His train of thought was interrupted by Steele’s quiet voice. Steele, in his capacity of chairman of the joint chiefs for that period, put into words the conclusions which Navy and Army were reaching independently. "Gentlemen, the President and the Secretaries of State and Defence will be joining us in a few minutes. I can see only two alternatives to suggest to them. The first is we recall the 843rd. I don’t know how we can, but that is one possibility. The other," he paused, and for a few moments the room was very still. "The other," he repeated, "is to carry this action to its logical end. General Franklin has told us it is his belief the bombers already committed to attack can effectively destroy the Russian priority one targets. What guarantee can you give us of that, Franklin?"
Franklin looked up at Steele. "No guarantee, sir," he said. "I can only say I myself am confident my crews will get there and bomb accurately. It’s early morning here, gentlemen, but in Russia it’s getting on for dark, especially in the more northerly parts where most of the targets lie. That’s an advantage we hadn’t planned on. Again, there’s no reason to suppose their defences are at top line. And this particular wing is considered able to hit their targets in daylight with the defences fully alert. I won’t give a guarantee because I feel in war nothing can be guaranteed. Let’s just say I feel confident they’ll make it. One hundred per cent."
"Seems to answer that one," Maclellan said. "So what’s the next step? We can’t recall, apparently. All right, if we’re committed let’s hit them good. What else have we got?"
Keppler said, "I agree. But isn’t there any chance at all of recalling them?"
Steele shook his head slowly. "We already have operators working steadily through the three-letter combinations. Trouble is, there are about seventeen and a half thousand possible combinations. All the planes are listening out on the same wavelength, so we can’t try twenty or thirty different combinations at once — it has to be one at a time. At thirty seconds for each transmission, we’d need about five days to cover them all. We’ve got less than an hour and a half."
"We’ve also," Keppler said flatly, "only five minutes or so before the President gets here. There’s just one idea I’ve got, but I need a little more information. Maybe General Franklin can supply it." He looked round at the other chiefs. "What say we retire for a short while, take General Franklin with us?"
"Suits me," Admiral Maclellan said.
"And the Air Force," Steele broke in quickly. He wondered just what Keppler had up his sleeve. It had better be good, he thought. Because yet another six wings, fully armed, were now heading for their X points. Franklin hadn’t wasted the time between the call from Omaha and the beginning of the meeting.
Chapter 7
Clint Brown checked his flight instruments again. He had been checking them every thirty or forty seconds for the last ten minutes. At the moment he had very little to do, and so his mind prompted him to look for work, to do anything which would push the thought of Seattle and his fiancée into the background. It did not help that the rest of the crew were quiet and subdued. They too, he knew, would be finding it was not easy to put away unwelcome thoughts. A man can conquer his fear for himself more easily than his fear for those he loves. There was nothing to be done about it. He glanced at his wrist watch, checked the instruments again, looked out past the distant tip of the port wing into the icy blackness beyond. The hands on his watch moved round with agonising slowness to 10.31. He forced himself to wait until the exact second, then said, "O.K. Herman, you can arm up the hornets now."
"Roger," Goldsmith replied. He sounded eager, anxious to begin work.
Brown eased himself out of his seat and stood aside to let the engineer, Federov, climb into his place. It was normal practice for Federov to sit at the controls while the command pilot moved about the cabin.
Brown leaned over Stan Andersen’s chart table, watching the navigator’s busy fingers as he plotted information from the machines on to his chart, and fed back further information from the chart to the machines. Andersen looked up at Brown, smiled briefly. His face was set and drawn, but he at least was busy. "Still estimating 10.41, Start?" Brown asked.
"Still 10.41. This wind’s working out pretty good."
"Fine." Brown straightened up, went past Mellows, the radioman, who was sitting tense at his silent set. He gave Mellows a smile and a friendly pat on the shoulder as he went past. He was only a kid, Brown thought. But maybe that helped. Maybe he didn’t grasp the full implications of what was happening.
As a matter of fact, Brown was wrong. Mellows realised quite well that by now the States had been hit. He was an only child, and his parents lived in Washington D. C. In his mind he knew that they were gone. All right, that was it, they were gone. It would be nice to be able to give way to his grief, but that was out. Right now he had the chance to avenge them, simply by doing his job. He would. He fondled the tune control of his radio, watched Brown stop by Goldsmith’s fire control panel. He concenerated with all his determination on the set.
Goldsmith looked up at Brown. He nodded an acknowledgment of Brown’s presence, then went back to his work. He had already pulled down each of the ten big switches ranged in banks of five at the top of the panel. Five weapons for the port firing tube, five for the starboard. Beneath each of the switches a red light glowed. As Brown watched intently the red lights flickered out one by one, and below them green lights flashed on in their place. The weapons were armed.
Goldsmith’s hand now went to another row of switches, halfway down the panel. He selected the left hand switch of the port bank, and the left hand switch of the starboard. Again a red light glowed beneath each of the two switches.
In the rear of the fuselage two slim rockets, five feet long, slid quietly from a storage rack into a polished metal chute. Mechanical clamps pushed them smoothly along the chute to a point six feet short of the tail. Here the chute became a tube. The rockets vanished into the tube, leaving only the twelve firing ports of their motors in sight. Two hinged arms linked to the top of each tube slowly straightened. The tubes moved downwards, through an aperture formed by the sideways sliding of sections of the flooring. The rockets in their tubes hung a foot below the fuselage of Alabama Angel, vibrating slightly in the furious air blast, lethal now that the two safety plugs had been pulled out of warhead and motor as they dropped into firing position. On Goldsmith’s panel the two red lights winked out and were replaced by green. The two missiles were primed and ready for firing.
Goldsmith looked up at Brown, said laconically, "Numbers one and six ready to go. Hope we don’t need ‘em." Then he burned to the radarscope that was linked in with the fire control system, adjusting the brilliance of the centre sweep.
Brown nodded. "Hope not," he agreed, and began to make his way back to his seat. On the way he passed Garcia and Minter, the ornance experts. Garcia looked worried, he noted, but Minter was his usual calm, unimaginative self.
He tapped Federov on the shoulder, took the engineer’s place at the controls. A swift check of the dials showed everything normal, everything functioning smoothly. Glancing at his watch he saw that in another four minutes they would be turning on to the attack leg. In four minutes they would be sixty thousand feet above the imaginary dot on the Barents Sea which was exactly seventy-five degrees north, forty-five degrees east. From that point the bomber’s track would be a straight line almost due south in heading, eight hundred and fifty nautical miles long, to the primary target. Brown wondered where along that line they would meet trouble — if they met it at all. And whether, if they met it, the defence systems built into the 52K’s would take them safely through.