The unearthly racket had awakened Sam Brenckmann but the woman in his arms had almost slept through it; or so he had thought until she stirred, shrugging closer. Judy said she had a transistor radio in the kitchen; but neither of them really wanted to hear the news or to move from the warm safety of the bed in the first floor room of the old wood-framed house on the edge of Bellingham. They might be safer in the cold, dank basement, for all they knew a great cloud of deadly radioactive fallout was about to envelop and blight the town. For all they knew more rockets and bombs were heading directly for Bellingham. But how could anybody know anything foe certain in a world suddenly turned upside down?
Vancouver or somewhere a few miles north of the border had already been hit, so had Seattle eighty miles to the south, to the west was the Pacific, to the east the Cascade Mountains. If they ran away where would they run?
And what was the point of running?
The worst had happened. At least while they were in this bed they were still human beings in control of their destiny, out in the streets they were just anonymous victims of the future. They did not need to discuss what to do next. The discussion would have been pointless, utterly futile. And besides, they already knew exactly what they wanted to do next.
Judy groaned and rolled over.
She kissed him wetly, and stroked his stubbly beard.
She giggled, kissed him again.
“I don’t even know if you’ve got a girlfriend?”
Sam propped himself on an elbow. A few hours ago he would have played this scene coolly. Icily. Like Rick Blain, Humphrey Bogart’s character in Casablanca — he often framed things with reference to scenes from his favourite movies — even though Judy was not exactly Ilsa Lund, Ingrid Bergmann in the great film of 1942. Judy was more the sort of girl a red-blooded guy actually wanted to spend a B-movie necking with in the back row; although not perhaps the kind of girl every mother wanted her son to marry but…
Where the fuck did that thought come from?
Sam tried to unscramble his wits.
God in heaven, Judy smelled great…
“Her name is Miranda,” he admitted. “Miranda Sullivan. She’s English, well, sort of Anglo-Californian, I suppose. Her folks were walk ons in a hundred movies back in the day, her Pa is something serious at one of the big studios in LA. Miranda was the one who linked me up with the Limonville Brothers. Well, with their agent, a mean piece of work called Johnny Seiffert, leastways. We had a big falling out. Miranda thinks I ought to be pushier. Whatever that means.”
“Miranda? What’s she like?”
“Blonde. Legs up to her navel. She was going to be a model once. Still is, I suppose. We don’t live together or anything. Most of the time I get the feeling I’m just her latest project. She wants me to move back up to San Francisco but I like LA just fine.” He reconsidered this last remark. “Not so sure it feels the same way about me anymore but hey, that’s life.”
Judy squirmed onto her back.
She reached for him, squeezed and stroked him as he quickly became engorged.
It took every ounce of resolve for Sam not to mount her immediately. He ran his tongue over her erect nipples, sucked and toyed, his left hand starting to explore the wet warmth between her thighs until she started to moan.
“Fuck me!” She demanded huskily.
He was inside her momentarily, deeply and urgently thrusting as she wrapped herself around him.
Chapter 12
It had taken Max Calman over an hour to get through security. The thirty-four year old Caltech mathematician and Burroughs Corporation Senior Network System Analyst eventually found his boss, Carl Drinkwater alone in the bunker conference room rifling through a heap of computer printouts.
“What are you doing here, Max?” Drinkwater asked distractedly.
“It was a false alarm with Lena,” replied the prospective father of twins due any day now. “I left her at the hospital. They’ve got a big shelter, she’s probably as safe there as anywhere.”
“You should be with Lena.”
“She said I was freaking her out,” the younger man shrugged. “I reckoned I’d be more use here, Carl.”
Drinkwater nodded. Although he had worked with the Philadelphia-born Calman for over four years he could not claim to know him very well. Nobody knew Max well. Max was an introverted, work-obsessed man who had come to Burroughs from Honeywell after an assignment on the H-bomb project at Los Alamos. He and his wife, a plain looking, dumpy high school teacher from Idaho, kept themselves to themselves. They turned up for the occasional ‘at homes’ organised by Carl’s wife, otherwise they fiercely guarded their privacy. Carl did not begrudge his people that. Sometimes the team worked days and nights without a break, never seeing their wives or kids for week or more; everything they did was ‘outcome orientated’, either they got results or they were history. Those were the rules and when a man signed on the dotted line the terms of the contract were unambiguous. The upside was that he and his people got to work at the ragged, razor edge of the newest, most state of the art computer science. They were breaking new ground daily and the possibilities seemed limitless. Or at least, they had been until a few hours ago.
Carl Drinkwater forced himself to take a sip of cold black coffee.
“We launched an all out first strike,” he said sombrely. “Everything we had ready to go. We ought to have creamed the Soviets but,” he groaned softly, “they must have already been at a high state of alert because they managed to shoot at least eleven confirmed ICBMs at us over the Arctic.” Several of the other suspected incoming ICBMs had been re-classified as ‘ghosts’ now that the Air Force had had a chance to run a preliminary analysis of the actual Soviet counter-strike. Carl was not convinced, the data was as flaky as Hell and it was pretty chaotic out there. “NORAD is dealing with the bombers within SAGE’s kill zones as they come over the horizon. We don’t think any bandits will get through but,” he gestured aimlessly with his hands, “the network took a big hit early in the exchange. Right now there could be a Tu-95 running in from its initial point right on top of us for all I know!”
“Shit!” Max Calman grunted. He was a man of slightly less than average height, leanly made with dark eyes and brows. His hair was invariably, as today, severely crew cut and notwithstanding possessing an IQ that trumped that of any of his colleagues — all top men in their own fields — he had never mastered the art of tying his own tie. Without Lena constantly organising him he blithely wandered around looking creased and downtrodden like a hobo who had lost his way. However, nobody who actually knew him mistook his appearance for anything other than the outward disinterest of a man whose mind was constantly on fire. “The Soviets must have known what was coming.”
“Jesus, Max!” Carl Drinkwater retorted in a confidential whisper. “We only found out what was happening when General LeMay came on the horn!”
Max Calman had already moved on from the conclusion he had drawn from the bare details of the exchange that he had learned in the last few seconds. The Soviets had been pre-warned that they were about to be attacked. It was obvious; they had been able to retaliate with ICBMs that took anything from three to four hours to several days to prepare for launch on unprotected open pads. Logically, from this starting point there were only three scenarios worthy of further consideration: one, the Soviets had been preparing their own first strike irrespective of US actions; two, the Soviets had been tipped off; or, three, every assumption NORAD had ever made about Soviet strategic missile capabilities had been wrong.