“Don’t call us,” the President had interrupted, grinning, “we’ll call you.”
Then he launched into what he called his hemorrhoids theory of history, mixing metaphors rather badly. All the best-laid plans of mice and men, he informed the general, could go awry because of one enlarged blood vessel in the wrong leader’s rectum. Very irritating, that, enough to cause anyone to misread Sarajevo and stumble into World War I. The Secretary of Defense had blanched. The general had stumbled to a stop. “Don’t worry, general,” the President, attempting to make up clearly lost ground, assured him. “I’ll keep Preparation H in every desk drawer.”
The general waited an intolerable length of time, twenty seconds on the long row of Command Balcony clocks that had crept past midnight in Omaha, one a.m. in Washington.
“Icarus,” the general repeated.
“Icarus,” the President said.
“Mr. President, is your EWO there?”
“EWO.”
Jee-zuz. The general paused in frustration. Then he added with a bite: “Your Emergency War Orders officer, Mr. President.” He almost added: The man with the black briefcase who sits outside your bedroom while you’re fucking, Mr. President.
Radnor returned from his daily thirty-minute session with the Alert Facility’s barbells, slipping into the cafeteria two minutes after the scheduled ten-o’clock closing. A young Vietnamese, the only remaining attendant, shot him a briefly hostile glance—a look that said Radnor once again was keeping him in this crazy place longer than necessary—and continued rubbing down the stainless-steel counters. Radnor, caught up in a decision between pie or a doughnut, ignored the look. He chose the doughnut, bounced a single penny onto the counter, and retreated in his skivvies to a dimly lit government-issue lunch table. He draped his flight suit, from which he never could be separated, over a plastic chair.
The price was right, the radar operator thought, mentally thanking the Air Force for this little fringe benefit for a 168-hour work week without overtime.
The wall menu read: “Doughnut 1 cent, pie 5 cents, Blue-Plate Special (Chicken Cacciatore today) 35 cents.”
Radnor, a freckle-faced twenty-five-year-old newlywed who usually chose apple pie, liked the Air Force. He had many reasons for that, not the least of which was his wife, Laura. If it hadn’t been for the Air Force, they would not have met. He took a lot of joshing about being married to an Air Force cop. The base newspaper, the Geiger Alert, loved it—romance on the flight line and all that. The public press sensationalized it—“A Doomsday Romance,”
“Finding Love by the Megaton,” and so forth. But he didn’t mind, figuring he had found the most special woman in the world.
The Air Force had been very good about it, transferring her from the Minuteman missile base at Great Falls where they met and placing them both on duty here. Just a few years earlier, the Air Force would have turned purple and transferred one of them to Guam. But the times were changing. He knew that the other guys his age, middle to late twenties, were studying and using this as a chance to get advanced degrees and get out. But not Radnor. This was a way of life, a good way of life, important. And it was even better since he had met his wife, the cop.
Radnor made a mental note to ask Tyler if the incident with his kid had been planned. They picked some screwball ways to test flight-line security. But with a kid? Radnor was glad Laura had not gone on duty till tonight.
At times he really worried about her. That was another reason he felt a debt to the Air Force. She was a lot safer here than she had been in Montana guarding those isolated missile silos. That wasn’t just a rationalization, either, of which he knew they all did their share. Sure, the missile silos and their underground command capsules were targeted with the biggest crater-makers the Russians had. That was the only way to take them out—dig them out in the craters. But, hell, Fairchild probably was spray-targeted with smaller but more warheads to get the Buffs before they got off the ground. So that wasn’t the point. Radnor was career. He knew why they were here. To deter. As long as they were here, as long as the hardened silos were spread throughout the Great Plains and the submarines moving silently beneath the oceans, nothing would happen. That was the point of all this. If that wasn’t the point, what was?
No, it was simply that her job had been damned dangerous in Montana. People were wacky over there. They went hunting with a thirty-aught-six in one hand and a six-pack in the other. Get those folks out there in the boondocks, where the silos were, and they took half-stewed potshots at the Minuteman security patrols. Just for kicks. It was nice having her here, near him, guarding B-52’s, where all she had to worry about was the screwball drills and a few ban-the-bomb freaks trying to climb the fence.
Radnor took the last bite of his penny doughnut, wiped at the barbell sweat glistening off the freckles on his forehead, draped his flight suit back over his arm, and headed for the showers.
Icarus was mistaken. The President was not drunk. He had fallen asleep in his chair in the Lincoln Sitting Room on the second floor, watching a rerun of Mission Impossible. His wife was in Connecticut overnight after christening a new ship, and it was uncomfortably lonely in the White House. The ethereal image danced foggily in front of him now, Greg Morris setting an elaborate bug in the ornate woodwork of an old East European capital. The sounds meshed uneasily—cocked pistol, this tape will self-destruct, Icarus.
Icarus.
Greek mythology was not the President’s strong point. His mind tripped woozily to the vision of a demigod flying too close to the true god, the sun. Icarus. Then he remembered. He came awake rapidly. Damn, he wished these guys wouldn’t call him in the middle of the night. He had aides for this stuff. Still, he was embarrassed by his lapse and his mind raced in search of a smart line to recapture control of the conversation. Then, recalling his first meeting with the general, he discarded that thought and said alertly: “Sorry, general, you caught me half asleep. What seems to be the problem?”
The President thought he heard a sigh at the other end.
“Is your EWO there, Mr. President?”
“I’m sure he is outside the door. In all this time, I’ve only been able to ditch him once.”
The President chuckled. The general did not.
“You need him immediately, sir.”
“General, what is the problem?”
“We are at Fast Pace, sir. I am now moving us to Round House. It is in your hands.”
“My hands, general? What is the problem?”
“Mr. President, we are in the secondary stages of a major attack, probably a Counterforce variation. SIOP is analyzing it now. Our defenses show a swarm attack by submarines, almost certainly Soviet, and a random attack by land-based ICBM’s, certainly Soviet. We need your authority.”
The phone conversation paused again, the President staring dully into the television screen as Martin Landau parked a falsebottomed getaway van over a Budapest sewer manhole.
“Defenses,” the President said finally. “The computers again, huh?”
The President thought he heard another sigh, which he took as a sign of weakness. Getting no other response, he went on, adding a touch of anger to his voice.