“General, may I be candid with you? This is a shitty way to get a new set of computers.”
“Sir!”
“How many times, since I became President, have those damned machines screwed up? Several hundred? How many times have they screwed up so badly we have gone to attack conferences? Five? Six?”
The general was getting truly worried. And angry.
“And how many times have I picked up this telephone, Mr. President? We have no time for this, sir. As you know from the briefing”—he paused slightly on that—“we have no time for debate, no time for thinking. We need your authority. This is real. This is Pearl Harbor.”
“I don’t believe it. I talked to the Russian ambassador today.”
“I’m talking to SIOP. I trust him more.”
“And what is your computerized adviser telling you, general? You woke me up at one o’clock in the morning with this crap. This is not new. What is SIOP telling you? Your career may be riding on it.”
“My career, sir?”
Icarus looked at the huge map in front of him, saw the white lines inching farther out of Polyarnny. He looked at a side screen onto which the computers, very rapidly now, spewed out data showing one of the white lines attaining suborbital height over the Arctic Ocean. He watched the computerized data quickly reduce the margin of error on the missile’s trajectory. His voice took on a brittle quality.
“Our defense system is telling me that a Soviet SS-18, carrying 2.5 to 5 megatons, has my name on it, Mr. President. SIOP is telling me my career will be over in twenty-six minutes.”
The conversation stopped again.
“It also is telling me that a submarine-launched missile, fired off the Outer Banks, has MIRVed near Richmond. One of its multiple warheads, carrying forty kilotons, is directed at the vicinity of Washington.”
The general’s tone changed again, with a slight hint of puzzlement. “Strange. It’s so small.” Then the brittle monotone returned.
“The computers say the odds are fifty-fifty the target is the White House, thirty-seventy it is aimed at Andrews Air Force Base. Pentagon is a possible target but it is so near the White House the choice seems irrelevant. Depends somewhat on whether it is a ground burst or air burst. We can’t determine how the warhead is rigged. It will arrive in four minutes, sir.”
“Bullshit,” the President said.
The President looked up to see his EWO, the ever-present man with the briefcase, switch off Mission Impossible. Standing near the EWO in the open door to the sitting room were the night duty officer from the Situation Room and the President’s appointments secretary, the only one of his personal aides working late this night.
The water pelted O’Toole with a thousand Lilliputian fingers. His own Gulliver’s hands pummeled the soap, turning the Ivory into a froth that filled his hair, whitewashed his huge shoulders, and invaded every bodily crevice with 99.44 percent purity. He was glad the Air Force provided Ivory. It reminded O’Toole that he hadn’t come that far. The shower reminded him that he had.
O’Toole felt good. He almost always felt good.
Inside the Alert Facility, O’Toole took two showers a day, one in the morning and one, like this one, at night. He realized this was an idiosyncrasy, one which his buddies razzed him about. But they had not grown up in a three-room house with no running water, escaping to the Air Force.
O’Toole rubbed the soapy lather up and down his legs, working the Ivory into the warmth at the top of his thighs where he felt the familiar pleasure of lubrication as well as cleansing.
“O’Toole!”
O’Toole’s spongy knees snapped into a near-joint lock. He dropped the Ivory.
“Cleanliness may be next to Godliness, you Mick prick. But you can’t stay in the shower all night. Get your well-scrubbed butt out of there or you’re going to have company. And you know what the Air Force thinks of asshole buddies.”
O’Toole relaxed. It was Radnor, back from his barbell workout. Radnor was his pal. He hadn’t seen.
“Hang on to your own sweaty dong, Radnor. And don’t try anything funny. I got a pal whose wife is a security cop here. She’d love to get a couple of hotshot SAC airmen on lewd behavior in a public—well, almost public—restroom.”
The young Electronics Warfare Officer picked up the soap, placed it on the shelf, and let the shower spray begin to hose him down. He turned the water on ice cold, as he always did, to get that last jarring bit of stimulation.
The EWO opened the briefcase. The President seemed not to notice, staring out the sitting room’s corner window where the white edifice of the Washington Monument stood frozen in the clear January night. The monument’s tiny red eyes, beacons for the commercial aircraft at National Airport, winked at him in devilish mockery.
Like most Presidents, in moments of trauma he felt a sudden dislike for this house. It creaked with ghosts. He felt Lyndon Johnson here, during Vietnam, sleeping fitfully, jolted out of nightmarish dreams by the roar of aircraft approaching National, certain that the planes were bombing the White House. Johnson had lunged out of bed night after night, the huge Texas frame dripping sweat, and stared out the window at the same haunting red eyes.
The President gripped the phone tightly and stared into the monument’s tiny Orwellian orbs. The Emergency War Orders officer spread a file in front of him.
No one had told him it would be like this. No one told him he would have to trust computers that didn’t work half the time. No one told him he might have to make a decision in four minutes, not knowing if the computers were working or not, not knowing if some fool Russian or some fool American had run the wrong tape again, not knowing if SIOP or the general was out of control. Not knowing, for God’s sake, if he ever would know.
He felt Richard Nixon in the house, with a different kind of trauma, gesturing almost hysterically to a group of congressmen who wanted him to quit. He could go into the next room, Nixon said, push a button, and kill twenty-five million people. Too low, the President thought. Nixon’s figure was too low. Button, button, who’s got the button… dammit, there is no button… dammit, you’ve got the button.
The appointments secretary placed a hand on his shoulder, squeezing slightly, seeming to nudge him, too.
The President sagged. He had pushed the Russians. Everyone knew that was the proper way to treat them. Push them and they backed down. He had run his entire life believing that, preaching that. It was gospel, part of his political liturgy. You didn’t question truths like that. It was the wishy-washy Carters that got us into trouble, nibbled to pieces; the dilettante Kennedys with their first-step treaties.
He didn’t understand. He had weapons so accurate he could lob them, as Goldwater had said years ago, into the can in the Kremlin. Weapons so awesome Russia could be a moonscape in half an hour. They couldn’t possibly be so foolish. He didn’t believe it. It had to be the goddamn computers. His palm had grown wet gripping the phone. But the voice at the other end continued.
“We need your authority, sir.”
The words rang woodenly in his ear.
“Authority,” the President repeated dully.
In Omaha, the general’s hands had grown wet too. He was afraid now. Not of the white snake uncoiling out of Russian Arctic. He was afraid of the President.
“Time to earn your two hundred thou, sir,” the general said coldly.
He almost added: Time for the Preparation H, Mr. President. But he already had spoken more icily, more disrespectfully to his Commander-in-Chief than he had ever dared during his long career. He also had moved the alert status to Double Take.