Майкл Ридпат - Launch Code

The time waiting for the missiles to spin up was tense, even in an exercise. It was even tenser now in the missile control centre.

I took my seat in front of the launch control console. The missile control centre was cooler than the rest of the ship, in an attempt to counteract the heat generated by the rows of computers down there.

‘What was the delay?’ Craig asked me.

‘They were discussing the order.’

‘The targeting? East Berlin?’

I nodded.

‘That seemed weird to me,’ said Craig. ‘But they decided to go ahead?’

There were two missile techs near us, who could easily hear what we were saying. I lowered my voice to just above a whisper. ‘Lars objected.’

‘He did?’

‘Yes. He said he thought the order might be an error. They had given us no context. East Berlin didn’t make sense. Only three missiles didn’t make sense. The fact it was the same target package as the exercise they gave us a couple of weeks ago didn’t make sense.’

‘I get what he’s saying,’ said Craig. ‘What did the captain say?’

‘He thought about it. Said we go ahead.’

‘And the XO?’

‘Concurred.’

Craig frowned. He didn’t look as if he agreed with that conclusion. ‘OK,’ he said with a sigh.

He paused as an instruction came through the intercom from the conn. ‘The firing order will be one, nine, two,’ he announced to his team over the missile control centre circuit.

‘Lars took a swing at the captain,’ I said. ‘With a wrench. Could have killed him. He was trying to kill him.’

‘What!’

The missile tech in the seat next to Craig, a petty officer named Morgan, glanced up at me, shocked. But everyone on the boat would know what had just happened in the control room soon enough.

‘He was stopped,’ I said. ‘ I stopped him. Now he’s under arrest.’

‘I bet he is. So he cracked?’

I nodded. But as I did so, I wasn’t sure that Lars had cracked. And I knew I hadn’t explained my own role to Craig entirely accurately.

The minutes ticked by. The missile department was a good team. We worked well together. We had practiced this countless times.

This was going to happen.

The missile control centre lurched and tilted as the submarine rose toward launch depth of one hundred and fifty feet.

As I leafed through the checklists in the launch manuals and played my part in the dozens of procedures required to ready the missiles, to check and double check the targeting, my mind was divided in two. One half was concentrating on what I was doing, what I had been trained to do.

The other half was thinking about what the consequences were.

And I knew I wasn’t alone. The team appeared to be entirely focused on their job. But I could tell from the tension in the shoulders of those missile techs hunched over their instruments and in the sneaked glances between one crew member and another, especially those whom I knew were close buddies, that they were all thinking of what was about to happen, what might be happening at that very moment.

The New London Submarine Base would be on the Soviet target list. It was unlikely that families would be evacuated in time. So every crew member with a wife would probably lose her that day, lose their children.

Maybe they would be the lucky ones, dying instantly in a thermonuclear explosion, rather than slowly from radiation poisoning.

The world had finally gone mad.

Or had it? There was a chance, a slim chance perhaps, that Lars was right. That despite the Soviet leadership’s paranoia, the doctrine of Mutual Assured Deterrence was holding. That the EAM we had received was just an enormous screw-up.

Suddenly it was clear to me. If the launch order was genuine, we were already involved in a nuclear war or soon would be. A war no one would win. The Alexander Hamilton’s participation would make no difference one way or another.

But if the launch message was an error? Then what we did would make a very great deal of difference.

This was a problem with only one correct answer. And Lars had found it.

I heard Craig talking into his headset next to me. ‘Conn, weapons. Three minutes to 1SQ.’

I glanced over to the fire control console. There were sixteen columns, one for each missile, but only three were lit up. The bottom four lights were labelled 1SQ, DENOTE, PREPARE and AWAY. All four buttons shone red. Soon, one by one, they would turn to green. The DENOTE and PREPARE launch phases took less than sixty seconds, during which the outer hatch of each missile was opened to the sea one by one. When the AWAY button turned green the missiles would be in the air.

A digital readout above the panel counted down to an estimate of when all three missiles would be spun up. Two minutes and fifty seconds.

Driscoll’s voice came over the 1-MC, echoing throughout the submarine. ‘This is the captain. Estimated time to 1SQ three minutes. Prepare for missile launch.’

‘Craig?’ I stood close to him, my voice low. I addressed him as ‘Craig’, not ‘Weps’.

‘Yes?’

‘That target package makes no sense, right?’

Craig turned to me. ‘Someone in NMCC must think it makes sense.’

‘There is a chance it’s an error, don’t you think?’

‘Hey, Bill. We only have ninety seconds to 1SQ. You said the captain and the XO discussed this. You and I have to obey orders.’

I glanced at the safe, positioned right above Craig between the fire control and the launch control consoles. ‘You don’t have to open that.’

Craig’s eyes darted to the combination lock and then back to me. He was hesitating.

‘If you don’t open it, and you refuse to tell anyone else the combination, then the birds won’t fly.’

Craig closed his eyes. Then he opened them. Doubt was replaced by determination. ‘Lieutenant Guth. We have our orders. You will follow them, as will I.’

‘Craig?’ I pleaded.

‘Back to your station, Lieutenant Guth.’ Craig grabbed the intercom.

I went back to my post. I glanced at the panel. The missiles would be spun up in less than a minute.

Then the captain would give Craig permission to fire and he would open the safe.

Lars’s words came back to me. You can stop a nuclear war if you shoot him. In the head. Because the captain’s head was where the combination to the safe in his stateroom was stored.

It was too late to stop the captain fetching his launch keys from the safe in his stateroom. The only way now to prevent the launch of the missiles was to stop Craig from opening the missile control centre safe and extracting the trigger. He was the only one who knew the combination. So he had to be stopped in such a way that he couldn’t tell a fellow officer those numbers.

He had to be killed.

My friend, one of my best friends, had to be killed. By me. In the next few seconds.

I didn’t have a gun. But Lars had chosen a good weapon. There were wrenches stowed all over the submarine in positions that were easy to grab in the event of a leak. In peacetime submarines didn’t leak, but in wartime when under attack from enemy torpedoes or depth charges, it could easily happen.

The nearest wrench was hanging in a pouch just behind me, maybe three feet from Craig.

Missile number nine spun up first, swiftly followed by number two.

Then the last 1SQ button turned from red to green.

‘Conn, weapons. The weapons system is at 1SQ.’ Craig was speaking into the intercom. He listened to an instruction and repeated it. ‘Permission to fire, aye.’

Do it!

I slowly got to my feet and moved nonchalantly towards the wrench as Craig stood and reached up to the safe, his fingers touching the tumbler.