“If you had the transport,” Forte prompted.
“That’s right, if I had the transport.”
Forte signaled Rockwell’s circuit cut.
“Well, General Habner?”
“I wish to hell I could help, Mr. Forte, I really do. Now, if it were bombs, it wouldn’t be a problem. But slurry requires continuous discharge. Even if we could somehow rig our aircraft to handle a liquid discharge, we’d have to install the proper tanks. That could take weeks.”
“Why can’t you use the same type aircraft that Rockwell uses? There should be plenty around, what with all the forest fires. It would only mean borrowing them for a day or so.”
“True. But how are you going to fly them from the U.S. several thousand miles down to the equator without wing tanks? Wing-tank racks will take days to install.”
“How about aerial refueling?”
“Hopeless. Rockwell’s planes don’t have the equipment.”
“The answer is no, General Habner?”
“The answer is no, not with slurries, anyway.”
“Stand by. Professor Smith?”
“Present, more or less,” came a muzzy voice against a background of clinking glasses, strident voices, and loud music. “What’s on your mind, keed?”
“General Habner says he can’t dump bentonite slurry. Can you suggest any alternative?”
“Sure, get yourself another general.” There was a peal of idiot laughter.
“Professor Smith, please. We’ve got three million tons of crude burning down here, and we’re depending on you for answers.”
“Wha’s it worth to ya?” slurred the professor. “Money on the line, ass on the bed, or no dice–that’s what my old daddy always used to say.”
“You’ll be well compensated. You can depend on it.”
“I wanna million dollars–cash–or I’ll take my business elsewhere.”
President Turnbull broke in.
“Listen to me, you drunken son of a bitch!” he said savagely. “This is Horatio Francis Turnbull, the President of the United States. In about three minutes a couple carloads of F.B.I, agents are going to descend on that bar where you’re lushing it up and take turns beating the shit out of you unless you give us answers and give them quick. Understand me, Smith?”
There was a slight pause while Smith considered whether to treat it all as a joke. But a lifetime spent in fear and trembling of saying the wrong thing and thus imperiling his chances for tenure asserted itself. Suddenly he was dead sober.
“What do you wish to know?” he replied in well-articulated Cantabrigian.
“If bentonite slurry won’t put our oil fire out, what will?”
“Well, there’s always the halogenated hydrocarbons, of course,” said Smith crisply. “The Halon series is quite efficient, you know. Halon 1301, for instance, is at least ten times as efficient a flame retardant as carbon dioxide. Halon 2102 is even better for oil fires, of course.”
“Is it readily available?”
“I’m afraid not, not in the quantities you’d need. Have you considered wet water?”
“Now listen here, you little–” began President Turnbull, but was quickly silenced by his scientific adviser, who assured him that something called wet water really did exist.
“Or more properly,” Professor Smith hastened to say, “a fluorochemical wetting agent. The Navy uses it for extinguishing flaming fluids.”
“The distribution problem,” objected General Habner. “We can’t get the right planes in sufficient numbers in time.”
“Then use plain dry sand. It will bind the oil particles, and their combined weight will make them sink.”
“Better, and it might work if I had twenty-four hours to organize it,” sighed Habner. “But I don’t.”
Forte smiled grimly and motioned to the radiomen to sever all circuits but that of the President and the Navy chief of staff.
He waited. He had played his cards. From here on he had to trust to luck. It was fortunate Dr. Sidney Bussek was with the President. Forte was pretty sure Admiral Devin would drop a broad hint if the President didn’t suggest it first, but with the President’s own scientific adviser at his elbow, maybe even that fallback position wouldn’t be necessary.
A discreet cough was heard in the background.
“Sid?” said the President.
“Well, sir, if you want my opinion, Al Seifert had the right idea about blasting the fire out.”
“The right idea, maybe, but he couldn’t deliver.”
“No, sir, but Admiral Devin could.”
“Is that right, Mike? You can deliver the nitroglycerine?”
Admiral Devin hesitated.
“Well?”
“I don’t think that nitroglycerine was what Dr. Bussek had in mind,” said Admiral Devin slowly. “Or was it, Sid?”
“Of course not, Admiral. I was thinking of an atom bomb.”
33. FLAMEOUT
14 MARCH 2008
0840 ALAMO TIME, 0540 WASHINGTON TIME, WAS ZERO hour.
The bomb had to be detonated over the burning crude oil by then, at the latest. By then, all the surface ships in Admiral Hodge’s task force would have arrived on station seven miles to the west, close enough to dash through the blowout zone and keep it clear before the burning oil began to spread back and heal the breach in the triangle of fire.
When the Sun King and the Alamo got clear, along with their auxiliaries and the U.S.S. Pratt, now trapped
with them, the task force would proceed at full speed out of the area and begin a thorough scrub-down of the ships to remove any trace of radioactive contamination.
The bomb itself would be a small thirty-kiloton device set for airburst above ground zero. The final altitude of detonation was as yet the subject of intense discussion. A compromise had to be struck to find an altitude at which the blast would be most effective against the flames and least injurious to the ships of the task force and, especially, to the fragile Alamo. Only when the B-2 was over the target at twelve thousand meters would the altitude for detonation and the order to drop be given.
If it was given.
Everybody was going ahead as though the decision had been made, but in fact only the President of the United States had given his permission. As one consequence of SALT III, two-thirds of Congress had to concur with any presidential decision to explode a nuclear device–anywhere and for any reason–except in the case of unprovoked attack on the United States.
Within two minutes of President Turnbull’s assent to the use of an atomic bomb, the switchboards of the White House, Pentagon, State Department, CIA, and National Security Agency were summoning the 535 members of the U.S. Congress into emergency session. It was going to be a formidable job, for March 15 was a Saturday, and excellent spring weather had been predicted. One by one, the congressmen had to be run down, for the legislation that White House staffers were even then preparing required a quorum.
And run down they were. The first of them arrived on Capitol Hill shortly after 0200, Washington time, less than an hour after President Turnbull had made his decision. But they were few. Another surge of solons came along around 0300, escorted through empty Washington streets by park police cars, their sirens in full cry.
Still the chambers were less than half full. The first arrivals, apprised of the reason for the emergency session, formed tight little knots in the cloakrooms, exploring with men of like minds the possibilities that the President’s urgent request had opened up. The ripe aroma of deals a-cookin’ filtered through the corridors.
Not until 0400, when the speaker of the House and the president pro tem of the Senate called their respective chambers to order, was a quorum in prospect. The legislators came by cab, by subway, in squad cars, in Air Force helicopters. Many were rumpled and bleary-eyed, and a number were obviously drunk, but all were fully conscious of the gravity of the emergency. The sentiments of the vast majority were clear: If they failed the Alamo now, their thirsty constituents would remember it in November. The only question was whether the vote would be unanimous.
The bill, two paragraphs long, was presented in the Senate by the majority leader, a Democrat, and quickly read aloud by the Senate clerk.
A motion made that an immediate vote be taken was, however, blocked by Senator Davidson.
“Just before I entered this chamber,” said the senior senator from New York, “I was informed by sources in the State Department that representations–serious representations–were made less than an hour ago to our government by the Soviet Union, protesting that the detonation of an atomic device would be construed as a unilateral abrogation of SALT HI and that retaliatory action would be taken.”
The Senate broke into uproar.
The president pro tem let his charges get the predawn bile out of their systems and then gaveled the house into silence. “We will not have the luxury of full debate on this issue, ladies and gentlemen. Perhaps the gentleman from New York will tell us whether his information came from the secretary of state.”
“No, Mr. President, it did not. But–”
“If it did not, then it cannot be construed as official information. To be a factor in these particular deliberations, in any case, information bearing on foreign relations would have to come from the President himself.”