Carefully, holding on with both hands, he climbed down the ladder to the floor of the silo, which was just a grate over a large hole, the fire tube, designed so the fiery rocket exhaust would not cook the missile before it rose from the silo.
The rats may have got into the silo when he had the cap open, he thought. Yes, that was probably it. They got inside, found nothing to eat, began chewing on wire insulation to stay alive.
But the rats were dead.
His woman was dead, and he soon would be.
The missile …
He patted the side of the missile, then began climbing the stairs to the control room to do his electrical checks.
Nobody gave a damn about the missile, except him and maybe the major. The major didn’t really care all that much — the missile was just a job for him.
The missile had been the old man’s life. He had traded life in Russia as a slave in the Strategic Rocket Forces for a life in paradise as a slave to a missile that would never be fired.
He thought about Russia as he climbed the stairs.
You make your choices going through life, he told himself, or the state makes the choices for you. Or God does. Whichever, a man must accept life as it comes.
He sat down at the console in the control room, ran his fingers over the buttons and switches.
At least he had never had to fire the missile. After all these years taking care of it, that would be somewhat like committing suicide.
Could he do it? Could he fire the missile if ordered to do so?
When he first came to Cuba he had thought deeply about that question. Of course he had taken an oath to obey and all that, but he never knew if he really could.
Still didn’t.
And was going to die not knowing.
The old man laughed aloud. He liked the sound so much he laughed again, louder.
After all, the joke was really on the communists, who sent him here. Amazingly, after all the pain and suffering they caused tens of millions of people all over the planet, they had given him a good life.
He laughed again because the joke was a good one.
CHAPTER ONE
Guantánamo Bay, on the southeast coast of the island of Cuba, is the prettiest spot on the planet, thought Rear Admiral Jake Grafton, USN.
He was leaning on the railing on top of the carrier United States’s superstructure, her island, a place the sailors called Steel Beach. Here off-duty crew members gathered to soak up some rays and do a few calisthenics. Jake Grafton was not normally a sun worshiper; at sea he rarely visited Steel Beach, preferring to arrange his day so that he could spend at least a half hour running on the flight deck. Today he was dressed in gym shorts, T-shirt, and tennis shoes, but he had yet to make it to the flight deck.
Grafton was a trim, fit fifty-three years old, a trifle over six feet tall, with short hair turning gray, gray eyes, and a nose slightly too large for his face. On one temple was a scar, an old, faded white slash where a bullet had gouged him years ago.
People who knew him regarded him as the epitome of a competent naval officer. Grafton always put his brain in gear before he opened his mouth, never lost his cool, and he never lost sight of the goals he wanted to accomplish. In short, he was one fine naval officer and his superiors knew it, which was why he was in charge of this carrier group lying in Guantánamo Bay.
The carrier and her escorts had been running exercises in the Caribbean for the last week. Today the carrier was anchored in the mouth of the bay, with two of her larger consorts anchored nearby. To seaward three destroyers steamed back and forth, their radars probing the skies.
A set of top-secret orders had brought the carrier group here.
Jake Grafton thought about those orders as he studied the two cargo ships lying against the pier through a set of navy binoculars. The ships were small, less than eight thousand tons each; larger ships drew too much water to get against the pier in this harbor. They were Nuestra Señora de Colón and Astarte.
The order bringing those ships here had not come from some windowless Pentagon cubbyhole; it was no memo drafted by an anonymous civil servant or faceless staff weenie. Oh, no. The order that had brought those ships to this pier on the southern coast of Cuba had come from the White House, the top of the food chain.
Jake Grafton looked past the cargo ships at the warehouses and barracks and administration buildings baking in the warm Cuban sun.
A paradise, that was the word that described Cuba. A paradise inhabited by communists. And Guantánamo Bay was a lonely little American outpost adhering to the underside of this communist island, the asshole of Cuba some called it.
Rear Admiral Grafton could see the cranes moving, the white containers being swung down to the pier from Astarte, which had arrived several hours ago. Forklifts took the steel boxes to a hurricane-proof warehouse, where no doubt the harbormaster was stacking them three or four deep in neat, tidy military rows.
The containers were packages designed to hold chemical and biological weapons, artillery shells and bombs. A trained crew was here to load the weapons stored inside the hurricane-proof warehouse into the containers, which would then be loaded aboard the ship at the pier and transported to the United States, where the warheads would be destroyed.
Loading the weapons into the containers and getting the containers stowed aboard the second ship was going to take at least a week, probably longer. The first ship, Nuestra Señora de Colón, Our Lady of Colón, had been a week loading, and would be ready to sail this evening. Jake Grafton’s job was to provide military cover for the loading operation with this carrier battle group.
His orders raised more questions than they answered. The weapons had been stored in that warehouse for years — why remove them now? Why did the removal operation require military cover? What was the threat?
Admiral Grafton put down his binoculars and did fifty push-ups on the steel deck while he thought about chemical and biological weapons. Cheaper and even more lethal than atomic weapons, they were the weapons of choice for Third World nations seeking to acquire a credible military presence. Chemical weapons were easier to control than biological weapons, yet more expensive to deliver. Hands down, the cheapest and deadliest weapon known to man was the biological one.
Almost any nation, indeed, almost anyone with a credit card and two thousand square feet of laboratory space, could construct a biological weapon in a matter of weeks from inexpensive, off-the-shelf technology. Years ago Saddam Hussein got into the biological warfare business with anthrax cultures purchased from an American mail-order supply house and delivered via overnight mail. Ten grams of anthrax properly dispersed can kill as many people as a ton of the nerve gas Sarin. What was that estimate Jake saw recently? — one hundred kilograms of anthrax delivered by an efficient aerosol generator on a large urban target would kill from two to six times as many people as a one-megaton nuclear device.
Of course, Jake Grafton reflected, anthrax was merely one of over one hundred and sixty known biological warfare agents. There were others far deadlier but equally cheap to manufacture and disperse. Still, obtaining a culture was merely a first step; the journey from culture dishes to a reliable weapon that could be safely stored and accurately employed — anything other than a spray tank — was long, expensive, and fraught with engineering challenges.
Jake Grafton had had a few classified briefings about CBW — which stood for chemical and biological warfare — but he knew little more than was available in the public press. These weren’t the kinds of secrets that rank-and-file naval officers had a need to know. Since the Kennedy administration insisted on developing other military response capabilities besides nuclear warfare, the United States had researched, developed, and manufactured large stores of nerve gas, mustard gas, incapacitants, and defoliants. Research on biological agents went forward in tandem at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and ultimately led to the manufacture of weapons at Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas. These highly classified programs were undertaken with little debate and almost no publicity. Of course the Soviets had their own classified programs. Only when accidents occurred — like the accidental slaughter of 6,000 sheep thirty miles from the Dugway. Proving Ground in Utah during the late 1960s, or the deaths of sixty-six people at Sverdlovsk in 1979—did the public get a glimpse into this secret world.