“What you’re saying,” said the Secretary of Defense, his features drawn tensely, “Is that the technology is available to create a weapon a million times more powerful than a hydrogen bomb?”
Sacheverell nodded.
“You’re some sort of nut,” the Secretary of Defense said.
“It only takes a gentle push, sir. There are plenty of these asteroids around. The trick is to find one that passes close to the Earth. Then you soft land a small atom bomb on it. If you explode the bomb on the right place at the right time, you nudge the asteroid into an Earth-crossing orbit. It doesn’t need much. With a mid-course correction—a second explosion with a small atom bomb or even conventional
explosives—you could target the asteroid to within a couple of hundred miles.”
Grant turned to Heilbron. “You say they’ve pulled it off already?”
“In my opinion it’s on the way in now.”
A slim, hawk-nosed man in his late fifties, wearing an expensive, dark three-piece suit, was standing at the back door of the theatre. He spoke angrily. “In the name of God, Rich, you’re telling us we’re at war.”
Grant raised his hand quickly. “Not here, Billy.” He turned to the DCI. “How many people know about this?”
“The seven of us in this room, two of my staff, and one of General Hooper’s aides. On the European side, about an equal number. About twenty people in all. And a team of eight trying to find the thing. They’re hidden away in a mountaintop observatory in Arizona.”
“Doctor Sacheverell, we know where to reach you?”
“Yes, sir. I’m one of the team, in Eagle Peak Observatory.”
“Don’t even discuss this with your dog. Gentlemen, that applies to us all. I want no apocalyptic statements, no veiled hints, no unusual moves. Nathan, Sam, the Green Room at 3 a.m.”
“With respect, sir . . .”
“Nathan, I’m about to entertain guests. Like I said, no unusual moves. What do you want me to do? Send him out for a pizza?”
Grant and his wife, accompanying King Charles, Camilla Parker-Bowles and His Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador, walked along the long Entrance Hall, the sound of Liszt’s
Hungarian Rhapsodies
coming from a dozen violins still entertaining a hundred guests in the State Dining Room. The President’s head was fuzzy from Chateau Latour and his cheeks ached from hours of enforced smiling. By protocol, he led them to the elevator taking them up to the residence for a private talk.
An hour later Charles and Camilla, looking exhausted, were being escorted by Secret Service men to Blair House, across the road from No. 1651. Grant gave it another hour and then came back down by the stairs to the Entrance Hall. He turned through the colonnade into the Cross Hall. Adam-style chandeliers and bronze standard lamps threw a warm glow on to the marble walls. Images of past presidents looked down at him. The violins were now silent. Somewhere three chimes of a clock cut into the stillness.
A door was ajar and he turned into the Green Room. Logs crackled in the fireplace, and a whiff of woodsmoke unexpectedly evoked a distant memory: a camp fire, sausages sizzling on a stick, smoke stinging his eyes, young men and women laughing. But before he could place the image in time, it had gone forever.
The Secretary of Defense, Nathan Bellarmine, was sprawled in a Federal-period chintz armchair at the fire. He had smooth, black hair, was slightly balding, and wore a dark three-piece suit. The dark waistcoat and Brylcreemed hair made him look slightly like a snooker player.
Occupying the chair at the other side of the fireplace was a small, hook-nosed, middle-aged man with white hair and eyes like dark pebbles: this was Arnold Cresak, the President’s National Security Adviser and a long-standing confidant.
The third man in the room was Hooper, sitting upright on a hard-backed chair, underneath Durrie’s nostalgic
Farmyard in Winter
. There were dark shadows under the soldier’s eyes. Grant waved them down as they began to rise, tossed his dinner jacket on to the carpeted floor and himself sank with a sigh into deep upholstery.
“Is the room clean?”
Cresak nodded. “It’s been swept.”
The President loosened his black tie. “I don’t like this early hours stuff, but what can we do? What are we doing?”
Bellarmine said: “I informed the British Prime Minister, and the Presidents of France and Germany, as you instructed. They sent us a couple of specialists Monday morning. I now have a team of seven trying to locate the asteroid. They’re being run by a Colonel Noordhof, who’s with USAF Space Command. I assigned him to 50 Wing, Falcon Colorado. Special Projects, which covers no end of sin.”
“Look, one whisper and we’re fried. Who are these seven samurai?”
“We have McNally, the NASA Administrator. The rest are top scientists, for example Shafer, the CalTech genius.”
“Shafer. The hippie scientist?”
Bellarmine said: “With two Nobel Prizes. He was on the cover of
Time
last month.”
“I don’t trust these superbrains: you don’t know what they’re really thinking. And what are we doing with Europeans on the team? That sounds to me like a couple of loose cannon.”
“We want the top people whoever they are. We’re in a life-or-death situation here.”
“They know the timescale we’re working to?”
Bellarmine nodded. “Consensus is the chances of success are very slim.”
The President held the palms of his hands towards the fire. “Sam, where in your opinion will the Russians hit us?”
“Kansas. First, they maximize their chance of hitting land. Second, they get Omaha, Cheyenne Peak and the revamped silos. If you believe this Sacheverell they’ll roast the States in less time than it takes to roast a chicken.”
“Kansas is a reasonable guess,” said Cresak. “But so is California. Maybe they’re going for our economic base. They don’t even care if they miss because a Pacific splash would submerge the West Coast.”
“And an Atlantic one would decapitate us,” said Hooper. “But who cares? We’re dead wherever it hits.”
“Okay.” Grant took a deep breath and visibly tensed. He looked like a man about to jump off a cliff. “Now say we don’t find Nemesis in time.”
Hooper said, “Sir, in that case the parameters define a very narrow envelope.”
“Sam, I’m a tired old man. If you mean we have limited options just say so.”
“We have to assume the worst-case situation.”
“Which is?”
“A blue sky impact. The asteroid comes in from daylight. The first we know about it is when it hits the upper atmosphere at sixty thousand miles an hour and we get a two-second warning.”
“Excuse me, but did you say a
two-second
warning?”
“Yes sir. Two seconds.”
“As His Royal Majesty expressed it to me, in his very British way, it would freeze the balls off a brass monkey in here.” The President poked at the fire and threw in a couple of logs. “Anyone want a hot chocolate?” Cresak leaned over
to a work table next to the fireplace, pulled a telephone from a drawer and muttered an order.
“Now in those two seconds,” Hooper continued, “while it’s punching our air away, it seems it will also generate a massive electric current overhead. So it screws up our C-cubed systems.”
“I thought we had fibre-optic cables from here to Omaha,” the President said.
“A few, not a complete network. The real trouble is, the optical links still need electronic relays to boost the signal every so many miles. If the EMP zaps the relays, then the optical links go dead. Of course our satellite links collapse and we get cut off, isolated from everything at the critical moment.”
“Well now that’s just dandy. A few thousand engineers spend a few gigabucks of public money trying to fix it so we maintain integrity of command while the nukes are falling, only when it comes to the crunch you tell me what we really need are smoke signals.”
Hooper remained impassive. “The links might survive through a nuclear war, Chief, but the asteroid, now that’s a new ballgame.”
Bellarmine said, “So we lose contact with our counter-strike forces at the moment of atmospheric entry, and impact takes place two seconds later?” The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff nodded.
“I like your technique, Nathan,” Grant said, turning his palms once again towards the rising flames. “I like the casual way you slipped the word
counterstrike
into the conversation.”
An elderly man, wearing a dark blazer with the presidential seal on the breast pocket, came in, followed by a young maid. A table was set up with four steaming mugs. They left without a word.
Bellarmine turned to Hooper. “
Could
we counterstrike?”
The soldier shook his head. “Not effectively, Mister
Secretary. When Nemesis cuts loose we’ll turn into a snake without a head. Even at Defcon One we couldn’t contact our silos, and our bombers would be torn to bits even if we got them aloft.”
“We still have our submarines,” Bellarmine said.
“How do we contact them? VLF, blue-green lasers and ELF. Very Low Frequency needs a wire a kilometre long trailed behind a TACAMO bomber. But all our command posts would be overwhelmed even before we contacted the bomber. The blue-green lasers beam down from the ORICS satellites. But”—Hooper checked off the points with his fingers—“One: the subs and satellites have to be in the right positions. Two: you have Kansas up there in the stratosphere giving us an umbrella of red-hot ash over the States. Three: you have an ionosphere gone crazy. So the signals don’t get up to our satellites in the first place.”
“And ELF?”
“We use a forty-mile antenna buried under Wisconsin. The radio pulses vibrate the whole Laurentian Shield. The vibration can be picked up from anywhere on Earth.”
Grant grunted. “So? That’s Nemesis-proof.”
“We still have to be alive to send messages.”
Bellarmine said, “Not necessarily. If we keep broadcasting Condition Red with the ELF, and other communications channels break down, standing orders are for submarine commanders to launch their nuclear weapons.”
The soldier leaned forward intently and said, “There’s a problem with that.”
“You may as well lay it on, Sam,” said the President.
“If we launch missiles they’ll run into Kansas on the way up and disintegrate. It’s like Brilliant Pebbles in reverse, a sort of natural Star Wars destroying our own counterstrike. Anyway, our submarine fleet carries only a small fraction of our megatonnage. Even if we get off a few Tridents the new ABM rings round Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad and so on could
handle them. Mister President, it’s simple. If they get Nemesis in first our capacity to respond is smashed. Russia will incur acceptable losses, but we’ll be dead and gone.”
The President sighed. “Okay Nathan, get it off your chest. What are our options?”
“They’re stark. We can accept the annihilation of America and do nothing about it. We can wait for the impact and then try to hit back with our offensive capability smashed. Or we can beat them to the punch. Launch a nuclear strike now.”
“Uhuh.”
The President closed his eyes. Hooper wondered what thoughts were running through the old man’s head. The soldier said, “Only the third option has military credibility.”
A surge of fear suddenly went through Cresak’s nervous system like an electric shock. It was more than the fact that the unimaginable prospect of a nuclear war had entered the discussion; it was the fact that it had slipped in, by stealth, almost without conscious reasoning. “Crap,” he said, his voice unsteady. “The Russians would hit back. Then Nemesis would come in and finish off whatever was left of us.”
“The time for the Major Attack Option has never been better,” Bellarmine said. “They don’t expect it, their political system’s in chaos, and we have a dozen Alpha lasers in orbit to handle any Russian missiles that do get launched.”
“You’re insane,” said Cresak. “What about Carter’s PD-59? They could survive a strike long enough to obliterate us.”
“Nuclear war is winnable,” said Hooper emphatically. The situation has moved on since McNamara and Carter; we have the Alpha shields now. The winner is the one who hits first. Central Command computers show that a first strike will be decisive and that’s why our command and control systems are geared for a first-strike capability. We’ve always known that a second strike, one under attack, would fail utterly. Sir, we’ll never get another chance like this.”
“This is lunacy,” said the National Security Adviser. His voice was shaky but determined. He ticked the points off
with his fingers, one by one. “The Russians kept their C3 system intact through all the political upheavals. Even with SALT and START they still have seven thousand ICBMs and a thousand submarine-launched missiles. They have two thousand bomb-proof bunkers to protect their top leadership. The situation has changed in Russia too. They’ve now got a streamlined chain of command, straight from their General Staff to their missile units. The new leadership have thrown away the old safeguards. They’ve obtained the unlock codes from the old KGB. The political officers have long gone from the system. They’ve taken away the electromechanical switches for sealing bomb doors.”
“Get to the point, Arnold. What are you driving at?” asked the President.
“Sir, they could respond in seconds. And if even a handful of their Sawflies got through, America would be finished.”
“Hell, Arnold, we can handle it,” Hooper said. “The Alpha lasers. And the leadership would be fried before they even reached their bunkers.”
The President sipped at his chocolate. It was too sweet. “What’s the modern view on nuclear winter?” he asked.
Hooper pulled a thin blue document from a battered briefcase at the side of his chair. “Our climate modellers have looked at all sorts of smoke injection scenarios. Mostly they darken the sun for about three months and could wipe out agriculture in the growing season. That’s another reason for an early strike, to let the sky clear by July.”
Grant said, “Sam, let’s not get too excited. There may not even be an asteroid. All we have is a string of circumstantial evidence that Heilbron has woven into a pattern. We can’t go levelling the planet just because the DCI has an overactive imagination.”