way. Who’s going to tell him about the cheating in the first place?”
“Washington.”
“Oh. How did she find out?”
He was embarrassed and frightened enough without revealing that she’d seen him looking at his not-so-smart watch.
“I don’t know, but she told me she’d seen someone with a crib sheet during the exam. She wouldn’t tell me who.”
“When is she going to tell him?”
“In three days.”
“Joe, one way or another Colonel Nichols is going to get the names of everyone involved and it’s going to go down hard on them. You’ve got to see him as soon as possible—today—and confess. Tell him as much as possible about the scheme. Do it before she does. In fact, tell her you’re going to do it so she doesn’t. Your confession looks better that way.”
She got up to pour them both cups of coffee.
“Are you mad at me?” he asked.
“I’m disappointed. I’m sad. I’m worried. But I’m not mad. I don’t know why I’m not. I guess I look at it like you had an accident.”
He would do as his wife recommended. It was wise. But first he’d have to speak with Forster. He’d have to be fair to Forster the way Washington had been fair to him.
They met at a pizza parlor on the base, sitting as far as they could from the short line of customers in front of the cash register. Calderone wanted to break the news to Forster in a public place. Why? He wasn’t sure. Forster’s temper? Maybe.
“Don’t you want a pizza?” asked Forster.
“Maybe later. I need to tell you something first.”
Calderone to
ok a deep breath, exhaling fast, a puff, and then he did it again as if he’d been out jogging. He’d come here with the intention of giving Forster a heads-up about his imminent revelation to Nichols of widespread cheating on base, but given that Forster had organized the whole scheme, he was at risk for a much greater penalty than a one-time cheater. He’d be furious.
So instead he said, “I’m not doing drugs anymore.”
“We had to come here for you to tell me that? Hey, it’s no skin off my ass. What’s wrong? You don’t look so hot.”
“Oh, Maria and I had an argument. It was her idea I quit, and I’ve hardly even started.”
“Well, if you change your mind.”
“I won’t.”
The apple-cheeked young officer in Nichols’s anteroom asked Calderone to sit. His appointment was for four and at exactly four he was told to go in.
Nichols was seated behind his desk. Calderone saluted and thanked the colonel for making the time for him.
“All right then,” said Nichols, indicating a chair.
Calderone had two serious offenses he should admit to, but he just couldn’t bring himself to reveal both. He’d admit to the more serious of the two. If it were later discovered that he’d used drugs on a few occasions, so be it.
But what was he going to say about the cheating? Nichols would ask from whom he’d gotten the answers. He’d be a snitch if he told, but what he really feared was Forster’s anger. He was a hot head.
“Sir, I am here to confess to cheating on a proficiency exam. It pains me to say so, and I’m sure it will pain you to hear it, but there is widespread cheating on these exams because poor grades, maybe even one poor grade, will block career advancement.”
Nichols scowled like a prize fighter hit below the belt, and remained silent for an inordinately long time, as if recovering from the blow.
At last he spoke. “Tell me about your cheating.”
“What do you want to know, sir.”
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