of Roggen. You need the license number for Mr. Friend?”
“Christ,” Hoskins said.
“Excuse me, sir?” He read off the number. “That's correct.”
“Can you check two other license numbers?”
“Surely.” He read them off. “First one's an incorrect number… so's the second — wait a minute, these numbers are just like—”
“I know. Thank you.” Hoskins set the phone down. “Okay, Walt, think fast… ” First he needed more information from Clinton.
“ Murray.”
“Dan, this is Walt Hoskins. Something just came in you need to know.”
“Shoot.”
“Our friend Marvin Russell parked a van at the stadium. The NEST guy says that the place where he parked it is pretty close to where the bomb went off. There was at least one — no, wait a minute — okay. There was one other guy in there with him, and the other one must have been driving the rental car. Okay. Inside the van was a large box. The van was painted up like an ABC vehicle, but Russell was found dead a couple miles away. So, he must have dropped off the van and left. Dan, this looks like how the bomb might have gotten there.”
“What else do you have, Walt?”
“I have passport photos and other ID for two other people.”
“Fax 'em.”
“On the way.” Hoskins left for the communications room. On the way he grabbed another agent. “Get the Denver homicide guys who're working the Russell case — wherever they are, get 'em on the phone real fast.”
“Thinking terrorism again?” Pat O'Day asked. “I thought the bomb was too big for that.”
“Russell was a suspected terrorist, and we think he might — shit!” Murray exclaimed.
“What's that, Dan?”
“Tell Records I want the photos from Athens that're in the Russell file.” The deputy assistant director waited for the call to be made. “We had an inquiry from the Greeks, one of their officers got murdered and they sent us some photos. I thought at the time it might be Marvin, but… there was somebody else in there, a car, I think. We had him in profile, I think…”
“Fax coming in from Denver,” a woman announced.
“Bring it over,” Murray commanded.
“Here's page one.” The rest arrived rapidly.
“Airline ticket… connecting ticket. Pat—”
O'Day took it. “I'll run it down.”
“Shit, look at this!”
“Familiar face?”
“It looks like… Ismael Qati, maybe? I don't know the other one.”
“Mustache and hair are wrong, Dan,” O'Day thought, from his phone. “A little thin, too. Better call Records to see what they have current on the mutt. You don't want to jump too fast, man.”
“Right.” Murray lifted his phone.
“Good news, Mr. President,” Borstein said from inside Cheyenne Mountain. “We have a KH-11 pass coming up through the Central Soviet Union. It's almost dawn there now, clear weather for a change, and we'll get a look at some missile fields. The bird's already programmed. NPIC is real-timing it into here and Offutt also.”
“But not here,” Fowler groused. Camp David had never been set up for that, a remarkable oversight, Fowler thought. It did go into Kneecap, which was where he should have gone when he'd had the chance. “Well, tell me what you see.”
“Will do, sir, this ought to be very useful for us,” Borstein promised.
“Coming up now, sir,” a new voice said. “Sir, this is Major Costello, NORAD intel. We couldn't have timed this much better. The bird is going to sweep very close to four regiments, south to north, at Zhangiz Tobe, Alyesk, Uzhur, and Gladkaya, all but the last are SS-18 bases. Gladkaya is SS-11s, old birds. Sir, Aleysk is one of the places they're supposed to be deactivating, but haven't yet… ”
The morning sky was clear at Alyesk. First light was beginning to brighten the northeastern horizon, but none of the soldiers of the Strategic Rocket Forces bothered to look. They were weeks behind schedule and their current orders were to correct that deficiency. That such orders were nearly impossible was beside the point. At each of the forty launch silos was a heavy articulated truck. The SS-18s — the Russians actually called them RS-20s, for Rocket, Strategic, Number 20—were old ones, more than eleven years, in fact, which was why the Soviets had agreed to eliminate them. Powered liquid-fueled motors, the fuels and oxidizers in were dangerous, corrosive chemicals — unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide — and the fact that they were called “storable” liquids was a relative statement. They were more stable than cryogenic fuels, insofar as they did not require refrigeration, but they were toxic to the point of nearly instant lethality to human contact, and they were necessarily highly reactive. One safeguard was the encapsulation of the missiles in steel capsules which were loaded like immense rifle cartridges into the silos, a Soviet design innovation that protected the delicate silo instrumentation from the chemicals. That the Soviets bothered with such systems at all was not — as American intelligence officers carped — to take advantage of their higher energy impulse, but rather a result of the fact that the Soviets had lagged in developing a reliable and powerful solid fuel for its missiles, a situation only recently remedied with the new SS-25. Though undeniably large and powerful, the SS-18—given the ominous NATO codename of S ATAN— was an ill-tempered, pitiless bitch to maintain, and the crews were delighted to be rid of them. More than one Strategic Rocket Forces soldier had been killed in maintenance and training accidents, just as Americans had lost men with its counterpart U.S. missile, the Titan-II. All of the Alyesk birds were tagged for elimination, and that was the reason for the presence of the men and the transporter trucks. But first, the warheads had to be removed. The Americans could watch the missiles in the destruction process, but the warheads were still the most secret of artifacts. Under the watchful eyes of a colonel, the nose shroud was removed from Rocket Number 31 by a small crane, exposing the MIRVs. Each of the conically shaped multiple independently-targetable re-entry vehicles was about forty centimeters in width at the bottom, tapering to a needle point 150 centimeters above its base. Each also represented about half a megaton of three-stage thermonuclear device. The soldiers treated the MIRVs with all the respect they so clearly deserved.
“Okay, getting some pictures now,” Fowler heard Major Costello say. “Not much activity… sir, we're isolating on just a few of the silos, the ones that we can see the best — there's woods all over there, Mr. President, but because of the angle of the satellite we know which ones we can see clearly… okay, there's one, Tobe Silo Zero- Five… nothing unusual… the command bunker is right there… I can see guards patrolling around… more than usual… I see five — seven people — we can get them real good in infra-red, it's cold there, sir. Nothing else. Nothing else unusual, sir… good. Okay, coming up on Alyesk now — Jeez!”
“What is it?”
“Sir, we're looking at four silos on four different cameras…”
Those are service trucks,“ General Fremont said, from the SAC command center. ”Service trucks at all four. Silo doors are open, Mr. President.'
“What does that mean?”
Costello took the question: “Mr. President, these are all -18 Mod 2s, fairly old ones. They were supposed to be deactivated by now, but they haven't been. We now have five silos in sight, sir, and all five have service trucks there. I can see two with people standing around, doing something to the missiles.”
“What's a service truck?” Liz Elliot asked.
“Those are the trucks they use to transport the missiles. They also have all the tools you use to work on them. There's one truck per bird — actually more than one. It's a big semi-truck, like a hook 'n' ladder truck, actually, with storage bins built in for all the tools and stuff — Jim, they look like they pulled the shroud — yeah! There are the warheads, it's lit up, and they're doing something to the RVs… I wonder what?”
