> TELEMETRY LOST, EKV #7
> TRACK NOT CONTINUED, BALLISTIC TARGET “GOLF”
> SUCCESSFUL INTERCEPT PROBABILITY = 75.1 %
Lionel scanned the last line.
Maybe they’d gotten all three of the warheads already, and the remaining four were all decoys. Then again, maybe all three successful intercepts had been decoys, and all three of the real warheads were still out there. The only way to be certain was to destroy them
The tracking computer bleeped again, and new lines of text appeared on the screen:
> TELEMETRY CONTINUED PAST INTERCEPT POINT, EKV #2
> TRACK CONTINUED PAST INTERCEPT POINT, BALLISTIC TARGET “BRAVO”
> SUCCESSFUL INTERCEPT PROBABILITY = 00.0 %
The words hit Lionel like a punch in the stomach. Zero percent? Telemetry continued past Intercept Point?
“Oh shit!” one of the console operators said. “We missed one of them. One of the warheads got past us.”
“Calm down,” Lionel said. His voice contained a calmness that he did not feel. “Maybe it wasn’t a real warhead. Maybe it was one of the decoys.”
Please, just let it be the one, he thought. Let us get the rest of them. Let us knock the rest of them out of the sky. Please.
But the next alert message announced the failure of EKV #5, followed closely by the failures of EKV #3, and EKV #1.
Of the seven inbound warhead shapes, the ground-based interceptor missiles had managed to kill only three. Four of the targets had gotten past them.
Lionel could see them in his mind’s eye: four darkly conical shapes, streaking through the blackness of space, bending their trajectories downward. Toward his country. Toward the very people who depended upon Lionel to protect them.
How many of those shapes were nuclear bombs? One of them? None? Three? There was no way of knowing, but the warheads would shortly be passing into the reentry phase of their trajectories. Within the next few minutes, the question would answer itself.
Lionel stared at the screen, and the alert messages announcing the failed intercepts. It was up to the Navy, now. He hoped they were up to the challenge.
Like many of his fellow Air Force types, Lionel didn’t think much of the swab jockeys. They had too much mouth, too much money, and not enough of the Right Stuff. But he’d give a year’s pay to see them show up the Air Force right now. If they could knock down all four of the remaining targets, he’d plant a big sloppy kiss on the first Navy type he met. Male or female, eighteen years old or eighty, seaman or admiral. Lionel didn’t care. He just wanted them to finish the job. Nothing else mattered. Nothing.
Harvey Calloway muted the audio on the little bedroom television and hobbled over toward the window. With the sound turned off, he could hear the noise from outside more clearly. Down in the street, car horns were blaring and people were shouting. Harvey heard a pop in the distance that might have been a gunshot, but he couldn’t tell. He was in his nineties and even with his hearing aid turned all the way up, his hearing was pretty bad.
The window was only seven or eight feet away, but it took him a minute or so to cover the distance. The arthritis in his hips and knees made his steps short and difficult, the soles of his slippers scuffing painfully across the carpet in the shuffling walk that his great granddaughter called ‘choo-choo feet.’ He hated having to walk like that, but at least he could still make it around on his own. A lot of guys his age couldn’t get out of bed. Hell, come to think of it, most guys his age were already dead.
He was grateful to still be walking, arthritis and all. But he missed the bouncy swagger of his youth. Harvey had been something else in those days. Nothing but balls, good looks, and a big toothy grin. And man had he cut a figure in his uniform.
Harvey had been a U.S. Navy fighter pilot during the big one. In ’42, he’d flown F4F Wildcats against the Vichy French over North Africa. And later he’d gone eyeball-to-eyeball with the Japanese at places like Tarawa, Leyte Gulf, and Okinawa. He’d even bagged himself a couple of Zeroes at the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. He’d been flying the F6F by then.
The Hellcat … Now there, by Lord, had been an aircraft. Fueled and armed, she had weighed in at more than 15,000 pounds, but she’d danced on the breeze like a ballerina. And she’d given old ‘
He craned his neck and looked through the window at the California sky. They’d beaten the Vichy Frogs, the Krauts, and the Nips. Everyone said they’d beaten the commies too, but Harvey had never really bought that. Everybody with a lick of sense knew the Russkis were bent on world domination. And suddenly they just throw down their guns and give up the fight, without firing a shot? Other people might believe that crap, but Harvey knew better. It had all been a trick, to get America to relax and drop her guard. The commies had been lying quiet and waiting for their moment to strike. And now it had come. Now the sneaky bastards were launching their A-bombs at America.
The guy on television was telling everybody to stay in their homes. Don’t panic. Don’t try to run. Harvey shifted his eyes to the traffic jam in the street below his window. It wouldn’t be too hard to follow the television guy’s advice. Even if he could still drive, there wasn’t a prayer of getting out of here before the bombs started to fall.
Of their own accord, Harvey’s eyes pointed themselves toward the drawer of the nightstand beside his bed. There, behind pill bottles, handkerchiefs, and paperback novels, was an old companion: a Navy-issue.45 that had followed him home at the end of the war. He wasn’t supposed to have a gun here; it was against about a dozen of the rules for Vista Del Rio tenants. Harvey had smuggled it in wrapped up in a sweater, because he couldn’t make the staff understand that he needed it for protection.
“
But the.45 wasn’t for burglars. It was for a different kind of protection. Harvey had promised himself a long time ago that he’d use it the very first day that he couldn’t get to the toilet by himself. A man shouldn’t have to go through life with hoses shoved into his orifices, and plastic bags of slop hanging from the side of his bed.
Harvey blinked and looked out the window again. Those commie A-bombs should be falling any minute now …
Two armored hatches snapped open on the cruiser’s forward missile deck, revealing the weatherproof fly- through covers that capped the upper ends of two vertical launch missile cells. At the same instant, another pair of hatches snapped open on the ship’s aft missile deck.
Some fraction of a millisecond later, all four of the fly-through covers were blasted into fragments as two pairs of SM-3 missiles rocketed out of their vertical launch cells and roared into the afternoon sky on bright columns of fire.
In the darkened confines of the ship’s Combat Information Center, the Weapons Control Officer keyed the microphone of his communications headset and spoke into the tactical communications net. “TAO — Weapons Control. Four birds away, no apparent casualties. Targeted one-each on the four ballistic inbounds.” The rumble of
