“That’s not your job. Concentrate on your own assignment. Do you foresee any difficulty?”
“Difficulty? Sure. But nothing impossible.”
“Then we can rely on you for that.” Belsky turned to Nicole. “Your job is to assemble all Amergrad personnel at the municipal airport at precisely six o’clock Sunday evening—all personnel who are not directly involved in the final sequences of execution. The others will be Sergeant Hathaway’s responsibility. But it’s up to you to communicate with all our local personnel and get them here at the appointed hour. There are to be no exceptions; you understand that. If any member is unable to be present you will give me his name and location.”
“So that he can be liquidated, Comrade?”
“Yes. You can see what the result would be if even one of us remained behind to reveal what had happened here.”
“Makes sense,” Hathaway said. “But how do we work the getaway?”
“Colonel Winslow will arrange for the presence of a C-141 Starlifter jet on one of the alternate runways of the municipal airport at the appropriate time.” He turned to Winslow. “The plane must be fully fueled and manned by a flight crew drawn from our own numbers. You may call it a training flight or whatever you choose. I am correct in assuming the aircraft is capable of containing two hundred and four people including crew?”
“It’ll be a hell of a squeeze. We’ll be like sardines in there.” Winslow’s face was tight with strain. “The number you’re talking about is the number of Amergrad agents in Tucson, isn’t it? Agents alone—not their children.”
“The number represents the surviving members, yes. Two arc dead.”
Nicole said, “That makes two hundred and three. I take it the two hundred and fourth passenger is yourself.”
“Correct.”
“I suppose that’s meant to convince me you weren’t planning to send us all crashing into a mountain.”
Winslow interrupted. “What about our families? Our children? We have to know, Dangerfield. What happens to them?”
“Nothing.”
Hathaway said, “We have somebody tailing your son around town, Colonel. Just to make sure you stay in line. But nothing’s going to happen to him unless you make it happen.”
Winslow wasn’t letting it go. “You mean we’ll just leave them behind. Never see them again.”
Belsky said, “Can you think of another way to handle it? The children are Americans. They know nothing of the truth. In Russia they’d represent a threat to us all. Here they offer no threat to anyone since they know nothing of value. Their parents simply disappear without warning. They’ll be upset, naturally; they’ll go to the police, hire private detectives, what-have-you, all of this assuming such institutions are still in operation following the nuclear disruption. The children will survive your disappearance if they survive the war.”
“The war,” Winslow murmured. “It’ll be that, won’t it? I mean, there’ll be retaliation.”
“To some extent. Once these missiles have exploded over China there won’t be a great deal of retaliatory capacity left in China.”
“But Russia will come to China’s aid.”
Belsky said, “I can tell you this much. Russia will not come to China’s aid. I have been authorized to disclose that much to you so that you won’t be unduly concerned about the likelihood of your children being killed in a nuclear holocaust. Russia will not bombard the United States unless the United States attacks Russia first, and that is most unlikely. There is a certain risk from Chinese counterattack, yes, but your children stand a good chance of escaping harm since the Chinese retaliation will most likely be directed at American bases in the Pacific and along the West Coast—their ICBMs haven’t the range to reach too far inland.”
Winslow said, “My daughter is in school in California.”
“I’m sorry, Comrade. But that’s no proof she’ll be hurt.”
Douglass said, “This jet plane. Where’s it going to take us? Cuba?”
“Of course,” Belsky said. “And from there to the Soviet Union on board an Aeroflot plane.”
Winslow, clearly, still had his mind on his family, but by evident effort he wrenched it away and said uncertainly, “There’s one thing we haven’t covered that bothers me. Our whole system is geared to a second-strike premise. That is, we’re set up to fire these missiles only in the event of enemy attack.”
“The enemy attack will be simulated. Your wing headquarters will receive all the signals it would receive in the event of a real red alert. That’s Captain Ludlum’s field of operation.”
“I understand that,” Winslow said. “But the missile squadrons aren’t the only units that get activated under a red alert. The Pentagon goes on DefCon One—Defense Condition One—highest alert status, like when JFK was assassinated. The DefCon One signal alerts not only the ICBM wing but also the rest of the base. The SAC planes get a ‘Batter Up’ order to get them airborne so they won’t be caught on the ground—all that kind of thing. Is that going to happen here?”
“Obviously not. Airplanes have radios. We couldn’t very well have a wing of SAC bombers take to the air and then request confirmation from NORAD on the open airwaves which we can’t control. To do that we’d have to take over the whole of NORAD and we can’t possibly do anything like that.”
“But then what happens when the ICBMs go on red alert and the rest of the Air Base remains on normal status? It won’t make sense to anybody.”
“There won’t be any contact between the two groups. Pay attention now because I haven’t time to repeat myself. The essential mechanical and electronic preparations will have to be done tomorrow night under cover of darkness. Mrs. Conrad, it’s your job to see that the sentries who are assigned to guard duty at the key points both inside and outside the missile silos are members of our group. That applies to the twenty-four-hour period beginning at six tomorrow evening. You have that?”
“It’ll take some reshuffling of assignments,” Adele Conrad said, “but I suppose the ones who suddenly find themselves with a weekend off duty won’t complain. I’ll have to get together with the officers in charge of these assignments.”
“Never mind the details now. But Captain Ludlum’s people will be working in the open and the sentries who see them must be our own people. We can’t have any alarms. You’ll have to see that the members of Captain Ludlum’s teams are off duty, or assigned to places where Captain Ludlum needs them.”
“We’ll take care of it.” She might have been talking about the installation of a television set in a ranking officer’s bedroom.
Belsky said, “The key to everything is to seal off communications. We’ve got to be certain there’s no leakage in or out.”
“It ought to work,” Ludlum said. “We’ve had twenty years to work out the details, and Douglass here keeps us up to date on everything new they install by way of equipment.”
“Your plan is satisfactory, but there’s one vital thing it doesn’t take into account. We may get orders to abort from Moscow at any time—we’ve got to be prepared to react exactly as you would react if an actual countermand came down from the President.”
Ludlum said, “You’ve got to be above ground with your radio receiver, is that it?”
“Yes. So you’ve got to maintain one thread of contact with the outside—contact with me.”
“Well, we’re disconnecting the antenna systems. We can wire an independent receiver into one of them and hook it into one of Fred Winslow’s scrambler phones. That’ll give you direct voice contact with Colonel Winslow and he’ll have his finger six inches from the countermand button.” Ludium’s blunt head turned. “We can test it as soon as we’ve wired it up. I don’t see any big flap about the technical end but Nick’s got to get the codes to us in time. How soon can I have copies?”
Conrad said, “We’ll start printing right away. Sometime tomorrow morning be all right?”