“Tunnel,” he ordered.
They tunneled.
A Mountain Mole was hired away from its more prosaic role in the construction of subways and was lowered piecemeal into the underground cavern of SD-1. There, within the walled, guarded confines of the transportation-pool area, it was reassembled, then moved to the point on the perimeter of the chamber nearest the ship channel.
The engineer in charge mounted the ladder to the cab and switched on main power. Brilliant lights sprang to life, revealing a machine as big as a two-story house. The front of the Mole was a huge steel ring, bristling with diamond-tipped titanium-steel teeth the size of wheelbarrows. The engineer touched a button, and the giant ring began to rotate. He pressed a lever, and the 283-ton monster clanked forward on six caterpillar treads until the cutting disk touched the wall. A sheet of protective blue glass slid up to cover the windows of the Mole’s control room. The engineer’s hand depressed a switch. From within the ring, a multitude of laser beams pierced the limestone wall with eleven-second bursts of energy. The intense heat was followed by bursts of liquid CO2. The din was like the explosion of cannon, as the differential expansion of the rock caused it to star with a million minute fissures.
The diamond-tipped teeth of the rotating ring now bit into the crumbly rock as if it were just so much dry bread. When the ring reached the limit of the fissured stone and struck the native bedrock, a sensor retracted and shut down the rotating mandible.
Horizontal conveyor belts at ground level, meanwhile, were carrying the spoil in a continuous stream to the rear of the Mole, where electric rail cars hauled it away to skips. The skips, in turn, raised the broken rock to the surface. The Mole then ground forward-the upward gradient was one-in-ten-on its huge steel-shod feet to take another bite.
The air was filled with churning rock dust despite a constant stream of water across the drilling surface, and the noise of the clanking, whirring, sparking, thundering machinery was so intense that the Mole’s attendant workers, some 140 per shift, wore hardhats with earmuff speakers and throat mikes, in addition to respirator masks against the rock dust.
Operating around the clock, three crews drilled an average of seventy-two linear centimeters a minute, driving a circular passage 5.8 meters in diameter. The spoil truckers worked fast to keep up with it, as did the concrete crew, which braced and cemented the floor and walls of the tunnel behind the Mole. In their wake came the track-layers and electricians, putting down twin standard-gauge railways-traffic would proceed in both directions when the tunnel was completed- signal system, fresh-air tubing, bundles of electrical cable, and overhead lighting. Bringing up the rear was a gang laying pipe for fresh water and others for sewage and liquid-waste disposal.
It took ten days to drill the 9.1 kilometers from SD-1, as SII’s underground complex in the salt dome was called, to the edge of the basin where the Texas was berthed. Two weeks after the first trucks rumbled away with spoil, the last carried its load of rock to the skip. By then, some 250,000 cubic meters of rock had been excavated and hauled to the surface, put on barges, and shipped twenty kilometers downstream to Galveston Bay for dumping in deep water. The quantity was sufficient to cause comment from environmentalists. Gwillam Forte’s press representative explained it away by saying that it came from a tunnel to a nearby salt dome, where SD-2 would soon be built.
An airtight passageway now was extended through the remaining rock and silt separating the tunnel from the Texas’s slip. In order to prevent a breakthrough from flooding SD-1 at the base of the steep tunnel, an airtight caisson punched through the remaining rock and was jacked forward. One steel section at a time was added to the rear of the caisson, until with a metallic clank! it closed against the hull of the battleship two meters below the water line, invisible from the surface in the murky waters.
Divers welded the connection watertight. The caisson’s air lock opened so metal workers could cut through the battleship’s six bulging layers of protective hull armor, which had been added in 1925 to protect her from torpedos. A continuous passageway now connected SD-1 with the engine room of the U.S.S. Texas.
The first man to go aboard was Gwillam Forte.
In the engine room, he addressed the assembled veterans, engineers, and technicians: “As. you all know, only certain areas of the ship are open to the public. As of now, hatches leading from those areas to this will be welded shut. Under no circumstance is the public to get the idea that any work is going on down here. To make sure they don’t, in future we work night shifts only.” He paused. “The future starts now.”
28 DECEMBER 1997
How brief the future might be Gwillam Forte had learned forty-two months later, when he was summoned to the White House for a secret conference with President Wilson Wynn and eight fellow moguls of the American press, radio, and television. Together, the nine media men sitting around the polished ebony table in the cabinet conference room had daily access to more than 97 percent of American readers, listeners, and viewers. President Wynn rightly considered their influence crucial in the formation of American public opinion. How the nine men felt about any public issue was how, ultimately, the American people would be persuaded to feel. Usually the nine were divided, and thus Americans were divided, and politicians like Wynn exploited such divisions to win high office. But today, Wynn was praying he could unite them: the nation’s future, no less than his own, depended on it.
“I have asked you here today, gentlemen,” the President began, “to seek your support of an important foreign policy initiative. How important it is, and the secrecy you should attach to it, you may judge from the absence of anyone but the ten of us in these discussions. No tape recording is being made, and I shall ask you to take no notes and to keep what will be said here confidential. Anyone who does not agree to maintain confidentiality may leave before I proceed.”
He waited. No one stirred.
“I am happy to know I can count on you all,” Wynn said with a cryptic smile. “Let me begin by remarking that most of you have been generous with support for my foreign policy during my first administration, without which I doubt that I would have been reelected last year, considering the primacy of foreign policy issues. I now thank you collectively, as I have previously thanked you individually, for that vote of confidence, gentlemen.” He nodded to each of seven of the nine, who smilingly acknowledged his gratitude. “However, honesty obliges me to confess that perhaps- only perhaps, mind you-this foreign policy has given birth to disaster.”
Seven smiles faded from seven faces, and were transferred to those of Gwillam Forte and J. D. Pascal, the eighty-eight-year-old New England press lord who had bitterly, consistently, and long repudiated the premises of America’s one-world foreign policy.
“Disaster?” the owner of CBS exclaimed. “How can you even suggest that a policy that has bought us ten years of peace is a disaster, Mr. President?”
“That is all it is, so far, David,” the President replied equably, “-suggestion. The suggestion comes from my service chiefs, and I’ve asked you here to help me examine it. If you think it has merit-which, I might add, my political advisers do not-then I hope you will have some ideas about how we can prepare the American public for a drastic change in official United States policy, for that will be a first priority. If, on the other hand, you think the criticism has no merit, I hope you will give me the ammunition with which to shoot it down.”
The President leaned back in his high leather chair and regarded his steepled fingers.
“The watershed in recent international relations was, I am sure you will agree, the abandonment of world conquest by the Soviets just ten years ago. Since then, the guns have remained stilled, although Russia’s war readiness remains at high pitch. That, of course, doesn’t alarm us, since both Russia and the United States have achieved nuclear parity and the capability of destroying each other’s ICBMs the minute they leave their launching pads, by means of satellite-based weapons in geosynchronous orbit. If we need fear Russia at all, it is that nation’s conventional offensive weapons that we must look to.”
“Then we can quit worrying, Mr. President,” interjected Frank Twigg, the dynamic young chairman of a Washington-based chain of eighty-three large American dailies. “My group has recently completed a survey of American opinion about the strategic forces of the two great powers. American opinion is inescapable: 63 percent of Americans believe Russia would be creamed if it tried to invade the United States today, against only 8 percent on the other side and 29 percent ‘don’t know.’ After all, the Russians have no new secret weapons-at least that we know of-and without such weapons they could never launch the two-ocean amphibious assault that would be necessary to subdue this country. Besides, if they tried, using their full military strength, their unguarded satellite countries would immediately revolt. That’s confirmed by a poll we took only last month-81 percent of Americans affirm it.”