Майкл Ридпат - Launch Code

No explanation at all. Odd.

Moscow and Leningrad made sense as targets, but East Berlin? That was seriously strange. East Berlin was never included in the Hamilton’s targets and for a very good reason. Nuclear warheads detonating there would destroy West Berlin too, massacring not just a couple of million of the citizens of one of the United States’ closest allies, West Germany, but also thousands of NATO servicemen. Including Americans.

Never included? East Berlin had been featured in that one drill EAM we had received three weeks before. At the time, we had assumed that was an exercise in retargeting to unfamiliar co-ordinates. Could it be, as the captain had suggested, that it was preparation for the target package that the National Military Command Center always expected the Hamilton to use in a war?

Maybe. But I thought it unlikely. It seemed more likely to me that the same message had simply been resent in error.

If there were already thousands of missiles criss-crossing the skies above the waves, then three more wouldn’t make any difference. But if there were none as yet, if the Soviets did indeed have their own fingers hovering above the nuclear button, then the Alexander Hamilton’s three missiles would set all the others on their way.

The world would be finished.

So I should shoot the man in front of me. Commander Driscoll, a man whom I liked and admired. A man whom I was pleased to call my commanding officer. A man with an ex-wife and two kids.

Despite being in the Navy for eight years, I had never killed anyone before. I had never been asked to kill anyone before.

Did I have the courage to do it?

To save the human race?

Yes, I did.

What would God want? Would God want me to take another man’s life? I wasn’t an avid Christian, I never went to the small services on the submarine led by Chief Kunkel, but I had been to Sunday school as a kid and I did still occasionally attend church with my parents. I believed in God.

Would God expect me to kill one man to save mankind? Yes. But was God trying to end the world? Was this some biblically inspired Armageddon?

I’d need a theology degree to sort that one out. I had no idea what God wanted, and no time to figure it out.

What would Donna say?

Shoot him. Shoot him now.

But Donna was wrong about this stuff. Wasn’t she?

If I didn’t shoot him, Donna would die. But perhaps there was a missile heading for New York right now. Perhaps Donna would die anyway.

‘Do your duty, son.’ Driscoll’s voice was calm. Almost friendly. His blue eyes, as always, commanded.

These thoughts flashed through my brain in seconds. A very few seconds. But I had to make a decision.

The Navy had anticipated this. Some of the brightest minds in the country had spent years thinking about moments like this. It wasn’t up to me, a lowly lieutenant, to make this decision. How could it be? How could someone like me possibly be relied upon to make a decision this difficult this quickly and under this pressure?

The Navy had it figured out. There were other people who decided. In particular, the President of the United States. Then there were others further down the line. On the Hamilton , there were at most two men who could decide not to follow orders, the captain and the executive officer, and in a case like this it was clear they should do what they were commanded to do.

And so should I.

‘COB?’ I said.

Piatnik, the chief of the boat, or ‘COB’, who was standing not six feet away from me responded. ‘Sir?’

I lowered the pistol and handed it to him, along with the holster.

The relief in the control room was palpable. Petty Officer Williamson immediately grabbed Lars, and hurled him to the floor. Another crewman snatched the wrench. It only took Driscoll a second to reassert his authority.

‘COB, give me the weapon. Arrest Lieutenant da Silva and lock him up with an armed guard.’

He strapped on the holster, and approached me, stopping right in front of me, his face not six inches from mine. ‘Lieutenant Guth. You did your duty. We are going to need you in the next few minutes. Are you willing to continue doing your duty?’

There was only one answer now. I stood to attention. ‘Aye aye, captain.’

Driscoll stared at me for a moment. Given what I had just done, he was taking quite a leap of faith to trust me. Almost done. What I had actually done was save his life. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Now, I’m going to my stateroom for the keys.’

There was silence as the captain left the control room. The crew were still transfixed by what had happened.

‘Back to work, gentlemen,’ said Robinson from the conn. ‘COB. Take Lieutenant da Silva to my stateroom and lock him in there.’ The submarine was too small to carry its own brig. The XO’s stateroom was as good a place as any to hold a prisoner.

I waited for the captain to return. He was quick.

‘Captain in the control room,’ announced a petty officer. Driscoll appeared with four keys on dull green lanyards around his neck: the CIP key and three missile launch keys.

The captain took off the lanyard holding the purple CIP key and inserted it into the captain’s indicator panel, turning it and flipping up the Permission to Fire toggle switch. The panel lit up with green and red lights indicating the status of the sixteen missiles.

Driscoll took off the three lanyards for the launch keys, and handed them to me. I hurried at a rapid walk aft to the missile compartment and slid down the ladder to the missile control centre, where I passed the keys on to a missile tech to insert in the gas generators attached to missiles one, two and nine. This would arm them, generating the steam that would propel the missiles out of the submarine and above the ocean’s surface, where their solid-fuel rockets would then ignite and take them up and away through the earth’s atmosphere.

It took about twenty minutes to ‘spin up’ the missiles. ‘Spinning up’ referred to the tiny beryllium balls spinning at thousands of revolutions per second within each missile’s inertial navigation system. During that time a host of other operations were initiated for each of the three missiles. The three-stage solid-fuel propulsion system was activated, and target coordinates and the coordinates of the submarine were fed into the fire control computer, which downloaded the results to each missile. Diagnostic tests were run on everything.

Once the missiles were spun up, the captain would grant the weapons officer permission to launch. The weapons officer would open a small safe in the missile control centre with a combination only he knew. Inside was a grey removable handle on which nuzzled a simple red pistol trigger. The weapons officer would insert the lead from the handle into the launch control console, give the order to prepare the first missile and, once the missile hatch was open to the outside sea, squeeze the trigger. The missile would fly. It would take about a minute to prepare the second missile and then the third.

Launching missiles made a lot of noise. Every Soviet attack submarine in the area would know exactly where we were. So the tactical systems officer would be devising a torpedo evasion plan to go deep, go quiet and hide the instant the birds were away. Except the tactical systems officer was Lars, who was now locked up in the XO’s stateroom; one of the other junior officers would have to do it.

The most dangerous part of the whole process for the crew of the Alexander Hamilton was in the couple of hours after launch.

Unless you counted the inevitable day when we would be forced to surface and face a world poisoned by radioactivity in the depths of a nuclear winter. And you probably should count that.