David's Sling (37 page)

A punishment that would not harm innocent people.
He faced a crisis here so difficult that he couldn't imagine a way of coping with it. Without thinking, he reached for the knife that had accompanied him up the mountain. He paused, contemplating the knife, the mountain, and the crevasse. He felt calmer.

And then he felt hopeful, for he realized that there
was
a punishment he could allow the Soviets to impose that involved no
innocent
victims. It was a third alternative, one he had thought of once before, dangling by a rope in a deep and deadly crevasse.

The strangled voice of a junior officer penetrated Hilan's meditation. "Thank God," he said. "The rest of them are getting through."

Hilan looked up to see another silo-attack sequence on the board. This time, the pattern of sleet struck with silent precision: a dead-center hit, that left visible cracks in the silo cover; a second hit, that left broken concrete rocks in its wake; a third hit that speared through the opening, to cut through the nose cone of the missile like a meat cleaver; and another hit that cleared most of the rubble from above before piercing the missile to its core in a second mortal blow. This second hit struck the fuel supply. A burst of light and fire spit back into the night from which the sleet had come, then settled to a glowing ember, deep in the shaft of what had once been a missile silo.

Hilan drew a long, shuddering breath.

General Hansen asked, with the tone of an order, "What's the ratio of kills to misses?" He leaned forward, squinting one eye at the numbers frothing in one corner of the display. "About 20 to 1?"

The officer in charge of the display nodded. "Yes, sir."

Hansen looked back at the president. "Good, but not as good as we had hoped. And not good enough, Mr. President. The Russians have over 2,000 missiles. If one in twenty survives, they still have over a hundred of them."

Hilan nodded. "Not enough to destroy the world, but enough to destroy the United States." How did this change Hilan's analysis? Certainly, it made an all-out Soviet attack even less rational from the Soviet point of view: they could not doubt, in these circumstances, that the U.S. could and would retaliate. Even so, Hilan's earlier analysis remained valid. He still needed to offer the Russians a sane way to punish the Americans.

He rose from the table with stiff precision. "I believe it is time to negotiate with Klimov." He walked past the glass control area to sit down with the hot line display system, confident that Klimov would be with him shortly.

Yurii began a painful ascent from deep slumber at the sound of mad, pounding boots. "Sir, we are under attack."

"What?" Light pounded against Yurii's closed eyelids; he winced.

And then he was in a helicopter, his robe flapping as he dressed in the dark, in the cramped space, in the screaming noise of the rotor, in the heart-tightening fear that wormed through his soggy thoughts.

As he grew older, Yurii had more trouble waking at odd hours. A moment of empathy for the retired General Secretary hovered on the edge of his mind, then vanished as his mind focused on the terror of the situation.
We are under attack.

But Forstil had just initiated the destruction of his own missiles! Could that have been a ruse? Somehow, Hilan Forstil had seemed too sincere, in that American sort of way, to devise a trick of such scale.

Finally dressed, he set his shoulders and listened to the situation report. It was, in some bizarre sense, not as bad as he had feared. The information was fragmentary—the primary communications systems had been knocked out with superb efficiency—but apparently no nuclear weapons had been used in the attack. Just prior to the strike, the radars had noted the breakup of the new HighHunters, with the oversized Crowbars. Now that it was too late, Yurii understood the new weapon and its purpose. Ah, the accuracy of hindsight!

The briefing ended too quickly, with too few facts. Yurii retreated to the hot-line room with an army of translators, though Yurii understood English as well as many of them.

Hilan Forstil was waiting for him. The quality of the picture was uncanny; Yurii had not seen the system since the new high-resolution cameras had been installed. Forstil sat close by at a table; if Yurii focused on the oversized screen, it seemed that Hilan was with him, in Moscow, rather than half a world away.

"Greetings," the president said. "I've been expecting you." He smiled, the sad, stem smile of a doctor who has only precarious news for his patient's family.

Yurii glared at him, a flood of anger welling up that he barely contained by his awareness of the chasm between them—a chasm large enough to swallow them both. "You have stripped me of communications. I can talk to no one but you."

Hilan looked back calmly, his face suffused with sincerity. "Really? I would like to believe you. Heaven knows we tried our best to destroy all your communication systems. However, I doubt that we succeeded. General Secretary, the Soviet Union has a
lot
of communication systems."

A feeling of near-amusement struck Yurii; in fact, the president was right. Yurii still had other assets, though coordinating them to carry out a plan remained problematic.

Forstil spoke again. "But though we failed to take away all your communications, I suspect that I know more about your current status than you do. Let me bring you up to date: your submarines are gone, all of them. Your bombers are gone as well: the handful you have in the air are under observation, and if they try to move in our direction, we will destroy them quickly, even easily."

Forstil paused, to look away at a display that was hidden from Yurii's camera. "Your intermediate-range missiles have been reduced in number along the European front, though a considerable number remain. Of course, they aren't relevant now, since they can't reach the United States. Your forces along the Chinese border remain intact."

Hilan smiled almost mischievously, knowing that these were not the critical statistics. "Your land-based missiles have taken the most severe damage. Most of them have been destroyed. But you do have about a hundred ICBMs left."

Yurii nodded. His own people could account for about 30 operational systems; something on the order of a hundred seemed reasonable. Of course, the American President could be lying. Forstil could be giving him either a high estimate or a low one, depending on his purpose. Certainly, Forstil had had more time to consider this situation. Yurii was sure the president had used that analysis time well.

Yet the man seemed so open and willing to share information. Could Yurii use that? "President Forstil, your estimate is lower than our analysis suggests. Which hundred missiles are the ones you think are still operational?"

The president leaned forward, suddenly very serious. "We can't afford to play games here, General Secretary. We have a planet to save. "

For a moment, Yurii couldn't control his anger. "You have attacked the sovereign territory of the Soviet Union! We can destroy your whole civilization!"

Forstil's sorrow returned. "Yes, you can. Of course, we can destroy yours, as well." He licked his lips. "Please remember that little harm has come to your people. The United States will, of course, pay retribution to the families of the men who have lost their lives. Frankly, I don't expect that to involve many claims."

Indeed, to Yurii's knowledge, only two men had died in the attack. One had been wounded. "You have destroyed billions of dollars of investment in our defenses!"

"We will destroy a similar set of investments in our nation. We have already started, as you well know. And we were the only reason you needed all that hardware in the first place."

"Your trivial destruction of a few Minutemen is a ruse and a hoax, designed to trick us into lying still while you grasp world dominance!"

Forstil shook his head. "Yurii Klimov, you are the most astute General Secretary the Soviet Union has had in a long time. And you are the most sophisticated analyst of Americans ever to hold your office. You have studied me. I am destroying the American strategic missile force. Soon we will have no more missiles than you have today. Klimov, I have no reason to lie to you on this matter. What value would more than a hundred nuclear missiles have? What value did they ever have? Have you personally slept any better with thousands of these monsters than you did before? I can't believe it."

The open weariness of the American struck Yurii with surprise. Even more surprising, Yurii recognized the same feeling within himself—a weariness with the wrestling match he had conducted all his life, under the shadow of nuclear terror that was insane in its intensity. He looked away for a moment as he realized that, one way or another, that shadow that had haunted him would now become lighter.

A feeling of optimism followed. He began to believe that the American would destroy most of the American missile force, as surely as he had destroyed Russia's. Yurii started to tell the president that the Soviet Union had planned to follow America's lead and reduce its nuclear force, but cut off his own words. The president was right; this was not a time for games.

Still, his anger remained. His country had been attacked!

He wanted to launch a counterstrike, to destroy the American ICBM silos in return. This course of action seemed like proper justice. But he did not have enough missiles, even if he had the command and control systems to arrange it. Besides, the Americans would destroy those silos for him.

He glared at the president again. Forstil, he realized, had been studying him intently these past few moments. Yurii suddenly despised the high-resolution television system that betrayed his every movement to the American. He fought a desire to order the camera shut off, sensing that such a reduction in personal contact was the first step to oblivion. Yet oblivion seemed inevitable. What recourse did he have, but to strike back at America's cities? He
had to
respond to this attack! What else could he do, other than destroy American cities?

Hilan Forstil seemed to read his thought. "This is a personal confrontation, General Secretary, no matter how it affects the world. You must not blame the United States for the destruction of your missiles. The United States did not initiate this attack against you. I did." The president seemed to grow in presence. The sincerity in his eyes reached out, convincing. "Blame me. If you feel you must punish someone, punish me."

"Very well, President Forstil. I shall blame you." His face twisted with fury. "But how do I punish you?"

"With my hand. With yours." Now the president opened his right hand; it contained a bright red swiss army knife. With hypnotic, casual grace, Forstil opened the blade and brought it to his own throat.

A gasp arose from somewhere off-camera. Forstil frowned at the sound, then turned back to Yurii. "Kill no innocent people, Yurii Klimov. Kill only those who are to blame. In killing them, you will get your message across most effectively. Let this nightmare end with the guilty. "

Yurii stared at the knife. The steel blade flickered in the light, clean and precise in its deadly intent. It seemed so small, yet so perfectly lethal—truly, a proper mate to the surgical Hunters that had excised the Soviet arsenal. Except that
this
surgical weapon was under Yuriis control— At least, Forstil claimed that it was under Yuriis control.

Control. Control of the environment. Control of the self. No man reached the pinnacle of Soviet power without understanding control. He believed Forstil: he believed that he himself, not the American, controlled the knife.

And he wondered, did he control the knife, or did the knife control him? Yurii could not take his eyes away from it.

His eyes slid reluctantly down to the smooth plastic handle, held in a firm but easy grip. Yurii had an identical knife in his own desk. For a moment this thought gave him a sense of kinship with the president. He could feel the smooth surface sliding between his own fingers, tapping a fingernail against its unyielding strength.

Afraid of too close an empathy, he jerked up to look at the American President. And here he found a break in his rapport with the man who offered his life: Forstil looked back with steady eyes—eyes that held no trace of guilt or fear.

It provoked Yurii to another outburst. "You launched a sneak attack against us! Without discussion, without warning!" he screamed, trying to extract some admission of guilt. "Of all the people in history, you most deserve to die for starting this holocaust!"

"Yurii Klimov." The president's voice was soft, almost a whisper. "If our positions had been reversed, what would you have done?"

If he had had the chance to so cleanly neutralize Amer ica, what would he have done? The answer struck him like shards of ice flung in his face. He suddenly saw generosity in Hilan Forstil's actions.

The president was speaking again. "Frankly, it doesn't make any difference what you might have done. I am the one who did it. General Secretary, the vengeance you seek, in your belief that it is justice, is in your hands. It is yours for just the slightest motion. " The knife tip pressed against yielding flesh.

Yurii had the American totally in his power. To kill this man would indeed send a potent message to anyone foolish enough to think about this stunt again. Yet, the thought continued to haunt him,
what would l have done in the same situation
?

He must have moved his head, for he saw the president's hand grip more firmly, a last tension before plunging the knife home.

Yurii leaped up. "No!" he shouted. "I will not take your miserable life."

The president's fingers relaxed, though for a long moment his expression remained the same, as if not quite believing his reprieve. Then he smiled, that same sorrowful smile. "Thank you." He looked to the side, and his smile became wider, yet also more sorrow-filled. "And now it no longer makes any difference."

Yurii looked at the president, puzzled, until Forstil explained. "A second wave of SiloHunters just struck the Soviet Union. General Secretary, your country no longer has a strategic nuclear force."