Launch Code

by Michael Ridpath

  ‘It’s just as bad for you, isn’t it, honey?’ said Bill.

  ‘It’s just bad, Dad. It’s just bad. For all of us.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Her father took another swig of whiskey.

  ‘But what’s with the booze? I get that you are sad. But I haven’t seen you drinking up till now?’

  ‘That’s because I haven’t. I’ve been trying to hold it all together. But, you know, sometimes, I just don’t care. I want to feel numb. I want to feel wasted. I even want to feel wrecked tomorrow morning.’

  ‘I see,’ said Alice.

  She left him to the whiskey and went up to bed.

  But early the next evening, when her father produced another bottle, Scotch this time, Alice talked to him. Quietly. Gently. A bit like the way she knew her mother would have talked to him. Sure he had the right to get himself wasted every night, and in fact a lot of people would completely understand if he did. Alice wasn’t going to stop him. But was he sure that was what he really wanted to do?

  And was he sure that was what Donna wanted him to do?

  He drank no more than a couple of glasses that night, and just a couple of beers or glasses of wine each evening until Alice left. Once she got back to New York, she spoke to him every day, and she was pretty sure he hadn’t relapsed, or at least if he had it was only once or twice.

  Bill Guth had held together. Thanks to Alice.

  Twenty-Four

  As Toby and Lars got back to Pear Tree Cottage, Maya was just shutting the boot of her small rental car. She was wearing her flight attendant’s uniform.

  ‘I’m glad I saw you before I left,’ she said, giving Toby a hug. ‘Don’t worry. They’ll let Alice go. Daddy’s got some honcho with him now. Bye, Lars. See you soon.’

  And she was gone.

  Toby and Lars went into the kitchen where Megan was waiting for them. She pointed to the living room and made a face.

  ‘The admiral?’ Toby asked.

  She nodded. ‘And another one. A Brit. I think he’s a spook.’

  They heard footsteps in the hallway, and then Bill appeared followed by two men.

  ‘You’re back!’ he said. ‘Toby. Let me introduce Admiral Robinson and Dominic Prestwitch, who works for the British government.’

  Admiral Robinson extended a hand. Although he must have been a few years older than Bill, he didn’t look it. What remained of his hair was still dark, and there was vigour in his handshake. His dark eyes were quick and intelligent. He looked like a man who got things done, who was used to giving crisp orders which were crisply obeyed. ‘Good to meet you, Toby. And great to see you, Lars. How are you doing?’

  ‘I’m doing good,’ said Lars, shaking his hand. The admiral clapped him on the shoulder but, despite the admiral’s bonhomie, Lars seemed wary.

  Dominic Prestwitch was much younger than his colleague. Early thirties, thick brown hair greased into a fashionable quiff, glasses, a grey suit and a lime green tie. A pair of buck teeth threatened to escape his upper lip, but were successfully contained.

  ‘Toby. Can we have a word? In the living room?’

  Bill led Toby through with the two other men following. They all sat down.

  Bill looked to his former shipmate. ‘Glenn?’

  The admiral leaned forward, asserting his authority. And he had authority.

  ‘Bill told me about the death of the poor historian as soon as it happened,’ the admiral started. ‘And I came right away. I’m sorry to hear that your wife has been arrested. I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding.’

  ‘So am I,’ Toby said.

  ‘Bill mentioned that you heard what the historian thought happened on the USS Alexander Hamilton in 1983?’

  ‘I did, although Bill didn’t confirm it.’ Toby thought there was no harm in letting the admiral know Bill had done what he was supposed to do.

  ‘I’m sure he didn’t. As he has explained to you, that information is Classified.’

  ‘He has,’ Toby said. ‘But I know no more than Sam Bowen. Both Bill and Lars da Silva have been discreet.’

  ‘We’re here to make sure you don’t tell anyone anything you know or find out about the Alexander Hamilton,’ the admiral said.

  ‘But presumably those are US secrets. I’m a British citizen.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said the admiral. ‘This is where Dominic comes in.’

  Prestwitch reached into his pocket and produced a warrant card. Toby examined it. ‘MI5? Isn’t it supposed to be secret? I mean, are you allowed to admit that you work there?’

  ‘I can these days,’ Prestwitch said. ‘Things have changed.’ He bent down and reached into his briefcase, pulling out a one-page form.

  ‘What’s this?’ Toby asked. But one glance told him. ‘The Official Secrets Act?’ His name was printed in a box near the top. The signature space was blank.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Prestwitch. ‘As you know, both the UK and the US still operate a fleet of ballistic missile submarines to deter foreign aggressors. And we assess that what happened on the USS Alexander Hamilton in 1983 is still a threat to security. So it’s just as important to our government as to the Americans’ that you don’t talk about it.’

  ‘But I explained, I know nothing.’

  ‘You know something,’ said the admiral. ‘And Bill says you are a smart guy. You might end up knowing more.’

  ‘So this silences me?’ Toby said, picking up the sheet of paper.

  ‘It does,’ said Prestwitch.

  ‘But why should I sign it? My wife is in a police station suspected of murder. It seems to me likely that the knowledge of whatever happened on the submarine might help set her free.’

  ‘It won’t,’ said Bill.

  ‘You say that, but I don’t know it!’ Toby protested.

  ‘You should sign it because you are a British citizen, and because it is important to your country,’ said Prestwitch.

  ‘And my wife?’ A thought occurred to Toby. ‘Can you get the police to release my wife?’

  Prestwitch replied carefully. ‘If your wife did murder Sam Bowen, and if the police have solid evidence that she did, then we can’t help her.’

  ‘Of course she didn’t murder him!’ Toby protested.

  ‘In which case we may be able to help. I will certainly be speaking to the police and, without being specific, I can provide them with guidance.’

  ‘So, if Alice is innocent, which she is, you can get her off?’

  ‘I can help,’ said Prestwitch. ‘I can’t guarantee they’ll let her go.’

  Toby flung the form on to the coffee table. ‘Then why should I sign?’

  ‘There is another way of looking at it,’ Prestwitch said. ‘If you don’t sign, we certainly won’t help Alice.’

  ‘Is that a threat?’

  ‘Damn it, Toby!’ Bill interrupted. ‘Stop playing games. You should sign this because your country asks you to, and because it might help Alice. Aren’t those good enough reasons? And if they are not, sign it because I am asking you.’

  Alice’s father had never spoken to Toby like that before. But there had never been so much at stake before.

  Toby was reluctant. But then he asked himself would signing the document make it more or less likely that Alice would be released?

  Having MI5 on your side must be a good thing. Bill clearly thought so.

  Toby picked up the form, took Prestwitch’s pen and signed.

  Twenty-Five

  November 1983, Norwegian Sea

  ‘Don’t do it, son. Do what you have been ordered to do. You owe it to your country.’

  Commander Driscoll’s eyes were steady as they looked down the barrel of the Colt 1911, his left hand clutching the shoulder that had been smashed by Lars’s wrench.

  My aim was remarkably firm as I focused on Driscoll’s forehead. The control room was crammed full of men, and they were all staring at me in silence.

  ‘You gotta shoot him, Bill,’ Lars said. He was standing barely a foot away from th
e captain, the wrench still in his hand. Williamson, a large navigation petty officer, was poised just behind Lars, ready if Lars took another swing at the captain.

  I ignored them all.

  Driscoll was right, of course. My duty as a naval officer was to put down the gun and let him go ahead with the launch. My duty as a naval officer was to play my part in sending three nuclear missiles – thirty warheads – to Moscow, Leningrad and East Berlin. Warheads that would flatten cities and kill millions. Warheads that would probably provoke massive nuclear retaliation from the Warsaw Pact.

  Certainly provoke it, if what the XO had said the night before about the Soviets’ nervousness was true.

  Unless the Soviets had already launched their missiles, getting their own pre-emption in first before NATO could initiate the first strike the Russians were convinced was on its way under cover of Able Archer 83.

  In that case, we were the second strike. Our job, our duty, was to launch our missiles.

  All of them. Not three of them. Why three? And why the same three targets that we had been given in a training exercise two weeks before? And why East Berlin?

  The standard orders for a nuclear submarine launch, the ones that occurred most often in their drills, were a response to an all-out Soviet nuclear strike. That was, after all, the principal reason for the existence of the American ballistic missile submarines. Dotted around the world’s oceans, gliding quietly at three knots several hundred feet down, they were impossible for the Soviets to find and destroy. So if the Russians ever launched a nuclear attack on the United States, even a surprise one, the submarines would be there to retaliate. Between them they had the firepower to destroy every major Russian city, to kill tens of millions of Russian citizens.

  Which was why the Russians would have to be insane to launch a nuclear attack on the United States.

  But drill EAMs usually contained a section giving background, declaring that the Russians had launched their missiles, or were on the brink of launching their missiles. This one didn’t. In fact, neither had any of the EAMs we had received over the previous twenty-four hours.

  No explanation at all. Odd.

  Moscow and Leningrad made sense as targets, but East Berlin? That was seriously strange. East Berlin was never included in the Hamilton’s targets and for a very good reason. Nuclear warheads detonating there would destroy West Berlin too, massacring not just a couple of million of the citizens of one of the United States’ closest allies, West Germany, but also thousands of NATO servicemen. Including Americans.

  Never included? East Berlin had been featured in that one drill EAM we had received three weeks before. At the time, we had assumed that was an exercise in retargeting to unfamiliar co-ordinates. Could it be, as the captain had suggested, that it was preparation for the target package that the National Military Command Center always expected the Hamilton to use in a war?

  Maybe. But I thought it unlikely. It seemed more likely to me that the same message had simply been resent in error.

  If there were already thousands of missiles criss-crossing the skies above the waves, then three more wouldn’t make any difference. But if there were none as yet, if the Soviets did indeed have their own fingers hovering above the nuclear button, then the Alexander Hamilton’s three missiles would set all the others on their way.

  The world would be finished.

  So I should shoot the man in front of me. Commander Driscoll, a man whom I liked and admired. A man whom I was pleased to call my commanding officer. A man with an ex-wife and two kids.

  Despite being in the Navy for eight years, I had never killed anyone before. I had never been asked to kill anyone before.

  Did I have the courage to do it?

  To save the human race?

  Yes, I did.

  What would God want? Would God want me to take another man’s life? I wasn’t an avid Christian, I never went to the small services on the submarine led by Chief Kunkel, but I had been to Sunday school as a kid and I did still occasionally attend church with my parents. I believed in God.

  Would God expect me to kill one man to save mankind? Yes. But was God trying to end the world? Was this some biblically inspired Armageddon?

  I’d need a theology degree to sort that one out. I had no idea what God wanted, and no time to figure it out.

  What would Donna say?

  Shoot him. Shoot him now.

  But Donna was wrong about this stuff. Wasn’t she?

  If I didn’t shoot him, Donna would die. But perhaps there was a missile heading for New York right now. Perhaps Donna would die anyway.

  ‘Do your duty, son.’ Driscoll’s voice was calm. Almost friendly. His blue eyes, as always, commanded.

  These thoughts flashed through my brain in seconds. A very few seconds. But I had to make a decision.

  The Navy had anticipated this. Some of the brightest minds in the country had spent years thinking about moments like this. It wasn’t up to me, a lowly lieutenant, to make this decision. How could it be? How could someone like me possibly be relied upon to make a decision this difficult this quickly and under this pressure?

  The Navy had it figured out. There were other people who decided. In particular, the President of the United States. Then there were others further down the line. On the Hamilton, there were at most two men who could decide not to follow orders, the captain and the executive officer, and in a case like this it was clear they should do what they were commanded to do.

  And so should I.

  ‘COB?’ I said.

  Piatnik, the chief of the boat, or ‘COB’, who was standing not six feet away from me responded. ‘Sir?’

  I lowered the pistol and handed it to him, along with the holster.

  The relief in the control room was palpable. Petty Officer Williamson immediately grabbed Lars, and hurled him to the floor. Another crewman snatched the wrench. It only took Driscoll a second to reassert his authority.

  ‘COB, give me the weapon. Arrest Lieutenant da Silva and lock him up with an armed guard.’

  He strapped on the holster, and approached me, stopping right in front of me, his face not six inches from mine. ‘Lieutenant Guth. You did your duty. We are going to need you in the next few minutes. Are you willing to continue doing your duty?’

  There was only one answer now. I stood to attention. ‘Aye aye, captain.’

  Driscoll stared at me for a moment. Given what I had just done, he was taking quite a leap of faith to trust me. Almost done. What I had actually done was save his life. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Now, I’m going to my stateroom for the keys.’

  There was silence as the captain left the control room. The crew were still transfixed by what had happened.

  ‘Back to work, gentlemen,’ said Robinson from the conn. ‘COB. Take Lieutenant da Silva to my stateroom and lock him in there.’ The submarine was too small to carry its own brig. The XO’s stateroom was as good a place as any to hold a prisoner.

  I waited for the captain to return. He was quick.

  ‘Captain in the control room,’ announced a petty officer. Driscoll appeared with four keys on dull green lanyards around his neck: the CIP key and three missile launch keys.

  The captain took off the lanyard holding the purple CIP key and inserted it into the captain’s indicator panel, turning it and flipping up the Permission to Fire toggle switch. The panel lit up with green and red lights indicating the status of the sixteen missiles.

  Driscoll took off the three lanyards for the launch keys, and handed them to me. I hurried at a rapid walk aft to the missile compartment and slid down the ladder to the missile control centre, where I passed the keys on to a missile tech to insert in the gas generators attached to missiles one, two and nine. This would arm them, generating the steam that would propel the missiles out of the submarine and above the ocean’s surface, where their solid-fuel rockets would then ignite and take them up and away through the earth’s atmosphere.

  It took about twenty mi
nutes to ‘spin up’ the missiles. ‘Spinning up’ referred to the tiny beryllium balls spinning at thousands of revolutions per second within each missile’s inertial navigation system. During that time a host of other operations were initiated for each of the three missiles. The three-stage solid-fuel propulsion system was activated, and target coordinates and the coordinates of the submarine were fed into the fire control computer, which downloaded the results to each missile. Diagnostic tests were run on everything.

  Once the missiles were spun up, the captain would grant the weapons officer permission to launch. The weapons officer would open a small safe in the missile control centre with a combination only he knew. Inside was a grey removable handle on which nuzzled a simple red pistol trigger. The weapons officer would insert the lead from the handle into the launch control console, give the order to prepare the first missile and, once the missile hatch was open to the outside sea, squeeze the trigger. The missile would fly. It would take about a minute to prepare the second missile and then the third.

  Launching missiles made a lot of noise. Every Soviet attack submarine in the area would know exactly where we were. So the tactical systems officer would be devising a torpedo evasion plan to go deep, go quiet and hide the instant the birds were away. Except the tactical systems officer was Lars, who was now locked up in the XO’s stateroom; one of the other junior officers would have to do it.

  The most dangerous part of the whole process for the crew of the Alexander Hamilton was in the couple of hours after launch.

  Unless you counted the inevitable day when we would be forced to surface and face a world poisoned by radioactivity in the depths of a nuclear winter. And you probably should count that.

  The time waiting for the missiles to spin up was tense, even in an exercise. It was even tenser now in the missile control centre.

  I took my seat in front of the launch control console. The missile control centre was cooler than the rest of the ship, in an attempt to counteract the heat generated by the rows of computers down there.