The Day Before Midnight

“Is there any late word on what’s under that canvas?” an officer wanted to know.

“Our analysts in the Pentagon think it might be the emplacement of a heavy artillery piece,” said Puller. “In Nam, we used 105s to fire flechette canisters at the NVA. It’s possible they brought a heavy piece up there disassembled. Or maybe it’s a Vulcan or one of those fast-firing Czech 23-mm cannons. You’ll know soon enough.”

When he wasn’t talking, Peter sat with a kind of rigid politeness through all this. He knew it wouldn’t do for these guys to see into what he was thinking. But there was a joke in it all, and he thought of the line, all dressed up and no place to go, for that’s exactly what it might work out to be if he couldn’t get them through the door.

“And then Dr. Thiokol opens the door, and Delta goes in, and it’s all over but the cheering,” said Puller. “Right, Dr. Thiokol?” Peter nodded.

Right, he thought, nodding politely, except he had no idea in hell what the door code could be and so knew only one terrible truth: Aggressor-One had done it.

Welcome to Armageddon.

Bells were ringing, men were hopping around.

Peter looked up from his daze. He heard them shouting, a lot of nos, and no ways. The general discipline of the briefing was completely disintegrating.

“What’s going on?” he asked the man next to him.

“Didn’t you hear, man?” said the fellow, a helicopter pilot. “They got an ID on these guys. They say they’re Russians.”

And he heard Skazy talking about something called a Spetsnaz Silo Seizure team, but others were saying no, no, it couldn’t be, why’d they want to blow away their own country, what the hell did it mean?

And then there was silence.

Peter saw they were all looking at him.

“Dr. Thiokol, here. You make some sense of this for us, will you please?”

He handed Peter a yellow teletype sheet, with the words PRIORITY: FLASH across the top. He read the contents swiftly.

FBI hq believe team leader of aggressor forces at South Mountain to be PASHIN, ARKADY Colonel-General, GRU, First Deputy of GRU, head of Directorate V, Operational Intelligence. Subject PASHIN according to CIA records has primary responsibility in GRU the past decade for penetration of U.S. strategic warfare compounds. He is a graduate of the Intelligence Faculty of the General Staff Academy; the Training Centre of Illegals; the Military- Diplomatic Academy; the Military Institute of Foreign Languages, where he learned to speak brilliant English; the Special Faculty of Higher Communications; the Kiev Higher Military Command School; the Special Faculty of the Second Kharkov Higher Military Aviation and Engineering School, and the General Staff Academy. He spent a decade in United States attached to the Soviet U.N. mission. One identifying peculiarity is that he is only high-ranking Soviet command-staff figure on record to have formally rejected the use of his patronymic. In November of 1982 ARKADY SIMONOVICH PASHIN formally notified his headquarters that he would henceforth be known simply as ARKADY PASHIN. No information is available as to the reason for such an unprecedented decision. None of our sources have any idea as to its meaning. One last item: Subject PASHIN has been twice named as possible sponsor of group known as PAMYAT (Memory), thought to be a collection of right wing thinkers agitated into action by Gorbachev’s apparent willingness to meet with West, sign an INF, and to permit policy of glasnost. PAMYAT has senior analysts worried; information on it, however, is scant. More follows.

Peter put it down.

“Is it some kind of coup?” asked Dick Puller. “Would the Soviet military, or this nut-case PAMYAT outfit, be taking over the country, and they want their finger on a nuclear trigger somewhere for a certain period of time?”

“No,” said Peter. He realized in a second what it was all about. He saw it. He had been pulled along the pathways of the same argument, knew its temptations, its hypnotic allure. He knew how it could seduce a man into believing in the moral good of pushing the button.

“No, it’s not a coup. It’s simply logic, or rather strategic logic, and the willingness to follow it to the end.”

He gave a grim little smile. He knew Pashin, knew how his mind worked, because it worked the way his own did.

“You see,” he said, “it’s really very simple. This Pashin … he’s done something no one else has ever done. He’s figured out how to win World War Three.”

He felt the power of Pashin’s mind, its reach, its grasp, its subtleties and, most of all, its will.

He took a deep breath.

“Pashin believes that MX is a first strike weapon, and that when it is fully operational and we have the advantage, we will push the button and blow them away — furthermore, that by our own logic, we have to. That’s where these missiles take us. And since the MX is so clearly superior in terms of accuracy and silo-busting capacity and since our own command, communication, and control system is so fragile and so unable to withstand a Soviet first strike, we’ve got to use it. It’s use it or lose it, and he thinks we’ll use it. That’s his first position: it’s unassailable, and I can’t say — no man can say — that it’s not a distinct possibility. It’s not that we want to, it’s that we’ll be afraid not to.”

There was silence.

“So from his position the choice isn’t between peace and war, it’s between losing and winning an already inevitable war. That’s all. Once you accept that, it all follows, particularly if he’s of a conservative bent, as his membership in this PAMYAT thing would indicate. There’s going to be a nuclear war. It will be fought as soon as our system is operational, in six months to a year, via an American first strike with clear weapons superiority, and a complete victory for the United States, with all their cities ruined and all their birds fractured in their silos and all their command bunkers turned to barbecue pits. Or it will be fought now, tonight, in a few hours, and”—he paused, letting it sink in—“and they will win.”

There was silence in the room.

“This is how it works. He fires our MX into the Soviet Union. But it’s important to understand the targeting of this particular missile. Those ten warheads are zeroed on what we call third and fourth generation hard targets, as opposed to soft targets such as cities, people, that sort of thing. Our W87s are sublimely accurate; they never miss; they’re sure as death and taxes. And because of their accuracy the bombs can be quite small. So the ten warheads deploy against three key long-range radar installations, the Soviet air defense command, a deep leadership bunker thirty miles outside Moscow — the point is to decapitate their leadership — and five Siberian missile silos, which, by the time they strike, will be empty. The reason, of course, is that once the Soviet radar identifies the ten incomings, the Russians go crazy and punch out with everything they’ve got. Our ten nukes detonate with a total megatonnage of thirty-five; they take out the installations I’ve named and they kill — I don’t know, tops maybe thirty thousand people. Seven to nine minutes later, they hit us with four thousand megatons; they tag all our cities and missile silos; they EMP our radars and computers to craziness, they kill maybe three hundred million of us; they effectively wipe us out. That’s it. Game, set, and match, Soviet Union. Essentially the point of this Pashin’s exercise is to goad his own country into what amounts to a first strike, because the premium on a first strike is so high. But of course neither the Politburo nor any sane command group would push the button. So he does it himself, maybe with the help or under the inspiration of this Pamyat thing, and with this little commando unit, based on his intelligence. See? It’s easy. It’s more than easy, it’s brilliant. And when it’s over, he climbs out of the mountain, a chopper picks him up, and he’s tsar of all the Russias.”

“But our subs, with our subs we can—”

“No,” said Peter, “sorry, but they’ve got our subs zeroed. They can take some of them out in the first few minutes of the spasm. Then they can hunt down and kill the Tacamo VLF aircraft that are our primary sub links and are set to deliver the retaliation message. They’ll go straight for those babies, jam them, EMP them, or just blow them away. The subs will be out of contact, and will wait to fire while the Russians hunt them down in the following couple of weeks. At the worst, they’ll have plenty of time to evacuate their cities. They can outlast or outsmart the