“Jesus,” Beck said, fingering the compendium of last-ditch nightmare preparations. “That bad, is it?” Looking around, he realized that he was the only man in the room who didn’t have a small red radiation-sensitive badge pinned to his lapeclass="underline" he took one from the box and put it on, took three more and slipped them in his pocket, feeling as if he was in the middle of a bad dream just waiting to wake up.
The Second Secretary, who had been polishing his gold-rimmed glasses, stared up at Beck with an expression of glum horror that made his sharp, beady eyes seem like an imbecile’s.
“Beck.” Dickson was rod-straight, standing at the head of the table: “Why the fuck won’t you carry your damned gun like you’ve been told to? Your degrees aren’t bulletproof, and it’s going to be open season on Americans as soon as the rest of the world realizes how thoroughly we’ve pissed in everybody’s drinking water.”
The four other senior staffers were like limp rag dolls. Beck had the impulse to find some cold water to throw on them.
“Answer one question for me, Dickson, and I promise I’ll strap on my government-issue iron—if I like the answer.”
“Go ahead, smart-ass.” Dickson’s reaction to personal danger was always fury after the crisis had passed. During one, he was anybody’s best man.
“The question is, do we still have a government?”
The First Secretary, a black man with distinguished graying temples, turned his face to the window and began quietly to weep.
“Of course we’ve got a government—we’ve got a roaring mad ex-Vice President who’s taking the Oath of Office—” Dickson glanced at his watch “—even as we speak, safe as he can be underground at… you know where.”
Beck didn’t: the new President could be at the Aerospace Defense Command Center, Norad, or any of a half dozen other sanctuaries. “Beggs, you mean?” Beck said distastefully: Claymore had been a hothead, but comprehensible; Beggs was a politician through and through, a viper.
“Beggs. Claymore put a bullet in his mouth after he pushed the button. The war lasted,” Dickson sat on the table, running his fingers absently through the gear meant to protect them from chemical warfare, and began Beck’s briefing with acid precision, his previous emotion gone now as he began doing what he knew he did very well, “exactly forty minutes—one salvo each, unrecallable, of course, mostly submarine-launched, we think: our Deltas, their SS-NX-20s and SS-N-18s.”
Beck digested that, trying not to let his emotions show: any missiles launched from submarines had a CEP—circular error probability—of as much as a mile, and these were MIRVed missiles: the SS-NX-20s carried twelve MIRVs with a five thousand mile range; the SS-N-18s, three MIRVs with a maximum range of four thousand miles. The strikes would hardly have been surgical. His mind threw up images of fireballs rising forty thousand feet in the air whose “Rem”—Roentgen-Equivalent-in-Man—was as high as four thousand. Seven hours later, one tenth of that radiation would be present, and every seven hours thereafter it would decrease until it reached a low level of three or four Rems per hour, where it would stay for three or four months. Absorb four hundred Rems in a day or a week, and your chances of survival were fifty per cent or less; absorb less than a hundred, and you might pull through with modest care and live another thirty or forty years, though your odds of getting cancer within fifteen or twenty years increased drastically. All he could think of was his family—Muffy, the kids.
But Dickson was still talking: “Beggs and his opposite number—I’m not quite sure who that is just yet—in the Kremlin, did their best to minimize the damage. We can’t get a damage assessment of any consequence, won’t have one for a while: the electromagnetic pulse and some of the Soviets’ first impulses—killer satellites and the like—knocked out almost everything… all communications, anyway. We do have some satellites which were transiting the southern hemisphere, but… well,” and suddenly Dickson slumped and his compact, upper-class little body seemed almost to melt, “we’ll just have to play it by ear.”
“By ear,” Beck repeated numbly as what he was hearing sank in. “You wouldn’t happen to know exactly how many nukes hit us, would you? Where the red zones are?”
“Not yet, I told you. We think there were a lot of misfires, as many as one out of three—old weapons will malfunction—but I’m not suggesting you fly home tonight to take your wife for a carriage ride in Central Park… or that you’ll be able to do so any time soon.”
“Not in this lifetime,” the First Secretary muttered.
“We can do without any defeatist talk, Sammy. Beck’s missed all the fun. We were just about to start collating what reports we’ve got—” Dickson’s hand waved aimlessly and Beck realized that Dickson wasn’t taking this as well as he was pretending.
And neither was he: there was a lump in his throat and he kept seeing TV fireballs rising up to heaven. He thought, in a moment of private despair, that if he were lucky, his wife and kids would already be dead. Then he thought about the catastrophe-theory model that purported to prove that any nuclear detonation of consequence would plunge the entire world into an endless night of icy death.
Then he said, “Do we have to put this stuff on?” and poked at the protective masks and suits.
“It’s up to you. It’s kind of hard to work in it. We’ll have enough warning, the Israelis say, of any serious radiation hazard blowing this way.” Dickson blinked like a rabbit in Beck’s headlights. “There’s still—something, you know… there’s the Red Cross, and there’s a UN, sort of, though God knows we can’t raise the building it used to be housed in. That’s what we’re doing, trying to find out what we can do to help….”
Abruptly, Beck sat down. “Right. Well, let’s see what we’ve got for assets.” And the words reminded him: “You realize that this whole thing, unless I’ve got my signals crossed, happened because none of us had the guts to put our careers on the line and back up Ashmead’s people?”
Nobody said anything for a long time. Beck wanted to get it over with, though: “So it’s our fault, gentlemen. In pursuit of a Palestinian solution, and with a careful eye to the feelings of our oil-producing friends, we may have destroyed the civilized world.”
It wasn’t until much later that Beck remembered Christine Patrick or his convention of genetic engineers.
The first was understandable—she’d just appeared in his life and didn’t bear on the problem at hand; the second was inexcusable—the brainpower sequestered by day on the Dead Sea but allowed the freedom of Jerusalem at night might be the extent of America’s remaining brain trust.
Chapter 2
Five hours later, Chris Patrick was having dinner on Beck’s balcony and watching him stare defiantly out over the American Quarter into a blazing Israeli sunset that made you understand why three of the world’s great religions claimed this spot as their spiritual home, listening while Beck explained why the lights were on in Jerusalem, and in general fed her the official line.
“…so you see, Chris, wherever old tube transformers are in use or where defensive hardening of long lines has been undertaken or those lines are fiber-optic or underground or shielded by certain types of porous rock or by the earth’s curvature from the force of the blast, communications and power stations are pretty much intact.”
“Pretty much,” she echoed, and Beck looked away from the darkening horizon of purple and gold to assess her face—that was what Beck did; he didn’t look at her, he evaluated her and then took the appropriate measures.