It was nearly two o’clock in the morning when Hathaway arrived at the warehouse. He said, “I got a million things to do. I hope this ain’t going to take long.”
“Not long at all,” Belsky assured him.
“Where’d you get that truck?”
“Have you got time to waste asking pointless questions?”
“Sorry.” Hathaway’s uniform was rumpled. He glanced into the truckbed.
Belsky said, “It’s a nonlethal gas. I want you to have your men secrete some of these canisters in the ventilation and circulation systems to cover all occupied rooms of the launch complex. You’re to rig the valves with electrical switches so that they can be opened by remote control from the exit you plan to use when you evacuate our people after the missiles have been fired. Do you understand?”
“I know what you’re telling me but I don’t get the point.”
“When you and the others leave the launch complex we don’t want you followed and we don’t want people buttonholing any of you and asking hysterical questions. If you trigger these canisters when you leave, the gas will render everyone unconscious in the launch complex. They won’t regain consciousness for at least two hours and that will give us ample time to get everyone into the aircraft and be on our way.”
It was an expedient lie. Hathaway and his men had had twenty years to make friends with Air Force enlisted men, some of whom would be in the launch complex. There wasn’t any point in burdening Hathaway’s conscience with the knowledge he was going to murder them.
Belsky climbed into the back of the truck and carefully lifted four of the canisters out and left them on the floor of the warehouse. “I’ll need these for another location,” he said. “You may take the rest.”
“Truck and all?”
“Of course. How else did you expect to smuggle them into an Air Force base?” Belsky picked up the transceiver and turned toward the door. “I’ll use your car. I’ll be at Ludlum’s.”
“What happened to the car we gave you?”
“It got mislaid,” Belsky said, and went outside.
Chapter Seventeen
It was four o’clock in the morning before Fred Winslow found a moment to make his way to the coin-operated public phone in one of the underground day rooms. He wasn’t sure it wasn’t tapped but he took the chance. He put through the call to Celia and exactly half an hour later he made a vague excuse and slipped up to the surface. She was waiting outside the fence and he eeled into the car past her. “I haven’t got very long.”
In the starlight the boniness of her face was accentuated; her eyes looked very large; her smile was fixed and meaningless. Winslow said, “They’ve put a tail on Alec.”
“Well, we thought they might.” She looked preternaturally tired—too tired to care about anything at all.
He said, “Tomorrow night. They’ve ordered us to shoot the missiles tomorrow night. Half-past six.”
“Dear God,” she whispered.
“At China. All the targets are in China.” He had been doing that for hours—saying things twice. He shook his head violently, trying to clear it. “Dangerfield says the strike will wipe out most of China’s retaliatory missiles and the Russians won’t come into it at all unless the Americans start shooting at Russia first. He said they’d allowed him to tell us that much because they want to reassure us that our children have a good chance to escape being caught under an atomic blast.”
“He’d have said that whether it was true or not.”
“I know,” he said. “I know. But it could be true, couldn’t it?”
“Because you want it to be true? How can we believe anything that man says? Truth means nothing to them—why should it? They tell us what they want us to know.”
He was carrying an executive call-up—a radio-activated pocket device that would emit a high-pitched whistle if he was needed down below. He kept waiting for it to sound.
He said, “No, it’s not true. We’re programming the missiles to hit sites in the north and west of China. We’re not going to hit the sites on the Yellow Sea and those are the ones that are aimed at the United States. Dangerfield says they haven’t got enough range to get much deeper into this country than the Pacific Coast but that isn’t true either. If that really was the case he couldn’t expect our launch people to believe the Pentagon was under attack by Chinese missiles, could he?”
“You’ve got to get a grip on yourself, Fred.”
He gripped her forearm. The chilly sweat of fear streamed down his ribs. He pulled his head around toward her and said, “Have you thought about it? What we talked about?”
“How could I have thought about anything else?”
“I know. But what I meant was have you decided?”
“No. Not for myself. But I’ll do whatever you decide, darling.”
“Maybe this is one time I’d really rather have you make the decision.”
“I can’t.”
He sat studying the backs of his hands and then turning them over and studying the palms. Finally he pressed them together until the knuckles cracked. She was watching him anxiously and he felt his face color under her stare. “We’re grotesques,” he muttered. “Twenty years leading double lives—twenty years is so long when you break it up into hours but it still isn’t long enough. We’ve become middle-aged Americans. We chose to forsake everything Russian—the flavors and smells and sounds of Russia. You can’t steal the results of the next election from the government safe. You don’t wait for the tramp of police boots, the knock on the door, transportation to penal squads in a slave camp, legions of secret police.… I remember how we used to seal the windows in the wintertime and go to bed very early and sleep in all our clothes because we couldn’t afford fuel.… God, stop me, Celia, I’m babbling.”
She twisted in the seat to grip him on both shoulders. His face slumped forward and he turned unashamedly toward her; she printed warm gentle kisses on his tear-streaked face.
“I had my mind made up,” he said. “I was ready to do it. And then they told me they had someone following Alec—just to keep me in line, they said. Oh Christ. Alec’s just a boy. We can’t make him share in our guilt.”
“He’s twenty-two years old, Fred, and he’s going to suffer whatever happens. He’s going to lose us whatever we do.”
“Should we do it, then?”
“I can’t—I don’t know.”
He thought of Alec, husky with young energy.
She said, “What do the rest of them think?”
“I haven’t asked them. I can’t speak for them. How could I ask them? They’d report me to Dangerfield and we’d both be killed.”
She said nothing. He thought of Barbara, fourteen years old and away in California with her school chums and her silver fingernail polish. He tried to remember whether Sacramento was within fallout radius of the California defense bases. It must be; there were so many bases. Russian roulette: how many missiles did the Chinese have? How many would they launch at California targets? How many would penetrate the ABM defense screen? But all it took was one. He thought of the film lectures: We project a fifty-mile destruction radius for the Chinese twenty-megaton warhead. …
He said, “I’m going to do it,” and the sound of his own voice electrified the skin of his spine. “I’m going to do it, Celia.”
She was watching him; in the bad light he couldn’t make out her expression. He asked softly, “What do you think, then?”
“No. First you decide you’re going to do it and then you ask me what I think. No. If you were sure of yourself you wouldn’t have asked me now—you see what you’re doing, Fred? You want me to tell you you’re wrong, because then you can get all worked up with self-righteousness and indignant rationalizations and you can get angry enough to convince yourself that you are right. But we can’t play that game this time. It’s too much—too much at stake. We can’t decide out of anger.”