mechanical. He could see her shaking; she had wrapped her arms tightly around herself, as if the fear had made her cold. Her eyes were unfocused. Jack longed to touch her and to make the men go away.
“We don’t have a lot of money,” he said through a clog of phlegm in his throat, though he was certain it wasn’t money the men wanted. But he couldn’t begin to guess what they were after. What could
“Come this way, please,” said the leader.
They went into the living room.
“Now, it’s very simple, Mr. Hummel. We have a job to be done. That is, we
There was something remote in his voice — not an accent so much as the effort to pronounce each word perfectly. It had an odd, disconnected sound to it.
“And if — I’m just asking — if I don’t?”
“Best to come, Mr. Hummel. We’ll be leaving some people here. Best to come, Mr. Hummel, and avoid unpleasantness.”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Jack. “Please don’t hurt them. Please, I’ll do anything. Just don’t—”
“Mr. Hummel, if you do what you’re told, no harm at all will come to your wife and children. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“You may say good-bye. If all goes well, you’ll be back by noon. If not, it may be a day or so. Your children, however, and your wife, will be perfectly all right.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Jack,
“Fine. Then we are off.”
“I suppose I’m an idiot for asking. But where are we going?”
“To meet the general, Mr. Hummel.”
0800
Hapgood had tendencies toward comedy which he could not suppress. In his third grade class picture, for example, amid all the still, grave faces, his is the only blur; he is laughing at something private, his face gone in the smear of movement.
“Donny,” his mother had said, “Donny, I declare, what
As it turned out, very little could be done with Donny. He laughed his way through high school and college and got extremely high grades. He laughed his way into a marriage and nearly out of it. In his profession, his humorous impulses continued subversively, for he made his living amid men who laughed at very little because there was very little to laugh at. But he could not resist: In his infantile scrawl he had crayoned a large sign on a piece of shirt cardboard and taped it above the heavy steel blast door to the launch control center, where its orange childishness fluttered against the rows and rows of switches, the bright red NO LONE ZONE imperatives from SAG stamped everywhere in sans serif — forbidding solitude in proximity to nuclear weapons systems — the constellations of red and green status lights, the big twenty-four-hour clock, and the dizzying mesh of wires, cables, and solid-state units that comprised a communications bank comparable to that of a small midwestern top-forty radio station.
WELCOME, the cardboard sign said, TO THE MIRV GRIFFIN SHOW.
Then, just today, on the console panel itself, above the launch enabling keyhole, the famous little metal slot which would, if penetrated, set in motion the probable end of the world in fire, he had added, in ball-point, on an index card, AND HEEEERE’S MIRV….
The star of the show, MIRV, was the Multiple Independently Targeted Reentry Vehicle, perched in a cluster atop the bird nested at the center of Hapgood’s command. The ten MIRVs and their second bananas, the W87/Mk- 21 thirty-five-kiloton fissionable warhead, sat atop a tube of black titanium dubbed, with a sense of humor that the great Hapgood could only aim for, Peacekeeper.
This was more famous in the lexicon as MX, Missile Experimental. No longer an experiment, it stood now in its super-hard silo not one hundred feet from Hapgood, long, silent, and enigmatic. A large-payload solid-fuel cold- launch four-stage intercontinental ballistic missile, it was seventy-one feet long and ninety-two inches wide and at launch weight 193,000 pounds. It was fired by three solid-propellant booster motors, with storable liquid hypergolic propellant in the fourth-stage post-boost vehicle. It was guided by an advanced inertial reference sphere and delivered a payload of 7,200 pounds. Its targets included all Soviet “super-hard” control centers, fourth generation ICBM silos, and “very hard leadership bunkers.” It was, in short, a head hunter, a Kremlin buster, a leader killer, an assassin.
“If anybody from Squadron sees that,” his partner Romano informed him, pointing at the new bit of comedy taped to the launch board, “your ass is history. This is a no-laugh zone.”
“Squadron,” replied Hapgood with a snicker, “is two thousand miles away. Out in Wy-fucking-oming, if memory serves, where the deer and the antelope roam. We are all by our lonesomes in Burkittsville, Maryland, the ultimate lone zone of the entire universe. Moreover,” he continued in his grand voice, aching to get a smile out of the dour but focused Romano, “if I am going to unload thirty-five megatons of nuclear doom on top of the Soviet Union and face my maker as one-half of the greatest mass-murder team in history, I’d prefer to do it with a smile on my face and a song in my heart. You’re too fucking
Romano, a captain to Hapgood’s first lieutenant, two years older and maybe ten years wiser, simply made the unhappy face of a man sucking a ReaLemon bottle. Still, Romano would go easy on the kid: whatever his excesses, Hapgood was the best, the sharpest, the smartest missile officer Romano had ever seen. He knew the procedures and he knew the boards as if he’d invented them.
Besides, Hapgood was largely correct. He and his friend and superior officer occupied the only strategic missile silo east of the Mississippi. Originally a Titan prototype silo, from the late fifties when the liquid-fuel Titan seemed to be The Answer, it had never been completely developed and was left fallow after Air Force enthusiasm had shifted in favor of the western-states-based solid-fuel Minuteman in 1962. Now the installation, on a bit of government real estate in central Maryland, had been hastened into operational condition because it was available and obscure, being located halfway between the Pentagon in Washington and the National Alternate Military Command Center at Fort Richie, and also because the Titan configuration called for basing bird and LCC in the same hole rather than remote from each other, as was Minuteman doctrine.
“Rick, I just had a flash from God,” Hapgood suddenly blurted out. “He wants us to redecorate! Think about it, Rick! A launch control center done over in—
In spite of himself, Romano smiled.
“God, Donny, what the fuck are we going to do with you?”
“Pray I turn my key, if turn it I must,” said Hapgood, touching the red titanium key he wore around his neck on a chain and tucked into his white jump suit’s breast pocket.
“But who knows,” Hapgood continued, “I might, like, not be in the right mood, you dig?”
Romano laughed at the kid again. If the word came, Donny would turn, on cue, and send the bird on its flight.
It was another day in the hole. They would pass it as they had passed so many others, one day in three, one hundred feet underground in the hardened command capsule of a missile launch site, aware that if World War HI were fought, they were the ones who would fight it, at exactly the same time they were convinced that their very presence guaranteed that it would never be fought.
The chamber of their drama was a one-piece capsule sunk deep into the earth so that its interior curved at the ceiling line, increasing the
