The countdown ticked by in a way that was by now familiar.
As zero flashed up, all five targets exploded together; at the same instant all traces of the attacking missile salvo were lost. The action had been effortless.
A stunned silence had taken over the room. Ashen faces registered the dawning of the first full realizations of what all this meant. The five menacing mushrooms were still spreading across the screens when Clifford’s voice sounded again, still cool and dispassionate.
“Allow me to put what you have just seen into perspective. In the last demonstration, the J-reactor was operating at low power only, and the exposure time per target was one microsecond. With moderate power and a longer exposure, it would be perfectly feasible to wipe out a large city. Simple calculations show that, without taxing the system, one hundred selected enemy cities could, once the relevant coordinates had been fed into the fire-control programs, be totally destroyed in just over one hundredth of a second.”
Hardly a word was spoken as one by one the screens went blank and the machines were shut down. Clifford emerged from the Control Room and looked down from the raised gallery over the silent upturned faces. His cheeks were hollow from the strain of more than a year of unbroken work, his eyes dark-rimmed from lack of sleep.
“You demanded my knowledge and my skills to be harnessed for the ends of war,” he said. “You have them.”
He said no more. There was nothing more to say.
Chapter 22
After testing the intentions of the West with nearly twelve months of escalating provocation, the Eastern Alliance nations had satisfied themselves that no serious attempts would be forthcoming to frustrate their designs in India. The Afrab and Chinese forces fighting on the frontiers, committed originally to defend the so-called People’s Uprising, gradually assumed the role of regular armies of invasion. The internecine squabbles within the Indian nation were forgotten as rival civil factions united and turned to face the common threat, but by that time the country’s cohesive power was draining fast.
Afrab armies took over all of the northwest plains and advanced southward to occupy the Kathiawar Peninsula, little more than two hundred miles from Bombay. In the east, the Chinese reached the delta of the Mahanadi River, and pushed along the basin of the Ganges to take Lucknow and Kanpur. Delhi was thus left precariously between the closing jaws of the pincer with both of its main arteries of communication severed, all the time becoming more isolated as the potential source of relief was compressed into the southern half of the subcontinent.
By then every armed satellite deployed by the West was being marked by at least two hostile shadowers. The strategic calculations of the Eastern bloc showed a tip in the balance that would preclude the West from so much as contemplating an all-out conflict, and developments in India seemed to confirm it.
The Vladivostok government declared its commitment to a crusade for the reunification of Siberia and Russia, denouncing the Moscow regime as unrepresentative. A mood of defeatism swept across Europe as Euro-Russian and Siberian armies clashed with renewed ferocity west of the Urals. The Afrabs struck northward from Iraq into the Caucasus; Americans and Europeans counterattacked from eastern Turkey.
The world braced itself.
* * *
Alexander George Sherman, President of the United States and cosignatory to the Alliance of Western Democracies, sipped approvingly at his whiskey and allowed his head to sink back into the leather padding of one of the armchairs facing the fireplace in the sitting room that adjoined the presidential study. The eyes that looked over the rim of his glass at the guest sitting opposite bore the marks of the burden of Atlas. And yet the expression in those eyes was calm and composed, mellowed by the compassion that comes with maturity and the wisdom of a thousand years.
“The provocations to which we are being subjected might seem to constitute a clear-cut justification for using the J-bomb without restriction,” he said. “I am satisfied that were I to give the word, our enemies would be completely crushed within an hour. However, I must consider not only the heat of the moment today, but also the cool that will come when the world looks back from tomorrow.”