He returned unhurriedly toward his car, unlocked it, and got in without another glance at the man he had just stabbed.
The flow of blood, copious though it was, was steady rather than pulsating. It came, not from the carotid artery, but from the superior vena cava. The policeman remained conscious just long enough to drag his revolver from its holster, raise it shakily, and fire a single shot before the recoil knocked the weapon from his hand. Ten seconds later he was dead.
Hobe Caulkins wasn’t. But the bullet slammed through the window frame of his car into his left shoulder. Unless he got medical attention, and fast, he knew that he too would bleed to death.
7 JULY 1998: DAYBREAK
Gwillam Forte was aloft in the Houston Herald’s television helicopter Fubar before dawn, winging southward toward the mouth of the ship channel near Galveston. The helicopter flew with navigation lights blazing and transponder on, its pilot hoping that the immunity that had spared it and other news-gathering choppers the day before still prevailed. Apparently it did, for the reconnaissance helicopters and jet aircraft from the Russian carrier that flew by northward seemed not to notice them.
The channel had been cleared of major obstructions during the night by Russian minesweepers, but evidence of the previous day’s battle saturated the air, for from the blackened banks on both sides, and the channel’s black, waxy, fetid water, came the stench of tens of thousands of charred and decomposing bodies, streaming through Fubar’s air intakes.
According to the Russian announcement broadcast on American television the evening before, the Red fleet would proceed as scheduled, one day late, up the channel to its reception in the inner city. The Karl Marx would lead the column and drop anchor in the Buffalo Bayou Basin. In its wake would come two fixed-wing-aircraft carriers, three helicopter carriers, six missile cruisers, and eleven destroyers. The train of fleet tankers, mine-sweepers, amphibious support ships, communications ship, tenders, and the cryptotanker Omsk would remain in Galveston Bay; that they were defenseless against even the most modest conventional naval force was simply another indication of their contempt for the Texans they had defeated with such ease the day before.
Russian intelligence, as usual, had been excellent. The channel bottom was sounded by airborne depth finders to confirm the accuracy of the latest navigation chart. The survey showed that even megaton tankers could still maneuver without difficulty over the hulks of ships sunk the day before. Aerial reconnaissance had revealed no appreciable signs of life in the twin belts of desolation along the channel banks. Russian precautions even extended to sending an agent disguised as a Coast Guard commander to inspect that forlorn old relic, the Texas, to ensure that the Texans had not somehow contrived to put its rusty guns back into commission. At virtually point-black range, the ship’s two twin-turreted fantail guns could maim the bigger ships and even sink destroyers in a single salvo. The agent found the ship completely deserted, and the guns’ muzzles fouled with birds’ nests. There would be no surprises here. . . .
The Karl Marx was just entering the channel. It proceeded slowly: speed would have conveyed an impression of nervousness the Russians didn’t feel.
“Can you estimate the speed of the column?” Gwillam Forte asked of the pilot.
The pilot nodded. “I can do better than that.” He flipped on a radio switch, exchanged some esoteric palaver with an unidentified contact, and reported that the fleet was making something over eight knots.
That would put the flagship opposite the Texas basin in about three hours, Forte calculated, and in Buffalo Bayou Basin in less than six, just before noon.
“SD-1,” he instructed the pilot.
Ten minutes later the Fubar fluttered down like an autumn leaf atop the blast shielding that served as SD-l’s heliport. Some miles to the north of the region of devastation, El Caballejo Ranch and the adjacent industrial areas had been untouched, but the ghost-town quiet of the streets and workshops testified that the workers who had once populated them had gone, never to return. Forte stepped wearily out of the helicopter, grim-faced and gray.
He rode the big elevator alone down the manway to SD-1. Here, a mile underground, the workers were few, hollow-eyed, and pale. They avoided his eyes, as if they shared some guilty secret. Forte walked through deserted passageways to the command center, where he had been told his department chiefs were assembled.
They were all there: the scientific department heads, the twenty-one veterans who had worked so hard and long on the Texas, and the two dozen technicians who had labored on the later stages of the Elbows installation, the computerized controls for the Texas, and the magnetic antibeam devices that were to protect the Elbows. Some were drinking coffee at the long mess table to one side of the large circular room, others stood in tight little groups second-guessing the previous day’s events. A few men were checking the instruments and computer programs, already checked and rechecked during the past twelve hours.
Their greetings were subdued, but their expressions cool and determined. Whatever they had to tell him, he sensed, at least there was hope in it.
“Well, Ed,” he said, leaning against the conference table, “what’s the good word?”
“Better than it was yesterday at this time.”
“I’m all ears.”
“First of all, we’ve recalibrated the Elbows. Instead of emitting a diffused beam, the seventy-two weapons will generate a beam of the minimum possible spread. They’re as lethal as we can make them.”
“Good. What else?”
“We’ve devised a decoy. On the mainmast we’ve rigged an array of transmitters sending out UHF signals on thirty-five different channels.”
“What does that do?” asked Forte.
“Not a damned thing-not for us, anyway. For the enemy, it sows confusion. He’ll be trying to sort out the relation between the frequencies and the Elbows fire, which, because of the magnetic screening, he can’t take out. Well, there isn’t any relation, of course. So he concentrates his fire on the mainmast-now also heavily screened magnetically, I need not add-thinking it’s some kind of fire-control apparatus. Meanwhile, our Elbows will be hammering away, their fire direction coming from this invulnerable, undetectable base down here in SD-1.”
“Good. Anything else?”
They told him about the cross-channel tunnels. Openly skeptical at first, Forte was convinced by their calculations and fervent assurances that it might, after all, have a chance of working. Indeed, there was hardly any other.
“You really think exploding them will inflict major damage-like destroying half a dozen ships?” Forte said.
“More,” Emilio Salvatore promised him. “Half a dozen destroyed outright, that many more disabled. If the Texas gets in among the survivors before their damage-control parties can take charge, we could even sink a couple more. But I’ve got to warn you, the whole proposition is untried. It’s never been done before. We could fall on our faces, with not so much as a scratch to their paintwork.”
“I guess we’ll have to try it,” Forte observed. “We can’t let the Russians get away with what they did yesterday without trying. They probably think they’ve scared the American people into unanimous support of the Washington Protocols by their-”
“They nearly have,” Ham Reed said dryly. “Despite what you might think after witnessing the sight of thousands still streaming into Houston, the radio reported now that 88 percent of Americans polled by telephone last night, after the bombing, favor going through with it. Before the bombing, it was 79 percent.”
“All the more reason to go ahead as planned. Who gets the hot seats?”
“We’ve drawn straws, Will,” Ed Curry said. “Fred Bateson, T. D. Roebuck, Terry Jones, Ski Modeljewski, Gil Persoe, and Chill Fallows will be the gunners, and Ham Reed gets overall command by consensus, since he’s the resident war-games wizard.”
On a dais dominating the command center were six padded seats in two lines of three, back to back. A seventh faced them at right angles. Each of the six controlled twelve Elbows mounts, and each had responsibility for a sixty-degree field of fire, although Ham Reed, from his post, could override their commands. Together, the gunners covered the six sextants of the horizon depicted on the big wraparound television screen that girdled the room. The image televised from the ship’s cameras was projected onto the circular screen. Each gunner was equipped with headgear linking his eyeballs’ movements to the computer-driven fire control system. The gunner had only to fix his eyes on the target and press the firing pickle to activate his battery. Instantly the twelve Elbows would swing toward the target and loose their electron beams-eleven 6,000-MeV, 125-kiloampere bolts per second. The bolts could bore through three centimeters of armor plate per second at 1,950 meters. Repeated hits on the same spot could penetrate any known defensive armor, slice through the sturdiest steel beams, cut through mast and rigging as if it were so much soft cheese.