World in Flames

“Hands on keys,” came Cochrane’s confirmation.

“Initiate on my mark. Five, four, three, two, one. Now. I’ll watch the clock.”

“I’ve got the light,” said Shirley Cochrane. “Light on. Light off.”

“Release key,” said Melissa.

“Key released.”

Even now Shirley Cochrane half expected that the launch code would not come in, that the vote required from another LCC — launch control center — which was required before they could go to “strategic alert” would never come and that instead an ILC — inhibit launch command — would come in its place.

But the launch code did come, as the yellow lights turned to white into the waiting mode for “launch-fire- release”—the alert’s arrival announced by a high-pitched electronic ringing and then the voice of the man they had never seen, only heard, delivering the sixteen-word, four-numeral mixed sequence in clear, calm, modulated tones: “Sierra… Papa… Foxtrot… Hotel… Tango… Lima… Acknowledge.”

“Copied,” said Cochrane, advising Melissa, “I see a valid message.”

“I agree,” confirmed Melissa. “Go to step one checklist. Launch keys inserted.” Both women unbuckled and went to the midpoint red box, each of them taking out her red-tagged brass key and returning to her console, flipping up the clear safety cover and inserting the key, then buckling up again.

“Ready?” said Melissa.

“Ready.”

“Function select key, “ordered Melissa. “Switch to off.’ “

“It is.”

“MRTCEP to MRT,” instructed Melissa.

“MRT.”

“Sixty-five select.”

“Sixty-five.”

“Initiate activator clockwise.”

“Activator clockwise,” confirmed Cochrane, her delicate hand turning the black knob hard right.

“Take up alarm,” instructed Melissa. A deep buzzer sounded. Melissa then reached forward to the progress control panel, turning the knob clockwise to the fourteen-hundred-watts position.

Soon, after the launch code was checked, the keys were moved from “set code used” to “launch.”

“One mark!” commanded Melissa.

Both keys were turned.

“Got my print?” asked Melissa. “You armed?”

A bell started ringing, but above the sound was another, like a waterfall growing in crescendo, the concrete-muffled sound of cold-gas-forced launch.

“Mark your process,” said Melissa. “… Out of inner security… outer security… missiles gone. All gone.”

With that, two MX ICBMs with twenty MARVed warheads, each of 335 kilotons per warhead, were en route to their military targets in the USSR. Three targets, ICBM complexes in Kamchatka Peninsula, were allotted two warheads apiece against superhardened silos. The first of the two warheads allotted each of these three targets was set to explode in high air burst in order to prevent “fratricide”—in which one bomb’s electromagnetic pulse, combining with airborne debris, could rise as high as sixty-two thousand feet, interfering with the second warhead’s trajectory.

Every one of the MX warheads, unlike those of the Soviets, had been tested in the United States on a north/south trajectory in the Pacific, their circular error of probability reduced to only plus or minus three hundred feet. They were ideal for counterforce attacks — against military targets.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

In Moscow, General Marchenko, already in shock over the news that his son’s Fulcrum had been shot down over North Korea, and Admiral Smernov sat whey-faced, having just scrambled for safety with the rest of the twenty-six Politburo and STAVKA members through one of the tunnels once used by Rasputin to see the czarina when he was out of favor with the czar. The superhardened concrete bunkers below the Council of Ministers had been ruled out, the VIPs fearing that explosives set by the enemy commando raid in progress would entomb them under rubble.

Inside the Lenin Library, where the secret tunnel exited, Marchenko found himself sitting close to the admiral. He couldn’t stand Smernov’s breath. Though he had wanted to broach the subject, albeit diplomatically, several times in his career, Marchenko had resisted, and he did so now, for he neither had the courage nor the instincts for political suicide. It was a small thing, he knew, and perhaps with the blood of Suzlov still fresh on their hands, his preoccupation with the admiral’s breath was a kind of petty escape, an avoidance of the terrible responsibility in which they were now all involved. But what other choice had they? Even before the meeting had begun, it was obvious President Suzlov had been chafing at the bit to order chemical and nuclear artillery weapons used against the NATO front. He had been waving reports from Beijing of American nuclear aggression and announcing with growing hysteria that he was ready to unleash the entire Soviet arsenal against the Americans, that he wouldn’t go down in history as the leader of his nation’s greatest defeat. Marchenko and Chernko had argued with him, but they could see no way out. He was set on his course and said he would use his power of veto. But above all else, it was the SAS commando raid, still in progress inside the Kremlin, and not Suzlov’s ranting that had persuaded Chernko, the natural leader among the rest, that drastic action was called for — the SAS attack a clear sign that if the enemy’s conventional forces could reach so far into the Soviet Union, then it was indeed the beginning of the end. Chernko was a man of unfettered ambition, but he was always the realist. He knew that they must quickly come to some “arrangement.”

“What arrangement?” Suzlov had screamed, quite deranged by now and having already launched the ICBMs from the Kola Peninsula against America. Reason was beyond him, but the nine-millimeter parabellum bullet from Chernko’s Walther P38 wasn’t. It settled the matter.

Now, even as their SPETS elite guards were trying to dislodge and annihilate the SAS attackers, they were, under Chernko’s leadership, formulating peace proposals to NATO. Marchenko moved away from the admiral toward Chernko, who immediately interpreted this as a political move away from the navy and into his camp. For the wrong reasons, he was correct. Marchenko, who was opposed to Suzlov in the final meeting, now wanted to disassociate himself, despite his military rank, from the three chiefs of the armed forces, for from the moment he had seen Suzlov temyat’ urn—”cracking up”—and heard of the ICBM launch from Kola, he knew the Soviet Union was nearing the abyss. Only with Chernko’s power, with the KGB at his disposal, could they hope to convince the others, particularly Admiral Smernov, not to launch from the nuclear fleet and hope to persuade the cocky, relatively untouched Siberian republic to surrender.

But the admiral had been stubborn in the Council of Ministers’ meeting, questioning whether the reports of Soviet launches from the Kola could not have been merely enemy propaganda to justify an all-out attack on the Soviet Union. “Have we firsthand reports from Murmansk?” he’d asked defiantly.

At that point, Marchenko had lost patience with Smernov.

“Are you mad, Admiral? Madder than Suzlov? What do you think reports will tell you? Is it photographs of the mushroom clouds you want to see — or the dust cloud that will obliterate the sun?” Marchenko had remembered the awesome outpouring of the American volcano Mount Saint Helen’s many years ago, its dark cloud darkening entire cities, turning midday into midnight, and the volcano’s explosion was only a fraction of the nuclear arsenals both sides had at their disposal. “Is it the dust of millions of vaporized bodies you wish to see? We have no time to lose, Admiral. If we don’t contact the Americans now, they will bury us.” He paused. “The trouble is, Admiral, we don’t know exactly where most of our warheads will land. Our propaganda has covered our technological deficiencies for years, but you and I — all of us here — know that the circular error of probability of your submarine-launched missiles might be as large as twenty miles. Anyway—”and here Marchenko turned to the KGB chief “—Comrade Chernko will attest to the fact that we have reports of shoddy workmanship— explosive bolts that don’t explode to separate the second and third rocket stages. Let alone the navigation system.”