The situation was not unique. Captains of naval vessels had acted in the past as Quinten was acting now. So had military commanders in the field. Their actions had usually been costly, but the cost was capable of measurement in ordinary terms. They entailed the lives of a few thousand men, the destruction of a small town, the unnecessary sinking of a nine-thousand-ton cruiser. Disastrous actions, but actions which entailed losses in terms which could be comprehended.
Quinten, on the other hand, had committed himself to action at a fateful moment in history. If his bombers all hit their targets, they could not reasonably be expected to kill less than thirty to forty million people. In theory, his action was no different from any of the similar actions which had preceded it. In practice, the past actions of commanders acting independently paled to insignificance beside it.
He allowed his head to sink on to his hands for a moment. The pain which had been an ever present companion over the past two years was worse than ever today. He thought that maybe to talk to Howard a while would help. He raised his head slowly, painfully, and reached out to the button. He remembered the red line phone, and clicked the switch attached to the scrambler box into the off position. Then he pressed the button.
Howard, sitting at his desk alert for any summons from the General, rose abruptly to his feet when he heard the signal. The niggling question that had been in his mind thrust itself forward again, demanding his attention. He started for the door, turned abruptly as realisation struck him, and walked back to his desk. He slid open the second drawer of the right hand pedestal, revealing a portable radio. It was the battery operated, transistor kind. He switched it on, listened to the local disc jockey for a few moments, then tuned in other stations. A frown spread slowly over his face. The bell rang again. He slammed the drawer shut. Then he walked slowly across the room and pushed open the door into the general’s office. There were some questions he had to have answered. Urgently.
Chapter 6
It has often been said that the Pentagon is not so much a building as a city. Certainly in terms of size and working population it merits that description. Like most other cities it is busier by day than by night. Except in time of crisis, few lights burn through the night. But ten minutes after General Franklin had received the message from Omaha, lights were winking on all over the vast building as key personnel, abruptly woken, began to arrive at their desks.
The organisation was sufficiently smooth, the communicattions system sufficiently sensitive, for the key men to be located at once. When located, they were merely given the one word which indicated a national emergency. They scrambled into their clothes, ignoring such formalities as washing and shaving. There were razors and washing facilities at the Pentagon they could use later. For now, all that mattered was to arrive at their desks fast. At that time of morning traffic was light. Even those living twenty miles out, by driving at eighty and ninety on the almost deserted highways, were able to report within fifteen minutes of the summons. Many got to their posts inside ten minutes, a few inside five. Some, of course, were already sleeping in the building.
The Joint Chiefs arrived at the War Room, half way down the central corridor, almost simultaneously. Their I.D. cards, special passes, and War Room entry permits, were scrutinised as minutely and thoroughly by the Military Police on duty outside the door as those of the more junior officers of all three services who followed them in. Nor were the elaborate security measures unnecessary. Secrets were made in other places. Here in the War Room, they were displayed.
At one end of the huge, rectangular room, a dozen comfortable arm chairs were arranged in a semi-circle facing a wall which sloped at an incline of about fifteen degrees towards the chairs. On it were three maps, all of them of the world, but drawn in such a way that the average person would not have realised at a first glance exactly what they were.
The map on the left was the least confusing. It showed density of populations, amount of food production per head of those populations, political allegiance, and degree of industrialisation. The map on the right was concerned with naval and military dispositions. At a glance it was possible to see the trend of Russian naval traffic, and the deployment of their massive land forces.
The central map, larger than both the others together, was a view of the northern hemisphere as it might have been seen from a satellite a thousand miles above the North Pole. Here were marked in red and blue the targets in Russia and America which had been allotted a priority of one or two.
Red was for priority one targets. It indicated a target which was considered vital to either side for immediate operations, and especially for offensive operations. Priority one targets were those which must be hit within hours of the start of a war. They consisted largely of airfields, missile sites, and a few great cities. There were forty-six such targets in America, and a further fourteen — mostly SAC bases — in the rest of the free world. In Russia there were thirty-one, with three in the satellite countries and one in China.
Priority two targets were shown in blue. They were the targets which would be hit in the second phase, between twelve hours and four days after the initial attacks. They comprised communications systems, industrial complexes, cities with a population of a half million or more, defensive airfields and missile sites. There were around five hundred of them in the free world, four hundred in the Russian bloc.
The difference between red and blue, between priority one and priority two targets, had been defined by an Air Force general back in 1951. "These targets are all vital targets. They are all necessary in order to wage war. But first priority must surely be given to those targets which enable a nation to wage immediate offensive war. Those are priority one. In the long run the other targets may enable a nation to hurt its enemy equally badly if they are spared. But not immediately, in the first few hours. They will not be spared of course, but though they must be destroyed the need to destroy them has not the same urgency as is the case with targets in the first priority. To those targets the maximum initial effort of the attacking forces must be applied. The true test is to assume that all such targets were blotted out in a sudden attack. Could the attacked nation then mount any sort of immediate counter attack? If the answer is yes, that nation contains targets which have not been given a high enough priority. Again, assume that from among the priority one targets, each single target in turn alone comes through a sudden attack undamaged. Could an immediate counter attack be launched from that target? If the answer is no, then that target has been overgraded and belongs among the priority twos, not the priority ones."
Behind the wall, which was made of a transparent material, teams of plotters were at work, drawing in with coloured wax pencils the X points and target routes of the 843rd Wing. Every one of the targets was shown in red. And between the thirty-two bombers, every red target was covered, either as a primary or secondary. Quinten had been well aware of that when he made his decision.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff conferred for a few moments, talking in low tones. Then General Franklin was asked to explain what had happened, and give his estimate of the situation over the next two hours.
Franklin stepped up on the platform which ran the width of the wall, and stood under the central map. He was a short, thickly built man, with a round, impassive face. He was unshaven, but his plentiful black hair was neatly brushed. He gave an impression of solid strength, and that impression was fully in accordance with his character. Without it, he could never have become SAC’s commander in his fortieth year.