Arc Light (20 page)

“Ready on my mark?” Langford repeated, and Stuart could see Langford look up at him in the oval mirror mounted atop his instrument console.

Stuart stared back for a second, but as Langford twisted in his chair, Stuart cut off the impending tirade by shouting, “Ready! Ready!”

Langford was watching him now, and Stuart turned to look at Langford.

Stuart suddenly felt a faint but sustained vibration through the soles of his feet. Langford obviously did also because he looked up at the console. The alarm and flashing lights suddenly went out. When Stuart looked at his own console, he could see that the forty-eight small green lights were turning red across the panel in rapid and random succession.

“They've already fired. Somebody beat us to it,” Stuart said as the last of the green lights turned red. Of the five Launch Control Centers, the requisite two had already “voted” for a launch and the missiles were already leaving their silos.

“Launch Execute on my command,” Langford repeated.

“What's the point?” Stuart asked. “They're gone. Couldn't you feel it?”

“Complete the sequencing!
Ready on my mark!”
Langford yelled at the top of his voice, rattling Stuart with his outburst. “Three, two, one—
mark!”

Stuart turned the key one quarter to the right with an audible click, as Langford would be doing. “Hold for five seconds,” Langford said even as Stuart silently counted.
“One one thousand—two one thousand—three one thousand—four one thousand—five one thousand.”
Stuart let the key spring back to the neutral position. The
final computer “go-over” by the Launch Control Facility's Hewlett-Packard LC5400 mainframe, itself sheathed in titanium directly adjacent to their elevator shaft, would have taken almost a full minute after “Launch Enable.” It then would issue a short blip of energy that opened the silo doors and fired the missiles.

“I show Key Turn is accomplished,” Langford said. The bell rang again. “I've got Alarm Number Three. The command was received.”

Not that it mattered in their case. Stuart was certain he had already felt them fly. “They were gone already, I'm tellin' ya.”

“You shouldn't have gone over to the teletype!” Langford snapped as he opened the big black logbook.

“What the hell are you
doing?”
Stuart snapped back, watching as Langford began to record the launch—to record the end of the world—in his book. When Langford slammed the book closed with a bang, Stuart jumped. Langford got up and walked over to Stuart's console, picking up the teletype and reading it.

Stuart jumped again when a phone buzzed. He picked up the white base telephone.

“Stuart,” he said.

“What the hell's goin' on?” the voice demanded.

Oh, my God! What've we done?
Stuart panicked.

“Cap'n Stuart?” the voice said. It was Kline, Stuart realized.

“We . . . we got a valid EAM,” Stuart said simply.

“Where?” Kline asked. “Where're they headed?”

“Don't know,” Stuart replied. “Russia,” he amended.

“Jeezus Christ. Oh, Jeezus God Aw-mighty,” Kline said.

“Is that Kline?” Langford asked, anger dripping from his words.

“Yeah.”

“Ask him about eight.”

At first Stuart didn't understand what Langford was saying. Then his mind cleared, and he said, “When will you have number eight up?”

Kline sighed. “Oh, I don't know, Cap'n.” Away from the phone, Kline shouted, “Hey! You guys close that plate and power up! Move it!” Then he asked more quietly into the phone, “How much time we got, sir?”

Stuart said, “I don't know, Sergeant.” He remembered the teletype and looked at his watch. He didn't bother with the answer.

“Well, we'll try,” Kline said. “We'll do our best, sir.”

“Thanks, Sergeant.”

“Bye, Cap'n,” Kline said limply.

“Bye,” Stuart said, and the line clicked. He hung up reluctantly and slumped back against the leather chair. The phone rang again.
It was the “shed,” the Launch Control Facility one hundred feet above them. He hit the button to pick up the line. “Stuart.”

“Cap'n Stuart, this is Airman Shackleford.”

“Come
on,
Shack!” someone shouted in the background over the sound of a Humvee revving its engine.

“Request permission to . . . to get the hell outa here, sir!”

“Permission granted.”

“Good luck, sir,” Shackleford blurted before hanging up.

Stuart turned to Langford as he replaced the receiver. “I . . . I gave the guys up top permission to bail out.”

There was dead silence now as time passed. Stuart heard a metallic clacking sound from Langford's direction. He looked over to see Langford resting his head against the back of the chair.

Stuart reached down and grabbed the seat restraints, pressed out of the way into the folds of the chair. After fishing the belts out, dirty with crumbs and hair from the crevices, he inserted his arms through the harness and pulled the crotch strap up between his legs, pushing the three-way locking mechanism together with loud clacks.

The straps were tight, and he reached down to make certain that his right hand could reach the 9-mm Beretta automatic at his side. He undid the flap on the top of the holster. The air force had told them the weapons were for the security of the Launch Control Center. Popular press had it that they were in case the other launch officer went berserk. But strapped into chairs in a metal capsule one hundred feet below ground zero waiting for the enemy's missiles to strike, the launch officers knew what they were really for.

General Wilson completed his walk around, shaking the hands of the men and women in the main room. Very few of them were busy now. The only ones still working at the frantic pace of a few minutes earlier were those trying to outload data from the complex's many computers. He left those people alone to do their jobs and went back up to his office.

From behind the glass wall he looked down at the milling men and women below. A lot of good-byes. Handshakes, mostly, a few hugs. Several men sat at their consoles, their heads bowed in prayer or thought. Several others were not dealing with it well, and small crowds gathered around the disturbances in attempts to help them through it.

Al Wilson pulled the cord to shut the blinds covering the glass wall, walked over to his desk and sat. Picking up the picture of his wife and kids and pulling the photo out of the glass frame, he touched the fresh-scrubbed faces of the boys—now older but it didn't matter. And his wife . . . his wife. He looked at the phone. They would be asleep. He resisted the selfish temptation to listen to the groggy voice of his wife, to have her wake the boys, deciding to let her sleep in their dream house in the hills a couple of miles from the complex entrance. Too close. Way, way too close. It would be better if they were asleep.

Wilson knew by heart now all the particulars of the attack. If he had wanted, he could have predicted the headlines in the papers the next day and imagined what the war damage would be at almost every target on the Big Board. His mind was a blank, however. His world—everything he knew, everyone he loved—was coming to an end.

Wilson unbuttoned two buttons on the center of his blouse and placed the cool photograph against his chest, rebuttoning the blouse and holding the picture in place with his crossed arms. It slowly warmed to his body temperature, and he could no longer feel it. But the image stayed in his mind—the fresh-faced boys, his wife glowing with pride.

The only sound was the ticking of the clock on his desk. Al Wilson closed his eyes, focusing on the photograph. Remembering the day it was taken.
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . .

The President, Secretary of Defense, and Joint Chiefs stood in the battlestaff work area around Lambert, waiting. The passageways on either end of the area were filled with off-duty personnel. Lambert listened as General Starnes explained to the President what everybody's job was. Lambert, who was feeling ill and considered excusing himself to go to the bathroom, listened distractedly.

“One ERCS is up, sir,” an officer said in a somber, almost reverent tone from a nearby bank of consoles.

“The Emergency Rocket Communications System,” Starnes explained, although the President didn't seem to care. “We've got ten old Minutemen II ICBMs at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri that had their warheads replaced with a communications satellite.
We injected a prerecorded launch order into the radio package of one of ‘em and fired it into low earth orbit. It'll broadcast for about thirty minutes to all our bombers and the navy's
TACAMO
aircraft.”

“
TACAMO
?” the President asked out of the blue. Lambert clenched his teeth and looked away, a shot of anger flaring at the annoying behavior of his boss.
Now he's asking stupid questions like there's gonna be a quiz at the end of the fucking war,
Lambert thought.

“
TACAMO
stands for Take Charge and Move Out,” Admiral Dixon answered. “They're E-6A aircraft airborne over the Atlantic and Pacific. They'll pass the nuclear control orders along to any subs that didn't receive shore-based extremely low frequency transmissions.”

“And you said bombers?” the President asked.

General Starnes hesitated. “Uh, yes, sir. We and the navy have got about a thousand aircraft en route to Russia now, mainly ACC bombers from the U.S. and navy strike aircraft off Pacific and Norwegian Sea carrier battle groups, but some Quick Reaction Alert aircraft from
USAFE
in Europe.”

“A-a-a-h-h!” Lambert heard screams as several men and women clawed at their headsets and pulled them off their ears. Immediately, muted alarms and beeps began sounding from various consoles.

A colonel standing behind a group of three consoles on the next row said, “We've got blackout, sir,” to Brigadier General Sherman.

General Thomas said, almost whispering, “There's been a burst.”

Everyone and everything fell silent, as if time missed a beat.

“
FLASH OPREP
-3
PINNACLE—NUDET
!” a woman sitting at a console in front of them shouted. “NDDS reports detection. Coordinates: longitude 88 degrees, 47 minutes, 17 seconds West. Latitude 43 degrees, 29 minutes, 36 seconds North. Altitude: 575,000 feet.”

The President looked tiredly at General Thomas, waiting for the translation.

“The Nuclear Detonation Detection System just reported a nuclear detonation at 575,000 feet—where?” Thomas asked, turning to General Starnes.

“Over Wisconsin. Milwaukee, more or less,” the air force general replied.

“I thought you said they weren't targeting cities!” the President exclaimed.

“Mr. President,” General Thomas said, “at that altitude—over 100 miles—there'll be almost no effect on Milwaukee other than the EMP effects.”

“Unless you stare straight at it,” General Starnes amended.

“
FLASH OPREP
-3
PINNACLE NUDET
,” the woman said again. “NDDS reports detection. Coordinates—”

“You can dispense with the coordinates, Lieutenant,” General Starnes said. “Just the altitude and common map locations.”

“Altitude 560,000 feet, approximate ground zero”—she looked at the map on the screen of the officer to her right—“northwest Colorado between Boulder and Salt Lake City.”

“Why are they blowing up so high?” the President asked with what sounded like a glimmer of hope in his voice.

“They're intended to create EMP, sir,” Starnes replied in a monotone as he waited with his eyes fixed on the female lieutenant's screen. “Electromagnetic pulse. At those altitudes, most of the energy of the blast is released as gamma radiation, which causes secondary reactions in the atmosphere that release electrons and photoelectrons. Wave guides like antennas, cabling, power lines, grounding systems, and even sewer pipes focus the energy and create high-voltage surges. Solid-state circuitry, which is about ten million times more vulnerable than the older vacuum tube technologies, gets burned out by the power spikes. The armed forces harden most of their critical circuitry—surge protectors and dampeners—to defeat EMP, but those two bursts just burned up some large portion of the country's civilian electronics. We don't have any way of knowing just how much.”

“Damn bonanza for the Japanese,” General Fuller muttered, and several of the senior officers shot him a disapproving glance. Fuller pursed his lips and frowned, but fell quiet.

“
FLASH OPREP
-3
PINNACLE NUDET
,” the woman said. Everyone turned back to her and waited. She looked over at another screen and then said, “Multiple nuclear detonations—indeterminate number—Warren Air Force Base. Altitude: near ground level.”

Before anyone could say anything, she said, “
FLASH OPREP
-3
PINNACLE
,” and then paused, the words stuck in her mouth as she listened. “
NUDET
! Three . . . five detonations . . . indeterminate number of detonations at Minot Air Force Base. Altitude . . . altitudes all near ground level!”

General Sherman put his hands on her shoulders and leaned over to say something to her in a quiet voice.

“
FLASH OPREP
-3
PINNACLE NUDET
!” the officer next to her yelled. “Nuclear detonation . . . ”

The battlestaff work area was filled suddenly with calls from eight different work stations at once: “ . . . Multiple detonations . . . ”