And then the J-bomb went into action again.
The swarms of interceptors were methodically cut to shreds and then obliterated. The attacking salvos from the West were allowed to penetrate just far enough—far enough to act as bait to draw up the last of the defending missiles; then they too were destroyed. The destruction of the West’s own attack force did not produce any reactions of surprise or anger now; the watchers around the Operational Command Floor had already resigned themselves to being merely puppets in the design that Clifford and Aub were revealing. They had all played out their assigned roles on cue as unerringly and as surely as if they had been manipulated on physical strings.
Carlohm watched as the last scattered defenders were mopped up and the green attack pattern ground to a final halt.
“I wonder what they’ll make of that,” he commented. “They’ll know that none of their interceptors were getting through. It sure as hell wasn’t them that stopped it.”
Then it was all over. The entire war machine, which had required forty years and the lion’s share of the world’s finance, industry, and talents to conceive and put together, had been wiped from the face of Earth in less than an hour. Not a single manned target on either side had been attacked successfully and, as far as anybody could tell, there had not been a single casualty.
Sherman stood for a long time gazing up at the now inanimate display, faithfully preserving its record of the things that had happened through every agonizing second of that hour. There was an expression of wonder on his face, a mixture of awe and almost reverence, as if he alone could divine a deeper meaning to it all. The rest of the room remained silent, still savoring the relief and the sweet taste of the reprieve that none had dreamed possible.
Suddenly the operator at the communications console sat forward as words began appearing on the screen before him. He read for a moment, then looked towards Carlohm.
“It’s a reply to the ultimatum,” he announced.
Carlohm strode over and looked over his shoulder. Then the general turned. “Beijing has ordered immediate cease-fires in India and Russia,” he informed the room. “Also, they agree unconditionally to all the demands that we have put to them.” Forgetting his formal duties for a moment he added wryly: “Boy—we sure must have scared the shit outa those bastards!”
Chapter 24
The atmosphere at the meeting, called on the afternoon of the following day at the White House, was still one of dazed bewilderment. To make matters worse, a completely new and unexpected complication had been added to the already unprecedented situation that confronted the men sitting around the table in the President’s private conference room.
Vice President Donald Reyes leaned forward in his chair and looked at William Foreshaw with a mixture of noncomprehension and plain disbelief.
“Sorry, Bill, I’m not quite with you,” he said. “Just say that again, will you?”
“I said,” the Defense Secretary replied, “that they haven’t just taken out the whole of the world’s capacity to wage global nuclear war; they have totally and completely paralyzed the possibility of any kind of strategic military operations for at least the next hundred years! They’ve demolished the whole structure of the East-West political balance of power.”
“That’s what I thought you said. Now could you explain it?”
Foreshaw passed his hand wearily across a brow that had been creased with concentration for most of the previous twenty-four hours.
“Aw, hell, this all gets a bit technical. Pat, go through it again, would you?”
Patrick Cleary, the principal Presidential adviser on computing matters, nodded from the far end and cleared his throat.
“Before they came out of the Control Room at Brunnermont yesterday, the last thing they did was activate a complicated system of interlocked programs in the supervisory BIAC . . . that’s the main computer that controls all the rest. It appears that the only person who knew that these programs even existed in the system at all was Dr. Clifford; he’d begun developing them even before he and his team moved from Sudbury to Brunnermont.”