So. He was dealing with a faceless man. He had no clue as to his identity or his background. But, to his surprise, the Premier had developed a tremendous respect for the man already. It had been beyond reasonable hope to find such a sophisticated man drawn out of the lower reaches of either of their governments. But the chess moves with the bombers! Masterful! Turn one bomber, wait for a response, and then turn the others! Ingenious! The man had reinvented the carrier pigeon. It had bought them some time. The Premier slumped in his seat. Perhaps not enough, he thought bleakly. Pushkin. Nakhodka. He knew the system. He knew the orders to take his cities had not come from the E-4, just as the decision to hit Baton Rouge had not come from Cherepovets.
It further amazed the Premier that the presidential successor had shown such wisdom after that bit of insanity. The Premier had issued orders to have the idiot submarine commander shot if he ever made it back to the motherland, which was doubtful. The American submarine commander had shown far greater wisdom as he prepared to die in the North Sea. Had he unloaded his missiles on Leningrad instead, there would have been no controlling the people in this bunker, loyalist or not. The Premier knew people. He knew that neither side could tolerate many more Pushkins or Baton Rouges. His hands were shaking. He reached for another small vodka to settle his nerves. The American had sent him a sign of good intentions. Still, even with the best intentions, the Premier knew the system he once thought he controlled was hanging on by a most slender and fraying thread. He was certain the new President had the same problem—especially with the submarines. Those infernal American submarines. He absolutely had to talk with the man.
The Premier swirled down the vodka. He lifted himself ponderously and moved toward the radio operator. He harangued the man unmercifully—Durak! Fool!—and ordered him to bull his way through the mangled atmosphere to the American E-4. The technician frantically went through the motions again, but with no success. The only place in America from which he heard regular signals—signals that were neither directed at them nor understandable—emerged from the location in Maryland that the KGB had identified as an obscure civil-defense bunker. The Premier, unable to control himself, thumped his fist down angrily. He was not interested in chatter among low-ranking American bureaucrats. He needed to talk only with the President.
“Large hematoma on the right thigh… abrasions, contusions. Whole area’s edematous.”
“Ummmm. Legs crushed. Do we have any ice around here?”
“Good God, his eyes are gone. Severe retinal burn.”
“Nothing we can do about that. Just make him comfortable. Get the ice, huh? Let’s get his legs splinted.”
The President moaned unintelligibly.
“Just relax, Mr. President. You’ll feel better in a minute. Just relax, sir.”
“Shocky.”
“Little wonder at that. What’s with the I.V.?”
“Normal stuff. L.R. Lactated ringers. Two milligrams of morphine.”
“Yeah. How long ago was that?”
“Let’s see. Ummmm… twenty-five minutes.”
“Let’s give the poor man two more milligrams. Damn, I wish we had a doctor here.”
“Well, we don’t. Tough bugger, isn’t he?”
“Tough, but he’s no youngster. And he’s hurting, sweetie. Two more milligrams of morphine.”
“Got it right here. They stocked this place with enough to keep every junkie in Washington going for a year.”
The President groaned again and tried to say something.
“Just relax, sir. You’re doing fine. You’ll feel better in a minute.”
Sedgwick already was feeling better—much, much better. He floated rapturously, not a care in the world, two angels in white hovering over him and his friend. Life was splendid and the nurses’ words washed serenely over him. The room was white and bright and warm. His friend lay next to him. His friend…
The young naval officer sat bolt upright in his bed, the pain from his legs searing through his serenity. He ripped at the intravenous tubing attached to his arm, causing one of the nurses to rush at him.
“No morphine!” he screamed, lashing out at the nurse.
“Hey, hey, hey,” the nurse soothed. “Calm down. You’ll be okay, soldier.”
“Sailor,” he corrected her, more calmly, the drug taking him again.
The nurse chuckled softly. “Okay, sailor boy, take it easy.”
“Two aspirin and call me in the morning,” the President mumbled woozily.
The nurse laughed. Sedgwick floated back into his angelic world.
Off to the side, in the small white hospital ward buried near Olney, the civil-defense director watched the scene without interrupting. He had trouble absorbing what suddenly had happened in his obscure little niche in the bunker world. He had almost refused the President entry, the scene outside had been so unlikely. A man arriving battered and bruised, dressed only in a tattered bathrobe and pajamas, wrapped in blankets, carried on the back of a street tough he could barely understand. Unconscious and with no identification. It was only the military aide’s NSA card, with the little coded dot that gave him admission anywhere, that finally convinced him.
Earlier, the bureaucrat had seen the instructions from the computerized Presidential Successor Locator sending the E-4 after the Secretary of the Interior. Now, for the first time, it occurred to him that the United States actually might have two Presidents. It also occurred to him that he was the only person in the world who was aware of that awkward possibility. However, he didn’t have the vaguest notion what to do with the information. There was no one to tell—not even this President, who was semiconscious and loopy on the painkilling morphine. It did not occur to him that it might be unwise to allow the nurses to administer the morphine.
Nearby, the Olney radio operator was growing increasingly frustrated, downright angry at times, with his superior’s casual indifference to the radio traffic he now was receiving. Dammit, they had the President of the United States back there, even if the poor bastard was in no shape to talk to anyone.
Transmissions were moving between NATO countries, although he couldn’t hold them for reasons that were beyond his understanding. The radio traffic between the Looking Glass and the E-4 had fallen off to rare, brief messages and he still had not been able to get a response from them. But it was the stuff out of the Soviet Union that fascinated him. Maybe the source was a CIA spy, but he certainly had access to good equipment. He was trying everything under the sun—very high frequency, ultra high frequency, very low frequency. It all seemed directed at the Midwest, perhaps at the command planes. And now the spook had tapped into a Molniya II satellite. The radio operator shook his head on that one. Molniya II was the Soviets’ hotline link. The hot line was deader than a doornail. He would have sworn that Molniya, a satellite with a perigee of only three hundred miles, was dead by now, too. But it wasn’t. The guy was one smart spook—and desperate, too, using the Soviets’ own satellites.
On his own, without informing his uninterested boss, the radio operator tapped out a brief response. “This is Pit Stop Two,” the low-frequency telegraph message said. “Do you read?”
In another of the world’s modern mole holes, beneath Cherepovets, the harassed Soviet communications operator felt a brief moment of extraordinary excitement and relief. Then he sagged in despair again. The American message, still encoded, had come from the insignificant bunker in Maryland. He angrily kicked at his radio. Prokliatia mashina! Damned machine! He despondently handed the message to the equally harassed cryptographer. The cryptographer, perspiring so steadily he had begun taking salt tablets, worked hurriedly over the short message. He turned wearily toward his colleague and arched his bushy eyebrows. Pit Stop Two? But they moved the message up channels, knowing they would feel the Premier’s wrath whether they moved the message or whether they didn’t.