William Prochnau - Trinity's Child

This time the translator stopped, asking the Premier to repeat his final words.

“…If that happens, Mr. President, I cannot guarantee you two minutes.”

• 2000 Zulu

Around the world, on the various clocks set to Zulu, the hands moved silently past twenty hundred hours. A certain lulling fatalism settled in among the players in the last act. The system functioned.

In the cavernous bunker beneath Cherepovets, the Soviet Premier missed the marking of the last hour. His head nodded from exhaustion. His mind skittered in a dozen foggy directions. His heavy eyelids drooped, then snapped back open again, focusing fuzzily on the small red canister over which he had burned the American codes and shredded the ashes through its rarely used and rusted grille.

His eyes moved ponderously to the blur of the huge display screen from which the symbols of his remaining ICBM’s gleamed mockingly. Zhangiztobe, tucked far away in the high plains of Kazakhstan, throbbed rather than gleamed at him. He forced his fatigued eyes away to the next screen, where a handful of computerized white cursors fluttered in a taunting reminder of the tattered remains of his nation’s other, and more exhilarating, use for rockets. He sighed. They had beaten the Americans into space—stunned the world with Sputnik, charmed it with the orbiting of the little dog Laika, awed it with the human triumph of Yuri Gagarin. I am eagle! They had placed stars in the heavens, but now the stars were blinking out, only a few white cursors remaining as testaments to Gagarin’s glory. From its low orbit, Molniya, a survivor, his only link to the American President, winked at him like the setting evening star. Too few others twinkled—a Volna, a Cosmos, another Volna launched into high geostationary orbit in 1980. I am mole, he thought despairingly. His heavy eyelids drooped further. The screen blurred. He reached for another amphetamine. His last one, he told himself ruefully. Of that, and only that, he was certain.

In the smaller bunker beneath Olney, the American President lay in the clinic now, eyes closed, neither asleep nor awake, drifting. Occasionally he emitted a loud moan, bringing the nurses rushing to his side, but the occasional moans were not products of the pain. Those, he suppressed. These ran from a deeper source, wrenched out of the depths of his soul as his sightless eyes drifted into new visions of America, its purple-mountained majesties, its fruited plain, its alabaster cities pockmarked like the moon.

Sedgwick manned the radio room, his bed rolled into the cramped slot vacated by the President. He, too, missed the passing of the Zulu clock’s hands as he pushed the radio operator through futile probe after futile probe—UHF, VHF, HF, LF, frequency after frequency, dead satellite after dead satellite. He picked up an increasing gaggle of world sounds now—curt Europeans, an excitable Portuguese voice out of Brazil, a New Zealander who babbled incoherently about Nevil Shute, an occasional dirge from some unknown and unmanned American radio station. His frustration was total, the flutter of other radio conversations infuriating. He knew the TACAMO planes were there, one having lifted out of Bermuda, the other out of Guam. But they made no sounds.

In the E-4, Condor did not notice the passing of the hour. He rested comfortably, even contentedly. Each man is presented with his moment of truth, and Condor had faced his, meeting it to his satisfaction. The Librarian had moved to the radio compartment. If any American communications center had a chance to reach the TACAMO planes, the E-4’ s chance was best. The communication was not necessary, but the Librarian was an efficient man. He could negate any possible breakthrough by creating a conflict, so he worked as diligently as Sedgwick at reaching the planes.

Of the crucial players aboard the E-4, only the pilot was troubled. Just inside the locked cockpit door the Secret Service agent stood cradling his Uzi, the pilot’s security against further madness of the kind that had brought Harpoon down almost at his side. He forced himself to accept that Alice, closing in on him again, suffered from the same battlefield malady. It was difficult to believe of men he had respected, but strong men had cracked under far less pressure. He followed orders—just as he followed orders to no longer avoid radioactive clouds. The fate of his nation was at stake.

In the Looking Glass, Alice felt the pressure. He gazed out the cockpit window at the shimmering plane ahead of him and saw both his nation and the world slipping out of his fingers. The E-4 had become desperately artful, racing at full bore, darting into billowing clouds, maneuvering in the opaque vapor, and then darting out in a different direction. Smitty swerved the Looking Glass onto the surprise course, only to have the E-4 swing again. The Looking Glass measured its gains in feet. It was not enough. Alice wanted a cigarette.

In the placid depths of the world’s oceans, in silently roaming behemoths, American submarine commanders methodically noted the hour. Beneath their feet giant gyroscopes, one of the true marvels of American technology, whirred relentlessly with precision even greater than that of the Zulu clocks. The gyros guided both the submarines and their deadly cargo, inextricably linking the two. With timing measured in microseconds the gyroscopes monitored the submarines’ forward progress, their depth, their direction, their turns and pauses. Through huge umbilicals, the gyros fed the data to the missiles, adjusting their trajectories microsecond after microsecond so they were forever trained precisely on thousands of far-off targets. When the time came, and it was scarcely an hour off now, the commanders would turn simple keys from positions at Hold on the left, to Tactical straight up, to Fire on the right. The gyros would send the last microsecond’s trajectory adjustment, the umbilicals would fall away, and the commanders would feel a lurching whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. The gyroscopes were called the Ships Inertial Navigation System. Aboard the boats, they were known simply as SINS.

In scores of tiny mole holes across the Soviet Union, pink-cheeked young officers of the Rocket Forces had no way of knowing the significance of the hour change. They waited, locked deep in the frozen earth with their SS-17’s and SS-19’s. A few sat with rockets designated SS-18’s. They were loaded with twenty-five-megaton warheads, the world’s largest—a weapon that would dig a hole, killing everything within a diameter of thirteen miles, igniting winter-dry shrubbery as well as children’s clothing twenty-five miles from its target. The young men sat nervously, their imaginations at work. Unlike the submarine crews, they were not yet sure of their role. But they would act, as surely as the submarines. Upon instruction, they would utter the final count: tri… dva… odin…pust! On the display boards in front of them, green lights marked with Cyrillic lettering would begin to flick rapidly: Enable Command… flick… Launch Command… flick… Launch in Progress… flick… Missile Away… flick.

World away.

Flick.

Aboard the Polar Bear, where two stragglers still struggled against the system, the system rebelled against the rebellious. In the B-52, buffeted violently just barely above seas far more angry than the serene depths in which the submarines roamed, the gyros functioned less well, as did the display lights. Torrential rains, whipped by the fury of the tropical storm, flooded through Halupalai’s escape hatch. Water pellets lashed into the sophisticated electronic jamming equipment at the rear of the topside compartment, jamming the equipment instead, shorting it out in sizzles and snaps that flashed like devils’ beacons in the murk.