“Spoken like a man who wants to add to his collection of pink slips.”
“Sure,” said Reston, “you can fire me for telling you the facts, and then you hire some yes-man who’ll take all your loose change and give you the same answer five years down the road.”
“Now, now,” said Forte, contrite, “don’t take me literally about the pink slip. It’s only that I know you play a Brown-Ash Mark IX computer like Ormandy used to play the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. All I ask is that you purge your mind of preconceptions and think about whether there is a way in.”
“Yes and no. Yes, I’ve thought about it; and no, there isn’t.”
Forte draped his hairy forearm about the shoulders of the smaller man and led him from his laboratory, where he felt compelled to think like a scientist, to the comfortable lounge, where he could put his feet up and dream like a civilian. Forte poured the good doctor a cup of coffee and sat in the leather club chair opposite him.
“Let’s approach this thing systematically,” Forte began. “First of all, the SDI satellite system is controlled by electronic impulses from the ground. We could break into it-”
“-if we had maybe twenty or thirty billion man-years,” Reston interposed. “They have an elaborate code to authenticate orders, and the code changes each day randomly according to an algorithm that is more secret than the formula of the silver hair dye that President Turnbull uses. Next idiocy?”
“So it’s impossible for us to get control of the system?”
“Absolutely-from a technological standpoint.”
Forte frowned. “Are you trying to tell me something?”
“Maybe. How far are you prepared to go to break into the system?”
“As far as I have to.”
“Who’ll run the operation?”
“The most competent man we can find.”
“Okay.” Reston smiled. “You talked me into it….”
Six days later Captain Merle Plash of the U.S. Army, designated custodian of the “football,” the briefcase containing the go-cards with which the President of the United States would authenticate his strike commands in the event of a Soviet missile attack, sat in an anteroom of the Oval Office reading the Armed Forces Journal. It was his responsibility to accompany President Turnbull at all times, never to be more than a few steps from the president’s side, and never to relinquish possession of the black briefcase chained to his wrist to anyone except his authorized relief, who had to identify himself with a special card issued by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the presence of the president’s military aide.
Lieutenant Colonel Henry Haperman, who had reported two days earlier for duty with the National Security Council, stuck his head through the doorway, did a double-take when he saw Captain Plash, and said, “What the hell are you doing here?”
Captain Plash rose to attention, a puzzled frown wrinkling his forehead. “I’m on duty, sir. It’s my watch.”
“But where’s Hudson?”
Lieutenant (jg) Hudson was Plash’s relief, but he wasn’t due to report for more than twenty minutes.
“He comes on at sixteen hundred, sir.”
“I know that,” replied Haperman impatiently. “But I thought he’d relieve you at once, when he heard the news.”
“News?” Captain Plash felt a sudden roaring in his ears. “What news?”
Haperman hesitated. “I thought you knew. Your wife was just arrested by the Secret Service. When she drove through the gate to pick you up, they made one of those unscheduled inspections and found a quantity of amphetamines under the front seat.”
“What? Where is she?”
“Still at the gate, so far as I know, trying to explain that it’s all a mistake. That’s why I’m surprised that Hudson’s not reported, knowing that you could get down there and straighten everything out in five minutes.”
Plash agonized. To leave his post carrying the football was unthinkable. Not to intercede for his wife was equally unthinkable-considering what the shock of arrest might do to the baby Sheila was carrying. Where the hell was Hudson?
“Maybe I’d better go look for him, or maybe you should just wait until your watch ends. After all, it’s only twenty min-”
Plash cleared his throat. “Colonel, you can do me a great favor, if you would, sir. You’re cleared for Muckraker material, and the president just went into conference with the Speaker of the House. He won’t be out for at least half an hour.”
“If you’re going to ask me to hold the football, forget it.” Lieutenant Colonel Haperman shook his head. “That would be a breach of regulations, and you know it, Captain.”
“Just five minutes, sir,” Plash pleaded. “Nobody will know, and-I’ve got to go to my wife.” His forehead was damp, his eyes agonized.
Lieutenant Colonel Haperman came to a sudden decision. “Five minutes, Plash, and not a second longer. If anybody comes while you’re gone, it’ll be my ass….”
Twelve minutes later Captain Plash was back, flushed and sweaty but with a triumphant smile on his face. Switching the handcuff and chain from Colonel Haperman’s wrist to his own, he explained: “I stepped into the guard shack and pissed into a bottle for them, then got them to take Sheila downtown to run a test on her. It’s all a mistake, and I think the Secret Service realizes it. Obviously, some malicious son of a bitch planted that stuff in our car, and they’ll have proof of it when they test us with the polygraph, which I’ve already volunteered us to take.”
“I’m relieved you got it straightened out,” Haperman said. “Meanwhile, let me have a word with the Secret Service officers to see if we can’t keep this incident off your record.”
“That’s damned decent of you, sir. I won’t forget this.”
Haperman smiled. “Look, Captain, we’ve both done something that could ruin our careers and get us demoted to Pfc and a tour of the stockade. I think the best thing would be for us both to forget the last fifteen minutes ever happened. What do you say?”
Plash extended his hand. “You’ve got my word,” he said thankfully.
On 28 July 2009, at dusk, as the Russian wheat harvest was getting into full swing, the iodine lasers of American Strategic Defense Initiative satellites transiting the Soviet Union, in what was later found to be a major malfunction, sent a 150-millisecond burst of energy that could theoretically destroy even the thickest-skinned spinning target.
Actually, since no missiles were launched, the American alert that would have responded with its own massive missile launch against Russia were the SDI system to fail caused a number of heart attacks and much mystification, but no other casualties. The iodine laser beams, which failed to connect with ascending missiles, expended their energy on the first solid matter they encountered, which happened to be the huge grain-growing areas of central and southern Russia and the fertile flat-lands west of the Ural Mountains.
Even as the President of the United States was sending an urgent message of apology for the SDI malfunction and promising appropriate punishment for the culprits responsible, along with generous indemnities to the Soviet Union, scattered fires broke out in an area of more than one and a half million square miles, and soon the isolated fires joined to produce a firestorm whose 200-mile-an-hour winds spread the fire still further, defeating all efforts to bring it under control.
For the next twelve hours of darkness, while the firestorm raged out of control across the Soviet Union’s heartland, the President of the United States was airborne in his Boeing 797 aerial command post, ready to give the order that would cause a four-star general’s finger, poised over a computer keyboard, to fall, unleashing America’s response to the expected Russian retaliatory ICBM strike.
To the surprise and enormous relief of American politicians and defense staff, satellite reconnaissance showed that the Russians who would have been preparing missiles for launch were instead trying desperately to bring the fires under control. Whole cities emptied as millions of Russians, with shovels and rakes, bulldozers and burlap bags, fought a losing battle against the flames.
The fire, unprecedented in the history of the world, was not the only source of heat. The hotline between President Turnbull’s air command post and the Kremlin crackled and burned with accusation and recrimination from the Russians on one hand and abject apology from the Americans on the other. But even before the fires began to burn themselves out, President Turnbull had convinced Premier Evgeniy Luchenko that the Americans had nothing to do with the fire and that, indeed, the United States would empty its grain storehouses and silos to make good the Russian loss as a gesture of international amity, and at no cost to the Soviet Union.
As for the unknown criminal who had somehow broken through SDI security, President Turnbull strongly hinted that it must be someone known to bear obdurate hatred for the Soviet Union and possessing the means to pervert the peaceful Strategic Defense Initiative system into a weapon that could devastate the heartland of Russia.