commander around, and he allowed himself to relax a little. “Hold on to it for a minute, I think it’s Tom” Stewart said and he went over to his console where he punched in Mccann’s car radio frequency and picked up his phone. “Little Bird, this is Whiz Bang, you copy” he radioed. There was no answer. “Anything else on the rest of the board” he called across to the technician. The other four duty officers had looked up from their monitors. “No, Sir”
“Little Bird, this is Whiz Bang, you copy, over” Still there was no answer, and Stewart slowly put down his handset. If Mccann had wanted to show their new CO the inside of one of the missile bays, that was well and good. They would have entered through the maintenance hatch. So why the hell had they opened the main bay doors? He picked up the Missile Ready red phone and punched in the number for the missile bunker with the open door. The instant the connection was made, an extremely loud Klaxon would sound in the bay. Loud enough to wake the dead, he thought, though just how close to the truth he was, he could not expect as yet.
His alert crew phone buzzed, and Stewart picked it up with his left hand while still holding the Missile Ready phone with his right. “Operations OD” he answered. “Gerry, this is Jim Hunte, we’ve got a missile bay open light on our board over here. Ah, Six-P-Two”
“We’re showing the same thing” Stewart said. Captain James Hunte was the Army’s on-duty alert crew chief on this shift. They were old friends. “Is it an alarm malfunction”
“Doesn’t look like it. Our new CO showed up today. Tom is out showing him around. Looks like they opened the door”
“Well, raise them and tell them to close it. That’s Army property, old top, remember”
“I tried, Jim. No answer”
The line was silent for just a moment. In his other ear Stewart could hear the soft buzz indicating the missile bay Klaxon was still blaring.
“Did you try the missile bay red line”
“I’m on it right now. It’s ringing through, but there’s been no response. “All right, Gerry, no screwing around now. Should I call Colonel Collingwood or will you send someone out there to see what the hell those guys are doing”
Stewart was an engineer out of Cal Tech. He had taken the Air Force Officers’ Command Course, but he was not a decision maker unless it involved complex electronic circuitry. Interservice rivalry notwithstanding, this time he made a yery bad decision. “I’ll go myself” he said. “Collingwood could have one of his people there in a lot less time than it could take for you to drive out”
“Let’s not blow the whistle just yet. It’s my CO and Tom Mccann”
“You’re calling the shots, Gerry” Hunte said coolly. “But I don’t mind telling you that the situation is making me nervous. That’s an armed nuclear missile out there”
“Yeah” Stewart said. “I’ll get right back to you. “Do that” Hunte said, and he hung up. Stewart put down both telephones and grabbed his uniform blouse. “I’m heading topside, be on TAC ONE” he told Lieutenant Hartley, his Fire Control Board officer. He took the elevator to the surface, signed out with security, and jumped into his station wagon, peeling rubber as he pulled away from the Missile Control bunker and headed back into the staging field. “Whiz Bang, this is OD One, any change on the board” he radioed back to the situation room. “That’s a negative”
“Keep me advised” The afternoon was warm. Stewart drove with the windows down. He had been in Germany for thirty months, only six more to go and he’d be rotated back to the States, a move he was looking forward to, though so far this assignment had been a piece of cake. Why now, he asked himself. He did not want to get into a fight between his new CO and Army security, but he had a feeling it was coming. Shit runs downhill, he thought wryly. And at this moment it was two lieutenant colonels, a major, and another captain versus his own two bars. He was definitely at the bottom of the hill. He brightened a little with the thought that this could be nothing but a test of his own abilities. It was possible the new CO was pulling a little impromptu test simply to see what the OD would do about it. If only it turned out to be that simple, he thought. A quarter of a mile from the missile bunker he slowed down and turned onto the gravel road that led back into the woods. If he didn’t know better he would have sworn that something very heavy had recently come up the road. Something with wide tires.
Something very big. And his heart began to thump in his chest, a tight feeling at the pit of his stomach. Coming into the bunker yard he slammed on his brakes and sat for a long moment. The missile bunker doors were open, and the bunker was empty. The Pershing II missile and its transporter were missing. It was hard to keep his thoughts straight.
He jumped out of the car and raced across the yard and into the bunker itself. Major Mccann lay on his back, his eyes open, a small black hole in the middle of his forehead. “Oh, shit” Stewart swore.
The transporter itself was nothing more than a flatbed truck on which the thirty-four-and-a-half-foot missile lay in its launch cradle. The tractor was a low-slung, armor-plated tenwheeler in which the driver and normal launch crew of three rode in bucket seats. It drove like a semi truck but steered almost like a tank, capable of speeds up to eighty miles per hour on the open highway, and twenty-five miles per hour over open terrain.
Only the largest of trees or reinforced tank traps could stop it.
Kurshin barreled down the main transport road in excess of fifty miles per hour. He had timed his departure from the missile bunker so that the last perimeter patrol had passed five minutes ago and would not be back for another five to seven minutes. He hunched forward so that he could see better through the forward Lexan-covered slits as the paved road gave way suddenly to a narrow gravel track that split abruptly left and right. The tall wire mesh fence was less than fifty yards straight ahead. Kurshin eased up on the accelerator and downshifted so that at the moment of impact he would have more reserve power. The transporter lurched over a big hump in the unpaved road and as he recovered, the sixty-two-ton rig hit the fence, cutting through it like a hot knife through soft butter. He was in a line of small trees an instant later, crashing through them almost as easily as he had the fence, and then the covering fringe of forest gave way to a long, narrow field that sloped downward toward the Stuttgart Autobahn about four miles away. Kurshin slowed the big machine even further so that he was going barely twenty miles per hour. No doubt there was a sensor on the missile bay door that would have rung an alarm in the Missile Control situation room. There were probably perimeter breach alarms as well. By now they’d know that one of their nuclear missiles was missing. The question was: What would they do about it? From what he had seen so far, security was so incredibly lax that they might not do anything for several precious minutes. Time was on his side. Twelve minutes, he figured, from the moment he’d hit the fence until he was at the autobahn. With one hand on the control column, he activated the rig’s rearward-looking television cameras. He could see the path he’d taken through the woods and down the grassy field. There were no pursuers so far. Next, he activated the skyward radar. Immediately several blips showed up on the narrow screen, but none of them seemed to be converging on his position. After a moment he decided that as incredible as it might seem no one was after him. The hill steepened, a shallow creek crossing at the bottom before the land rose sharply upward about fifty feet to the autobahn. The big tundra tires rolled easily across the bed of the creek, the heavy trailer and eight-ton payload lurching behind him, and then he was grinding up the hill, toward the cars passing along the divided highway. He spotted the gray Mercedes 220D parked on the paved shoulder about fifty yards to the south, and he immediately angled that way, downshifting again, crashing the gears, the big tires biting into the soft dirt, the machine giving a final lurch as it came up over the crest of the hill and crashed through the knee-high aluminum safety barrier at the side of the road. He crossed both lanes of traffic and dipped partway down into the grassy median strip before he got the big machine straightened out. A dark blue Fiat was suddenly there, and he crashed into the car, the big tires climbing up and over the small car, crushing it. A Citron truck, braking hard to avoid crashing into the transporter, fishtailed, hit the median strip sideways and flipped end over end into the oncoming traffic in the opposite two lanes, bursting into flames as it disintegrated. Kurshin skidded the transporter to a halt opposite the waiting car, the brakes locking, the big tires jumping. Traffic in all four lanes was screeching to a halt, in some cases skidding out of control, sliding down into the median, crashing off the security rail, or tailending other cars. It was pandemonium. Two armed men got out of the Mercedes, one of them rushing back to the rocket on its trailer. Kurshin opened the door and jumped down onto the road.
“You’ve actually got it” Ivan Yegorov said, his eyes bright. He’d changed his name, but he was a swarthy Georgian with deep-set dark eyes.
“Cover our back” Kurshin snapped, and he hurried back to where Dieter Schey, a former East German rocket engineer, was setting up the plastique explosives around the rocket casing, about two feet forward of the recessed vanes. Schey worked methodically as if this were his normal duty. He strapped a broad plastic collar around the forty-inch rocket, and to this he attached the separate shaped plastique charges into which he inserted a radio-
