Since that post-holder had resided in Bellevue and had not yet made an appearance at the Capitol Building he was probably, along with tens of thousands of other citizens of Bellevue, dead.
Governor Rosellini tried very hard to exude quiet confidence rather than the rage that seethed beneath his brittle outward composure. One of his aides had once joked that the State Capitol Building was ‘the biggest and best bomb shelter’ in the North West; but a couple of weeks later a surveyor’s report had landed on the Governor’s desk informing him that because the dome of the building — the mighty cupola atop its rectangular ground plan mimicking that of the Capitol Building in DC — was only secured to the rest of the structure ‘by gravity’ even a relatively small earthquake might cause the structural failure of the ‘whole building’.
It beggared belief that some idiot had been allowed to design the great dome to be the tallest self-supporting masonry ‘dome’ in the United States without explaining that he had no plans to actually attach the dome to the rest of the building! Albert Rosellini regarded the grandiose State Capitol Building as a monumental folly that belonged to an age when men confused building tall with building for the future. Of more pressing relevance tonight; the building was absolutely not a very good ‘bomb shelter’.
Arriving in the office of the Emergency Disaster Management and Civil Defence Commissioner, the Governor took charge. He looked to his chief of staff, whom he had left knocking heads together while he had gone on his abortive tour of inspection.
However, before Rosellini’s harassed chief of staff could speak a grey-haired, stern-faced man in the combat fatigues of a Colonel in the Washington State National Guard Reserve cleared his throat and stepped forward.
“The Navy is flying over a liaison team from Bremerton sometime in the next hour, sir,” he reported. “However, I have a recent report on the air burst over Dabob Bay. There is also new information about the strike north of Bellingham and of an apparent failed strike near Hanford.”
The Governor looked to his chief of staff, who shrugged.
“Who exactly would you be, Colonel?”
“Dempsey, sir. Colin Powell Dempsey, Second Battalion 303rd Armoured Cavalry, Washington Army National Guard, sir.”
“What is the status of your unit, Colonel Dempsey?”
“Deactivated at ninety days readiness for war, sir. However, I have issued orders to activate my staff and to make the assets of 303rd Cav’s transport depots immediately available to the civil authorities.” He quirked an apologetic grimace. “Contacting reservists at this time is problematic. However, things ought to start moving at first light, sir.”
The Governor nodded.
“I have little information about the Sammanish strike,” the National Guard man admitted. “In accordance with current War Plans the Navy is co-ordinating all search, rescue and fire fighting operations on the eastern side of Puget Sound. The base at Bremerton is only lightly damaged. Nearer to the Dabob Bay air burst site the submarine base and ammunition store at Bangor appear to have been destroyed.”
The Governor listened, eying the old soldier thoughtfully.
“The strike north of the Canadian border destroyed the conurbation of Chilliwack and the surrounding hamlets in the Fraser Valley,” Colonel Dempsey announced flatly. “The fallout from this strike was initially blown almost directly due east. Unfortunately, the wind has now shifted around to the north. I have no intelligence as to current radiation levels anywhere in Washington State. I believe that the limited number of fixed radiation monitors require manual inspection at regular intervals. With regards to Hanford,” he continued, “McChord Air Force Base issued an impact alert at twenty-fifty hours yesterday with a circular error probability indicating Hanford was the target of an incoming ICBM. McChord now believe that the incoming missile either broke up in the atmosphere, or failed to initiate and crashed short of its intended target. A debris field approximately seven miles short of the Hanford security perimeter seems the most promising place for the decontamination teams from the Hanford Works to concentrate their efforts. Search teams will be deployed at daylight.”
Governor Rosellini listened to the cool, measured tones of the old army officer and decided that he had just indentified his new Emergency Disaster Management and Civil Defence Commissioner.
“What are your recommendations, Colonel Dempsey?”
The older man looked him in the eye.
“We can do nothing if the roads are blocked with survivors and refugees, sir. The first thing is to cordon off the most badly damaged areas. Once that has been done we can reassess the situation, and concentrate our limited resources, focussing on the areas in which we can actually do some good. Forget about Federal assistance for now. Federal assistance will come in due course but not until the Federal Government has reassessed its own priorities and taken stock of its own resources. That will take time and frankly,” Colonel Dempsey pursed his lips in grim contemplation, “we’re on our own until somebody tells us otherwise.”
He let this sink in.
“My first recommendation is that you must declare martial law, sir.”
Chapter 22
Planet Earth might have been plunged into chaos overnight but Major Paul Gunther, Head of Security at Ent Air Force Base, Headquarters of NORAD, was only responsible for security inside the gates of the base. For the time being he would let others worry about the big wide world outside.
What remained of it, leastways.
Carl Drinkwater, the Burroughs resident NSCAC — Network Systems Communications Analyst Consultant — who managed the Burroughs Corporation Systems Integration (Peterson Air Force Base) Network Implementation and Testing Team had been panicking about something just before one of his people, Senior Network System Analyst Max Calman, had put him in hospital.
Drinkwater had told the Air Defence Controller at the base — the man who was technically in overall command of the air defence of the entire North American continental mass — that quote: ‘even allowing for the damage sustained to the network from the initial Soviet strikes’ that ‘for SAGE to be degraded to its current operational status something is going on which we do not understand.’ Afterwards, the man with the most comprehensive understanding of the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment system which guarded continental airspace and which should have allowed the American people to sleep easily in their beds, had rushed back to his printouts and manuals and one of his closest colleagues had put him in hospital.
Gunther had ordered Max Calman’s cuffs to be removed and called a medic to examine him. Calman had busted a knuckle on his boss’s head, otherwise he was uninjured. Now he sat on the hard chair opposite the Security Chief, wilting under Gunther’s flinty, unblinking scrutiny.
Gunther’s office was in an unhardened building several hundred yards away from the four-storey windowless SAGE blockhouse which accommodated the two one hundred and thirty-five ton Burroughs Corporation mainframe computers, and the bunker control room of the North American Aerospace Defence Command.
Maxwell Lyall ‘Max’ Calman was not the most obviously ‘flaky’ member of Carl Drinkwater’s team; just the one who had seemed the most ‘different’. The Burroughs Corporation people and their IBM overseers were a mix of hard-headed bean counters and gifted mathematicians, physicists and nerdish programmers who inhabited their own rarefied intellectual space at Ent Air Force Base. While they were not exactly archetypal mad scientists — not even the Department of Defence knowingly employed madmen — Carl Drinkwater’s people were to a man eccentric, oddball and did not begin to understand, sympathise with, or know the first thing about military security and to a man honestly did not believe that it applied to them.