“No,” he replied. “I need a BASF, a thirtyminute BASF.”
The clerk shrugged and reached for a box on the shelf behind him. He threw three BASF tapes on the counter. “There you go. Three for five ninety-five.”
His customer picked one up. “Thanks,” he said, a hesitant, almost forced smile on his face, “but I only need one.”
A few blocks away from Times Square, at the Kennedy Child Study Center on East Sixty-seventh Street, the Daughters of Charity of the Order of Saint Vincent de Paul prepared to open a spectacle of a vastly different sort. Gently, as unobtrusively as possible, they shepherded their children toward the tinseled brilliance of the Christmas tree beckoning to them like a lighthouse of hope from the center of the auditorium.
The spastic uncertainty of the children’s movements, the slant of their eyes, the heavy tongues that rolled around their half-open mouths, all bore witness to the curse which lay upon their little bodies. They were mongoloids.
The mother superior motioned to the children to sit down, took an electric cord and plugged it into a socket. At the sight of the sparkling tissue of light inflaming the tree, a pathetic babble of discordant sound rose from the wondering faces around it.
The mother superior stepped toward their parents gathered around the room.
“Maria Rocchia,” she announced, “is going to open our program by singing for us the first lines of `O Little Town of Bethlehem.’”
She reached into the circle of uplifted faces and took the hand of a ten-year-old with black hair tied in pigtails that tumbled to her shoulder blades. Gently, the superior coaxed her toward the center of the circle.
The child stood there a moment, terrified. Finally she opened her mouth.
The only sound which escaped was a raucous bleat. Her head began to shake violently, sending her pigtails swirling about her. She stamped her feet in fury and frustration.
In the first row, a middle-aged man, his heavy torso wrapped in a well-pressed gray suit, reached a hand upward and plucked nervously at the collar of his white shirt. Each gesture of the child, each incoherent sound she emitted, sent a tremor of anguish through his heavy body. She was his only child. Since his wife had died of lymphatic cancer three years before, she had been in the nuns’ care.
Angelo Rocchia stared at his daughter as though somehow the intensity of the love radiating from his ruddy face might calm the tempest shaking her frail figure. Finally she stopped. A first hesitant sound, then another and another flowed from her mouth. The tone was harsh, yet the rhythm underlying it was perfect.
Angelo Rocchia dabbed with relief at the sweat sparkling on his temple just where the retreating skin of his forehead met the mass of his wavy gray hair. He unbuttoned the jacket of his suit and let his chest sag. As he did, one of the attributes of his calling became visible on his right hip.
It was a Smith and Wesson .38 heavy-barrel service revolver. He was a detective first grade of the New York Police Department.
Twenty-three miles from the White House, deep in the Maryland countryside, a man in an underground cocoon reached for a telephone at the same time the little girl in New York was concluding her carol. He was the duty officer of the Department of Energy’s Germantown, Maryland, nuclear-emergency command post, one of the dozens of steel-and-concrete moleholes, some secret, some not so secret, from which the United States would be run in an emergency or a nuclear war.
On the order flashed to him by Jack Eastman in the White House, minutes after Los Alamos’ preliminary analysis of the weapons design had come in, he was about to set into motion the most effective response the U.S.
government had been able to devise to the menace of nuclear terrorism. His gray telephone gave him access to the U.S. government’s “Autodin-Autovon”
closed military communications circuit, a global network whose five-digit numbers were listed in a seventy-four-page green volume that was probably the most secret telephone book in the world.
“National Military Command Center, Major Evans,” came a voice answering his call from another underground command post, this one far below the Pentagon.
“Department of Energy, Emergency Operations Center,” the warrant officer continued. He had no need to corroborate his identity or the source of his call since he was talking over a direct, secure line. “We have a nuclear emergency, code priority `Broken Arrow.”’
He suppressed a shiver speaking those words. They were the code for the highest priority assigned to a peacetime nuclear crisis by the Department of Energy.
“Emergency site New York City. We require airlift facilities for a full mobilization of our dedicated personnel and equipment.”
Those words were sending into action one of the most secret organizations under the control of the U.S. government, a collection of scientists and technicians kept on twenty-four-hour alert at the Department of Energy’s Germantown headquarters, at the nuclear-weapons laboratories in Los Alamos and in Livermore, California, and at the old nuclear testing ranges north of Las Vegas.
Inevitably the group was known officially by an acronym, “NEST” for “Nuclear Explosives Search Teams.” With their ultrasensitive neutron and gamma-ray detectors, their carefully refined and highly secret search techniques, the NEST teams represented the best scientific answer the United States had for the threat posed by the envelope delivered earlier in the day to the White House gate.
At the Pentagon, Major Evans pushed a series of code numbers onto the computer terminal at his communications console. In a second, the essential details of the emergency he had been requested to handle appeared on the television screen in front of him. He saw he would have to stage an airlift of two hundred men and their equipment out of Kirkland Air Force Base in Albuquerque and Travis Air Force Base in northern California. The screen also showed him that the Military Air Command at Scott Air Force Base outside St. Louis had orders to assign an emergency of this sort top priority.
The major’s computer console provided a last injunction: the planes must be routed to the Air Force base nearest the emergency site to allow the government to run the coming operation in strict secrecy, as far from civilian eyes as possible. He flicked another query into his computer terminal.
“Your assembly area,” he told the warrant officer in Germantown, “will be McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey.” Eighteen miles southeast of Trenton, an hour’s fast driving from the Lincoln Tunnel, McGuire was the closest base to New York that could handle Starlifters. The Pentagon major looked at the clock overhead. As he was talking, his deputy beside him had already been in contact with the Scott Air Force Base operations desk.
“I mark nineteen fifty-nine Eastern,” he told Germantown. “Your first designated aircraft will reach Kirkland at eighteen-thirty Mountain.”
High in the night sky over Kansas, a C-141 carrying a load of spare engines to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas had just shifted course and was droning southwest to Albuquerque.
Hunched over his chart table, its navigator was already working out the details of the flight plan he would follow on his trip back to New York.
It was precisely eight o’clock when the President of the United States entered the National Security Council conference room in the West Wing of the White House. The men and women in the room rose the instant his familiar figure appeared in the doorway. To even his most sophisticated advisers, there was always a special aura about the personage of the President, some intimation of the crushing dimensions of the problems he bore, of the awesome power that was his, of the responsibilities which made the holder of his office unique among men. He motioned to them to sit, while he remained standing, biting his lower lip as he often did when he was trying to concentrate. Before coming down from his living quarters, he’d changed into a suit and tie, a reflection of the respect he, too, felt for the high office he held.