“Right.” Barnes punched a button on the secure phone, calling Brigadier General Paul Wilkes, a former bomber pilot who lived in official housing on Boiling Air Force Base, just across the Potomac from National Airport.
“Yeah,” Wilkes said gruffly.
“Barnes here, sir. We need you in the NMCC immediately.” That was all the colonel had to say. “Immediately” is a word that has special meaning for an aviator.
“On the way.” Wilkes hung up and muttered further: “Thank God for four-wheel-drive.” He struggled into an olive-drab winter parka and headed out the door without bothering with boots. His personal car was a Toyota Land Cruiser that he liked for driving the back country. It started at once, and he backed out, struggling across roads not yet plowed.
The Presidential Crisis Room at Camp David was an anachronistic leftover from the bad old days, or so Bob Fowler had thought on first seeing it over a year before. Constructed during the Eisenhower Administration, it had been designed to resist nuclear attack in an age when the accuracy of a missile was measured in miles rather than yards. Blasted into the living granite rock of the Catoctin Mountains of western Maryland, it had a solid sixty feet of overhead protection, and until 1975 or so had been a highly secure and survivable shelter. About thirty feet wide and forty deep, with a ten-foot ceiling, it contained a staff of twelve, mostly Navy communications types, of whom six were enlisted men. The equipment was not quite as modern as that on NEACP or certain other facilities that the President might use. He sat at a console that looked like 1960s NASA in configuration. There was even an ashtray built into the desktop. In front of him was a bank of television sets. The chair was a comfortable one, even if the situation decidedly was not. Elizabeth Elliot took the one next to his.
“Okay,” President J. Robert Fowler said, “what the hell is going on?”
The senior briefing officer, he saw, was a Navy lieutenant commander. That was not very promising.
“Sir, your helicopter is down with a mechanical problem. A second Marine helo is on its way here now to get you to Kneecap. We have CINC-SAC and C IN C-NORAD on line. These buttons here give you direct lines to all the other C IN Cs.” By this, the naval officer meant the Commanders-in-Chief of major joint-service commands: CINCLANT was Commander-in-Chief Atlantic, Admiral Joshua Painter, USN; there was a corresponding C IN C-P AC in charge of Pacific area forces, and both were traditionally Navy posts. C IN C-S OUTH was in Panama, C IN C–C ENT in Bahrain, C IN C-F OR — heading Forces Command — was at Fort McPherson in Atlanta, Georgia, all three of which were traditionally Army posts. There were others as well, including SACEUR, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, the chief NATO military officer, who at the moment was an Air Force four-star general. Under the existing command system, the service chiefs actually had no command authority. Instead, they advised the Secretary of Defense, who in turn advised the President. Presidential orders were issued from the President through the SecDef directly to the C IN Cs.
But the SecDef…
Fowler looked for the button labeled NORAD and pushed it.
“This is the President. I am in my Camp David communications room.”
“Mr. President, this is still Major General Borstein. C IN C-NORAD is not here, sir. He was in Denver for the Superbowl. Mr. President, it is my duty to advise you that our instruments put the detonation either at or very near the Skydome stadium in Denver. It would appear very likely that Secretaries Bunker and Talbot are both dead, along with C IN C-NORAD.”
“Yes,” Fowler said. There was no emotion in his voice. He'd already reached that conclusion.
“The Vice-C IN C is traveling at the moment. I will be the senior NORAD officer for the next few hours until someone more senior manages to get back.”
“Very well. Now: what the hell is going on?”
“Sir, we do not know. The detonation was not preceded by anything unusual. There was not — I repeat, sir, not — a ballistic inbound track prior to the explosion. We are trying to contact the air controllers at Stapleton International Airport to have them check their radar tapes for a possible airborne delivery vehicle. We didn't see anything coming in on any of our scopes.”
“Would you have seen an inbound aircraft?”
“Not necessarily, sir,” General Borstein replied. “It's a good system, but there are ways to beat it, especially if you use a single aircraft. In any case, Mr. President, there are some things we need to do at once. Can we talk about that for a moment?”
“Yes.”
“Sir, on my own command authority as acting-C IN C-NORAD, I have placed my command on DEFCON-ONE alert. As you know, NORAD has that authority, and also nuclear-release authority for defensive purposes only.”
“You will not release any nuclear weapons without my authorization,” Fowler said forcefully.
“Sir, the only nukes we have in our inventory are in storage,” Borstein said. His voice was admirably mechanical, the other uniformed people thought. “I propose that we next initiate a conference call with CINC- SAC.”
“Do it,” Fowler ordered. It happened instantly.
“Mr. President, this is CINC-SAC,” General Peter Fremont, USAF announced. His voice was all business.
“What the hell is going on?”
“Sir, we do not know that, but there are some things we should do immediately.”
“Go on.”
“Sir, I recommend that we immediately place all of our strategic forces on a higher alert level. I recommend DEFCON-TWO. If we are dealing with a nuclear attack, we should posture our forces to maximum readiness. That will enable us to respond to an attack with the greatest possible effect. It could also have the effect of deterring whoever got this thing underway, in the event that he might have — or we could give him — second thoughts.”
“If I can add to that, sir, we should also increase our readiness across the board. If for no other reason, the availability of military units to provide assistance and to reduce possible civilian panic might be very useful. I recommend DEFCON-THREE for conventional forces.”
“Better to do that selectively, Robert,” Liz Elliot said.
“I heard that — who is it?” Borstein asked.
“This is the National Security Advisor,” Liz said, a touch too loudly. She was as pale as her white silk blouse. Fowler was still under control. Elliot was struggling to do the same.
“We have not met, Dr. Elliot. Unfortunately, our command-and-control systems do not allow us to do that selectively — at least not very fast. By sending out the alert now, however, we can activate all the units we need, then select the units we need to do things while they come on line. That will save us at least an hour. That is my recommendation.”
“I concur in that,” General Fremont added at once.
“Very well, do it,” Fowler said. It sounded reasonable enough.
The communications were handled through separate channels. CINC-SAC handled the strategic forces. The first Emergency Action Message used the same robotic voice that had already scrambled the alerted SAC wings. While the SAC bomber bases already knew that they were being alerted, the DEFCON-TWO notice made it official and far more ominous. Fiber-optic land-lines carried a similar notice to the Navy's Extremely Low Frequency radio system located in Michigan 's Upper Peninsula region. This signal had to be sent out by mechanical Morse. The nature of this radio system was such that it could only send out its characters very slowly, rather like the speed of a novice typist, and it acted as a cueing system, telling submarines to come to the surface for a more detailed message to be delivered by satellite radios.
At King's Bay, Georgia, Charleston, South Carolina, and Groton, Connecticut, and at three other locations in the Pacific, signals by land-line and satellite link were received by the duty staffs of the missile submarine squadrons, most of them aboard submarine tenders. Of America 's thirty-six missile submarines in service at the moment, nineteen were at sea, on “deterrence patrol,” as it was called. Two were in yard-overhaul status, and were totally unavailable for duty. The rest were tied up alongside tenders, except for USS Ohio, which was in the boat shed at Bangor. All had reduced crews aboard, though not one had her CO aboard this Sunday evening. That
