Майкл Ридпат - Launch Code

Donna was as charmed by Mystic as I hoped she would be. The inn I had booked was right by the river in the centre of the small town, next to an old iron drawbridge that was periodically raised in a grand salute to let a yacht pass through on its way out into Long Island Sound.

We found a place for dinner with a terrace overlooking the water.

In the nineteenth century, the port had been a thriving centre of New England industry, and many of the old buildings and ships still survived. On one side of the river they were preserved in a museum, exactly as they would have looked over a century before. On the other, they gleamed in white clapboard, with immaculate lawns and picket fences beneath a green wooded ridge.

One house in particular caught my eye. It was slightly bigger than the others, stuck out on a point in the river. I wondered who owned it. A current captain of industry, probably, or finance. Maybe it was inherited. I wondered if I would ever own a house like that. I couldn’t quite see how, unless I became an admiral. I had no idea how much admirals earned or houses like that cost, but it seemed like a suitable house for an admiral.

‘What are you looking at?’ Donna asked.

‘I was looking at that house,’ I said, pointing to it. ‘And wondering whether I could ever own one like it.’

‘Dream on,’ said Donna. ‘Where would you get that kind of money? Unless you became a pirate? You know, a kind of modern-day John Paul Jones, sneaking up on galleons in your submarine.’

‘He wasn’t a pirate,’ I said. ‘He was a hero of the US Navy. I could become an admiral one day, I guess. An admiral should be able to live in a house like that.’

Donna’s eyes widened. ‘An admiral? That’s ambitious.’

I shrugged. I was tempted to apply modesty, and I normally would have done, but with Donna I felt an urge to be honest. Honest with myself as much as with her.

‘I guess I am. Secretly. I really like the Navy. And I’m a pretty good naval officer. Our commanding officer is a guy called Ray Driscoll. He has this air of calm about him that makes you trust him, makes you want to please him. Makes you want to do the right thing for him and for your crew. I admire him. And I think I could do what he does just as well as him.’

For a moment, I thought Donna was going to tease me, but she smiled. ‘I can see that. You’d be good at it.’

‘Of course, being an admiral is different to commanding a submarine. Administration. Politics. But I like to think I can do that too. So I guess I am ambitious. What about you?’

‘Me? God, I don’t know.’ Donna sipped her wine. ‘I’d like to make the world just a little bit better, but that turns out to be really hard. You’d think the UN Development Program would be able to do that. All those people. All that money. The big shiny offices. All those staplers.’ She smiled. ‘But sometimes I wonder how much it achieves. Whether its purpose isn’t just to make people like me feel good about themselves.’

‘They must achieve something, surely?’

‘Oh they do, I guess. But I have this friend who was at Swarthmore with me. He wanted to do the same thing as me, make the world a better place. He’s doing a master’s in Agriculture. He says it’s all about digging one well at a time. He’s right.’

A couple of sculls glided along the calm evening water, their oars flowing in an easy rhythm. It was almost dark. The restaurant was full now, conversation a relaxed murmur as the diners enjoyed the dusk.

Donna grinned and reached across to take my hand. ‘Hey. This is a lovely place. I’m glad you brought me here.’

‘So am I.’

‘Did you ever do that?’ Donna asked. ‘Row? It looks fun. Especially on an evening like tonight.’

‘I did it for a couple of years when I was a kid. It’s hard work. There was a river that flowed right by our house.’

‘Which one was that?’

‘The Susquehanna.’

‘Wait. Lancaster County. Isn’t that near Three Mile Island?’

‘About fifteen miles away. Next county down the river.’

‘So that’s why you give off that faint glow in the dark. And I thought it was the submarine.’

‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘That was not the nuclear industry’s greatest moment.’ I braced myself for a broadside. After that first night, we had successfully managed to avoid quarrelling about things nuclear, but Three Mile Island was the site of the worst nuclear accident in US history, and it had only happened three years before.

‘I’ve been there, you know?’ Donna said. ‘Three Mile Island.’

‘Driving a uranium delivery truck?’

‘Chaining myself to a fence. And I’ve been to Groton before. A couple of years ago.’

‘Two years ago? The launch of the Corpus Christi ?’

A pack of demonstrators had tried to disrupt the launch of a nuclear submarine from the General Dynamics boatyard in Groton itself, a few miles downriver from the sub base.

‘That’s the one.’

‘Were you arrested?’

‘Not that time.’

I was tempted to ask what time Donna had been arrested, but decided against it.

She was looking at me, quizzically.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘I know we’ve been careful to avoid the subject of your job...’

‘But?’

‘But. I’ve been thinking about it. I get that you genuinely believe in nuclear deterrence. I know you’ve thought a lot about it, and I respect that. But if you were ordered to press the button or whatever you do on a submarine, would you really do it?’

‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘Unless everyone knows that people like me will do what they are ordered to do, then the deterrence won’t work. War will become more likely not less.’

‘OK. I get that. Or I get that you believe that. But by that stage, a major nuclear war will have started and the planet will be over. And you would want to play a part in that?’

‘You’re right, I have thought about it,’ I said. ‘The truth is, on the submarine we would never know for sure that there was a full nuclear exchange going on. It’s possible that there is a limited nuclear war. Just a few missiles. Or the United States is firing first.’

‘And that’s OK? It sounds worse, if anything.’

‘No. No, it’s not OK at all. But it’s not my job to think about that. Other people have that job, in particular the president, who is elected by the people. It’s my job to follow orders. Nothing will work as it should unless people like me follow orders.’

Donna didn’t look convinced. But I got the impression she was trying to understand me as much as convert me.

‘What about an accident? An accidental launch?’

‘That couldn’t happen. There are so many measures in place to make sure that couldn’t happen.’

‘They said that about Three Mile Island, didn’t they? They thought they had safety procedures in place for every eventuality. But then a combination of things went wrong: a filter got blocked, a valve got stuck, an operator missed a warning light and manually overrode the automatic emergency cooling system. They hadn’t prepared for that particular combination. And the darn thing nearly went into meltdown.’

She had a point about Three Mile Island, and she had clearly taken the trouble to study the details, as had I. That accident had shaken me, and some of the others. Especially Lars. He hadn’t liked the thought that so many smart people could be so stupid.

‘The Navy is much more thorough,’ I said. But even as I said it I wasn’t entirely sure I believed it.

‘So what if the captain goes crazy and decides to take out Russia by himself and orders the launch of his missiles?’

‘We have procedures to deal with that,’ I said.