“Colonel, you are wanted in the scientists’ briefing room right away. Marshal Moskanko’s orders.”
Kapitsa hurried out of the room. Without saying goodbye to Joe Safcek. Safcek stared straight ahead as Kapitsa’s broad back disappeared.
It was 10:06 A.M., Tashkent time. Out of breath from running, Colonel Kapitsa entered the briefing room, where Bakunin sat alone, toying idly with the fingernail scissors left by Bruk. The Colt .45 still lay on the table, its workings exposed. Beyond the marshal, Kapitsa could see on the other side of the glass wall the floor of the laser chamber. There the huge gun, under the care of a team of scientists now headed by Glasov, was poised to fire. On another wall of the briefing room, the television screen had just filled with the shape of Marshal Moskanko, talking from the command platform in the defense center room.
“Pavel Andreievich,” the defense minister shouted, “the American plane is about three hundred fifty miles out. We have a mass salvo due in three minutes from the missile batteries. Even a near miss from their atomic warheads will crack the plane like an egg. Now I want you to get right down there and make sure that laser is fired in two minutes’ time. Two minutes, do you understand? Stark has forced us into this.”
As he stood in the midst of his frantic staff, monitoring the approach of the SR-71, Moskanko watched in dismay as the blurred television image of Bakunin shook its head sadly.
“Do you understand?” Moskanko repeated.
“Viktor Semyonovich, you have gone mad,” Bakunin said softly, gesturing at Moskanko with the scissors. “Once you had my loyalty, but now I can no longer believe in you.” Bakunin’s face was oddly untroubled despite his words.
The defense minister roared: “Kapitsa, arrest that man!”
The stunned secret police officer was reaching to pull his gun from his belt as Marshal Bakunin leaned out of television view and using Bruk’s fingernail scissors deliberately snipped the wires that connected the transistorized battery to the marble of Einstinium 119. In the Moscow defense center, the television screen went blank before Moskanko’s eyes.
Gazing at the morning sunlight streaming in through his window, Joe Safcek was imagining Martha waving to him as he came up the driveway. She was reaching for him at the moment when the plastique imploded onto the marble of dark gray particles. In the next millisecond, Colonel Joe Safcek was incinerated in his bed.
At the moment of detonation, an intense bluish white light lit the sky. In seconds a brilliant orange fireball formed over several hundred yards and vaporized the laser and all buildings in the complex. It lapped at the surrounding slopes and roared through the gullies toward the highway a mile and a half away.
In the Maryland mountains, the time was precisely 11:08 P.M.—zero hour minus ten minutes.
On the road leading north from the laser complex, a terrified driver crawled from the wreckage of his vehicle and watched a herd of sheep bleating mournfully as they trudged, blind and helpless, along the roadway. Their blistered flanks were turning into blackened running sores, and the sheep stumbled and retched onto the grass as radiation invaded their bloodstreams and raced to consume them. The long line of animals trampled unseeing over the blackened corpse of their shepherd.
In a field two miles south, a farmer was driven head first through a tree trunk.
Two teen-age girls hiking through the desert flowers two and a half miles east of Ground Zero were blinded by the glare and felt a scorching wave of heat pass over them.
At a Soviet Army training camp three miles away, men standing in line for a meal felt the hot blast and saw their uniforms erupt in tiny puffs of fire that caught and fed on them. All military vehicles in the motor pool fused into grotesque lumps of steel.
Marshal Moskanko had sat staring a moment at the dark screen. Then he lunged to the phone and tried to raise Tashkent. The line was dead. Moskanko cursed loudly. “Have we got a satellite anywhere near Tashkent?”
The duty officer at the control board ripped a piece of paper from a computer and handed it to the defense minister. The numbed Moskanko read it with a growing feeling of doom.
NUCLEAR DETONATION NORTH OF TASHKENT IN FOURTEEN KILOTON RANGE …
In the depths of the Maryland mountain, William Stark stood ashen-faced as he watched the television. In his hand, the knuckles white, he clenched a cable, Moskanko’s reply to his hot-line warning that the SR-71 was coming in:
RECALL BOMBER IMMEDIATELY FROM SOVIET TERRITORY. DESTRUCTION OF LASER WILL BE REGARDED AS AN ACT OF WAR AND WILL BRING INSTANT RETALIATION AGAINST YOUR COUNTRY BY ALL SOVIET SYSTEMS.
V. KRYLOV
On the screen, the mushroom cloud had changed colors in seconds from pink to salmon to azure and ugly black. The laser works had just disappeared in the enormous pillar of energy beneath the lurking Samos. General Stephen Austin Roarke could not believe it.
“The strike plane isn’t due over the target for four minutes, but it’s gone anyway,” he screamed into the President’s ear. “It’s gone! It’s gone!”
Stark grabbed at the red phone. To Ellington on the other end he shouted: “Call it back! Call it back! Right now!” Ellington screamed into the radio: “Abort, abort” as he punched the recall alarm. Two hundred and twenty miles west of Tashkent, the SR-71 crew had no need to be told. From their perch in the sky, the men could see the twisting column of flame ahead of them and feel the spreading shock waves.
The strike plane turned quickly to the right. The pilot spoke to Incirclik: “Roger on abort, roger on abort. The target is no longer functional.”
At Incirclik, General Ellington repeated the words over the telephone to William Stark, who sank into a chair and watched the mushroom in horrified fascination. The spectators in the underground White House held their breaths as they witnessed the fury unleashed by the tiny marble of nuclear material. No one spoke. Only the impersonal chatter of radios and teletypes intruded.
On the third floor of the main hospital in Tashkent, Luba Spitkovsky was blissfully unaware of the violence swirling around her. Still unconscious after surgery for massive gunshot wounds in the stomach, she lay motionless as the ceiling cracked and plaster showered down on her. The KGB man guarding her ran into the hall in panic. Luba did not stir.
At the Navoi Opera House the roof ripped, and beams cracked. Inside, three glistening chandeliers whirled wildly, then crashed sickeningly into the rows of seats beneath.
On Komsomol Lake, amateur sailors with their girl friends were swamped by the suddenly thrashing waters, which soon smothered them and stifled their screams.
In the Soviet defense command center, Marshal Moskanko stared at the men around him. His shaking hands betrayed his turmoil. Omskuschin and Fedoseyev looked at each other in silence while someone switched on the cameras in a Cosmos orbiting two hundred miles northeast of Tashkent on a course leading it over the Chinese Communist nuclear-test facilities in the Sinkiang Desert.
The marshals of the Soviet Union looked at the wall screen and saw clearly the mushroom that Joe Safcek had planted.
Because the bomb was set off at ground level and in a sparsely populated region, its destructiveness did not match the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The fireball was blocked by the hills and valleys from spreading wildly down toward Tashkent. Even the full effects of the blast were muzzled somewhat as it reached the northern outskirts of the metropolis. But the inhabitants would never be the same after that day.
They saw the malevolent mushroom rising over them and then felt the concussion reach out to touch them.
Slivers of glass, carried like rain through the air, slashed thousands of pedestrians. On every street, houses buckled and crumbled under the impact of the shock wave. They swayed and fell, spewing out their collection of flotsam and furniture. Streetcars and busses overturned, and automobiles were rammed into buildings with the velocity of artillery shells. The cries of the trapped and dying were joined by the clamor of ambulances and fire trucks, rushing to extricate them from the deb
ris.
In the town of Chirchiz, eleven miles to the east, Olga Spitkovsky heard the rumble, then was thrown to the floor by the shock wave, which broke every window in the house. As Mrs. Spitkovsky rose, she stepped on a picture of her daughter, Luba, gone for so long from her country and her family. Luba’s mother wiped the blood off her face and ran outside to see what had happened to her town that day.
It had taken the bomb less than five minutes to spend its terrible fury.
Stark roused himself from the hypnotic vision on the screen to ask for Midas readings. Sam Riordan spoke to California. The monitor said Soviet missile sites were not on alert yet. Stark listened.
“The next hour will give us their reaction. Prepare to issue Red Alert to all strategic weapons systems just in case we get word they’re revving up.” He continued to watch the screen while the Midas satellite conversed with its master:
NUCLEAR EXPLOSION IN FOURTEEN KILOTON RANGE AREA TEN MILES NORTH OF TASHKENT. HEAT AT CENTER IN EXCESS OF FIVE MILLION DEGREES. BLAST EFFECTS IN RANGE TEN MILES TO FIFTEEN ON ALL SIDES …
Marshal Moskanko had retreated to his office, where he drank from a mug of vodka. What had gone wrong? He had just learned that the plane Stark warned him about on the hot line had turned back two hundred miles from the target. Yet his laser was gone. Could Bakunin have done that? Did the American bomb have a secret timing device on it? Could there be some other explanation? Moskanko’s eyes had been fixed unseeingly on a piece of paper lying on his desk. The defense minister picked it up now and found himself reading a copy of his last hot-line message to Stark.
Inside the mountain, William Stark was in the bedroom with Pamela. She held his hand tightly while he told her what had just happened. Stark was waiting for Randall or Riordan to summon him momentarily with word from the spy satellites whose electronic eyes and ears were fastened on nuclear missile and bomber installations inside the Soviet Union. While he waited for news, Pamela listened to him describe the awesome cloud over Tashkent.
Marshal Moskanko had been reading the hot-line copy again and again, brooding angrily over the phrases “act of war” and “instant retaliation.”
As an orderly entered to tell the defense minister that his deputies wanted to see him immediately. Moskanko lunged to his feet and ran out to the central command post. He glanced at the wall screen and saw the laser works still shrouded in smoke and dust. Small fires continued to lick at the edges of the blanket of destruction. Moskanko grabbed a phone and spoke to SMAG, the Soviet Strategic Missile Armaments Group in Chelyabinsk. The marshal was crisp.
“Priority Alert. Attack will be based on Operation Neptune, using multiple warheads against silos and Polaris systems only on first strike. City strike will follow later based on Operation Cygnus A. Execute order on receipt of computer voice code Suvorov.”
The voice on the other end repeated Moskanko’s words, and the defense minister slammed down the receiver and went along the corridor to a conference room. As he entered, he found Marshals Fedoseyev and Omskuschin waiting somberly. Moskanko walked to the head of the table, tossed the hot-line copy on the table and said: “Comrades, we are in a state of war.”
William Mellon Stark heard the knock and Randall’s voice saying urgently: “Mr. President, we need you out here immediately.” Stark pressed Pamela’s hand once more and left her sitting trembling on the edge of the bed.
One look at Randall’s eyes confirmed Stark’s fears. He went to the wall screen, where Riordan and Roarke were staring at a closeup split image of Soviet missile silos. The President asked: “Is this it?”
The shaken director of the CIA turned. “It was all quiet until just two minutes ago. Then we intercepted attack orders to all Soviet subs in the Atlantic and Pacific. At the same time the Samos began picking up these silos getting ready. The ones on the wall are at Novosibirsk. Notice that the big doors have been opened. Our radio monitors report that countdown is at T minus thirty seconds and holding. They’re just waiting for a final Go.”
“Are all the missiles like these?”
“They’re all going operational from Novaya Zemlya to Khabarovsk. What’s the true count, Steve?”
Roarke snapped: “Six hundred five and rising toward a thousand.”
President Stark shook his head in despair. “They leave me no choice, the fools. Put everything up to Red Alert.”
Roarke was talking on the phone immediately to NORAD in Cheyenne Mountain.
Stark rattled off further instructions. “As soon as the radar picks them up at the horizon line and verifies their trajectories, give me the word, and we’ll let go.”
Randall said: “God, what about the people in this country?”
“They’re already dead.” Stark answered tonelessly. “And so is everyone in Russia.” He tore off his suit jacket and fell into a chair. “But what else can I do?” Nobody spoke for a moment, and Stark broke the quiet: “Tell the television and radio networks to get ready for a switch to CONELRAD. That will help some of the survivors anyway.”
While the President sat watching the screen for the emergence of the Soviet multiple warhead missiles, the Bagman came up beside him and unlocked the black satchel containing the coded orders to initiate nuclear war. He held it open for William Stark’s next move.
Marshal Moskanko was in the midst of an unforeseen argument with his deputies.
“The laser is gone,” the stocky peasant Omskuschin said in his ponderous manner. “When I came in here there were no further signs of aggressive activity on the enemy’s part.”
“How can you be so shortsighted?” Moskanko railed. “We are in an impossible situation. Stark can move anywhere in the world now and expect us to do nothing about it unless we show him otherwise.”
The door opened, and a Soviet air force major came up to Moskanko: “The Americans have just gone to their Red Alert. All port-bound Polaris systems are getting under way for the open sea.”
The defense minister interrupted the man: “So, comrades, we must attack. I have ordered SMAG to fire when I give the computer password.”
There was a stunned silence in the room. Finally, Marshal Fedoseyev, commander of Soviet land forces, cleared his throat. “I want no part of a nuclear exchange,” he intoned. “It would be suicide.” With a look of impatience, Fedoseyev, whose normally taciturn manner was a Soviet army legend, now stood up.
“Viktor Semyonovich,” he said forcefully, “you have misjudged once too often. First, you should never have sent the message threatening instant retaliation. If the laser went, as it did, you would be left with your mouth open and your opinions nil. Now, without consulting anyone, you have ordered the missiles to priority alert. It is no surprise that the Americans have suddenly done the same thing. But your most serious misjudgment concerns the President of the United States. You thought he would avoid the ultimate decision to go into a hydrogen bomb war. You were absolutely wrong, comrade. Absolutely.”
Moskanko’s face was beet red.
“We cannot afford more such misjudgments,” Marshal Fedoseyev continued. “And when you talk of still proving we are strong, we say you are ignoring facts. Viktor Semyonovich, we will not allow it to happen again. We cannot let you go out of here and give the code word to attack.”
Fedoseyev pressed a button on the table, and the door opened to admit two plainclothes KGB officers from the Center. They took up positions on either side of the door. As Moskanko watched in disbelief, former Premier Valerian Smirnov walked into the room and stared silently down at him.
After a lengthy silence, Marshal Omskuschin addressed the defense minister: “Your biggest mistake, Viktor Semyonovich, was losing. Losers must pay. We must survive you and be the wiser for it. But you cannot continue. You are too reckless, too dangerous for the Soviet people. We have brought Smirnov to defuse the situation and try to salvage something with the Americans. They can take a very hard line with us now, and we think Smirnov may be able to return relations to a reasonable status without
losing too much. And that we want, much more than we want you to continue.”
Marshal Moskanko glared at Smirnov, who returned his look calmly. The two KBG officers watched the defense minister.
“We have arranged a comfortable dacha for you at Sochi on the Black Sea,” Omskuschin went on. “You will not need for anything, and you will not have to fear any retribution from—”
“You sniveling bastards!” Moskanko roared. “You have been with me in this from the very first moment, but I am the one chosen to fall.” Spittle forming at his lips, Moskanko lunged toward them. “You cannot—”
The two KGB officers moved simultaneously and forced the defense minister back into his chair. He pulled against them, but they pinned his arms. On a signal from Fedoseyev, they forced Moskanko to his feet and led him to the door. Smirnov stepped aside, smiling mockingly. “I will give President Stark your regards, Marshal.” The police pulled the raging Moskanko away from the premier, who turned his back and walked over to the hot line. He handed a sheet of paper to the operator. “Send this immediately.”
Behind him the two marshals of the Soviet Union watched Moskanko struggling down the hallway into oblivion.
At the television screen in the Maryland mountain, no one stirred. The President’s shirt was soaked with sweat, and his cigar had gone out several times as he alternately puffed on it and laid it down. Eight hundred and sixteen Soviet missiles were now poised along the arc of the Soviet heartland, but Stark saw only four on the screen. They hypnotized him as he waited for them to vault toward the orbiting Samos camera.
At precisely 11:42 P.M., the hot line chattered, and William Stark stiffened in his chair. Randall ran to the machine, and someone said, “This is it.” The President leaned over Randall’s shoulder to read the print as the Bagman jostled his elbow with the opened satchel.
TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FROM THE PRESIDIUM OF THE UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS:
The Tashkent Crisis Page 25
