Ian Slater - World in Flames

The Russian rockets were crashing closer and closer, and a rain of red-tailed missiles could be seen plummeting down over Leatherhead and nearby in Oxshott, devastating what had been heavily camouflaged army staging areas.

A salvo of Zhukov J rockets, their long crimson exhausts plainly, if only momentarily, visible, their harsh metallic retching sound rending the air, crashed into the nearby culvert, the explosion blowing out most of the Spences’s windows, the living room’s heavy blackout drapes sucked frighteningly inward, swirling about her but stopping most of the flying glass.

Zeldman, in the shelter, heard the implosion — glass shattering. Within seconds, drawing the Nansen slide bolt and wrenching the heavy door open, he was racing up the short flight of sunken brick steps as Georgina, her nerve breaking as more salvos rained about the culvert, fled the house toward the shelter.

In another flash of a Nike Hercules battery and the glow of fuel dump fires, the two of them all but crashed into one another in the garden. It would have been funny but for Georgina’s frantic panic.

Leading her back to the shelter, Peter Zeldman said little apart from a few quietly given instructions, and sat holding her, stroking her hair, trying to calm her down. For a long time her body remained rigid, tense with fear, but then slowly she yielded — all her pretenses shattered by the closeness of death, their mutual longing unreined by the dull thumps of the rockets’ explosions bringing danger ever closer, her fingers tearing into him as he lifted her high against the shelter’s damp wall, penetrating her with equally wild abandon, the fullness of her release sweeping over her time and again, the air raid reaching its crescendo, their joy a reverie.

In Montana, coyotes howled in the foothills of Bear Paw Mountain while in the hardened shelters of Strategic Air Command on the snow-covered Great Plains, an air force instructor was telling Rick Stacy and the other eleven silo cadets not to hesitate. “If your partner goes berserk under pressure, you not only have the right but the duty to shoot him or her.” He paused. None of them showed any surprise — which was good. “Now, the air force has taken great pains to select the best possible people for this job. But none of us knows for sure how we’ll perform if things start coming apart — that is, if it comes to a nuclear exchange — if other silos in your sector were to be hit. You all passed A-okay on the simulators, but tomorrow you’ll be in silo on solo ride.”

Stacy smiled across at Melissa Lange. The instructor saw it, gave no sign of disapproval, but made a mental note that these two were to be kept apart in the two-member team drills. You couldn’t stop fraternization. In fact, it could be a stabilizing factor off duty, but you kept them well apart in training and in the silo. Despite the advancement of women in the forces, the no-mixed-sex rule remained inviolate at “Ground Zero.”

“There’s something else I want to mention,” the instructor continued, neat and tan in knife-edged ironed pale blue uniform and tie. “In any crew, you’ll find there’s a tendency for one partner to become leader by default. Know what I mean, Lieutenant Stacy?”

“Yes, sir. One team member relies too heavily on the other.” Stacy looked pleased with himself.

“Not really,” replied the instructor. “You’re all taught to rely on one another, Lieutenant. The problem, however, is when one member habitually relies on the other so that in the event of a slipup by the one who’s been leading, we are likely to risk either aborting launch or executing an inappropriate release at the critical moment. It is not,” the instructor emphasized, “a pilot-copilot situation down there. In the silo there are two of you with equal responsibility. You’re a team. No one of you can launch. And forget all that BS you’ve read about a ‘string and second key’ game where one of you supposedly goes bonkers, shoots the other, and then catapults us into a nuclear exchange by using a connecting string to turn both keys at once. You can’t. We fixed it. You need a two-key insert to initiate your launch procedure.” The instructor paused. “You got that, Corporal Lange?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay. Let’s recap before you all head off to get drunk.” There was a polite ripple of laughter. None of them were heavy drinkers. The air force had carefully checked that out in the psychiatric profile on each recruit. Besides, everyone knew that if they so much as took an aspirin, it had to be reported. If anyone climbed aboard the pickup van and had taken so much as an antihistamine, they’d have to immediately declare themselves DNIA — duty not involving alert. Not to do so carried the same penalty meted out to a fighter pilot who hadn’t reported himself DNIF — a verbal reprimand, a fine, and confined to barracks. With launch crews of necessity required to live in and around the silos, being CB meant staying in the plusher SAC living quarters. But in the middle of the snow-covered prairie with all calls automatically monitored, the only recreation was to watch TV, get laid — difficult, given the long duty hours — eat, get overweight, and risk a WRC — weight reduction course.

For some reason Melissa couldn’t understand, the U.S. Air Force did not want their missile shooters fat. Rick Stacy, a fitness fiend, postulated that “excessive poundage,” in his words, made people slower on the controls. Melissa said she knew a cab dispatcher who was fat, enormous, and the most competent dispatcher around.

“We’re not dispatching cabs, Lissa,” Stacy told her. “We’re into kilotons on the front line.”

Melissa didn’t bother pursuing the fact that the front line was five thousand miles away in Europe, and nine thousand in Korea. In a way, she knew Rick was right, but his egocentric habit of automatically assuming the “front line” wherever he was annoyed her. Still, he was kind to her, considerate, and in this world where the casualties in Europe and Korea meant that there were about four women for every man back home, Richard was a better catch than most. And he’d given her good advice. While some of her friends at college had put their professional goals on permanent hold to have a good time, “while the world lasts,” as they’d put it, Melissa had signed up for the silo program, which would help pay for her degree. After the war, her degree and experience in such a highly skilled job would stand her in good stead.

In any case, she and Rick, by planning on getting married in the spring, were going to try both for the “good time” and, in Rick’s words, improve their “marketable skills.”

The only thing she regretted was that Rick was as organized and efficient in bed as he was in class. It was all very purposeful and unerringly “on target,” as he so romantically put it. And it was all over in ten minutes. She was reminded of some vulgar engineering student in Portland talking about “slam, bam, thank you, ma’am.” Part of the problem was that Rick detested sweat.

Now and then she found herself conscious of the stares of a local contractor, a man the air force used for base and silo support building repairs. He was a big man, very hairy, known to some of the unmarried women team members — and, it was said, some of the married women — as “KITS — Killerton in the SAC.” Melissa hadn’t been listening to the instructor, idly wondering whether “KITS” referred to his weight on top of you or to his actual performance in bed.

The instructor was rambling on about how “weather bias,” such as differences in air density, could cause possible “skipping” of a reentry warhead vehicle and how one way around this was for the kiloton or megaton warhead to effect reentry at a steeper angle than usual, which would make it more accurate, but that this in turn would generate more heat.