“What now?” the President sounded tired unto death.
“It came to me from CIA, but they got it from the FBI. The NEST team has identified the bomb material as definitely not Russian. They think the bomb material is American.”
“That is crazy!” Borstein announced. “We do not have any missing weapons. We take damned good care of those things!”
“Roger, you got that from Ryan, didn't you?”
“Yes, Bob, I did.”
Durling heard a long sigh over the line. “Thank you.”
The Vice President's hand trembled as he lifted the other phone. “He didn't buy it.”
“He's got to buy it, sir, it's true!”
“I'm out of ideas here. You were right, Jack, he's not listening to anyone now.”
“New Hot Line message, sir.”
P RESIDENT NARMONOV, Jack read:
YOU ACCUSE ME OF IRRATIONALITY. WE HAVE TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND DEAD, AN ATTACK ON OUR FORCES IN BERLIN, AN ATTACK ON OUR NAVY BOTH IN THE MEDITERRANEAN AND THE PACIFIC…
“He's close to doing it. God damn it! We've got the information he needs to stop this thing in its tracks and—”
“I'm out of ideas,” Durling said over the speaker-phone. “These damned messages over the Hot Line are making things worse instead of better, and—”
“That seems to be the key problem, doesn't it?” Ryan looked up. “Ben, you good driving in snow?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Come on!” Ryan raced out of the room. They caught an elevator to the first floor, Jack ran into the security room. “Keys to the car!”
“Here, sir!” A very frightened young man tossed them over. The CIA's security force kept its vehicles just off the VIP lot. The blue GMC Jimmy four-wheel-drive was unlocked.
“Where are we going?” Goodley asked as he got into the driver's-side door.
“Pentagon, River entrance, and get us there fast.”
“What was it?” The torpedo had circled something, but not exploded, and finally ran out of fuel.
“Not enough mass to set off the magnetic exploder — too small to hit directly… must have been a decoy,” Dubinin said. “Where's that original intercept?” A sailor handed it over. “'Propeller disabled by collision,' Goddamn it! We were tracking a bad power plant, not a damaged screw.” The captain smashed his fist down on the chart table hard enough to draw blood. “Come north, go active!”
“Oh, shit, conn, sonar, we have an active low-frequency sonar bearing one-nine-zero.”
“Warm up the weapons!”
“Sir, if we deploy the outboard, we'll get another two or three knots,” Claggett said.
“Too noisy!” Ricks snapped back.
“Sir, we're up in the surface noise. The high-freqs from the outboard motor won't matter much up here. His active sonar is low-freq, and that active stuff's liable to detect us whether we're noisy or not. What we need now is distance, sir, if he gets too close, the Orion can't engage to support us.”
“We have to take him out.”
“Bad move, sir. We're on SNAPCOUNT status now, if we have to shoot, that takes priority. Putting a unit in the water will tell us just where to look. Captain, we need distance to keep out of his active sonar, and we can't risk a shot.”
“No!” Weapons officer, set it up!"
“Aye, sir.”
“Communications, tell the Orion to get us some help!”
“Here's the last one, Colonel.”
“Well, that was fast enough,” the regimental commander said.
“The boys are getting lots of practice,” the Major standing next to him observed, as the tenth and final RV was lifted off the SS-18 at Alyesk. “Be careful there, Sergeant.”
It was ice that did it. A few minutes earlier, some snow had blown into the missile capsule. The shuffling of boots had crushed and melted it, but then the sub-zero temperatures had refrozen it into an invisible, paper-thin skim of ice. The sergeant was in the process of stepping back off the fold-down catwalk when he slipped, and his wrench went flying. It bounced off the railing, twirling like a baton for a moment. The sergeant grabbed for it, but missed, and it went down.
“Run!” the Colonel screamed. The sergeant needed no encouragement. The corporal on the crane swung the warhead clear and himself jumped from the vehicle. They all knew to go upwind.
The wrench nearly made it all the way down, but it struck an interior fitting and went sideways, gouging the skin of the first stage in two places. The missile skin was also the missile tankage, and both the fuel and oxidizer were released. The two chemicals formed small clouds — only a few grams of each were leaking — but the chemicals were hypergolic. They ignited on contact. That happened two minutes after the wrench began its fall.
The explosion was a powerful one. It knocked the Colonel down, over two hundred meters from the silo. He instinctively rolled behind a thick pine-tree as the crushing overpressure wave swept by. He looked a moment later to see the silo topped by a pillar of flame. His men had all made it — a miracle, he thought. His next thought reflected the humor that so often accompanies an escape from death: Well, that's one less missile for the Americans to bother us about!
The Defense Support Program Satellite already had its sensor focused on the Russian missile fields. The energy bloom was unmistakable. The signal was down-linked to Alice Springs in Australia, and from there back up to a USAF communications satellite, which relayed it to North America. It took just over half a second.
“Possible launch — possible launch at Alyesk!”
In that moment, everything changed for Major General Joe Borstein. His eyes focused on the real-time display and his first thought was that it had happened, despite everything, all the changes, all the progress, all the treaties, somehow it had happened, and he was watching it and he would be there to watch it all happen until the SS-18 with his name on it landed on Cheyenne Mountain… This wasn't dropping bombs on the Paul Doumer Bridge, or hassling fighters over Germany. This was the end of life.
Borstein's voice was the sound of sandpaper. “I only see one… where's the bird?”
“No bird no bird no bird,” a female captain announced. “The boom is too big, more like an explosion. No bird, no bird. This is not a launch, I repeat this is not a launch.”
Borstein saw that his hands were shaking. They hadn't done that the time he'd been shot down, nor the time he'd crashed at Edwards, nor the times he'd driven airplanes through weather too foul for hailstones. He looked around at his people and saw in their faces the same thing he'd just felt in the pit of his stomach. Somehow it had been like watching a dreadfully scary movie to this point, but it was not a movie now. He lifted the phone to SAC and switched off the input to the Gold Phone line to Camp David.
“Pete, did you copy that?”
“I sure did, Joe.”
“We, uh, we better settle this thing down, Pete. The President's losing it.”
CINC-SAC paused for a beat before responding. “I almost lost it, but I just got it back.”
“Yeah, I hear you, Pete.”
“What the hell was that?”
Borstein flipped the switch back on. “Mr. President, that was an explosion, we think, in the Alyesk missile fields. We, uh, sure had a scare there for a moment, but there is no bird in the air — say again, Mr. President, there are no birds flying now. That was a definite false alarm.”
“What does it mean?”
“Sir, I do not know that. Perhaps — they were servicing the missiles, sir, and maybe they had an accident. It's happened before — we had the same problem with the Titan-II.”
“General Borstein is correct,” CINC-SAC confirmed soberly. “That's why we got rid of the Titan-II… Mr. President?”