“Oh, Christ,” Colonel Casdo whispered. “They went right by the missiles.”
Two seconds later the two Soviet fighters went up in a rolling green blip. But their four missiles continued to bore in. The attacked Vindicator began to jink in the air, rapidly altering course and altitude. It also shot off four more missiles. But the Soviet missiles were too close. They closed on the Vindicator, seemed to converge and then the Vindicator disappeared in the explosion.
There was utter silence in the War Room. It was the first time that most of the men had “seen” a plane destroyed. For General Bogan it was not. In World War II he had seen planes destroyed on radar and with his own eyes. Now, he knew, was the time to establish the mood of the War Room. He turned on the intercom so that everyone in the room could hear him.
“Apparently the Soviets have a very slow missile which compensates by a long range,” be said distinctly. “That is a longer range than we had calculated their missiles possessed. The computing systems built into our air-to-air missiles detected the four Soviet air-to-air missiles, but ‘calculated’ that they were moving so slowly that they must be drones or reconnaissance planes, and so they ignored them and continued toward the Soviet fighters. You can’t win ’em all.”
Instantly he was aware of the unintended irony. The Vindicators must lose, must all be destroyed, or God knew what might happen. But all his deepest reflexes were with the Vindicators. They were his. He felt slightly sick, torn by cross-currents of loyalty and of logic.
“General, it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” someone said to him.
He turned and it was Raskob standing with his legs apart, a dead cigar in his mouth, staring at the board. Even in the dim light, General Bogan could see that Raskob was very pale.
“You’re right, sir, it’s going to get much worse,” General Bogan said.
“Will all our men hold firm?” Raskob asked. “Not just the ones here, but the ones in the air? After all, those are our men getting killed out there and it’s tough just to stand by and watch it. Is anyone likely to rack?”
“Not likely, Congressman Raskob,” General Bogan aid. “They’ve been screened, tested, rehearsed, and hilled until they can’t be sure what’s a drill and what’s for real.”
“I hope you’re right, General Bogan,” Raskob said. “I don’t know what the President is doing, but whatever it is he’d better be right. Khrushchev isn’t going o sit around forever and watch those planes move in on Moscow. The whole thing rests on the President’s Lbility to persuade Khrushchev it was an accident. If ie doesn’t, then we’re going to have all-out, 100 per cent, slam-bang, hell-bent war. That’s right, isn’t it, General?”
“Yes, sir, that is right,” General Bogan said.
He felt a sudden sympathy with Raskob. He was a though man, quick at making calculations and then at icing up to them. It was the first time that General
Bogan had faced the fact that everything now rested with the President. Barring some miracle, one or two of the bombers would get through. And if the Soviets did not believe the attack was innocent or made in error they would be forced to respond.
“No notion of how it happened, eh, General?” Raskob asked.
General Bogan felt an odd fuzziness, a thin coating of confusion, slide over his mind.
“No, sir, not the slightest,” he said. “They told us that the system was foolproof. Oh, some parts might break down from time to time, but the whole system would check itself out, they told us.”
“They told you,” Knapp said and there was wonderment in his voice. “Always that unknown they. Those of us who manufactured the gear, who had some notion of what it was being used for-we never told any. one that it was infallible. But somewhere in Washington they had to say it was perfect, that it couldn’t make a mistake. General, there is no such thing as a perfect system and they should have told you that.”
“Look, friend, in Washington you don’t get appropriations and bigger staff and more personnel by saying that what you’re doing is not perfect,” Raskob said roughly. “You stand up in front of the Appropriations Committee and you convince yourself that the system is perfect and then you tell the Committee it is perfect. And there isn’t a mother’s son on that Committee who can say you nay. Because we just ain’t boy geniuses at electronics and all this stuff. So we give them the dough. What the hell else can we do?”
“Nothing, not a thing,” Knapp said. “Except listen to the right people. Look, for years there has been a fellow named Fredikle, who has been working with the Rand Corporation and the Air Force on how to
reduce war by accident. He has found flaw after flaw in the system, at just. the same time that the newspapers were saying it was perfect. Kendrew over in England has talked about accidental war for years.- loud and clear. So have dozens of others. Most of us, the best of us on the civilian side,” and he spoke without pride, “we knew that a perfect system is impossible. The mistake was that no one told the public and the Congress.”
“What should we have done?” Colonel Cascio said suddenly, and his voice held a kind of baffled anger. “Just sit on our duffs while our enemy goes ahead and arms to the teeth and finally gets to a position where he can tell us to surrender and we know we have to do it?”
“No, son, we had to do what we did,” Raskob said wearily. “In politics if you sit still you are dead. I guess it’s the same in the military game. But maybe we should have recognized that past a certain point the whole damned thing was silly.”
General Bogan sensed that Knapp was in a terrible agony. His hunched and hard-driven body, his burning eyes, his ravished face, looked like a statue of anxiety. General Bogan could guess the reason: much of the machinery in that room had been developed and manufactured by Knapp and he had carried the burden of knowledge within him that it was far from foolproof. Right now he was wondering why he had not spoken out.
Only Raskob, the politically toughened man, could see the other side. His eyes remained glued on the board and when he spoke his voice was a mixture of pity and hard-bitten reality.
“Well-that’s one bomber gone. If those Soviet fighters start shaping up a bit maybe we can avoid the worst.”
The small group felt rather than saw Colonel Casdo turn in his chair. His eyes burned up at Raskob. He was oddly bent as if his body were undergoing an invisible physical torture. He did not speak, he only stared with hatred at Raskob.
Raskob looked down at him without emotion.
“There can be much worse things than the loss of six bombers, son,” Raskob said. “It’s a pity that those eighteen men have to fight their way in and. probably get killed in the process. But think a minute about all of the people, millions and billions of them, all around the world, walking around in total ignorance that they might be killed in the next few hours. Do you ever think about them? Well, that’s what politics is all about and that poor guy in the White House who has to make the big decision knows that.”
Colonel Cascio’s eyes did not change. He blinked once and then turned back to his controls.
The remaining five Vindicators were now widely scattered, but in a carefully calculated dispersion. Each was at the maximum range at which they could protect one another and be protected by the No. 6 plane. Still they were so dispersed that no single Soviet shot could down two of them.
“How are the Soviet fighters doing?” General Bogan asked, still on the intercom.
The Enemy Defense Desk responded at once.
“Apparently, General, they are badly confused by our masking and window,” the voice said. “They have not yet started to concentrate on Group 6. They are still scattered, chasing decoys.”
Somewhere in the War Room a voice cheered and instantly was joined by a score of others. General Bogan felt a kind of exultation start in his own throat, but quickly repressed it. There was a strange perversion about his feelings, a heightened sense of paradox. Again the thought flicked in and Out of his mind that he, standing before the boa
rd in the War Room, could help the Russians distinguish between plane and decoy. When he spoke there was a hard lash in his voice.
“Let’s knock that off,” he said. “This is no Goddamned football game.” There was instant silence. “Remember that. It might get hard in the next few hours.”
He looked around and saw the glint of resentment in a dozen eyes, shoulders hunched with anger. They were well trained, but not for this sort of incredible game.
“How much of her defensive gear does No. 6 still have?” General Bogan asked.
“Twenty-five per cent,” the voice said. “She is slowing down the rate of defensive fire, apparently to conserve missiles for the run on Moscow.”
On the southern flank of the Vindicators a Soviet fighter began to firm up on an intercepting course toward the closest Vindicator. The Vindicator turned away, but the Soviet blip also altered course. They Would still make an intercept.
“Fire, fire,” a voice said very close to General Bogan. He looked over and saw it was Colonel Cascio. He was half out of his chair, his teeth wet and prominent, his lips drawn back. “Fire before the bastard gets one of those long slow ones off at you.”
“Colonel, if you say one more word like that I will throw you out of this room and have you court-martialed,” General Bogan said in a low voice.
No one else in the War Room had heard the exchange.
Colonel Cascio whirled in his half-bent posture, like a boxer badly hurt and covering. He stared at General Bogan and then his eyes cleared. He sat down.
The Soviet fighter was joined by three other fighters and they formed a long box formation as they ran down their intercept. The Vindicator jinked once more. So did the Soviet fighters. Instantly the Vindicator fired four missiles. The Soviet planes each fired a single missile and continued to speed toward the Vindicator. At the same moment their detection gear told them they were fired upon and the Soviet fighters turned sharply away. It was too late. Five seconds later all of them were destroyed. But their four missiles ran with an agonizing slowness toward the Vindicator. It turned and ran, but was not fast enough. The missiles came in remorselessly. Again there was the merging, again the slow, exploding, engulfing blip.
General Bogan felt his fingertips shaking against his trousers. He felt for a moment as if he were being exposed to some strange torture; some spikeike split of his allegiance; some rupturing of his life. He yearned for the bottle of whisky in a faraway office.
As if by order, the breaths of two-score men were released from their lungs. It made a weird contrapuntal chorus of sighs. Congressman Raskob muttered something to himself. It sounded like “Four more to go.”
The phone on the President’s desk rang. It was a strong unbroken ring. The President looked at Buck, arched his eyebrows, and Buck picked up his phone.
It was Moscow.
The first voice that spoke was that of Khrushchev.
The moment he heard the voice something in Buck’s mind went alert. He heard perfectly and literally what Khrushchev said, but he also sensed something else. It was the same person speaking but in a different voice. The voice ended each sentence with an odd lifting sound.
As Buck translated the literal words he searched back over his experience. Something was there, elusive and subtle, but heavy with meaning.
“We have only a few hours left, Mr. President,” Khrushchev said. “How should we use them? You have launched an offensive attack against our country. Without provocation or cause. You state it is an accident. But meanwhile we lie defenseless before you.”
“Not quite defenseless, Premier Khrushchev,” the President said. “You have hundreds of fighter planes, countless ICBMs, missiles for defense. In fact in your recent Warsaw speech you boasted of the invulnerability of the Soviet forces.”
Krushchev grunted. Then oddly and out of character, he sighed.
Instantly things fell into place in Buck’s mind. He recalled listening to a record at the Monterey Language School made by a Russian peasant in which the ultimate in resignation and despair was precisely this sequence of petulance, a grunt, and a sigh. Even when joined to the most ordinary words their meaning was one of great sorrow-a sorrow so great that no words could convey it. It was not a matter even of inflection. It was a matter of sound and wind and something deep in the chest.
Buck reached for a pad of paper in front of him and in quick bold letters he wrote “Khrushchev’s mood is sorrow.” The President read it upside down as quiddy as Buck wrote it. When he had finished the President drew a large circle around the statement to indicate he understood.
The silence on the line went past the point of tension. The tiny, and usually inaudible, screech of static now seemed to be a scream in their ears. The President started to doodle on the pad in front of him. He traced the head of an arrow, started to draw the shaft and then, very deliberately, lifted his pencil from the pad and held it between his forefingers, the eraser touching the forefinger of his left hand, the sharp point of lead pushed into the flesh of his right forefinger. His hands were steady.
When Khrushchev spoke, it was to Buck like a bell fractured, a flash that ripped darkness, a pinprick through the eardrum. And yet, oddly, his voice was gentle.
“It is ironic, gentlemen, but now, at this moment when we still have time left, the time that is left is empty and without use,” Khrushchev said. Buck’s confidence was strengthened. He was certain that Khrushchev was in a sorrow so deep that it was close to agony. “There is a period during which we can do nothing. After that? I do not know. If the bombs fall on Moscow I know. We will strike back.”
Buck translated quickly, but the President seemed to be listening abstractedly, his head cocked to one side as if he were making a difficult calculation. He nodded at Buck, the calculation made.
“What luck have you had in your attacks on our bombers?” the President asked.
“Luck? No luck at all,” Khrushchev said. “But earned results, yes. By earned results we have gotten 860 of our supersonic fighters vectored in on the hundreds of targets which suddenly appeared on our radar. scope. That, Mr. President, was a tender moment. One group of our experts was convinced that your scientists had developed a method of camouflaging the approach of bombers until they were actually in our territory. They argued that what appeared as decoys were actually real bombers. They urged that we retaliate instantly with all of our ICBMs and our bombers.”
“Why did you not do that?” the President asked. Buck looked at him sharply. The President nodded for him to translate the question. To Buck it seemed brusque and antagonistic.
“Ah, that is a nice question,” Khrushchev said. Buck was bewildered by some inflection, some subtle inclination, so the fugitive meaning. Khrushchev’s words were as ironic and heavy as before, but his delivery was evasive.
“Why did you not launch an offensive?” the President said again.
Buck hesitated. The word “offensive” in Russian can take several different meanings. In one sense it means to question a man’s virility. In another to be crudely egotistical. In another to be a challenge. Buck looked at the President. With the gnawing tension growing within, he knew he must not give the wrong word to Khrushchev. It might be enough to trigger the peasant temper, to bring the powerful fingers stabbing down on the buttons.
Buck made up his mind.
“Why did you not defend yourself by counterattacking?” he translated the President’s words.
Khrushchev said in a quiet voice, “I held back the retaliation because I still had time to take the gamble that you were sincere. Also I knew that it would be the end for both of us. A peasant who becomes a politician, Mr. President, is not without insight. The generals are not happy. Just as I can guess your generals are not happy with you. But there is a time for common sense… which occurs as often among the low as among the mighty.”
The President started to speak and to his own surprise Buck found himself lifting his hand, restraining the President. The Russian was thinking al
oud and Buck sensed some gain in not interrupting him. The President nodded.
“Of the 860 planes we sent up 70 were, by great valor and ingenuity, able to attack one or another of your Vindicators,” Khrushchev went on. He paused. “We have been able to destroy only two of your planes.”
“What were your casualties?” the President asked.
“Very high,” Khrushchev said. “Out of the 70 planes which launched attacks somewhere around 65 were destroyed. And by means of which we have no understanding. Most of them simply exploded in midair. And for that we got two of your bombers.”
“What of the other four?” the President asked.
“There is little to be optimistic about,” Khrushchev said.
Incredibly, doubting his senses, Buck heard Khrushchev yawn. He looked up sharply at the President. The President had heard it also and his lips went white. Then, again from some buried part of his mind, Buck remembered a Russian at Monterey who had yawned all during a seminar-and committed suicide the next morning.
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Khrushchev said.
Now his voice had something of the old toughness in it. “Only time will tell.”
“Time must not be allowed to tell,” the President said, and his voice was so cold that Buck was startled. “I offered to give you our help in shooting down those Vindicators. You refused it. What is your attitude now?”
Khrushchev hesitated. The President bad put it as nakedly, as bluntly, as one could put it. Buck licked his lips. Instantly he wondered if Khrushchev was doing the same.
“Mr. President, I agree to setting up the conference line between your tactical people in Omaha and my people in Kiev,” Khrushchev said. His tone was still quiet. “If there is a chance, we must try and kill the Vindicators. Wait-while I make arrangements.”
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