The Day Before Midnight (37 page)

“Is there any late word on what’s under that canvas?” an officer wanted to know.

“Our analysts in the Pentagon think it might be the emplacement of a heavy artillery piece,” said Puller. “In Nam, we used 105s to fire fléchette canisters at the NVA. It’s possible they brought a heavy piece up there disassembled. Or maybe it’s a Vulcan or one of those fast-firing Czech 23-mm cannons. You’ll know soon enough.”

When he wasn’t talking, Peter sat with a kind of rigid politeness through all this. He knew it wouldn’t do for these guys to see into what he was thinking. But there was a joke in it all, and he thought of the line,
all dressed up and no place to go
, for that’s exactly what it might work out to be if he couldn’t get them through the door.

“And then Dr. Thiokol opens the door, and Delta goes in, and it’s all over but the cheering,” said Puller. “Right, Dr. Thiokol?” Peter nodded.

Right, he thought, nodding politely, except he had no idea in hell what the door code could be and so knew only one terrible truth: Aggressor-One had done it.

Welcome to Armageddon.

Bells were ringing, men were hopping around.

Peter looked up from his daze. He heard them shouting, a lot of nos, and no ways. The general discipline of the briefing was completely disintegrating.

“What’s going on?” he asked the man next to him.

“Didn’t you hear, man?” said the fellow, a helicopter
pilot. “They got an ID on these guys. They say they’re
Russians.”

And he heard Skazy talking about something called a Spetsnaz Silo Seizure team, but others were saying no, no, it couldn’t be, why’d they want to blow away their own country, what the hell did it mean?

And then there was silence.

Peter saw they were all looking at him.

“Dr. Thiokol, here. You make some sense of this for us, will you please?”

He handed Peter a yellow teletype sheet, with the words
PRIORITY: FLASH
across the top. He read the contents swiftly.

FBI hq believe team leader of aggressor forces at South Mountain to be PASHIN, ARKADY Colonel-General, GRU, First Deputy of GRU, head of Directorate V, Operational Intelligence. Subject PASHIN according to CIA records has primary responsibility in GRU the past decade for penetration of U.S. strategic warfare compounds. He is a graduate of the Intelligence Faculty of the General Staff Academy; the Training Centre of Illegals; the Military-Diplomatic Academy; the Military Institute of Foreign Languages, where he learned to speak brilliant English; the Special Faculty of Higher Communications; the Kiev Higher Military Command School; the Special Faculty of the Second Kharkov Higher Military Aviation and Engineering School, and the General Staff Academy. He spent a decade in United States attached to the Soviet U.N. mission. One identifying peculiarity is that he is only high-ranking Soviet command-staff figure on record to have formally rejected the use of his patronymic. In November of 1982 ARKADY SIMONOVICH PASHIN formally notified his headquarters that he would henceforth be known simply as ARKADY PASHIN. No information is available as to the reason for such an unprecedented decision. None of our sources have any idea as to its meaning. One last item: Subject PASHIN has been twice named as possible sponsor of group known as PAMYAT (Memory), thought to be a
collection of right wing thinkers agitated into action by Gorbachev’s apparent willingness to meet with West, sign an INF, and to permit policy of glasnost. PAMYAT has senior analysts worried; information on it, however, is scant. More follows.

Peter put it down.

“Is it some kind of coup?” asked Dick Puller. “Would the Soviet military, or this nut-case PAMYAT outfit, be taking over the country, and they want their finger on a nuclear trigger somewhere for a certain period of time?”

“No,” said Peter. He realized in a second what it was all about. He saw it. He had been pulled along the pathways of the same argument, knew its temptations, its hypnotic allure. He knew how it could seduce a man into believing in the moral good of pushing the button.

“No, it’s not a coup. It’s simply logic, or rather strategic logic, and the willingness to follow it to the end.”

He gave a grim little smile. He knew Pashin, knew how his mind worked, because it worked the way his own did.

“You see,” he said, “it’s really very simple. This Pashin … he’s done something no one else has ever done. He’s figured out how to win World War Three.”

He felt the power of Pashin’s mind, its reach, its grasp, its subtleties and, most of all, its will.

He took a deep breath.

“Pashin believes that MX is a first strike weapon, and that when it is fully operational and we have the advantage, we will push the button and blow them away—furthermore, that by our own logic, we
have
to. That’s where these missiles take
us.
And since the MX
is so
clearly superior in terms of accuracy and silo-busting capacity and since our own command, communication, and control system is so fragile and so unable to withstand a Soviet first strike, we’ve
got
to use it. It’s use it or lose it, and he thinks we’ll use it. That’s his first position: it’s unassailable, and I can’t say—no man can say—that it’s not a distinct possibility. It’s not that we want to, it’s that we’ll be afraid not to.”

There was silence.

“So from his position the choice isn’t between peace and war, it’s between losing and winning an already inevitable war. That’s all. Once you accept that, it all follows, particularly if he’s of a conservative bent, as his membership in this PAMYAT thing would indicate. There’s going to be a nuclear war. It will be fought as soon as our system is operational, in six months to a year, via an American first strike with clear weapons superiority, and a complete victory for the United States, with all their cities ruined and all their birds fractured in their silos and all their command bunkers turned to barbecue pits. Or it will be fought now, tonight, in a few hours, and”—he paused, letting it sink in—“and they will win.”

There was silence in the room.

“This is how
it
works. He fires our MX into the Soviet Union. But it’s important to understand the targeting of this particular missile. Those ten warheads are zeroed on what we call third and fourth generation hard targets, as opposed to soft targets such as cities, people, that sort of thing. Our W87s are sublimely accurate; they never miss; they’re sure as death and taxes. And because of their accuracy the bombs can be quite small. So the ten warheads deploy against three key long-range radar installations, the Soviet air defense command, a deep leadership bunker thirty miles outside Moscow—the point is to decapitate their leadership—and five Siberian missile silos, which, by the time they strike, will be empty. The reason, of course, is that once the Soviet radar identifies the ten incomings, the Russians go crazy and punch out with everything they’ve got. Our ten nukes detonate with a total megatonnage of thirty-five; they take out the installations I’ve named and they kill—I don’t know, tops maybe thirty thousand people. Seven to nine minutes later, they hit us with four thousand megatons; they tag all our cities and missile silos; they EMP our radars and computers to craziness, they kill maybe three hundred million of us; they effectively wipe us out. That’s it. Game, set, and match, Soviet Union. Essentially the point of this Pashin’s exercise is to goad his own country into what amounts to a first strike, because the premium on a first strike is so high. But of course neither the Politburo nor any sane command group would push the button.
So he does it himself, maybe with the help or under the inspiration of this Pamyat thing, and with this little commando unit, based on his intelligence. See? It’s easy. It’s more than easy, it’s brilliant. And when it’s over, he climbs out of the mountain, a chopper picks him up, and he’s tsar of all the Russias.”

“But our subs, with our subs we can—”

“No,” said Peter, “sorry, but they’ve got our subs zeroed. They can take some of them out in the first few minutes of the spasm. Then they can hunt down and kill the Tacamo VLF aircraft that are our primary sub links and are set to deliver the retaliation message. They’ll go straight for those babies, jam them, EMP them, or just blow them away. The subs will be out of contact, and will wait to fire while the Russians hunt them down in the following couple of weeks. At the worst, they’ll have plenty of time to evacuate their cities. They can outlast or outsmart the subs if they have to and Pashin has forced them to. That’s all; he’ll make them beat our subs. They aren’t going to want to fight that fight, but he’s taken the element of choice out of it. And he’ll make them do it. And in a terrible, deep way he probably thinks he’s cleaning up the mess the rest of his leaders have made. He’s the cleaning lady.”

“Why didn’t he take over a Russian missile compound and get his first strike that way?” somebody asked.

“Because this is the only independent-launch-capable silo in the world. It’s the only one he could take where he himself could push the button. He’s made the hardest choice of all, but by his lights, it’s the logical one. I suppose by a certain moral system it’s even the right choice. He’s not a madman, really, he’s just operating within the rules of the game, the game that his country and ours invented.”

“Who are those men with him?” somebody asked.

“Washington’s sure it’s Spetsnaz,” said Major Skazy. “Soviet Special Forces. In the control of the GRU, not the regular Army, and remember this Pashin is a big-time GRU heavyweight. Anyway, they’ve been trained in silo-seizure and blooded in Afghanistan. That explains those tans and the false teeth, meant to cover up their foreign origin. And there
were sixty? That’s four fifteen man teams, which is the operational unit in the Spetsnaz organization. And it explains where the goddamned Stingers came from. We’ve shipped Stingers to the Muhajadeem, to take out the Soviet MI-26 gunships. These guys must have bounced a shipment, and they’ve turned the stuff around on us. These are very, very good guys. That’s why they’ve been so tough.”

But Puller hadn’t been listening. He’d been thinking. He’d gotten close to the last wrinkle. “Dr. Thiokol,” he said suddenly, “doesn’t your theory fall apart on the issue of our response to their launch? As soon as our radar sees the Russian birds coming,
we
launch. And
they’re
blown away. And the world dies in the rad—”

“You haven’t seen it yet, Colonel Puller. Just as I said early on, something else has to happen. Something to prevent us from launching, something to totally de-coordinate our response in the crucial seven-to nine-minute envelope between the launch of this Peacekeeper and the launch of the Russian massive retaliation.”

Again, the silence.

“The launch is only one half of the operation. There’s another half of it, there has to be. I told you this from the very beginning, but I didn’t know what it was. Now I see it. It explains the radio message that he sent out this morning immediately after the seizure. He was talking to his other half, telling it to hold off for eighteen hours because of the key vault.”

“Hold off on what?” asked Skazy.

“It’s called ‘decapitation,’” said Peter, “or leader killing. It means cutting the heads off. And all the heads are in Washington. You better bump me through to the FBI fast, because they’ve got to get hopping on this. This Pashin’s going to launch at South Mountain and then he’s going to nuke D.C.”

This was the hardest thing yet. Uckley would rather do anything than this, but now events were whizzing by and it had been explained to him in Washington that he had this last job left to do.

“I—I’m not sure I can do it,” he said. “Can’t you get somebody else?”

After a restrained moment or two of silence, the voice at the other end of the line at last said, “They can’t get there in time. We can send the photos and documents over the wire to the state police barracks on Route 40 outside Frederick and have them to you in twenty minutes. You’re the senior federal representative there, it has to be you.”

Uckley swallowed. What choice did he have?

And twenty minutes later, a state police car whirled into town, its siren blaring, its flasher pulsing. Seconds after that, the messenger was delivered to Uckley.

“We got these over the computer hookup from D.C. just a few minutes ago. Hey, you okay? Man, you look like you had the worst day of your life.”

“It wasn’t the best.”

“I hear there was a bad shooting.”

“Yeah. Mine.”

“Oh, Jesus, sorry, man. Hey, don’t they give you time off for—”

“There’s no time for that today. Thanks.”

Uckley took the envelope from the man and headed up the walk. The house was full of lights. A minister had arrived and the family doctor and, a few minutes back, an older couple he took to be grandparents.

He paused at the door, wishing he were several million miles away, wishing the whole thing were over, wishing it weren’t him. But it was him, and eventually he knocked.

Minutes seemed to pass before someone answered. It was a man about sixty, heavyset, with expressionless eyes.

“Yes?” he asked.

“Uh, my name is Uckley. I’m a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’m sorry to have to do this, but I’ve got to talk to the girls.”

The man beheld him for the longest time.

“The girls are very tired,” he finally said. “They’ve been through a lot today. Too much. We’ve just gotten them down. I was going to sedate them if they have any trouble
sleeping. Their grandparents are here. Can’t this wait until some other time?”

“I wish it could, Doctor. But I’ve got to talk to them. This is a very urgent situation and time is important.”

“Young man, these girls saw their mother shot and killed today. Have you any—”

“Look, I hate to have to act like a jerk, but you’ve got to understand how terribly, terribly urgent this all is, Doctor. This is what’s known as a phase four nuclear emergency, and technically I have all legal rights to get what I want. Please don’t make me have to be an asshole about this.” He felt himself swallowing uncomfortably. His breath was heavy and his knees felt watery.