There was silence in the room.
“This is how it works. He fires our MX into the Soviet Union. But it’s important to understand the targeting of this particular missile. Those ten warheads are zeroed on what we call third and fourth generation hard targets, as opposed to soft targets such as cities, people, that sort of thing. Our W87s are sublimely accurate; they never miss; they’re sure as death and taxes. And because of their accuracy the bombs can be quite small. So the ten warheads deploy against three key long-range radar installations, the Soviet air defense command, a deep leadership bunker thirty miles outside Moscow — the point is to decapitate their leadership — and five Siberian missile silos, which, by the time they strike, will be empty. The reason, of course, is that once the Soviet radar identifies the ten incomings, the Russians go crazy and punch out with everything they’ve got. Our ten nukes detonate with a total megatonnage of thirty-five; they take out the installations I’ve named and they kill — I don’t know, tops maybe thirty thousand people. Seven to nine minutes later, they hit us with four thousand megatons; they tag all our cities and missile silos; they EMP our radars and computers to craziness, they kill maybe three hundred million of us; they effectively wipe us out. That’s it. Game, set, and match, Soviet Union. Essentially the point of this Pashin’s exercise is to goad his own country into what amounts to a first strike, because the premium on a first strike is so high. But of course neither the Politburo nor any sane command group would push the button. So he does it himself, maybe with the help or under the inspiration of this Pamyat thing, and with this little commando unit, based on his intelligence. See? It’s easy. It’s more than easy, it’s brilliant. And when it’s over, he climbs out of the mountain, a chopper picks him up, and he’s tsar of all the Russias.”
“But our subs, with our subs we can—”
“No,” said Peter, “sorry, but they’ve got our subs zeroed. They can take some of them out in the first few minutes of the spasm. Then they can hunt down and kill the Tacamo VLF aircraft that are our primary sub links and are set to deliver the retaliation message. They’ll go straight for those babies, jam them, EMP them, or just blow them away. The subs will be out of contact, and will wait to fire while the Russians hunt them down in the following couple of weeks. At the worst, they’ll have plenty of time to evacuate their cities. They can outlast or outsmart the subs if they have to and Pashin has forced them to. That’s all; he’ll make them beat our subs. They aren’t going to want to fight that fight, but he’s taken the element of choice out of it. And he’ll make them do it. And in a terrible, deep way he probably thinks he’s cleaning up the mess the rest of his leaders have made. He’s the cleaning lady.”
“Why didn’t he take over a Russian missile compound and get his first strike that way?” somebody asked.
“Because this is the only independent-launch-capable silo in the world. It’s the only one he could take where he himself could push the button. He’s made the hardest choice of all, but by his lights, it’s the logical one. I suppose by a certain moral system it’s even the right choice. He’s not a madman, really, he’s just operating within the rules of the game, the game that his country and ours invented.”
“Who are those men with him?” somebody asked.
“Washington’s sure it’s Spetsnaz,” said Major Skazy. “Soviet Special Forces. In the control of the GRU, not the regular Army, and remember this Pashin is a big-time GRU heavyweight. Anyway, they’ve been trained in silo-seizure and blooded in Afghanistan. That explains those tans and the false teeth, meant to cover up their foreign origin. And there were sixty? That’s four fifteen man teams, which is the operational unit in the Spetsnaz organization. And it explains where the goddamned Stingers came from. We’ve shipped Stingers to the Muhajadeem, to take out the Soviet MI-26 gunships. These guys must have bounced a shipment, and they’ve turned the stuff around on us. These are very, very good guys. That’s why they’ve been so tough.”
But Puller hadn’t been listening. He’d been thinking. He’d gotten close to the last wrinkle. “Dr. Thiokol,” he said suddenly, “doesn’t your theory fall apart on the issue of our response to their launch? As soon as our radar sees the Russian birds coming, we launch. And they’re blown away. And the world dies in the rad—”
“You haven’t seen it yet, Colonel Puller. Just as I said early on, something else has to happen. Something to prevent us from launching, something to totally de-coordinate our response in the crucial seven-to nine-minute envelope between the launch of this Peacekeeper and the launch of the Russian massive retaliation.”
Again, the silence.
“The launch is only one half of the operation. There’s another half of it, there has to be. I told you this from the very beginning, but I didn’t know what it was. Now I see it. It explains the radio message that he sent out this morning immediately after the seizure. He was talking to his other half, telling it to hold off for eighteen hours because of the key vault.”
“Hold off on what?” asked Skazy.
“It’s called ‘decapitation,’” said Peter, “or leader killing. It means cutting the heads off. And all the heads are in Washington. You better bump me through to the FBI fast, because they’ve got to get hopping on this. This Pashin’s going to launch at South Mountain and then he’s going to nuke D.C.”
This was the hardest thing yet. Uckley would rather do anything than this, but now events were whizzing by and it had been explained to him in Washington that he had this last job left to do.
“I–I’m not sure I can do it,” he said. “Can’t you get somebody else?”
After a restrained moment or two of silence, the voice at the other end of the line at last said, “They can’t get there in time. We can send the photos and documents over the wire to the state police barracks on Route 40 outside Frederick and have them to you in twenty minutes. You’re the senior federal representative there, it has to be you.”
Uckley swallowed. What choice did he have?
And twenty minutes later, a state police car whirled into town, its siren blaring, its flasher pulsing. Seconds after that, the messenger was delivered to Uckley.
“We got these over the computer hookup from D.C. just a few minutes ago. Hey, you okay? Man, you look like you had the worst day of your life.”
“It wasn’t the best.”
“I hear there was a bad shooting.”
“Yeah. Mine.”
“Oh, Jesus, sorry, man. Hey, don’t they give you time off for—”
“There’s no time for that today. Thanks.”
Uckley took the envelope from the man and headed up the walk. The house was full of lights. A minister had arrived and the family doctor and, a few minutes back, an older couple he took to be grandparents.
He paused at the door, wishing he were several million miles away, wishing the whole thing were over, wishing it weren’t him. But it was him, and eventually he knocked.
Minutes seemed to pass before someone answered. It was a man about sixty, heavyset, with expressionless eyes.
“Yes?” he asked.
“Uh, my name is Uckley. I’m a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’m sorry to have to do this, but I’ve got to talk to the girls.”
The man beheld him for the longest time.
“The girls are very tired,” he finally said. “They’ve been through a lot today. Too much. We’ve just gotten them down. I was going to sedate them if they have any trouble sleeping. Their grandparents are here. Can’t this wait until some other time?”