Fail Safe (16 page)

There was a sergeant standing at the door of the conference room. He saluted Black as he approached.

"General, they have moved the conference to the Big Board room," the sergeant said. He shrugged before Black asked the question. "I don't know why, General. Scuttlebutt is that the Secretary of Defense is going to be there. That draws the flies, so they needed more room."

Black smiled at the ramrod-straight sergeant's jazzy lingo (probably a college boy "doing his time"), turned and almost bumped into General Stark. Stark had heard the sergeant. The two men started off for the elevator which would drop them down into the suspended concrete cube hundreds of feet below the Pentagon.

"I think Swenson wants to see Wilcox in action," Stark said. "I hear that he doesn't think Wilcox was the best choice for SecArmy, so he may be along to roast him a bit."

"Maybe," Black said, but he doubted it. Swenson would size up a new man but not roast him.

The. briefing was for Wilcox, the new Secretary of the Army, but beyond that Black did not try to follow Stark's logic. Stark was a contemporary of Black's, they were both young generals on the way up, but they were very different. Stark had made his way politically.

He was quick, but he relied on tbe brilliance of others to form his career. Black had concluded that Stark would have made general on his own talents, but he enjoyed the Machiavellian role. He traded in gossip, inside dope, and a prescience for what would happen in the future. Stark's being political was not because of laziness or doubts of his own ability. Indeed he worked with great energy and had ability, but he loved the intricacy of personality conflict, was fascinated with the struggle between powerful men. Had he been dull, he would have been a superb manager of prize fighters. Being brilliant, he was a manager of men with ideas. Stark had discovered Groteschele and 'had managed his career beautifully. As Groteschele became famous Stark became a general officer.

"I read your memo on counterforce credibility the other day," Stark said to Black. He paused. "I don't think Groteschele is going to discuss that today."

Black nodded. It was Stark's way of requesting that a subject be ruled off-limits. He was meticulous in mentioning these informal limitations. Stark played a hard and very tough game, but he played by the rules. Once when he was a chicken colonel a classmate had leaked an item to Drew Pearson. Stark, Black realized, was really morally outraged. He had systematically and with the certitude of a Torquemada broken the colonel's career.

4'O.K., but what I said in the memo about credibility still holds," Black said. "It's damned nonsense to spend billions of dollars to develop a 'military posture' which might or might not be credible to the Russians. Who needs more muscle now? Neither side. It gets down to a guess in a psychological game, Stark. This thing of piling bombs on bombs and missiles on missiles when we both have a capacity to overkill after

surviving a first strike is just silly."

"All right already, O.K.., O.K.," Stark said and laughed. "But let's don't argue it today."

"Not in front of the Big Brass," Black said bluntly.

"Oh, my God, Blackie, you're so damned hard-nosed," Stark said.

They smiled at one another. The ground rules for the day had been laid down.

The Big Board room was dominated by the huge illuminated board which occupied an entire wall. The room had the same information-receiving capacity as the War Room at Omaha, but it lacked the array of desk-consoles. This was a room where the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense would gather in case of war. They would make decisions which would be implemented by other centers around the world. This was a room for strategy. Omaha, and all its counterparts, was a place for tactics. This was the room where the decisions were made. They were carried out elsewhere.

The Big Board room showed its character. It was a mixture of the executive suite and a military headquarters. Stark and Black were early and the technicians were testing the Big Board. In a random casual way they ran over various systems, cut in on streams of information, threw various projections onto the screen. At the moment, it was tuned in only to the SPADATS system, a shorthand phrase for "space data analysis." The headquarters for SPADATS was located in Colorado Springs, but the information was projected onto the Pentagon screen with a clarity that was uncanny. As General Black watched, SPADATS switched to a Samos III satellite orbiting high in the stratosphere. Words began to crawl across the bottom of the board.

"SAMOS III #15 is moving 20,000 miles an hour,

800 miles above the earth, and has )ust been instructed

to commence photographing the transmitting pictures," the words said. "It is making a routine scan of

a part of Russia which indudes a Soviet ICBM site.

Selective discrimination follows."

The screen dissolved and then hardened up. The picture was different from the ordinary Mercator projection. This was an actual picture of a vast reach of land and lacked the hard lines of longitude and latitude. There was a range of mountains, black on one side, for it was dusk and the eastern side of the range was in shadow. There was the great twisting course of a river and the countless smaller tributaries that flowed into it. The rest of the landscape, seen from so high up, was brown and featureless, bathed in the soft magenta of sunset. In some parts of the screen there were great white clouds and Black estimated that the largest of them was actually a storm front over two hundred miles long.

"The picture will now come to maximum close-up," the words on the bottom of the screen said.

General Black always enjoyed this particular process. It was marvelous, intricate, and it was dizzying. He a!ways bad to remind himself that the Samos pictures were being transmitted instantly. What he saw was happening halfway around the world a split second previously. By a combination of processes done at Colorado Springs and in the Samos III itself the picture grew as if the Sanios III had turned and were rushing toward the earth.

The picture took on definition with a speed that was terrifying. Water suddenly showed in the great river and the next second it glinted in the tributaries. Villages popped into view as small rectangles and an instant later individual houses could be identified. Huge

forests came into focus and then copses and then single trees. The picture centered on a cleared area pocked with the unmistakable circles of rocket silos. Scattered behind revetments were trucks. Casually, for this was only a drill, the picture bore down on one of the trucks. The rest of the ICBM reservation was squeezed out of the picture.

The technician operating Samos #15 was pushing the equipment to its limit. It was a marvel to observe, an almost unbelievable scientific spectacle. It sent Black's mind spinning ahead into the future. He had heard scientists discussing the ultimate possibilities of such long-range technical espionage. One day there would be more than a vague outline of a truck, its details would be clear and sharp. Black's thoughts, captivated by the prospect, filled in the fuzzy picture now on the screen before him. - - . Two men were leaning against the truck. They wore leather boots, Red Army uniforms, and their caps were pushed back on their heads. One of them held out something to the other. The definition became sharper, zoomed in doser, focused on the exchange. Gradually the huge screen was filled by four enormous hands, hair on the back of them, the fingernails dirty. Two fingers of one of the hands held a picture of a girl. The details were contrasty, not clear, but she had a round Slavic face, was smiling, and had her head twisted to one side in a coquettish manner. - - - At this point the picture on the Big Board dissolved and with it Black's fanciful enlargement.

The truck be had just seen on the Big Board was real, though, Black reminded himself. Its driver was completely unaware that his mission had been caught by a camera 800 miles in the sky, transmitted 8,000 miles to an information center, and then projected

another 2,500 miles and viewed on this screen with an interval of no more than one second between the action and its depiction on the screen. For the first time the Samos III, its marvelous camera and its future portent, made Black restless. It seemed somehow an invasion of privacy, this subtle and soundless observation of anything on the surface of the world. Blackie, he said to himself, for a man who supported the U-2 flights, all versions of the Samos and a dozen other ventures, you are getting soft. He turned to Stark, determined to make small talk.

"What do you hear about Wilcox?" Black asked.

"The usual stuff, but he pulled a smartie two days ago," Stark said and laughed. "Someone sent him a two-page memo for circulation to the entire staff. Wilcox stuffed a sixty-page essay by Emerson between the two pages and approved it for circulation. It came back all duly initialed, but not one damn comment or question about contents. Wilcox called everyone in for a chewing-out session. They say the blood was ankle deep before he finished."

Black laughed. The story fitted well with his mood. Wilcox sounded like he might liven things up a little. No wonder Stark was a little on edge over today's briefing session.

Black glanced idly around the room. It was filling up now. One group had gathered at the opposite side of the room around the red telephone which connected directly to the President at all times. It was like a fire-insurance policy. Your main hope was that it never would be used.

Black walked toward the long conference table in the center of the room. It was an impressive slab, as if the designers had tried to combine a large board of directors' table with a university graduate-seminar table.

Around the long table, neatly placed, were high-backed leather armchairs. In front of each chair was a precise blotter layout, a fat, large new scratch pad, and two pencils, precisely arranged and guarding either side of the scratch pad. At intervals, in the center of the table, were sterling thermos jugs and official tumblers. Beyond the table on the other side along the wall was "the reservation." There were two rows of slightly less impressive armchairs, carefully designed to show that their occupants, while significant, were the less important staff assistants. The barrier was invisible. Someone could, if he wanted and there was a vacancy, sit at the big table. But no "reservation Indian" ever made that mistake. He might hunger to sit at that table, but he would know precisely when he was qualified.

By now the room contained about twenty men, over half of them in uniform. They had a sameness of look:

graying, middle-aged, ruddy, powerful-looking men. Did men look this way because they were the power types, Black wondered, or were they chosen for power because they looked this way? Black watched Stark making his way from group to group. Stark was obviously pleased today, pleased with himself. He was assured that Black would not bring up disturbing doubts about credibility. It would be a Groteschele-Stark day. These briefings, necessary and valuable, were becoming increasingly unpleasant to Black. The disagreements were difficult to state, but once stated they had to be pursued and they were impossible to resolve. Much as Black loved SAC and the men he worked with in and out of the Air Force, for five years he had had the growing sensation that "things" were slipping out of control.

The calculations of Soviet intention and capability

had Started as a straightforward and direct exercise in logic. But at some point the logic had become so intricate, so many elements were involved, so many novelties flowed into the system, that for Black it had blurred into a surrealistic world.

We matched and surpassed their capability and then guessed at their intentions. They then ran a series of tests and surpassed our capability and guessed at our intentions. And then we guessed what they guessed we were guessing. Meanwhile years ago each side had developed the capacity to destroy the other even after suffering a massive surprise first strike.

Black often had the sensation in a meeting that they had all lost contact with reality, were free-floating in some exotic world of their own. It was not just SAC or the Pentagon, Black thought. It was the White House, the Kremlin, 10 Downing Street, De Gaulle, Red China, pacifists, wild-eyed right-wingers, smug leftwingers, NATO, UN, bland television commentators, marchers for peace, demonstrators for war. - . everyone. They were caught in a fantastic web of logic and illogic, fact and emotion. No one seemed completely whole. No one could talk complete sense. And everyone was quite sincere.

Black remembered when the sense of unreality had started. It was a few years before when Groteschele had brought up the Kahn example of what would happen if' an American Polaris submarine accidentally discharged a missile at us. The submarine commander would have time to make radio contact and explain what had happened so that SAC would know the missile was an accident. Everyone at the briefing had nodded, thinking that ended the discussion. But Groteschele bad persisted. The Soviet would detect the missile in flight, would know it was our accident and

would detect the explosion. But they would worry about our reaction. How could they be sure that we knew it was our own missile? Might they not fear our "retaliation" and, prompted by this fear, attack us in the confusion? So might not the best Soviet tactic be to strike at once? Indeed, might not the best strategy

•f each side, even if both knew it was an accident and both knew whose accident, be to strike at once?

They had, Black thought, slipped by that one cheaply. They had decided that all possible steps should be taken to assure against accidental discharge of a missile.

Maybe he should resign his commission. It hit him again. It had been coming to a head within him for a long time. Curious, he thought: he could live with his conscience and with his beliefs in almost any other arm of the service but the one he loved. But SAC and especially his own role in SAC (the link he furnished between operations and the Strategy Analysis and Evaluation Section) made his private thoughts seem like rank heresy. But why did it torment him so much more than it did the others? From the outside they looked happy in their jobs, but who could tell? He supposed he looked as untroubled as they.