"Why are submarines immune, Erik?"
"You've got to find them first, Dan, you can't materialize a bomb inside a submarine that's underwater unless you can find it. Bombers that are airborne are pretty much safe as well. But if they're on the ground or in dry dock—it upsets the whole logic of nuclear deterrence. And India and Pakistan both have sizable nuclear arsenals, but no submarines, they're all carried on bombers or ground-launched missiles. Into the middle of a hot war, the conflict over Kashmir with the artillery duels and machine gun attacks we've been hearing about these past weeks, it's not new—they've fought four wars in the past thirty years—the news about this science-fictional new threat, it's upset all the realities on the ground. India and Pakistan have both got to be afraid that the other side's got a new tool that makes their nuclear arsenal obsolete, the capability to smuggle nukes through other worlds—and they're already on three-minute warning, much like we were with the USSR in the fifties except that their capital cities are just five minutes apart as the missile flies."
"But they wouldn't be crazy enough to start a nuclear war over Kashmir, would they?"
"Nobody ever wants to be the first to start a nuclear war, Dan, that's not in question. The trouble is, they may think the other side is starting one. Back in 1983, for example, a malfunctioning Russian radar computer told the Soviets that we'd launched on them. Luckily a Colonel Petrov kept his head and waited for more information to come in, but if he'd played by the rule book he'd have told Moscow they were under attack, and it's anyone's guess what could have happened. Petrov had fifteen minutes' warning. Islamabad and New Delhi have got just three minutes to make up their minds, that's why the Federation of American Scientists say they're the greatest risk of nuclear war anywhere in the world today."
"But that's not going to happen—"
(Fast forward)
"Oh Jesus."
(Bleeped mild expletive.)
"This can't be—oh. I'm waiting for Bob, Bob Mancini on the India-Pakistan border. We're going over live to Bob, as soon as we can raise him. Bob? Bob, can you hear me? . . . No? Bob? We seem to have lost Bob. Our hearts go out to him, to his family and loved ones, to everyone out there. . . .
"That was the emergency line from the Pentagon. America is not, repeat
not,
under attack. It's not a repeat of 7/16, it's . . . it appears that one of the Pakistani army or the Indian air force have gone—a nuclear bomb, a hydrogen bomb on Islamabad, other explosions in India. Amritsar, New Delhi, Lahore in Pakistan. I'm Dan Rather on CBS, keeping you posted on the latest developments in what are we calling this? World War Two-point-five? India and Pakistan. Five large nuclear explosions have been reported so far. We can't get a telephone line to the subcontinent.
"Reports are coming in of airliners being diverted away from Indian and Pakistani airspace. The Pentagon has announced that America is not, repeat
not,
under attack, this is a purely local conflict between India and Pakistan. We're going over live to Jim Patterson in Mumbai, India. Jim, what's happening?"
"Hello Dan, it's absolute chaos here, sirens going in the background, you can probably hear them. From here on the sixth floor of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel there's traffic grid-locked throughout the city as people try to flee. In just a minute we're going down into the basements where"
(Click.)
"Jim? Jim? We seem to have lost Jim. Wait, we're getting—oh no.
No."
END RECORDING
The view from forty
thousand feet
“I don't know if this will work," said Paulette. "I've never done it before."
"Don't worry, they'll have set this up to be fail-safe. Believe me, we had enough trouble cracking their communication security—they know what they're doing. You may not get an immediate answer, but they'll know you paged them."
"I don't know how you can sit there and be so calm about it!"
Mike shrugged. "I've had a long time to get used to the idea," he said. Not exactly true: He'd had a couple of weeks. But the stench of bureaucratic excess, the penumbra of the inquisition, had clouded his entire period of service at the Family Trade Organization. "Sometimes you can smell it when the place you work, when there's a bad atmosphere? When people are doing stuff that
isn't quite right?
But nobody says anything, so you think it's just you, and you're afraid to speak out."
Paulie nodded. "Like Enron."
"Like—more than Enron, I guess; like the CIA in the early seventies, when they were out of control. Throwing people out of helicopters in Vietnam, mounting coups in South America. It's like they say, fish rot from the head down."
She lifted the phone handset she'd been gripping with bony fingers and hesitantly punched in an area code, and then a number. "We did an in-depth on Enron. It was just unbelievable, what was going on there." The phone rang, unanswered; she let it continue for ten seconds, then neatly ended the call. "What's next?"
Mike consulted the handwritten list she'd given him. "Second number, ring for four seconds, at least one minute after ending the first call." She didn't need him to do this: She could read it herself, easily enough. But company helped. "The hardest part of being a whistle-blower is being on your own, on the outside. Everybody telling you to shut the hell up, stop rocking the boat, keep your head down and work at whatever the wise heads have put in front of you. Hmm. Area code 414—"
Paulie dialed the second number, let it ring for four seconds, then disconnected. "I did an interview with Sherron Watkins, you know? When the whole Enron thing blew up. She said that, too, pretty much." She stabbed the phone at him. "Harder to blow the whistle on these guys, let me tell you. Much harder."
"I know it." He stared at the third number on the list. "On the other hand, they're not your regular gangsters: They think like a government."
"Some folks say, governments
are
gangsters. A bunch of guys with guns who demand money, right?"
"There's a difference of approach. Gangsters aren't part of the community. They don't put anything back into it, they don't build roads and schools, they just take the money and run. Governments think differently. At least, working ones do."
"But the Clan take money out of
our
communities. They don't spend it on
us,
do they? From our point of view they're like gangsters."
"Or an empire." Mike turned the thought around, examining it from different angles. "Like the Soviet Union, the way they drained resources from outlying territories." There was something not quite right with the metaphor, if he could just figure it out. "Oh, next number time. Area code is 506—"
They worked down the list over the course of an hour, as the jug of coffee cooled and the evening shadows lengthened outside. There were five numbers to call for varying lengths of time, at set minimum intervals; the third had an annoying voice menu system to navigate, asking for a quotation for auto insurance, and the fifth—answered in an Indian call center somewhere—was the only one with human interaction required: "Sorry, wrong number."
The whole tedious business was necessary for several reasons. A couple of random numbers to make traffic analysis harder; a couple of flags to say
I need to talk
and