Agatha said, “I knew you’d understand, Mum.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“So that’s why they’ve come here, to this pivot of history,” Joel said. “Two futures, fighting to be real. And 1962 is their battleground.”
Nick, lying on his back, cackled. “You should write for the comics, our kid. Dan Dare, maybe.”
“He’s right,” Agatha said. “This is a fight for the future. And here’s how I’m going to win.”
Agatha said the military planners, working in their citadels in the post-nuclear ruins of Britain in the year 2007, had “war-gamed” how America and its allies could have won a nuclear war in 1962.
By “winning,” they meant surviving more or less intact, while destroying the Russians. In the Sunday War the whole world had been bombed flat. The plan now was that it should be just Russia that got bombed flat, while the west survived.
It all depended on Laura’s Key.
“That’s the trigger,” Agatha said. “That Key can be used to launch one Vulcan, one British nuclear bomber plane.”
“Aha,” Joel said. “And given how the whole world is on a knife-edge over Cuba, that could be enough to change things.”
In the Sunday War, the first nuclear bombs would fall on Sunday 28th October. But Agatha intended to change history—to use the V-bomber controlled by Laura’s Key to drop the first bomb twenty-four hours before that, in the small hours of Saturday 27th.
Joel said quietly, “Tonight.”
The British bomber, striking without warning, would take out one Soviet city.
The Russians wouldn’t believe the British had acted alone. They would retaliate by striking at the Americans. The fastest way to do it would be to fire off their Cuban missiles, while they had the chance, at mainland America.
“And almost certainly,” Agatha said, “one of the Cuban missiles would hit Washington. That was what they were designed to do. Kennedy and all the American decision-makers—all dead.”
After that the American military machine, decapitated, would immediately lunge into total war.
“It would all be automatic,” Agatha said. “They call it the Single Integrated Operations Plan. It’s what’s supposed to happen if all the leaders are killed. First the big intercontinental missiles would fly, the Atlases, the Jupiters, the Thors, the Titans. The nuclear bombers would follow, the B-52s, the supersonic B-58s. And the submarines around the coast, and all the missiles from places like Turkey.”
If Kennedy had survived, he might have pulled back. As it was, the machine would take over. That was the whole idea. To trigger America’s war machine to destroy Russia, unthinking.
“The Russians couldn’t strike back,” Joel said. “Not with anything like the same firepower. And they couldn’t defend themselves against the missiles, the bombers. So their cities, industries, military bases—”
“All destroyed before dawn in Moscow,” Agatha said. “Nine hundred and fifty atomic weapons landing on Russia in the first wave. And it wouldn’t end there. Later in the day the Americans would launch their second wave.”
Laura asked, “What would be left to attack?”
“The trees.”
It was called the taiga, a vast belt of fir-tree forest that stretched across the north of the Soviet Union, halfway around the North Pole. After three hundred and seventy more nuclear strikes, Russia would become one vast firestorm.
“With all that smoke in the air blocking out the sun, not a blade of grass will grow in Russia for a whole year. The Nuclear Spring, they will call it.”
By Christmas 1963 perhaps a tenth of the Russian population would be left alive.
“While America will lose a few million,” Agatha said. “Tops.”
“And that’s what you call a victory,” Laura said.
“Yes! Don’t you see? In a nuclear war, the only way the Russians can hurt us is if they have time to fire off their weapons. That’s what happened in my timeline, the Sunday War. But if you attack them first, if you just hit them really hard with all you’ve got, you can wipe them out before they can respond.”
“And,” Laura said, “the one V-bomber controlled by my Key-”
“That starts it all off.”
Joel stared at her. “You’re talking about starting a nuclear war deliberately. The deliberate genocide of two hundred million people. Maybe a tenth of everybody alive on the planet. What kind of monster are you?”
She looked hurt. “You haven’t lived the life I’ve lived, Uncle Joel. Don’t call me a monster. You don’t know.” She turned to Laura. “Now you know it all. Will you help me, Mum? Will you give me the Key?”
Laura stared back. “I need to think.”
“We don’t have long,” whispered Agatha, and the candlelight made her face look deeply lined.
Chapter 23
Friday 26th October. 8 p.m.
We’re running out of time.
Four hours left to Black Saturday. Which will get even blacker if Agatha has her way.
We keep hearing shouts. Screams. Cracks that might be gunfire. Maybe it’s the police against the rioters. Or maybe the police have just withdrawn and left them to it.
Either way they are getting closer to us.
If we’re going to do something it has to be soon. But what?
Joel was talking about time travel with Agatha.
“What about time paradoxes?” he said. “I’ve read Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein.”
“Go on.”
“Suppose Laura gave you the Key, and your Nuclear Spring future came about. Then you would never have been born. Would you just—” he waved a hand in the air “—fade out of existence?”
“No. It turns out it doesn’t work like that. I would continue to exist, to live and breathe. But I’d be stranded here. The last relic of a future that will never happen.” She touched her diary. “Everything written down in here wouldn’t happen. Everything I remember would never happen. But I would remember it even so.”
“That’s a paradox.”
“So is disappearing…”
Laura called a council of war. Everybody except Agatha, who she asked to sit out so they could talk things over.
And except for Bernadette. She wouldn’t play. She skulked off to a dark corner, complaining of a headache.
Joel said, “Come on, Bern. We need you. You’re the only sensible one here.”
“Bog
