by Cuba (lit)
obsolete artifacts of a bygone age.
It was equally ridiculous to expect someone
to remove this missile from the silo and install
a new, modern one. Cuba was poor, even poorer
than Russia had been when he was growing up.
Cuba could not afford modern missiles and the new,
postcommunist Russia certainly could not afford
to give them away.
Not even to aim at Atlanta.
Those were the targeting coordinates.
He wasn't supposed to know the target, of course,
but that rule was another example of military
stupidity. He took care of the missile,
maintained it, tested it, and if necessary would someday fire
it at the enemy. Yet the powers that be didn't want
him to know where the missile was aimed.
So when he was working on the guidance module he had
checked the coordinates that were programmed in,
STEPHEN COONTS
compared them to a map in the village school.
Atlanta!
The gyros in the guidance module were 1950's
technology, and Soviet to boot, with the usual
large, forgiving military tolerances. No one ever
claimed the guidance system in a Scud I was a
precision instrument, but it was adequate. The
guidance system would get the missile into the proper
neighborhood, more or less, then the warhead
would do the rest.
The old warhead had an explosive force equal
to one hundred thousand tons" equivalent of
TNT. It wouldn't flatten all of
AtlantaAtlanta was a mighty big place and
getting biggerbut it would make a hell of a dent in
Georgia. Somewhere in Georgia. With luck, the
chances were pretty good that the missile would hit
Georgia.
The new warhead... well, he knew nothing about it.
It was a completely different design than the old
one, although it weighed exactly the same and also
seemed to be rigged for an airburst, but of course
there was no way for him to determine the altitude.
Not that it mattered. The missile had never been
fired and probably never would be. Its
capabilities were mere speculation.
The old man took a last look at the interior
of the control module, replaced the inspection plate
and inserted the screws, then carefully tightened each
one. Then he inspected the cables that led to the
missile and their connectors. From the platform he could
also see the hydraulic pistons and arms that would
lift the cap on the silo, if and when. No leaks
today.
Carefully, holding on with both hands, he climbed
down the ladder to the floor of the silo, which was just a
grate over a large hole, the fire tube,
designed so the fiery rocket exhaust would not cook
the missile before it rose from the silo.
The rats may have got into the silo when he had the
cap open, he thought. Yes, that was probably it.
They got in-
side, found nothing to eat, began chewing on wire
insulation to stay alive.
But the rats were dead.
His woman was dead, and he soon would be.
The missile...
He patted the side of the missile, then began
climbing the stairs to the control room to do his
electrical checks.
Nobody gave a damn about the missile, except
him and maybe the major. The major didn't really
care all that muchthe missile was just a job for him.
The missile had been the old man's life. He
had traded life in Russia as a slave in the
Strategic Rocket Forces for a life in
paradise as a slave to a missile that would never be
fired.
He thought about Russia as he climbed the
stairs.
You make your choices going through life,
he told himself,
or the state makes the choices for you. Or God
does. Whichever, a man must accept life as it
conies.
He sat down at the console in the control room,
ran his fingers over the buttons and switches.
At least he had never had to fire the missile.
After all these years taking care of it, that would be
somewhat like committing suicide.
Could he do it? Could he fire the missile if
ordered to do so?
When he first came to Cuba he had thought deeply
about that question. Of course he had taken an oath
to obey disand all that, but he never knew if he really
could.
Still didn't.
And was going to die not knowing.
The old man laughed aloud. He liked the sound so
much he laughed again, louder.
After all, the joke was really on the communists, who
sent him here. Amazingly, after all the pain and
suffering they caused tens of millions of people all
over the planet, they had given him a good
life.
He laughed again because the joke was a good one.
Guantanamo Bay, on the southeast coast of the
island of Cuba, is the prettiest spot on the
planet, thought Rear Admiral Jake
Grafton, USN.
He was leaning on the railing on top of the carrier
United States's
superstructure, her island, a place the sailors
called Steel Beach. Here off-duty crew
members gathered to soak up some rays and do a few
calisthenics. Jake Grafton was not normally a
sun worshiper; at sea he rarely visited
Steel Beach, preferring to arrange his day so that he
could spend at least a half hour running on the
flight deck. Today he was dressed in gym shorts,
T-shirt, and tennis shoes, but he had yet
to make it to the flight deck.
Gra bar ton was a trim, fit fifty-three
years old, a trifle over six feet tall, with
short hair turning gray, gray eyes, and a nose
slightly too large for his face. On one temple
was a scar, an old, faded white slash where a
bullet had gouged him years ago.
People who knew him regarded him as the
epitome of a competent naval officer. Grafton
always put his brain in gear before he opened his mouth,
never lost his cool, and he never lost sight of the
goals he wanted to accomplish. In short, he was
one fine naval officer and his superiors knew it,
which was why he was in charge of this carrier group lying in
Guantanamo Bay.
The carrier and her escorts had been running
exercises in the Caribbean for the last week. Today the
carrier was anchored in the mouth of the bay, with two of
her larger consorts anchored nearby. To seaward
three- destroyers
steamed back and forth, their radars probing the skies.
A set of top-secret orders had brought the
carrier group here.
Jake Grafton thought about those orders as he
studied the two cargo ships lying against the pier through a
set of navy binoculars. The ships were small,
less than eight thousand tons each; larger ships
drew too much water to get against the pier in this
>
harbor. They were
Nuestra Sefiora de Colon
and
Astarte.
The order bringing those ships here had not come from
some windowless Pentagon cubbyhole; it was no memo
drafted by an anonymous civil servant or
faceless staff weenie. Oh, no. The order that had
brought those ships to this pier on the southern coast of
Cuba had come from the White House, the top of the
food chain.
Jake Grafton looked past the cargo ships at
the warehouses and barracks and administration buildings
baking in the warm Cuban sun.
A paradise, that was the word that described Cuba.
A paradise inhabited by communists. And
Guantanamo Bay was a lonely little American
outpost adhering to the underside of this communist island, the
asshole of Cuba some called it.
Rear Admiral Grafton could see the cranes
moving, the white containers being swung down to the pier
from
Astarte,
which had arrived several hours ago. Forklifts took
the steel boxes to a hurricane-proof warehouse,
where no doubt the harbormaster was stacking them three
or four deep in neat, tidy military rows.
The containers were packages designed to hold
chemical and biological weapons, artillery
shells and bombs. A trained crew was here
to load the weapons stored inside the
hurricane-proof warehouse into the containers, which would
then be loaded aboard the ship at the pier and
transported to the United States, where the warheads
would be destroyed.
Loading the weapons into the containers and getting the
containers stowed aboard the second ship was going
to take at least a week, probably longer. The
first ship,
Nuestra Sefiora de Colon,
Our Lady of Col less-than 5n, had been a
week loading, and would be ready to sail this evening.
Jake Grafton's job was to provide military
cover for the loading operation with this carrier battle
group.
His orders raised more questions than they answered. The
weapons had been stored in that warehouse for years why
remove them now? Why did the removal operation
require military cover? What was the threat?
Admiral Grafton put down his binoculars and
did fifty push-ups on the steel deck while he
thought about chemical and biological weapons.
Cheaper and even more lethal than atomic weapons,
they were the weapons of choice for Third World nations
seeking to acquire a credible military
presence. Chemical weapons were easier to control
than biological weapons, yet more expensive
to deliver. Hands down, the cheapest and deadliest
weapon known to man was the biological one.
Almost any nation, indeed, almost anyone with a credit
card and two thousand square feet of laboratory
space, could construct a biological weapon hi a
matter of weeks from inexpensive, off-the-shelf
technology. Years ago Saddam Hussein got
into the biological warfare business with anthrax
cultures purchased from an American mail-order
supply house and delivered via overnight mail.
Ten grams of anthrax properly dispersed can kill
as many people as a ton of the nerve gas Sarin. What was
that estimate Jake saw recently"...one hundred
kilograms of anthrax delivered by an efficient
aerosol generator on a large urban target would
kill from two to six times as many people as a
one-megaton nuclear device.
Of course, Jake Grafton reflected,
anthrax was merely one of over one hundred and
sixty known biological warfare agents. There were
others far deadlier but equally cheap to manufacture
and disperse. Still, obtaining a culture was merely a
first step; the journey from culture dishes
to
a reliable weapon that could be safely stored and
accurately employedanything other than a spray
tankwas long, expensive, and fraught with engineering
challenges.
Jake Grafton had had a few classified
briefings about CBW-WHICH stood for chemical and
biological warfare but he knew little more than diswas
available in the public press. These weren't the
kinds of secrets that rank-and-file naval
officers had a need to know. Since the Kennedy
administration insisted on developing other military
response capabilities besides nuclear warfare,
the United States had researched, developed, and
manufactured large stores of nerve gas, mustard
gas, incapacitants, and defoliants. Research
on biological agents went forward in tandem at
Fort Detrick, Maryland, and ultimately led to the
manufacture of weapons at Pine Bluff
Arsenal in Arkansas. These highly classified
programs were undertaken with little debate and almost no
publicity. Of course the Soviets had their own
classified programs. Only when accidents
occurredlike the accidental slaughter of 6,000
sheep thirty miles from the Dugway
Proving Ground in Utah during the late
1960's, or the deaths of sixty-six people at
Sverdlovsk in 1979 did the public get a
glimpse into this secret world.
Nerve gases were loaded into missile and rocket
warheads, bombs, land mines, and artillery shells.
Biological agents were loaded into missile
warheads, cluster bombs, and spray tanks and
dispensers mounted on aircraft.
Historically nations used chemical or
biological weapons against an enemy only when the
enemy lacked the means to retaliate in kind. The
threat of massive American retaliation had
deterred Saddam Hussein from the use of chemical
and biological weapons in the 1991 Gulf War,
yet these days deterrence was politically incorrect.
In 1993 the United States signed the
Chemical Weapons Convention, thereby agreeing
to remove chemical and biological weapons from its
stockpiles.
The U.s. military had been in no hurry
to comply with the treaty, of course, because without the threat of
retalia-
STEPHEN COONTS
tion there was no way to prevent these weapons
being used against American troops and civilians.
The waiting was over, apparently. The politicians
in Washington were getting their way: the United
States would not retaliate against an enemy with
chemical or biological weapons even if
similar weapons were used to slaughter Americans.
When Jake Grafton finished his push-ups and
stood, the staff operations officer, Commander Toad
Tarkington, was there with a towel. Toad was slightly
above medium height, deeply tanned, and had a
mouthful of perfect white teeth that were visible when he
smiled or laughed, which he often did. The admiral
wiped his face on the towel, then picked up the
binoculars and once again focused them on the cargo<
br />
ships.
"Glad the decision to destroy those things wasn't one
I had to makeea"...Toad Tarkington said.
"There are a lot of things in this world that I'm glad
I'm not responsible forea"...Jake replied.
"Why now, Admiral? And why does the ordnance
crowd need a battle group to guard them?"
"What I'd like to knowea"...Jake Grafton mused,
"is why those damned things were stored here in the first
place. If we knew that, then maybe we would know
why the brass sent us here to stand guard."
"Think Castro has chemical or biological
weapons, sir?"
"I suspect he does, or someone with a lot of
stars once thought he might. If so, our weapons were
probably put here to discourage friend Castro from
waving his about. But what is the threat to removing them?"
"Got to be terrorists, sirea"...Toad said.
"Castro would be delighted to see them go. An
attack from the Cuban Army is the last thing on
earth I would expect. But terrorists maybe they
plan to do a raid into here, steal some of the darn things."
"Maybeea"...Jake said, sighing.
"I guess I don't understand why we are taking them
home for destructionea"...Toad added. "The
administration got
the political credit for signing the Chemical
Weapons Treaty. If we keep our weapons,
we can still credibly threaten massive retaliation if
someone threatens us."
"Pretty hard to agree to destroy the things, not do
it, and then fulminate against other countries who
don't destroy theirs."
"Hypocrisy never slowed down a
politicianea"...Toad said sourly. "I guess I
just never liked the idea of getting naked when
everyone else at the party is fully dressed."
"Who in Washington would ever authorize the use of
CBW weapons"..."...Jake muttered. "Can you see a
buttoneddown, blow-dried, politically correct
American politician ever signing such an
order?"
Both men stood with their elbows on the railing looking
at the cargo ships. After a bit the admiral
passed Toad the binoculars.
"Wonder if the National Security Agency is
keeping this area under surveillance with
satellites"..."...Toad mused.
"No one in Washington is going to tell
us,"
the admiral said matter-of-factly. He pointed
to one of the two Aegis cruisers anchored nearby.
"Leave that cruiser anchored here for the next few
days. She can cover the base perimeter with her guns
if push comes to shove. Have the cruiser keep her
