Alternities (56 page)

Tackett’s expression never changed. “I was hoping for better from you, Mr. President. I’m glad I didn’t count on it. Maybe I’d better let you talk to General Rauche, so you can see where you really stand.”

Kondratyev was shaving in the shower when the telephone rang. It was a surprise to be called out of the shower by his wife, still more of a surprise to hear the note of hysteria in Marshal Zaitsev’s voice. Kondratyev stood dripping, the receiver smeared with shaving cream, as the Commander of the National Air Defense Forces poured out his improbable tale.

“No. No, Evgeny,” Kondratyev said when at last he had an opening. “I do not understand it. A trick, certainly, but in which hand? No, the risk is too great.” He sighed. “On my authority. Yes, all of them. Bring them all down.”

Like a giant hand snatching gnats from the air, the Soviet air defense system awoke, reached out, and swept the skies clear—swiftly, efficiently, and indiscriminately.

The first to fall victim was a two-hundred seat Turkish airliner flying from Istanbul to Odessa. Struck by a missile fired from a Russian frigate cruising the Black Sea, it broke up into a rain of charred fragments which fell to the surface and vanished.

Less than a minute later, a Polish Tupelev-94 with sixty-one passengers aboard was intercepted by two PVO jet fighters just west of Minsk. Each launched a single heat-seeking rocket. One rocket malfunctioned, but the second crawled up the exhaust of the airliner’s tail-mounted engines and exploded, sending a ball of flame forward through the cabin.

In the Warsaw military district, confused air controllers warned targets off even as others vectored fighters in. Flight 201 from Munich, forty-five minutes behind the Tupelev on the same route, tried to turn and run from a pair of Polish Air Force interceptors. An air-to-air missile sawed the right wing off, sending 117 passengers and crew earthward in a death spin.

The carnage reached from the Barents to the Adriatic. Ground fire from a Yugoslav air defense unit claimed an Aeroflot plane inbound from Rome. An overzealous Frontal Aviation pilot downed a military transport three minutes after it had taken off from Arkhangelsk.

High above the island of Saaremaa, off the eastern coast of Estonia, David Matthews was alone at the controls of the VC-24. His copilot lay dead in the aisle behind the command seats, his flight suit dark with the blood still seeping from the bullet hole in his back. The great bomb was armed now, over his copilot’s objections.

Raw sunlight flooded the cockpit, for the aircraft was flying directly toward the sun, now just rising above the horizon. There was much frantic chatter on the radio in Russian, but Matthews could decipher none of it. It did not matter. He knew he was going to die. But he knew, too, that the pilot, the gunner, the artilleryman who eventually killed him would die, too.

An alarm squalled in the cockpit, and Matthews pushed the plane over in a dive. He did not hope to outrun the air-to-air missiles whose targeting radar had triggered the alarm—they were hundreds of miles per hour faster than his craft. He hoped only to gain a few more seconds, to carry his cargo another mile or two closer to Soviet soil. He would not reach Moscow. But he might reach Riga.

A second alarm, pitched higher and trilling faster, joined the first. Matthews did not wait for the automatic relay linked to the alarms to do its job. He reached out, twisted the black key, and pushed.

Instantly, a malevolent sun appeared in the gray skies over the Gulf of Riga, its light purple at first, then blindingly blue-white, starkly etching each line on the surface of the world for a hundred miles in every direction.

Like a hungry child, the new star grew, even as its cataclysmic birth cries hammered at the sea and the land. And masked within the fireball’s swollen heart, seared by the light, shattered by the sound, two fragile aircraft, hunter and hunted, were transformed into an evanescent haze of disassociated atoms, contaminating the purity of the nuclear fire.

Like voyeurs for violence, Wallace and Shan each claimed a pair of binoculars and a west-facing window to watch the assault on the gate house. From the top-floor offices of the Federal Building, they had an almost unobstructed view diagonally across grassy Memorial Plaza at the fortresslike cathedral one block away.

Bayshore had an even better view. He was on the Federal Building’s roof with a nightscope, radio, and the Group 10 commander, a silver-haired lieutenant colonel named Fletcher. But Bayshore and Fletcher were as much spectators as Wallace and Shan, for operational control had already passed to the unit leaders in the streets.

Only Eden did not seem interested in what was about to happen, possibly because he was already looking past that event. He sat across the room from the windows, notepad on his crossed knees, designing what he described as “chemical instrumentation” for his eventual forays beyond the gate.

Through the first hour of the flight from Pennsylvania, Eden had lobbied Bayshore for permission to enter the maze as soon as the cathedral had been secured. Wallace had volunteered to escort him, but Bayshore had flatly refused both the request and the offer.

“I’m not going to risk the only man who knows how to play the game and the only man who has a chance to figure out the rules,” Bayshore had said. “So if either of you thinks he’s getting near that gate tonight, you’d better revise your thinking.”

So Eden pored over his papers as Wallace peered through his binoculars and wondered if anyone he knew was about to die.

The first subtle sign of the assault was the disappearance of all traffic on Meridian Street as the assault zone was quietly cordoned off. Then, at eight minutes past midnight, the cathedral and the eight blocks which surrounded it were suddenly plunged into darkness. Street lights and business signs went dark, buildings turned to shadowy cubes and columns.

Darkness reigned for barely more than a minute. One after another, brilliant, blinding shafts of light stabbed down from the sky toward the cathedral as a quartet of helicopters bearing armored floodlamps made their appearance.

Seconds later, from the plaza on the east, the parking lots on the north and west, the roof of the commercial building to the south, gas-masked commandos fired a salvo of rifle-launched suppression grenades. The cathedral’s small upper-story windows frustrated some of the marksmen, the canisters going wide or high and striking the stone walls instead, spewing their potent mix of blinding, stomach-knotting gases on the manicured lawn.

But enough rounds found their mark. The ornate Gothic windows of the bell spire shattered and collapsed inward. Each of the three-story towers at the corners of the building took multiple canisters, until so much gas was escaping through the broken windows that it seemed the building was on fire.

“How well armed do you think they are?” Shan asked.

Wallace shook his head. “I don’t think they ever dreamed of coming up against something like this.”

A squat armored personnel carrier on tracks raced down Meridian Street, pivoted, and raced up the front steps to batter down the great mahogany doors under the entry arch. The rear doors of the vehicle sprang open, and black-uniformed commandos with breathers and stubby automatic weapons poured out and into the building.

After that, there was little but noise to tell Wallace and Shan what was happening—a rattle of small-arms fire, the pop of a pistol, the
krumph
of a suppression grenade, the thrum of the nearest helicopter hovering in the sky.

At one point, a handful of station personnel fled to the cathedral’s roof and took refuge behind the decorative stonework of the mock parapets, from which they fired down at the assault troops deployed around the building.

But a helicopter gunship quickly moved in and peppered their hiding place with machine-gun fire. Shan turned away from the sight; Wallace did not, but his body went rigid, and the acids of guilt seared his throat.

That was the last outward sign of resistance. Shortly after, Bayshore and Fletcher returned from the roof.

“It’s ours,” Bayshore said jubilantly.

Fletcher elaborated. “It looks like there were only twenty or twenty-five people inside, and most of them were disabled by the DM gas. The operation at the satellite station house went even smoother—we picked up another fifteen or so there without firing a shot.”

“What now?” Shan asked.

“We’re going over to the cathedral,” Bayshore said, standing with arms akimbo. “Rayne, I need you to come along and show us what’s what.”

Wallace shook his head stiffly. “No.”

“Pardon?”

“You got what you wanted from me. You even managed to close my eyes to what you were making me into. We call it a traitor where I come from.”

“You did the right thing,” Bayshore said.

“Yeah? It sure doesn’t feel like it.”

“They turned their backs on you when you were still playing by the rules.”

“Maybe they did,” Wallace said. “That still doesn’t mean I’m ready to see them lined up in rows, ready for the engraver.” He reached for Shan’s hand. “Come on. We’re getting out of here.”

As they moved toward the door, Shan looked back over her shoulder at Bayshore, as though expecting a protest. But Bayshore made no move to stop them.

“I can call down to the entrance checkpoint and have them held,” Fletcher said when they were gone.

“No,” Bayshore said, shaking his head. “He’ll be back.” He shrugged. “Where else can he go?”

General Rauche’s strong voice boomed from the speakerphone, carrying the unhappy news to each listener’s ears. “We’re getting hammered in the Atlantic. Task Force 21, near the Greenland-Iceland gap, has taken the worst of it. The carrier
Kearsarge
has been sunk. The cruiser
Collins
is sinking. A fleet oiler is burning. Three patrol planes down. They’d been shadowing us, so it was easy for them to hit quickly.”

“What about the ICBMs?”

“Still no reports of launches, but I frankly don’t know what they’re waiting for.”

“And our missiles?”

“Targets programmed according to Thunderbolt, ready to launch on your order, sir,” Rauche said. “Sir, I consider the Weasel squadron extremely exposed. In my opinion, the situation is use-them-or-lose-them.”

“Peter, we need breathing space. Request a cease-fire,” Rodman urged.

“There were a thousand sailors on the
Kearsarge
, ” Robinson said stiffly.

“There’s a thousand people right here in this building, and they’re still alive,” Tackett said. “Bill is right. Ask for a cease fire. For God’s sake, you might even apologize. Offer to pay reparations.”

“Reparations? They’re sinking our ships, killing our sailors—”

“For crying out loud, you tried to nuke Moscow,” Monaghan snapped. “What do you expect them to do?”

“The war’s already started, goddamn you. What do you want me to do? We’re not walking away.”

“No, someone’s going to have to carry us—if there’s anyone around to do it.”

Rauche interrupted the squabbling. “Something off Molink, Mr. President. I’m reading this verbatim: ‘To Peter Robinson, President, United States of America. At 1:00 a.m. Washington time, or immediately upon evidence of any further threat to the Soviet homeland, all units of the Strategic Rocket Forces and the SSBN fleet of the Soviet Navy will be authorized to proceed with a full retaliatory attack upon the United States.

“ ‘This attack will proceed unless you immediately agree to and begin to comply with the following demands: One, that the U.S, abandon and destroy all missile launchers sited in Europe. Two, that the U.S, immediately recall and ground all long-range bomber aircraft. Three, that the U.S, immediately withdraw all naval units to American territorial waters—’ ”

Robinson fairly leaped around the corner of the desk to get at Tackett. “Jesus Mary, Albert, what are you waiting for?” Robinson cried, grabbing Tackett’s shirt front with both hands. “Can’t you hear? I can’t let them do that to us. I’ve got to go ahead with the war. Which means we’ve got to get out of here, starting now. We’re out of time. Rathole—”

“Rathole is gone,” said a new voice. They looked up to see Barbara Adams standing in the doorway. “We’ve lost the Blue gate house. Some kind of commando team hit it at midnight. We recovered three people, just minutes ago. That looks like all that’s coming.”

There was an ominous, cornered look in Robinson’s eyes. “I won’t do it,” he said, releasing Tackett’s shirt and stepping back.

“You have to.”

“It’s wrong,” he said. “Don’t you understand, it’s wrong to give them anything. They have too much already. This was supposed to be our century, not theirs. We’re the chosen.”

Rauche said, “Mr. President, can I remind you that the Soviets have a seven-to-one edge in throwweight, a ten-to-one edge in warheads. Our bombers would be facing a fully alerted and fully functional air defense. This isn’t a fight we can win.”

Robinson kept shaking his head. “It doesn’t have to be Blue. We can go somewhere else. General, can you hear me?”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Initiate Thunderbolt.”

“No!” shouted Monaghan.

“Peter, I’m sorry,” Rodman said, as his right hand closed around a bronze statuette on the corner of Tackett’s desk. His face grimly determined, he swung the makeshift club upward, catching Robinson full in the throat. The President staggered backward, coughing, and Rodman struck him again, this time a backhanded blow across the side of his head. Robinson dropped to his knees, and the statuette came down once more on the back of his skull.

No one moved or spoke. Shocked and disbelieving stares took the place of words.

Rodman stepped toward the phone, the bloody implement still in his hand. “General Rauche, this is Chief of Staff William Rodman,” he said, his voice unsteady. “The President is incapacitated. Since he was not able to give you the authorization countersign, do you agree that his last order is non-operative?”

The General was slow to reply. “Yes,” he said finally. “I do agree.”