by Tom Clancy
“Make it clearer, General,” Fowler said so quietly that CINC-SAC barely heard him.
“Sir, what if Dr. Elliot is right, what if they really expected you to be at the game? Along with Secretary Bunker, I mean. The way our command-and-control works, that would have severely crippled us. I’m not saying they would have attacked, but certainly they would have been in a position, while denying responsibility for the Denver explosion, to—well, to announce their change in government in such a way as to prevent us, by simple intimidation, from acting against them. That’s bad enough. But they’ve missed their target, so to speak, haven’t they? Okay, now what are they thinking? They may be thinking that you suspect that they’ve done this thing, and that you’re angry enough to retaliate in one way or another. If they’re thinking that, sir, they might also be thinking that their best way of protecting themselves is to disarm us quickly. Mr. President, I’m not saying that they are thinking that way, but that they might be.” And a cold evening grew colder still.
“And how do we stop them from launching, General?” Fowler asked.
“Sir, the only thing that will keep them from launching is the certainty that the strike will not work. That’s particularly true if we’re dealing with their military. They’re good. They’re smart. They’re rational. They think before they act, like all good soldiers. If they know we’re ready to shoot at the first hint of an attack, then that attack becomes militarily futile, and it will not be initiated.”
“That’s good advice, Robert,” Elliot said.
“What’s NORAD think?” Fowler asked. The President didn’t think to consider that he was asking a two-star general to evaluate the opinion of a four-star.
“Mr. President, if we are to get some rationality back into this situation, that would appear to be the way to do it.”
“Very well. General Fremont, what do you propose?”
“Sir, at this point, we can advance our strategic-forces readiness to DEFCON-ONE. The code word for that is SNAPCOUNT. At that point we are at maximum readiness.”
“Won’t that provoke them?”
“Mr. President, no, it should not. Two reasons. First, we are already at a high state of alert, they know it, and while they are clearly concerned, they have not objected in any way. That’s the one sign of rationality we’ve seen to this point. Second, they won’t know until we tell them that we’ve upped things a notch. We don’t have to tell them until they do something provocative.”
Fowler sipped at his newest cup of coffee. He’d have to visit the bathroom soon, he realized.
“General, I’m going to hold off on that. Let me think that one over for a few minutes.”
“Very well, sir.” Fremont’s voice did not reveal any overt disappointment, but a thousand miles from Camp David, CINC-SAC turned to look at his Deputy Chief of Staff (Operations).
“What is it?” Parsons asked. There was nothing more for him to do at the moment. Having made his urgent phone call, and having decided to let his fellow NEST team members handle the lab work, he’d decided to assist the doctors. He’d brought instruments to evaluate the radiation exposure to the firefighters and handful of survivors, something in which the average physician has little expertise. The situation was not especially cheerful. Of the seven people who had survived the explosion at the stadium, five already showed signs of extreme radiation sickness. Parsons evaluated their exposures at anywhere from four hundred to over a thousand Rems. Six hundred was the maximum exposure normally compatible with survival, though with heroic treatment higher exposures had been survived. If one called living another year or two with three or four varieties of cancer breaking out in one’s body “survival.” The last one, fortunately, seemed to have the least. He was still cold, though his hands and face were badly burned, but he hadn’t vomited yet. He was also quite deaf.
It was a young man, Parsons saw. The clothing in the bag next to his bed included a handgun and a badge—a cop. He also held something in his hand, and when the boy looked up, he saw the FBI agent standing next to the NEST leader.
Officer Pete Dawkins was deep in shock, nearly insensate. His shaking came both from being cold and wet and from the aftermath of more terror than any man had ever faced and survived. His mind had divided itself into three or four separate areas, all of which were operating along different paths and at different speeds, and none of them were particularly sane or coherent. What held part of one such area together was training. While Parsons ran some sort of instrument over the clothing he’d worn only a short time before, Dawkins’ damaged eyes saw standing next to him another man in a blue plastic windbreaker. On the sleeves and over the chest were printed “FBI.” The young officer sprang upwards, disconnecting himself from the IV line. That caused both a doctor and a nurse to push him back down, but Dawkins fought them with the strength of madness, holding out his hand to the agent.
Special Agent Bill Clinton was also badly shaken. Only the vagaries of scheduling had saved his life. He, too, had had a ticket for the game, but he’d had to give it to another member of his squad. From that misfortune, which had enraged the young agent only four days earlier, his life had been spared. What he’d seen at the stadium had stunned him. His exposure to radiation—only forty Rems, according to Parsons—terrified him, but Clinton, too, was a cop, and he took the paper from Dawkins’ hand.
It was, he saw, a list of cars. One was circled and had a question-mark scribbled next to the license plate.
“What’s this mean?” Clinton asked, leaning past a nurse who was trying to restart Dawkins’ IV line.
“Van,” the man gasped, not hearing, but knowing the question. “Got in ... asked Sarge to check it out, but—south side, by the TV trucks. ABC van, little one, two guys, I let them in. Not on my list.”
“South side, does that mean anything?” Clinton asked Parsons.
“That’s where it was.” Parsons leaned down. “What did they look like, the two men?” He gestured at the paper, and then pointed at himself and Clinton.
“White, both thirties, ordinary ... said they came from Omaha ... with a tape machine. Thought it was funny they came from Omaha ... told Sergeant Yankevich ... went to check it out right before.”
“Look,” a doctor said, “this man is in very bad shape, and I have to—”
“Back off,” Clinton said.
“Did you look in the truck?”
Dawkins only stared. Parsons grabbed a piece of paper and drew a truck on it, stabbing at the picture with his pencil.
Dawkins nodded, on the edge of consciousness. “Big box, three feet, ‘Sony’ printed on it—they said it was a tape deck. Truck from Omaha ... but—” He pointed at the list.
Clinton looked. “Colorado tags!”
“I let it in,” Dawkins said just before he collapsed.
“Three-foot box ...” Parsons said quietly.
“Come on.” Clinton ran out of the emergency room. The nearest phone was at the admitting desk. All four were being used. Clinton took one right out of the hand of an admitting clerk, hung up, and cleared the line.
“What are you doing!”
“Shut up!” the agent commanded. “I need Hoskins.... Walt, this is Clinton at the hospital. I need you to run a tag number. Colorado E-R-P-five-two-zero. Suspicious van at the stadium. Two men were driving it, white, thirties, ordinary-looking. The witness is a cop, but now he’s passed out.”
“Okay. Who’s with you?”
“Parsons, the NEST guy.”
“Get down here—no, stay put, but keep this line open.” Hoskins put that line on hold, then dialed another from memory. It was for the Colorado Department of Motor Vehicles. “This is the FBI, I need a quick tag check. Your computer up?”
“Yes, sir,” a female voice assured him.
“Edward Robert Paul Five Two Zero.” Hoskins looked down at his desk. Why did that sound familiar?
“Very well.” Hoskins heard the tapping. “Here we go, that’s a brand-new van registered to Mr.
Robert Friend of Roggen. You need the license number for Mr. Friend?”
“Christ,” Hoskins said.
“Excuse me, sir?” He read off the number. “That’s correct.”
“Can you check two other license numbers?”
“Surely.” He read them off. “First one’s an incorrect number ... so’s the second—wait a minute, these numbers are just like—”
“I know. Thank you.” Hoskins set the phone down. “Okay, Walt, think fast....” First he needed more information from Clinton.
“Murray.”
“Dan, this is Walt Hoskins. Something just came in you need to know.”
“Shoot.”
“Our friend Marvin Russell parked a van at the stadium. The NEST guy says that the place where he parked it is pretty close to where the bomb went off. There was at least one—no, wait a minute—okay. There was one other guy in there with him, and the other one must have been driving the rental car. Okay. Inside the van was a large box. The van was painted up like an ABC vehicle, but Russell was found dead a couple miles away. So he must have dropped off the van and left. Dan, this looks like how the bomb might have gotten there.”
“What else do you have, Walt?”
“I have passport photos and other ID for two other people.”
“Fax ’"m.”
“On the way.” Hoskins left for the communications room. On the way he grabbed another agent. “Get the Denver homicide guys who’re working the Russell case—wherever they are, get ’em on the phone real fast.”
“Thinking terrorism again?” Pat O’Day asked. “I thought the bomb was too big for that.”
“Russell was a suspected terrorist, and we think he might—shit!” Murray exclaimed.
“What’s that, Dan?”
“Tell Records I want the photos from Athens that’re in the Russell file.” The Deputy Assistant Director waited for the call to be made. “We had an inquiry from the Greeks, one of their officers got murdered and they sent us some photos. I thought at the time it might be Marvin, but ... there was somebody else in there, a car, I think. We had him in profile, I think....”
“Fax coming in from Denver,” a woman announced.
“Bring it over,” Murray commanded.
“Here’s page one.” The rest arrived rapidly.
“Airline ticket ... connecting ticket. Pat—”
O’Day took it. “I’ll run it down.”
“Shit, look at this!”
“Familiar face?”
“It looks like ... Ismael Qati, maybe? I don’t know the other one.”
“Mustache and hair are wrong, Dan,” O’Day said, turning away from his phone. “A little thin, too. Better call Records to see what they have current on the mutt. You don’t want to jump too fast, man.”
“Right.” Murray lifted his phone.
“Good news, Mr. President,” Borstein said from inside Cheyenne Mountain. “We have a KH-11 pass coming up through the Central Soviet Union. It’s almost dawn there now, clear weather for a change, and we’ll get a look at some missile fields. The bird’s already programmed. NPIC is real-timing it into here and Offutt also.”
“But not here,” Fowler groused. Camp David had never been set up for that, a remarkable oversight, Fowler thought. It did go into Kneecap, which was where he should have gone when he’d had the chance. “Well, tell me what you see.”
“Will do, sir, this ought to be very useful for us,” Borstein promised.
“Coming up now, sir,” a new voice said. “Sir, this is Major Costello, NORAD intel. We couldn’t have timed this much better. The bird is going to sweep very close to four regiments, south to north, at Zhangiz Tobe, Alyesk, Uzhur, and Gladkaya, all but the last are SS-18 bases. Gladkaya is SS-11s, old birds. Sir, Alyesk is one of the places they’re supposed to be deactivating but haven’t yet....”
The morning sky was clear at Alyesk. First light was beginning to brighten the northeastern horizon, but none of the soldiers of the Strategic Rocket Forces bothered to look. They were weeks behind schedule and their current orders were to correct that deficiency. That such orders were nearly impossible was beside the point. At each of the forty launch silos was a heavy articulated truck. The SS-18s—the Russians actually called them RS-20s, for Rocket, Strategic, Number 20—were old ones, more than eleven years, in fact, which was why the Soviets had agreed to eliminate them. Powered by liquid-fueled motors, the fuels and oxidizers in question were dangerous, corrosive chemicals—unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide—and the fact that they were called “storable” liquids was a relative statement. They were more stable than cryogenic fuels insofar as they did not require refrigeration, but they were toxic to the point of nearly instant lethality to human contact, and they were necessarily highly reactive. One safeguard was the encapsulation of the missiles in steel capsules which were loaded like immense rifle cartridges into the silos, a Soviet design innovation that protected the delicate silo instrumentation from the chemicals. That the Soviets bothered with such systems at all was not—as American intelligence officers carped—to take advantage of their higher energy impulse, but rather a result of the fact that the Soviets had lagged in developing a reliable and powerful solid fuel for its missiles, a situation only recently remedied with the new SS-25. Though undeniably large and powerful, the SS-18—given the ominous NATO code name of SATAN-was an ill-tempered, pitiless bitch to maintain, and the crews were delighted to be rid of them. More than one Strategic Rocket Forces soldier had been killed in maintenance and training accidents, just as Americans had lost men with its counterpart U.S. missile, the Titan-II. All of the Aleysk birds were tagged for elimination, and that was the reason for the presence of the men and the transporter trucks. But first the warheads had to be removed. The Americans could watch the missiles in the destruction process, but the warheads were still the most secret of artifacts. Under the watchful eyes of a colonel, the nose shroud was removed from Rocket Number 31 by a small crane, exposing the MIRVs. Each of the conically shaped multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles was about 40 centimeters in width at the bottom, tapering to a needle point 150 centimeters above its base. Each also represented about half a megaton of three-stage thermonuclear device. The soldiers treated the MIRVs with all the respect they so clearly deserved.
“Okay, getting some pictures now,” Fowler heard Major Costello say. “Not much activity ... sir, we’re isolating on just a few of the silos, the ones that we can see the best—there’s woods all over there, Mr. President, but because of the angle of the satellite we know which ones we can see clearly ... okay, there’s one, Tobe Silo Zero-Five ... nothing unusual ... the command bunker is right there ... I can see guards patrolling around ... more than usual ... I see five—seven people—we can get them real good in infrared, it’s cold there, sir. Nothing else. Nothing else unusual, sir ... good. Okay, coming up on Alyesk now—Jeez!”
“What is it?”
“Sir, we’re looking at four silos on four different cameras....”
“Those are service trucks,” General Fremont said from the SAC command center. “Service trucks at all four. Silo doors are open, Mr. President.”
“What does that mean?”
Costello took the question: “Mr. President, these are all -18 Mod 2s, fairly old ones. They were supposed to be deactivated by now, but they haven’t been. We now have five silos in sight, sir, and all five have service trucks there. I can see two with people standing around, doing something to the missiles.”
“What’s a service truck?” Liz Elliot asked.
“Those are the trucks they use to transport the missiles. They also have all the tools you use to work on them. There’s one truck per bird—actually more than one. It’s a big semi-truck, like a hook ‘n’ ladder truck, actually, with storage bins built in for all the tools and stuff—Jim, they look like they pulled the shroud—yeah! There are the warheads, it’s lit up, and they’re doing something to the RVs ... I wonder what?”
Fowler nearly exploded. It was like listening to a football game on the radio, and—“What does all this mean!”
“Sir, we can’t tell ... coming up to Uzhur now. Not much activity, Uzhur has the new mark of the -18, the Mod 5 ... no trucks, I can see sentries again. Mr. President, I would estimate that we have more than the usual number of sentries around. Gladkaya next ... that’ll take a couple of minutes....”
“Why are the trucks there?” Fowler asked.
“Sir, all I can say is that they appear to be working on the birds.”
“Goddamn it! Doing what!” Fowler screamed into the speakerphone.
The reply was very different from the cool voice of a few minutes earlier. “Sir, there’s no way we can tell that.”
“Then tell me what you do know!”
“Mr. President, as I already said, these missiles are old ones, they’re maintenance-intensive, and they were scheduled for destruction, but they’re overdue for that. We observed increased site security at all three SS-18 regiments, but at Alyesk every bird we saw had a truck and a maintenance crew there, and the silos were all open. That’s all we can tell from these pictures, sir.”
“Mr. President,” General Borstein said, “Major Costello has told you everything he can.”
“General, you told me that we’d get something useful from this. What did we get?”
“Sir, it may be significant that there’s all that work going on at Alyesk.”
“But you don’t know what the work is!”
“No, sir, we don’t,” Borstein admitted rather sheepishly.
“Could they be readying those missiles for launch?”
“Yes, sir, that is a possibility.”
“My God.”
“Robert,” the National Security Advisor said, “I am getting very frightened.”
“Elizabeth, we don’t have time for this.” Fowler collected himself. “We must maintain control of ourselves, and control of the situation. We must. We must convince Narmonov—”