Fail-Safe

“Buck, this may all be over in the next few minutes,” the President said, turning the pencil slowly, looking away to see Buck. “It probably will be. The bombers will find out their mistake and turn around and head back or we will make radio contact and recall them. Right now we don’t know why they flew past their Fail-Safe point and.we can’t raise them by radio. By itself neither event is catastrophic. But this particular situation has never occurred before. The entire positive control system depends on our ability to maintain verbal contact by radio. That’s why we are here. Possibly it will get very sticky.”

The President paused. Buck knew he did not have to respond, but he found himself speaking.

“I don’t know about the details, Mr. President,” Buck said, surprised at his own words, “but if the military people were sure it was something they could solve themselves they wouldn’t have called you. You’re down here because they know it is a serious problem.”

The President stopped turning the pencil. “You interested in politics?” he asked.

Buck paused. “No, sir, not particularly.”

“I remember. You’re studying law.”

“Yes, sir.” Again Buck was amazed by the man’s memory, and profoundly flattered.

“You’ve got a nice political feel,” the President said. “Bogan in Omaha has instructions to get through to me in a number of very specific and detailed situations.

He also has one general instruction just in case something happens that the specific instructions don’t cover. You stated the general instruction just now: whenever anything occurs that looks serious get on the red phone.”

The President paused again. He looked back at the pencil.

“Look. Buck, If things get really serious we might have to use the ‘hot wire’ which connects me with the Kremlin,” the President said and paused. “For the first time.”

Buck knew that late in 1962 Washington and Moscow had agreed to maintain a constant telephone connection between the American President and the Premier of Russia. It had promptly been labeled the “hot wire.” Buck also knew that it had never been used. For the first time since his phone rang that morning, a chill went through Peter Buck.

“Most situations I can handle myself,” the President went on, “but I don’t speak Russian. You do. You might have to translate for me and the translation has to be not only literally perfect, but it should catch every emphasis I intend and the tones I use to convey meaning. Sb from now on you listen to every conversation I have on the phone. As soon as the conversation is over I will tell you what I think of it. Don’t argue with me, but just make sure you understand what I feel. All right?”

“Yes, sir,” Buck said. “It’s new to me, but I’ll try.”

The President leaned back in his chair and dosed his eyes. “That’s all you can do. That’s all any of us can do.” When he spoke again it was in an intimate and completely unguarded manner, a kind of verbal free-association.

“I’ve talked to Bogan in Omaha twice since 10:80,” he said. “Good man. Old type flier. Not afraid of all the new equipment. If he’s worried, I’m worried. O.K. Then I talked to Wilcox. New Secretary of the Army. He’s tough, but too tough for a new man. Too sure. We listen to him, but we take his advice slow. Very, very slow. Now the switchboard is trying to get Swenson. You know Swenson?”

The President did not open his eyes. Buck realized that he was both relaxing and giving instructions at the same time.

“No, sir,” Buck said. “I know he is Secretary of Defense, but that is all.”

“To Swenson we listen and if he gives advice we take it all,” the President said. “Unless I tell you otherwise, whatever Swenson says is what I think.”

The phone rang and the President opened his eyes and nodded at Buck to pick up his phone also.

“Mr. President, it’s Swensom at the Pentagon,” a dry small voice said. “I am in my own office, but have an urgent call to come to the Big Boardroom. There was also the word to call you.” The voice stopped. There was no apology or hesitation, merely that Swenson had conveyed all the information he felt pertinent.

“It might be nothing, Swenson,” the President said. “It might be big trouble. One of our groups of Vindicators flew through its Fail-Safe point and is headed toward Russia. Positive Control has broken down. Omaha doesn’t know how it happened. I talked to Wilcox in your Big Board room and he doesn’t either, but he is talking tough. I’d like you to get down there and be ready for anything. Keep that college professor Groteschele there and don’t let the military boys drown him out. Also Blackie, General Black, is there. Keep him there whatever happens.”

“Any particular reason, Mr. President?” the Secretary of Defense asked.

“No. He is an old friend and a classmate. I know him and trust him in any situation,” the President said with no apology.

“Yes, I understand,” Swenson said. “Anything else?”

“That’s all,” the President said.

The phone dicked dead instantly and without a farewell salutation.

The President grinned at Buck.

“Wastes no time,” the President said. “I wish I liked the sonofabitch a little better. All I can do is respect him. But that’s enough.”

Buck had seen Swenson from a distance, but had never heard him talk. Even so he knew a good deal about the man. He was something of a legend, a fable, in a capital which was accustomed to unusual men. Swenson looked like a clerk who had come to power by mistake. He was thin, shy, easily embarrassed, and at the same time abrupt, incisive, and cold. Socially he seemed to be a man who wanted to blend into the gray background, who shrank from contact. He dressed with an unmistakable flair for the totally inconspicuous, almost as if his clothes were camouflage. A Time cover story had stated, “He is the only self-made millionaire in the United States who looks as if his clothes were bought by his wife off the racks at a discount house.” In high school and college class photographs Swenson was the person no one could remember. Meeting him face to face it was impossible to conceive of Swenson as a bold administrator, a courageous innovator.

It took powerful and sensitive men only a few minutes, however, to realize that when they faced Swenson they faced an equal. If they were especially perceptive they sensed that in a peculiar, understated and almost eerie way Swenson was their superior. He had a calm, steely mind that would, if Swenson had allowed it full swing, have been dazzling. But he went to great pains to conceal his extraordinary intelligence. Swenson listened carefully to everyone in whom he had confidence, his head tilted to one side carefully evaluating what was said. The moment there was a flaw in logic or a missing piece of evidence he asked a quiet question.

Talking to Swenson was not a task that the average man liked. It was too much like a quiet and merciless interrogation. In his months in the Pentagon Swenson had quietly shifted dozens of admirals and generals out of important positions on the basis of a five-minute conversation with them. Men of the first quality, men who possessed the capacity for real power and a deep intuition, responded quickly to Swenson. Lesser men never quite understood Swenson. They were not around him long enough. Quietly and without injury to their reputations, they were disposed of. Swenson could not tolerate incompetence.

The President picked up the red phone. He nodded to Buck to pick up his phone.

“Get Omaha again,” he said.

The big clock on the wall showed 10:40.

Early that morning, while it was still dark, Lieutenant Colonel Grady, the commander of Group 6, had stood beside his Vindicator bomber and examined it in the cold, harsh, unblinking floodlights of the airstrip.

It is a dream bomber, Grady thought. On the ground it looks ungainly. Its wings droop. Its landing gear is very high to allow a great sleek pod to be slung under the regular fuselage. The pod contains extra bombs, or fuel, or air-to-air missiles, or deception apparatus. The pod is beautifully streamlined and makes the Vindicator look somewhat more muscular. On the ground, however, motionless and quiet, the Vindicator has the flamingo look of long improbable legs attached to a powerful body.

Once aloft, however, the Vindicator is sheer beauty. The wings rise, the landing gear retracts, and the Vindicator has a graceful jeweled lapidary look. Inside it is even more sophisticated and elegant. Although it is an enormously intricate piece of machinery, it is flown by only three men. Everything has been miniaturized, transistorized, servo-reinforced, and automated. It is flown by a pilot, a bombardier, and a weapons operator. In fact, the plane has been so mechanized that it could fly, fight, and drop bombs served by only a single man.

There was more than an aesthetic and mechanical reason why older men like Grady who flew the Vindicator loved the plane. They realized, some of them, with all the agony of a doomed love affair, that it was probably the last of its type. Maybe the RS-70 would be something like the Vindicator, but the old-timers knew they would not fly them. For them the Vindicator was the last plane. The Vindicator had pushed the cooperation between men and machinery to its uppermost limit. The next plane would surely be so fast, complicated, and intricate that it would be flown without humans aboard. The plane would, in fact, be a guided missile.

But the Vindicator crew, Grady thought proudly, still exercises judgment, the plane still responds to our bands. Our eyes scan the countless instruments. We must bring her screaming and protesting in for taut landings.

The bombardier and weapons operator walked by Grady and climbed into the plane. Like most of the younger airmen they did not glance at the Vindicator. They squeezed into the plane, map cases in their hands, eager to get into their burrows, fasten on their helmets and set about their tasks.

Grady looked up once more at the molded perfection of the Vindicator’s shape, ignoring her ungainly landing gear, and climbed aboard. Two minutes later he had her screaming down the runway. Behind him five other Vindicators leaned into the takeoff. Three hours later they were 60,000 feet in the chill air over Alaska. It was just turning daylight.

Once seated and strapped into the Vindicator, the three-man crew cannot move about. The plane is so full of machinery that the three tiny places which the men occupy hold them as tightly as individual burrows. They can talk on the intercoms and they can, if they wish, also talk normally to one another by removing the lower part of their face plates. But the crew almost never talk except over the intercom; in fact, the crew members make very little small talk with one another, partly because their training has discouraged it, and partly because they are seldom close friends.

It had recently become SAC policy to circulate crew members at random among planes. The objective was to get identical performance from all men so that they acted as identical units of a class rather than as individual personalities. Given the cost and the speed and the importance of a Vindicator, no one wanted to count on camaraderie or crew morale for a mission to be successful.

There were no brothers-in-arms aboard a Vindicator, Grady thought. He had met his two crewmen before, but had never talked with them at any length. He would not, he knew, talk much to them while aloft. Each man’s burrow was also his duty. Within eyesight were hundreds of dials to watch, gauges to check, knobs to turn.

In case of a fatal emergency each man’s burrow would be automatically catapulted out from the plane at an enormous speed and, containing its own oxygen and control system, would bring the crew member safely to earth, or sea. At least that was the theory, but no one had yet been catapulted at maximum speed from a Vindicator without sustaining grave injuries. At maximum speed the ejection capsules were traveling faster than bullets, and the air, so soft and gentle when still, was suddenly hard and brutal. When ejected a man was whacked around unmercifully in the tumbling, spinning capsule. It was something Vindicator crews tried not to think about.

For all these reasons the crewmen of the Vindicator were a proud and highly qualified lot. Even in their loneliness they took a pride, for the great glistening smooth-packed machinery they flew also gave them a sense of self. The fact that they were locked into the mechanism, embraced by it, yet in control while at their positions gave them a feeling both of individuality and of being bound tightly to an organization.

At 0580 the flight of Vindicators was topped off with jet fuel from two huge jet tankers. They performed the operation flawlessly, sucking thousands of gallons of fuel from the tankers in a matter of minutes. They continued their orderly flight plan, each plane locked into the V-shape of the group, not varying position by more than a few feet although they were flying at over a thousand miles an hour. Beneath them the darkness of the land began to break, immense chains of mountains shouldered up into the faint light, a glacier glittered icily.

They received the radio order to fly toward their Fail-Safe point without comment. They had all done it before. Grady led the group in a great sweeping arc through the sky. They picked up speed and still maintained flawless position. Grady felt the pride of a perfect performance as they completed the change of course. They flew in a nonevasive arrow straight line. Evasive action was useless at this point and merely expended fuel.

Captain Thomas, the bombardier, handed Grady a form which said “Fuel range past Fail-Safe estimated 8,020 miles.”

Grady came up on the intercom and acknowledged the written form.

“Thomas seems all right,” Grady thought to himself. He looked over at the captain. All he could see was a pair of fine brown eyes, dark eyebrows, and a few square inches of white skin. The rest of Captain Thomas’ face was covered by. a helmet, oxygen mask, and microphone. Grady looked back at Lieutenant Sullivan, the weapons operator. Seeing only the eyes, he realized with a shock that their acquaintance was so slight he could not even reconstruct in his mind what Sullivan looked like. But he was impressed with Sullivan’s hands: they had long sensitive fingers and when they moved, to touch a knob or control, they moved with an absolute precision and a definite and utter mood of assurance.

Grady, Thomas, and Sullivan, grady thought to himself. No good war novel here. The whole damn crew is Anglo-Saxon. What we should have is a Jew in it and an Italian to give color. He almost came up on the intercom to mention this, but stopped himself short. Because of his seniority, Grady had missed the intensive indoctrination which the younger crew members had gone through at various training centers around the United States. He had noticed that they seemed to have almost no sense of humor about their work, and besides, these boys hadn’t read the war novels. For a moment, a quick piercing slice of time, Grady felt like an old man, part of an older generation.

In the next moment he forgot everything, for Thomas handed him the clipboard with the information that they were a hundred miles from the Fail-Safe point. At once, with a sense of exquisite control which was very deep in. his muscles and his brain, he began a long sweeping curve which would bring him just to the edge of the Fail-Safe point. He knew without having Thomas check that the other five Vindicators had begun to turn with him. This, for Grady, was why he had joined the Air Force. It was an act of pure artistry and it filled him with a thrill of pleasure. He felt the Vindicator tilt, saw the wings move, felt a slight change in pressure against his harness and knew that they had probably lost 125 miles an hour by their long skidding maneuver movement across the sky. Grady hoped that they would stay at the Fail-Safe point for a few minutes this morning. It was the one time when he could still fly the plane with a sense of independence and autonomy. For at the Fail-Safe point the group commander could fly random patterns at random speeds as long as he did not go beyond the Fail-Safe point, and did not vary his altitude by more than 1,000 feet.

The sun shone jaggedly on the western horizon. It shot out long rays of bright light which illuminated the high darkness, but left the land black. The outline of distant mountains was etched sharp. Once, by some mirage of refraction, a whole glacier flamed blue-white for a moment and then died. The flash of the glacier reminded Grady that the people on the land were still in darkness and it gave him pleasure. In a few more minutes they would be in first light, but now the great altitude of the Vindicators gave them sole possession of the light. The knowledge of dark and lightness allowed Grady a sense of satisfaction. He knew it was a childlike sense of superiority. It meant nothing. But it was precisely for these seemingly childlike reasons that Grady had wanted to fly. This time his pleasure was short. At once he was thinking of the day when planes would fly themselves; when flying would become a combination of engineering and science and men would be merely spectators.

Quite reflexively, as if to demonstrate his control, he put the Vindicator into a.sharp turn. The enjoyment of it, Grady thought, can be only man’s. Machines could probably do it just as well, but they would have no sense of excitement, no pleasure at the beauty of the six planes holding their positions while traveling at high speeds. The outboard planes, with longer sweep to cover, would put on just enough speed to maintain the V-shape.

“Sullivan, how is the group holding formation?” Grady asked over the intercom.

“Perfectly, sir,” Sullivan said instantly. “Even No. 6 is not out of position by more than five yards.”

Grady smiled behind his oxygen mask. He must remember to compliment Flynn, the pilot of No. 6, when they landed. The No. 6 plane labored under a special disadvantage. Although she carried no thermonuclear weapons, the No. 6 plane was, paradoxically, the most heavily laden of any plane in the group.

In every group this was the plane that carried a maximum load of defensive apparatus and devices. It was this plane which could jam the enemy radar gear, receive and analyze and attempt to foil enemy attack, spread decoys throughout the skies, and act, as Grady had always figured in his mind, as a wise but tuskless elephant might do in leading a group of muscular young bulls into action. The No. 6 plane was always flown by specialists who thoroughly understood the incredible intricacy of its weird perceptions, methods of analysis, and means of defense.

Grady moved the yoke and the Vindicator leveled off. The slight strain on his harness relaxed. He glanced around his limited arc of sky and saw it turning from a crystal gray to a deep endless blue. Then he received two signals which made his body go rigid even before his mind understood fully what had happened. In his earphones there was a sudden beeping noise repeated in short staccato bursts. Automatically he looked down at the Fail-Safe box which was installed between him and the bombardier. For the first time in his flying career the bulb on top of the box was glowing red. Then his intellect caught up with his reflexes: this was the real thing. Both he and Thomas looked up from the Fail-Safe box simultaneously. Thomas’ eyes seemed nonchalant. Grady’s response was unhesitating. He reached for the S.S.B. radio switch. This would put him in direct contact with Omaha. It was the Positive Control double-check. mediately, Grady knew, he would hear from Omaha the reassuring “No go.” Something had gone wrong with the Fail-Safe box. It would all be corrected. He flipped on the S.S.B. switch. A loud, pulsating drone filled his ears. No voice signal was possible.

“Request permission, sir, to verify,” Thomas said crisply.

“Permission granted,” Grady said automatically.

To his own ears Grady’s voice sounded small and chilled. He was stunned at the tonelessness in Thomas’ voice, the expressionless look in his eyes.

Grady reached into the map case beside his seat and took out a pure red envelope which bore in black letters the words “Fail-Safe--Procedure March 18.” Thomas was taking out an identical envelope from his map case. As Grady’s fingers tore open the envelope he Looked at the face of the Fail-Safe box. There were six apertures, each of them about an inch square. Always, until this moment, the apertures had been blank. Now in bold white figures there were three letters and three numbers: CAP-SI 1. The Fail-Safe box was an intricate machine made up of a radio receiving device, plus six wheels, each of which contained either all the letters of the alphabet or the numbers from 1 through 9. When the radio receiver within the box was activated by a direct signal put into the machine by the Intelligence officer on each base and unknown to any crew member,

letters and numbers would appear in the aperture.

Grady got his envelope open and took out a thick white 8-by-8-inch card. On the top line was the date and below it were the words and letters CAP-811. He held the card directly over the machine to make sure that he was not mistaken. Thomas, in the meanwhile, had taken out an identical card which he held next to Grady’s. They both confirmed that the machine was showing the correct code sequence for the day.

“Request permission to authenticate on the secondary channel, sir,” Thomas said.

“Permission granted,” Grady said.

Thomas removed a red plastic cover from a dial which was labeled FAIL-SAFE ALTERNATE CRANNEL.

Without a moment’s hesitation he. turned the dial to the right. Instantly the red light and the beeping stopped. The letters and numbers disappeared from the apertures in the Fail-Safe box. Grady scanned the sky again, felt his musdes bulging against the tight harness. His mind was utterly blank. In three seconds the beeping started and the light went on again. The Fail-Safe box was now receiving its signal on a different channel. When Grady looked at the six apertures they again said “CAP-811.” Again Grady held his card directly over the apertures and Thomas held his card next to Grady’s. They checked.

Grady felt a spasm of doubt, a kind of upwelling of disbelief. It had never happened before, it could not be happening now. He thought of alternatives: he could not radio General Bogan at Omaha. He could keep circling at Fail-Safe, hoping for some other form of verification. And then he looked at Sullivan and Thomas. They were looking at him casually, their eyes unblinking and unquestioning. They were innocently implacable.

Grady felt as if his vertebrae had suddenly fused together. His hands did not shake but he felt all bone and muscle and cartilage. He was aware that Thomas was looking at him with something like puzzlement in his exposed eyes.

Grady felt that something had happened to the vital living parts of his body-the heart, brain, eyes, ears, and tongue had died. He felt for a moment that he would not be able to speak. He ordered his tongue to move, to speak the words he knew he must say.

“I read it as CAP-811,” Grady heard his voice say. This was the procedure in which they had been drilled thousands of times, but the voice did not sound like that of Grady. It seemed to come from somewhere in the intercom system, to be a mechanical and inhuman voice.

“I verify your reading as CAP-811,” Thomas said.

“We will now both open our operational orders,” Grady said, and again the voice did not seem to belong to him.

Grady reached down for the envelope in the map case. For a brief second he saw Sullivan looking at him. Again he had the impression of blankness, the eyes without the mouth and with the exposed flesh squeezed tight by mouthpiece and helmet, told nothing. If the masks and helmets were off, Grady thought, would Sullivan’s face be filled with terror? Somehow he doubted it. Sullivan looked back at his tubes and analyzers. Grady began to open the operational plan.

Squarely on the middle of the envelope containing the plan and in small red block letters were the words Top SECRET. In smaller black letters in the lower lefthand corner was a sentence which said TO BE OPENED ONLY AT SPECIFIC ORDERS AND UNDER CURRENT OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS. In the lower right-hand corner were the words DESTROY BEFORE CAPTURE OR ABANDONMENT OF AIRCRAFT. The flap closing the envelope was sealed at three places. The envelope was well designed to accomplish two purposes: it could not be opened without detection, but it could be opened easily.

Grady broke the seals and looked at the familiar format of the operational plan. It was all contained on a single stiff piece of paper. The rest of the enclosures were alternative plans, escape mutes, survival techniques, a cellophane-wrapped card which Grady knew gave the names of possible American agents within Russia and which would dissolve into a shapeless piece of cellulose the moment it touched water, even the amount of moisture that one had in his mouth.

The top line of the plan said: “Target: Moscow.” The second line said “Approach and penetration,” and described the altitude and speeds at which they were to fly. No. 6 plane was to take the lead. There were detailed instructions on what to do under varying conditions of fighter plane, missile, and antiaircraft attack.

On another line there were instructions as to bomb placement and settings. Under optimum conditions twelve bombs would be laid symmetrically over Moscow to explode at an altitude of 5,000 feet, Vindicators to bomb from an altitude of 60,000 feet.

In some unguarded and unclassified part of Grady’s mind there was a stunning montage of old motion pictures of bombs exploding at Eniwetok and Los Alamos and Bikini. The twelve great fireballs would gently touch and then feeding upon one another would gradually mold into a huge shuddering second-long unbearable white and heloid shimmer of pure heat. Deliberately, and aware that this vision was part sensual. Grady snapped off the picture. Thomas’ large cool blue eyes were looking at him.

“Do you want to come up on the TBS, sir?” Thomas said.

The TBS was a very low-powered radio which would carry only a few miles and was designed for communication between the planes in the group. Its signals were deliberately designed so that they could not be heard beyond a short radius.

“Just a minute, Thomas,” Grady said. He felt a strong necessity to do something more but was not dear what. A dread sense of lonely helplessness engulfed him. He knew there was only one explanation for his jammed radio and the “go” order on his Fail-Safe box: the Russians had started an attack. Further hesitation might play into Russian hands. He must follow his orders. This was what all his years of training had been about. No time now for doubt& He shook his head clear.

Grady looked into the eyes of the two strangers-the two magnificent technicians who might have been hundreds of other anonymous experts. Behind his mask he licked his lips. The four eyes rested lightly on him. They were without accusation. He imagined them to be burning with certitude, glowing with an innocent assurance. Indeed, why shouldn’t they be? The machines were with them. Somehow, in a way he could not understand, the four cool eyes soothed the nerve in Grady’s mind. He felt the surety of command flow back into him. When he spoke, his voice was for the first time his own and it was confident.

“Switch on the TBS, Thomas,” Grady said. With utter confidence he picked up the microphone and began to give penetration orders to the group.

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 the 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.

“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 just been instructed to commence photographing the transmitting pictures,” the words said. “It is making a routine scan of a part of Russia which includes 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 closer, 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 for 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.

A stir on the other side of the room caught his eye. There he was. Groteschele. It was as if he had opened a door from last night’s party and walked right into the Pentagon: the same confident, aggressive, jutting thrust. The same stride. In company with Groteschele came Wilcox, Carruthers, the Navy Chief of Staff, and Allen, of the National Security Council.

Everyone in the room had observed the entry of the big brass at the same time. The room “knew” it. An instant before it had been a room with one personality, relaxed and informal. Now it had become a room which had snapped to attention in all sorts of little ways hard to detect. It was the effort everyone was making to seem to behave as if the brass were not there that made the difference.

Groteschele proceeded to the head end of the long conference table. As he did so everyone else began finding seats around the table. It was clear that the Secretary of Defense was either not coming or would arrive late and had sent word for the briefing to start.

Stark handled the opening remarks easily and deftly. Then Groteschele began talking in his positive, slightly patronizing way. He announced the subject: accidental war. The subject had been cropping up in the news lately. There had been a few articles in magazines. The military people had, of course, been working on the problem for years and in detail.

“In the old days, six months ago,” Groteschele said with a chuckle, “most of the talk about accidental war was what we now call the madman theory.” He went on about the possibility of SAC squadron commanders going berserk and trying to save the world from the Communists.

It hadn’t been a joke, as Black knew well. Groteschele’s reference was to the special psychological screening system which the Air Force had inaugurated in 1962 to assure that no “mentally unfit persons” would have contact with the preparation or discharge of atomic weapons. Black had been among the first within the Air Force to propose and support the program. He was not sure even now that the problem could be disposed of summarily. The men in SAC were trained for destruction. They were “preprogrammed” to attack Russia.

“What frightened us was not so much the madman problem,” Groteschele was saying, “but its opposite: at the last moment someone might refuse to drop the bombs. A single act of revulsion could foil the whole policy of graduated deterrents. Say, for example, that some PFC at a transmitter simply decided not to carry out the order for an attack. That could ruin us right there.”

It was behavior in a showdown that the whole SAC training program was designed to prepare for. The tests, the indoctrinations, the training-all were designed to convert normal American boys into automatons.

“Automatons. That’s what some of our critics call them,” Groteschele said evenly. “But they are also patriots and they are courageous. And haven’t we always honored the Marines simply because they did exactly what they were ordered to do?”

To hell with Stark, Black thought.

“Professor Groteschele, one moment,” he said. “Isn’t it true that the ‘go’ reflex, the will to attack, is so deeply indoctrinated in our SAC people that even those who pass our psychological screening are more likely to err on the side of ‘go,’ rather than on withdrawal?”

“At one point, General Black, maybe,” Groteschele said. He controlled his impatience with the interruption. “But we analyzed the possibility and built in some protections. Even if you had a madman in command of a wing-even, General, if he had several colleagues who shared his madness, they could not carry out their will.”

Groteschele glanced at SecArmy. Wilcox was bent forward attentively. Groteschele then launched into a description of the elaborate checks, decoding systems, and other devices designed to assure that war could not happen through human error.

“It is impossible, quite impossible,” Groteschele concluded. “The statistical odds are so remote that it is impossible. Or as impossible as anything can be. The ‘go’ process will not operate until the President orders it. Even then the Positive Control routine requires a double check.”

Black hesitated. He knew Groteschele wanted to move on. But he also knew that Groteschele was skirting a real problem.

“What if the President went mad?” Black asked abruptly. “He is a man under considerable pressure.”

Black, as some in the room knew, was the single person there who could, because of his friendship with the President, raise such a question. But Groteschele, with a pang of envy, also knew that Black would have said it even if he had never seen the President.

The shock in the room’ was palpable. The SecArmy frowned at Black. Groteschele glanced quickly at the SecArmy, then around the table. He knew he did not have to answer Black directly.

“Then we would have trouble,” Groteschele said with a laugh. He shrugged, held his hands up as if imploring for common sense. “But it is not likely.”

The room relaxed. Black was still unsatisfied, but he knew when to stop. Still, he thought, it was possible. Woodrow Wilson had been President for two years after a stroke. High officials have cracked under the strain. Forrestal had jumped out a window. It was possible for the President to come down with paranoid schizophrenia, Black thought. Not likely, for American politics ruthlessly screened out the unstable personalities, but a possibility.

Maybe, Black thought, the whole damned game is taking me apart. He felt the diminutive terror start somewhere in his guts. It was something to do with the

Dream. At sessions like this the individual stripes of hide were sliced off his skin, each one leaving him less intact, more pained. And yet, he thought desperately, this is where I belong, where I am needed, where I can contribute. He allowed his mind to wander, searching for the moment when the real face of the matador would be revealed, for the instant when the real sword would slice in between his shoulders and end his indecision.

Groteschele was now proceeding to the possibilities of machine error. This was new stuff. Nobody really knew anything about it. Groteschele was always the statistical type. it was odd how flesh-and-blood human events disappeared into numbers. Groteschele was explaining that of course there was a remote mathematical possibility of machine error. He had calculated the error. In any year the odds were 50 to 1 against accidental war. This, Black remembered, had already been made public in the Hershon Report. But the report was several years old and the people at Ohio State who put it together made it dear that they did not have access to confidential information. The situation was much worse than they had reported because everything had gotten more complicated.

“Putting it another way,” said Groteschele, “and with the present rate of alerts and the present computerized equipment, the odds are such that one accidental war might occur in fifty years.”

“Does not the increasing intricacy of the electronic systems and the greater speed of missiles make that figure worse each year?” Black asked. He had in mind the public warning, several years previously, by Admiral L D. Coates, the Chief of Naval Research, which admitted what all insiders knew: electronic gear was becoming so complex that it was outstripping the ability of men to control it; complexity of new generations of machines was increasing the danger of accidents faster than safeguards could be devised. The statement had never been countered but simply ignored.

Groteschele paused, smiled tolerantly at Black. The SecArmy leaned toward one of his aides and asked a question. The aide looked at Black, smiled as he talked quickly in SecArmy’s ear. Black knew what he was saying: General Black is the professional heretic.

“In theory, yes,” Groteschele said. “But we completely pretest every component and every system is checked by another. The chance of war by mechanical failure is next to zero.”

This was not true, but Black did not choose to contest it. He forced his anger down and deliberately looked at the Big Board. It was like a vast moving mosaic, decorative rather than functional. Blips appeared, grew bright, traveled short distances, then vanished. The Big Board was not taken seriously until the light over it indicated that someone had decided to come to some degree of alert.

In how many places in the world, Black mused, were there just such strategy boards run by just such computer systems, picking up, identifying, and discarding just such radar signals? Our big operation at Omaha, of course. Probably at least one other standby “Omaha” at some other part of the country. Then there was the President’s bomb shelter: probably another computerized strategy board layout there. Maybe there was more than one Presidential bomb shelter. Maybe one at Camp David, or the summer White House, or who knows where else.

Then, in addition, he knew there was always, every minute of every day, a converted KC-135 aloft: a miniatore, emergency “Omaha,” in case everything else should blow. Probably another one on some super aircraft carrier somewhere. Still another on one of the nuclear submarines. How many others? Several in England, certainly, France, perhaps, and West Germany. Russia? Yes, surely there would be almost as many as there are in the United States.

Black knew that four KC-135s were reserved exclusively for Presidential use as a flying command post in case of emergency. Since 1962 they had been scattered about the country so that the Preskknt was never far from one. Whenever the President flew overseas one of these planes was quietly and unobtrusively included in his escort.

Surely each one of them in every country was similar. And the men in them, too. Today, throughout the world in each one of the Big Board rooms, staffed by busy, competent, dedicated men, probably the same signals were being received, analyzed, and projected. The big brass everywhere was watching similar strategy boards, studying the same blips, thinking out, or talking Out, the same strategic puzzles Groteschele was now discussing.

Black plugged back into the discussion. Groteschele was now classifying various types of possible machine errors. Accidental war caused by some machine failure. Miscalculation by the computers, misinterpretation by the staff of human interpreters (the “overriders” as the computer boys call them). And then the big one, electronic failure.

Big, Black thought, because no one knows anything about it. We just know that in any system so complex and so dependent upon intricate electronic equipment, the possibility of electronic failure or error must always be borne in mind.

“But the Positive Control Fail-Safe system is the ultimate protection against mechanical failure,” Groteschele was saying, his voice heavily persuasive. This was the ultimate safety factor in the whole system. This was where it all rested. So, we were all reassured. And indeed, Groteschele was very reassuring today, except that his nervous chuckle kept getting in the way. Black understood why. Groteschele knew more than he was saying.

It just was not that simple. Everyone knew it who had anything to do with the black boxes of the Positive Control system. Their components were 100 per cent double-checked on regular rotation schedules. Every possible condition to which the equipment might be subjected in operation was simulated. It was simulated in actual duplication systems arid it was also simulated on computers with meticulously devised mathematical formulas expressing every possible way the equipment might fail. On computers the bombers were “flown” and the “go” signals were “given.”

Variable atmospheric conditions could be predicted, operational deterioration of the equipment could be estimated, vibration characteristics of the Vindicator bombers could be factored in. Stress variables could be translated into mathematical formulas, and with these formulas the computers could test out the black boxes.

But the whole system had one big flaw in it. Nobody could ever be certain that the black boxes would actually work properly in a showdown. The reason was simple. There had never been a showdown, and there could never be a sure test showdown.

A showdown meant war. The whole Positive Control system really depended on equipment that could never really be tested until the time came for its first use, and because of this nobody could ever really know in advance whether or not it would work right. The Fail-Safe machines could be truly tested only once: the single time they were used.

There was ample evidence from the experience of the Electra planes and the now obsolete DC-6s that a serious flaw in an elaborate machine could survive every experimental situation-and then in real practice come completely unstuck.

This was material for the grim inside humor which went the rounds of SAC gossip. The DC-6 had been a beautiful drawing-board plane, except that the first ones to go into service caught fire in flight. Then it was discovered that the one thing they hadn’t calculated was what flight wind currents would do to fuel overflow spillage. The fuel was’ deflected by an invisible band of air to a point directly behind the engines where the air-intake vents sucked in the gas spillage, converting the plane’s storage compartment into a quite unplanned fire chamber.

Great corporations can also be injured when their computerized positive control systems break down. Black remembered the consternation a few years back when Fortune had demonstrated this point about General Dynamics. The Convair 990 was a 200 million-dollar demonstration of the fallibility of computerized simulation. Convair designed a drawing-board airplane that checked out to be the fastest commercial jet in the computer “flight tests,” so they decided to save money, skip the costly prototype stage, and go directly into production. Only the 990 didn’t perform as designed. Nobody knew why, and the enigmatic computers that had been so reassuring could not be charged with malfeasance.

General Black also knew that Groteschele was sliding past another important factor. Each machine had to be adjusted and installed by men. And men, regardless of their training, suffered from fatigue and boredom. Many was the time that General Black had seen a tired and irritated mechanic turn a screwdriver a half turn too far, fail to make one last check, ignore a negative reading on a testing instrument. On a plane, such errors would mean only that an expensive piece of machinery and a few men would be lost. On a Fail-Safe black box-and the men who adjusted and installed them had not the remotest notion of what they were- the slightest accident could trigger the final disaster.

Black glanced around the table. Stark was watching the strategy board. New blips had just appeared and Stark was toying nervously with his pencil as he followed their progress. Black looked at Wilcox. He sensed that Wilcox was mentally rejecting the possibility of accidental war. It depressed Black, and he felt that he should do more, but he knew he could not.

Groteschele’s patronizing voice reached back into Black’s consciousness. Now the voice was talking about what if there should be an accident. An “interesting” problem, it was saying.

“Suppose the Russians caused an accident,” suggested Grotesdiele. “Suppose it were a true accident. Suppose it was a 50-megaton missile aimed for New York or Washington, what could be done? How could we really know it was an accident? How could they prove it? Would it make any difference if they could? Even if we believed it to be an accident, should we not retaliate with everything we had?”

Good questions, Black agreed, but no answers were offered. It didn’t seem to be a real discussion about real problems. Black remembered the flurry of excitement a few years before when some scholar had published a paper on the strategy of surrender. The argument had been simple. If either side strikes first, is not surrender the only possible strategy for the other side? What is to be gained by retaliation? There had been a series of Congressional hearings, and then no one heard any more about the strategy of surrender.

Black’s thoughts were interrupted. Groteschele had stopped talking. Everyone was looking at the Big Board.

The large alert signal at the top of the board had flashed on. The board still showed the blips Black had just seen Stark watching. The six blips were six bomber groups in the air almost at their Fail.Safe points. There was also an unidentified blip somewhere between Greenland and Canada. Black noted that the clock above the Big Board showed 10:28. Groteschele paused to look around at the Big Board. He turned back to his audience, saying, “Well, we’re in luck. A nicely arranged alert for our discussion. You can’t count on these for a Pentagon lecture any more. The equipment has become so much more accurate that they only óccur about six times a month now.”

Groteschele tried to recapture the attention of his audience by delving into an explanation of the need for maximum reaction times in evaluating an alert. Even though more and more ICBMs were becoming operational every day, he explained, they would not be used immediately in a crisis. They had the defects of their virtues. They were too quick. They allowed too little time for thought and the detection of error. This had led to a return to manned bombers for a first-strike retaliation rather than immediate reliance on the newer long-range rockets. The bombers provided hours of revaluation and analysis, the rockets only thirty minutes. Besides, regardless of the outcome, even if the entire country were devastated the rockets could always be thrown in at the end.

The Big Board was proving more seductive than Groteschele. His voice rose slightly.

“Now if the Soviets really have a high-level satellite which carries a rocket, then we are in danger,” he said and paused, his voice heavy. “Real danger. For then the reaction time would be down to fifty or sixty seconds. Not even enough time to call the President.”

But Groteschele had lost his audience. All eyes remained glued on the Big Board. Soon the foreign unidentified blip would get identified, and fade off the board—a Canadian airliner off course, a heavily compacted flight of birds, and so on. Then the SAC groups would veer off their lines of flight and disappear from the board. Yes, Black could see, it was happening now.

The foreign unidentified blip was fading out. The room, which had grown quietly tense, now relaxed. Cigarettes were lit and pencils returned to doodling exercises as men tried to shed their nervousness in their private ways. Soon a messenger would come in with SPADATS’ explanation of what the blip had been. Then Groteschele could resume, happily monopolizing the attention of his audience again.

One by one, five SAC groups began in turn to veer off. Only one group was left on the board. Then as Black watched unbelievingly it flew past its Fail-Safe point. He glanced at Stark. Stark was erect in his chair. Wilcox was oblivious of what had happened. Most of the other officers had turned back to Groteschele. Stark stared at Black. He raised his eyebrows.

Black looked at Groteschele. What happened to Groteschele came and went so quickly that Black was not certain he had seen correctly: Groteschele’s eyes glittered and he shuddered. To Black it seemed an expression composed of apprehension, excitement, delight, and opportunity. Then it was gone. Grotesehele stood absolutely still, staring at the board. Black realized that only three men in the room fully understood what had just happened.

Then the whole board went black. Apparently the operator did not think the action of Group 6 to be important. Maybe he had just not noticed it. Stark scribbled a note to Black. It said, “Ever see a group go past Fail-Safe before?” Black shook his head. Stark started to get up from his chair. Black knew he was going to check with the tactical officers in another office. Stark froze halfway up.

A phone had rung. It did not ring loud, but it did ring distinctively. A steady persistent unbroken ring. It was the red phone. None of the men in the room had heard it before. Wilcox was not aware of the import of the ring, but he sensed the tension around him. He came to rigid attention. An Army general ran across the room to the red phone. It did not look at all unseemly for a general to be dashing to answer a phone. In fact it seemed to be done in nightmarish slow motion.

The general listened for a moment. He turned back to the room woodenly. Looking at Wilcox he said with excessive clarity: “Mr. Secretary, the President is calling from the White House bomb shelter. He wants to speak to the senior person present. That is you. I am directed to see that the Joint Chiefs and the Secretaries convene here immediately.” He laid the receiver beside the phone and dashed from the room.

Wilcox stumbled around out of his chair and virtually fell toward the phone, stealing a look at the Big Board as he did so.

The Big Board had lit up again. And now it projected just two things; the Fail.Safe point of Group 6 and the blip of Group 6. They were already inches apart. Group 6 was headed toward Russia.

“There is nothing further to report, Mr. President,” General Bogan said. Colonel Cascio was staring straight at the Big Board. “GrOup 6 is about two hundred and sixty miles past Fail-Safe and continuing on what is apparently an attack course.”

“Do you know what happened to them?” the President’s voice asked.

“No, sir, we do not,” General Bogan said. “There is a chance, an outside chance, that they made a navigational error and will swing back.”

“Have they ever made a navigational error that big before?” the President asked crisply.

“No, sir,” General Bogan said. “But when you’re traveling over 1,500 miles an hour, a little error can throw you a long distance off.”

“Let’s rule that one out,” the President said. “Why haven’t you been able to raise them yet by radio?”

“We don’t know for sure, Mr. President,” General Bogan said. “We have tried them on all frequencies and can’t make contact.”

“Why?” the President broke in, his voice impatient.

“First, there might be natural meteorological disturbances, and our weather people say there is a big electrical storm just behind the Vindicators,” General Bogan said. “Secondly, the Russians might be jamming our radio reception—”

“Why the hell would they do that?” the President asked.

“I don’t know,” General Bogan said, paused, and then went on. He spoke slowly, his voice unconvincing. “There is a remote possibility that their Fail-Safe black boxes might be giving them a ‘go’ signal and that Russian jamming is preventing our verbal Positive Control system from operating.”

“Is that possible?” the President said sharply.

General Bogan paused. Then his voice gained confidence. “No, Mr. President, the odds against both systems falling at the same time are so high I think that is impossible,” General Bogan said. He was aware that Colonel Cascio was watching him. He felt an undefined and nagging discomfort. “Almost impossible.”

“All right,” the President said. “Now if we do regain radio contact will they respond to a direct order from me to return?”

“They will answer, sir,” General Bogan said, “providing we can reach them by radio within the next five minutes.” Then he paused. “However, if after that time their black boxes still tell them to ‘go’ they are under orders not to turn back even if someone who sounds like you orders them back. You can see the reason for that. The enemy could easily abort a real attack just by having someone around who could make a good imitation of your voice. Those people in the Vindica. tors have to obey the Fail-Safe mechanism. They can’t rely on voice transmissions.”

Something like a sigh came over the speaker.

“All right, let me sum up,” the President said. “For reasons which are unknown to us Group 6 has flown past its Fail-Safe point and right now seems to be on an attack course toward Russia. We can’t raise them by radio, but there’s an outside chance that we may later. What is their target?”

“Moscow,” General Bogan said bluntly.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” the President said in a low and very slow voice. He said it again, as if to shake off a terrible reality. There was for a fleeting moment something of the acolyte, the altar boy, in his voice. When he spoke again, however, his tone was strong. “What is the next step?”

“If we follow standard operating procedure the next step would be to order the Skyscraper fighter planes which are standing by at Vindicators Fail-Safe to attack them,” General Bogan said. Colonel Cascio’s head jerked sideways and he stared at General Bogan. “The fighters would first try to raise the bombers visually and divert them. Failing that, they would press home an attack with air-to-air missiles and cannon fire.”

There was a long pause on the line. Then the President spoke.

“Who gives that order, General?” the President asked.

“You do, sir,” General Bogan said.

“General, order the fighters to start their pursuit of Group 6,” the President said without a moment’s hesitation. “I assume that will take a few minutes at least. Tell them to hold fire until they get the direct order from me. I would like to delay the actual firing on the group until the last possible moment.”

Bogan and Cascio heard the click of the President putting down the phone without waiting for an acknowledgment.

Swenson had come into the Big Board room. He was accompanied by two of his aides. They were both tall men and they emphasized his slightness.

Swenson stood at the door for a moment and looked at the people in the room. They had all come to attention, had torn their eyes away from the Big Board. Swenson made his count, nodded, and they all sat down. He walked to the chair at the head of the table, and as he reached it the red phone, which had been moved directly in front of him, rang. As he leaned forward to pick up the phone Swenson looked casually at the Big Board. He seemed little in the chair-little and very confident and orderly. His presence eased the tension in the room.

“Yes, Mr. President,” Swenson said.

It was possible to link the red phone to a loudspeaker so that everyone in the room could hear it. Swenson chose not to do that.

“Mr. Secretary, General Bogan at Omaha has told me that he recommends that we order our fighter planes accompanying Group 6 to shoot them down,” the President said. This was not precisely the truth and the President knew it. However, he wanted Swenson to face the decision most abruptly and nakedly. “The decision is mine, but I would like the advice of you and your people.”

“Mr. President, do you want me to discuss this with them right now or shall we call you back?” Swenson said. He was glad he had not put the conversation on the loudspeaker. In Swenson’s methodical mind was stored the fact that shooting down the bombers was standard operating procedure. By phrasing the problem this way the President was forcing them to make an evaluation rather than follow a set procedure.

“I will hold the line for your opinion,” the President said.

“General Bogan at Omaha has recommended to the President that our fighters be ordered to shoot down Group 6,” Swenson said in a calm voice. “The President is awaiting our advice before giving that order. Gentlemen, what do you have to say?”

Of the men at the table only Swenson and Black knew that this was standard operating procedure. Of the rest of the group Wilcox was the most shocked. His face flushed.

“Jesus Christ, order Americans to shoot down other Americans?” Wilcox asked. “It would… it is indecent. I’m against it.”

Swenson’s eyes were veiled. He looked around the table. Groteschele’s hand went up.

“Mr. Secretary, I oppose it on the grounds that it is premature,” Groteschele said levelly. He wanted to overcome Wilcox’s apparent hysteria. “After all, sir, our planes have not yet reached Soviet air space. In fact, they are hundreds of miles away from it.”

Swenson’s face was still impassive; he might have been the presiding officer at a small Midwestern corporation’s board of management meeting.

“We must do it and at once,” Black said flatly. “First, if we do not give the order now the fighters may not be able to overtake the Vindicators. Secondly, if we delay the order we lose any bargaining position that we might need later with the Russians. They are watching Group 6 and our fighters right now and are trying to guess what we are doing. And keep in mind that there are other steps after this and they involve much more than the crews of six bombers. A lot may hinge on the Russians believing what we tell them. You can be damned sure that the moment those planes penetrate Soviet air space the President is going to be in a tough spot talking with the Russians and will need everything he can get to bargain with them.”

Another point occurred to Black: if only one fighter made it and brought down one bomber perhaps the others would turn back-but he did not really believe

it. He knew that the Vindicators would bore in even if they had to do it singly. They had been too well trained to panic at the sight of a single bomber exploding. They had also been steeled to the possibility that enemy planes, simulated to look like American planes, might make an attack.

Swenson’s eyes opened fully; they were bright and attentive. He glanced quickly around the rest of the men at the table. There appeared to be nothing left to say. Black was the one who had summed it up. Swenson knew that some of the others didn’t agree, but sensed that Black had the logic and the facts. He admired Black’s cool presentation and sensed that the President would be thinking in much the same way.

“Mr. President, it is our belief that it is a tactical decision, but it is our unanimous view that the fighters should be ordered in,” Swenson said, looking directly at Wilcox.

Swenson put the phone back in its cradle. Wilcox’s face was a mottled pink.

Buck had heard all of the conversations. He stared at the President. The President had one leg thrown over the arm of his chair and occasionally he puffed at a long thin cigar. His posture was reassuring to Buck. Everything that Buck had heard on the telephone had tightened his stomach muscles and only the President’s physical ease kept Buck from trembling.

“Get Omaha again,” the President said into the phone.

Almost instantly they were through.

“Yes, sir, Mr. President,” General Bogan’s voice said.

“General, order the fighters in,” the President said.

“Let me enfirm that,” a strange voice said on the circuit. “This is Colonel Cascio, General Bogan’s assistant. Do you want the fighters to press home the attack even if they have to go to afterburners? That will nearly triple their consumption of fuel and almost certainly mean that none of them will be able to make it back.” The voice paused, then spoke with more firmness, almost a tough arrogance. “Mr. President, those fighters are America’s first line of defense against a Russian attack. In putting them on afterburners to chase our own bombers we will be sacrificing our fighters’ defensive capability at the very time we may need it most-the Russians may attack at any moment now.”

The President paused. Buck watched him scribble some words on his pad. They said, “Sacrifice fighters convince Russians an accident? Give up defensive capacity of fighters… will they believe?”

“General Bogan, I repeat the order,” the President said, coldly.

“Mr. President, the fighters swung away from the Vindicators when they got the all dear,” General Bogan said. “In effect, the Vindicators and the Skyscrappers have been flying in opposite directions for some. minutes. The Skyscrappers have only a slight edge of speed over the Vindicators. There is some doubt that they can overtake the Vindicators.”

“I repeat, General Bogan, that the fighters are to overtake and shoot down the Vindicators even if it means going to afterburners,” the President said.

“Colonel Cascio, order the fighters to attack Group 6,” General Bogan said as he put the phone down.

Colonel Cascio came halfway out of the chair in a spasm of protest.

means that you have decided our bombers are making an accidental strike on Moscow?” Colonel Cascio asked. His voice was shocked, but there was also a hard underlay of rebellion.

“I have and the whole damn system has,” General Bogan said savagely. “The machines, the men, the diplomats, the President, all of us. Why the hell do you think we have fighter planes following the Vindicators? Just to protect them if they ‘go’? Don’t be silly. We always knew that one of their tasks was to shoot down the Vindicators if there was a mistake. All right, there has been a mistake. Get on the horn to the fighters, Colonel.”

Colonel Cascio lifted his hand. It was a peculiar gesture. It was partly a plea for time, partly as if he were warding off some grotesque thing, partly the gesture a child makes when threatened.

“General, the fighters-”

“Colonel, get on that horn and give the order,” eral Bogan said. “Every second you delay takes them further away from the Vindicators.”

Colonel Casdo began to move the levers and buttons that would put him in direct voice communication with the fighters. But even as he did this he kept talking.

“Even if they catch the bombers, General, which isn’t likely, they won’t have enough fuel to get back,” Colonel Cascio said. “They’ll go down in the ocean or on enemy territory.”

A voice came up on the War Room intercom. It was the officer in charge of Fighter Direction.

“General Bogan, we are in voice communication with Tangle-Able-l,” the voice said. “You can talk to

them on Channel 7, Single Side Band.”

General Bogan nodded and Colonel Casdo lifted a lever. Instantly there was the blurred static.heavy sound of long-distince radio transmission.

“Do I tell them in code or dear language?” Colonel Cascio asked.

“Clear language,” General Bogan said. “That is standard.”

Colonel Cascio knew this. It had been hammered out after months of discussion that if a situation arose in which our own fighters must shoot down our own planes there would be no disadvantage and, possibly, some advantage in having the enemy bear the transmission.

“This is Tangle-Able-1,” a young strong voice said through the static. “I read you five by five at last transmission.”

Colonel Cascio bent forward and spoke into a microphone, his voice only slightly thin and weak. “Tangle-Able-1, this is Colonel Cascio on the Omaha staff.” Sweat now stood out on his forehead. “Group 6 has flown through the Fail-Safe point and is on an attack course towards Moscow. It is a mistake. I repeat: it is a mistake. Go to afterburners and overtake and attack Group 6.”

There was a moment’s silence. Then the young voice came back loud and dear.

“Roger. Go to afterburners and overtake and attack Group 6,” the voice said.

Colonel Casdo leaned forward and switched the lever off. To General Bogan, watching, Colonel Casdo’s posture was that of a child crying soundlessly.

The lead plane of the six Skyscrappers made a long sweeping turn. The voice of the captain in charge of the flight came up on the TBS radio. He knew he could be heard only by the six planes in the flight.

“I don’t know what those mother-grabbers back in Omaha are doing, but you all heard the order,” the captain said. “We overtake and shoot down the Vindicators.”

“That will be the day,” a twenty-one-year-old pilot of one of the fighters said. “Us with a 50-mile-an-hour edge on the Vindicators and those bastards halfway to Moscow already.”

“By SOP they will divert a KC-135 to refuel us,” an-other voice said sweetly. “It does 560 an hour, we do 1,600. By the time we run out of fuel they’ll be about a thousand miles away. Everything is beautifully organized.”

“Don’t knock the staff people,” a voice said mockingly. “After you run out of fuel you make a thousand-mile glide back to the tankers. Any flier worth his salt should be able to do that in a Skyscrapper.”

Someone laughed briefly. They knew that the elegant little plane with its short wings would start to drop like a stone as soon as it lost power.

None of the six pilots thought they would overtake the Vindicators. They knew they would not be able to fly their fighters back to their bases. If they thought of anything they thought of two things. First, would the ejection capsule and parachute really operate at 1,600 miles an hour? Second, how long could a man live in arctic waters?

“Cut the chatter,” the captain in command said. “On the mark, go to afterburners.”

The captain counted from five down to one and then said quietly, “Mark.” Six fingers shifted six levers. Against the six young and doomed bodies the seat-backs slammed relentlessly. From a hundred tubes toward the end of the jet engines raw fuel poured into the hot flames of the exhaust. The planes trembled under the instantaneous acceleration and then steadied down to the chase.

Lieutenant Colonel Grady looked out and down. In front of the Vindicators the surface of the Pacific was black, so black it was purple. It looked not at all like water, but like thickened darkness.

Grady felt motelike, tiny, pushed by the great expanding aura of light behind him. He wished, in a quick irrational flash, that the sun would hold. To fly in darkness seemed protective.

Grady glanced quickly at the other two men in the Vindicator. They were intent on their instruments.

Suddenly Grady envied them their innocence with a remorse so great that it was close to hatred.

“Get the Pentagon back again,” the President said.

The President’s leg was still tossed over the arm of the chair, his cigar had developed only a small ash.

Swenson came up on the telephone.

“Mr. Secretary, four fighters shoot down the Vindicators it will be tragic, but the big problem will be over,” the President said. “I would like your people to be thinking about what we do if the fighters cannot shoot down the bombers.”

Swenson looked around the room. For a moment he debated whether or not to turn the Big Board off, but decided to leave it on as a reminder of the urgency of the situation. The problem was to get the fuziest possible answers to the questions in the least amount of time.

“Gentlemen, Omaha is plugged in with us and General Bogan and Colonel Casdo are listening in at that end,” Swenson said. “Mr. Knapp, the president of Universal .Electronics, and Congressman Raskob are also at Omaha on a visit. I have given them permission to listen to our discussion and to comment if they have something to say.”

Swenson’s voice had been almost excessively calm. Now when he spoke again, there was in his voice the sharp metallic ring of urgency.

“In a very short time the President will be back to us and he will Want answers to some questions,” Swenson said. “First, what happened? Secondly, what to do if the fighters cannot overtake the Vinclicators? Thirdly, what are the Russians going to think of all this? Fourth, what will they do about it? The discussion will be only on these points.”

Swenson glanced around the table. His eyes stopped when they came to Black. Black’s unblinking eyes, deep-sunken, almost invisible, looked steadily at him.

“General Black, will you very quickly bring us up to date on what has happened,” Swenson said.

“Mr. Secretary, the first thing to face is the fact that we are flying blind,” Black said. “No one knows exactly what has happened. All we know for sure is that SAG Group No.6 flew through its Fail-Safe point and, unless stopped, will attempt to make an attack on Moscow. Basically only two things could have happened: a compound mechanical failure or someone in Group 6 has gone berserk.”

“Statistically a double mechanical failure is almost impossible,” Groteschele growled.

“But it is conceivable, is it not?” Swenson asked the question so sharply that Black wondered if somehow he had been briefed on the earlier discussion.

Groteschele hesitated. “Of course it is possible, but…” Groteschele said, but stopped when Swenson swung his head away.

Bogan’s voice boomed over the loudspeaker. Somewhere a technician adjusted the volume and it seemed almost as if Bogan were in the room.

“I agree with General Black, but Colonel Cascio has a doubt,” General Bogan said. “Very briefly his argument is that the Russians have devised a way to mask the real position of Group 6, which is probably flying back toward the States. What we read as Group 6 on the radar is actually a group of Soviet bombers up there for precisely one reason-to lead us to believe that we have accidentally launched a bomber group at Russia. I disagree with this analysis. But it should be considered.”

Around the table there were multiple signs of restlessness. Groteschele scratched on a pad of paper. Others reached for cigarettes. Stark looked down the table at Black. Black remained impassive, but he tensed for Swenson’s reply. A lot would depend on Swenson’s reaction to Cascio.

“Thank you, General Bogan,” Swenson said, without taking his eyes from Black’s face. “I agree with your evaluation of Colonel Cascio’s argument. Now, General Black, will you continue?”

“Every surveillance device we have has been thrown on the Russians,” Black said. “They have seven bomber groups in the air at this moment. None of these can- reach America without refueling. None f them is flying an attack course. All are following -hold pasterns inside Soviet control borders. An abnormally large number of Russian fighters are in the air, in fact approximately half of their fighters are air-borne. However, a simultaneous computer analysis of their flight patterns does not reveal a definite aggressive pattern. The Russians have launched no rockets as yet. Our devices which pick up sudden discharges of energy are probably our most reliable surveillance instruments. “I am confident that the Soviets have not used their ICBMs as yet.”

“What do you make of it?” Swenson invited anyone’s comment but his tone said “keep it short.”

“They have the same problem with our Group 6 as we had earlier with the UFO,” Allen of the National Security Council said. It was the first time he had spoken. “They don’t know what it is, why it is there, or even if it is ours.”

“The best answer happens also to be the simplest,” Black said calmly. “The Russians probably picked up the same unidentified object we did. They can’t understood why our planes started to fly toward their Fail-Safe points. This thing has happened scores of timed and they have gotten familiar with the sweat. But when one of our groups did not turn back they knew it as soon as we did. That accounts for their launching an abnormal number of fighter planes. My guess is that right now they do not consider our Group 6 to be hostile or aggressive although the behavior of our fighter planes will probably begin to worry them in a few minutes. If they see the fighters actually try to shoot down the Vindicators, they will know there has been some big and dangerous mistake.”

“Or they will think we are sending them in as a ruse,” Groteschele said sharply.

“That is correct,” Black said. “Whichever of these interpretations they make will be alarming to them. Even so, I would not expect them to take any kind of retaliatory or offensive action that could not be recalled unless Group 6 actually invades their air space or we start to take what appears to be broader hostile action in support of Group 6.”

Allen of the NSC walked back to his chair at the table. He had been speaking on a phone at the far end of the room.

“Mr. Secretary, I have been talking to the National Security Agency people,” Allen said. “As you know they keep a 24-hour a day surveillance on Soviet communications, making tape recordings of everything that is said.” (Black looked at Stark. They bad both heard that when the U-2 went down with Powers the NSA people had listened to the Soviet antiaircraft crews talking on the radio and knew that Powers had lost power and dropped to 86,000 feet.) Allen went on, “They tell me that there is no significant increase in Soviet military communications and they estimate that right now, the Soviet military apparatus is not on a full alert or in aggressive position.”

“Professor Groteschele, would you care to comment on what the Russians might be thinking?” Swenson said.

General Bogan’s voice cut in flatly and without apology from Omaha.

“Who is this Groteschele, Mr. Secretary?” General Bogan asked. “Why is he sitting in?”

Swenson’s reply was polite but edged with ice. “Professor Groteschele is a recognized authority on many of the matters before us and was invited here at the express wish of the President.”

Groteschele smiled. Quite unconsciously, he stood up, the posture of the professor addressing students. He chuckled and then abruptly broke it off. He had seen Swenson’s face, stony hard, eyes a flat commanding blue. The look Swenson gave Groteschele was as explicit as a command.

Then Groteschele, to Black’s astonishment, spoke crisply, without ambiguous words and without evasiveness. The Russian leaders are Marxist ideologues, he said, not normal people. They believe history is determined by nonhuman events which will assure the victory of Communism. Nuclear war would interrupt the process of this historical determinism. Russians have more to lose by war than we. Therefore, an American first attack would bring Russian surrender rather than nuclear retaliation.

Black felt a reluctant admiration for Groteschete. He disagreed with most of What Groteschele said, but when the chips were down and the crisis came, the man had stated his position without reservations.

“Just why would they surrender if we hit them?” Swenson asked.

“They are human calculating machines, Marxist fanatics, not motivated by rage or hate,” Groteschele said evenly. “If they are hit first, even with H-bombs, they know that if they retaliate they can destroy us or a substantial part of our people and resources. But they also know that we would have a second strike capacity which would devastate them. The important thing, for the Marxist, is to keep at least part of the Soviet Union intact. They would not be particularly worried about the survival of a capitalist country. In fact, many of them believe that capitalism must play itself out to its inevitable historical defeat before Communism can really succeed. To put it crudely: they want to be around for a while, and if the price they have to pay is that some free countries are also around they will pay it. They will not allow the world to be destroyed. They aim to dominate it eventually and they want it reasonably intact. So they would surrender.”

Swenson looked back at the Big Board. The fighter blips were very dose to Group 6. He swung around abruptly.

“In short you believe they are utterly in the grip of an ideology,” Swenson said. “Their logic and their fanaticism will make them act in a perfectly determined manner. Is that correct?”

Groteschele hesitated. He could not tell how Swenson evaluated this argument. He took a deep breath.

“Yes, sir, that is what I think,” Groteschele said slowly.

Again Black felt a flash of admiration. Groteschele was putting a whole career, a reputation, a school of thought, nakedly on the line. There was a good chance that before the day was out it would face judgment.

Swenson looked around the table, his silence inviting comments.

Groteschele could not afford the silence.

“What I am-arguing, Mr. Secretary, is that although my interpretation seems unusual and novel it is Simplicity itself,” Groteschele. said, “We should do nothing. If -I am correct the Russians will surrender, and if our leaders are sufficiently resourceful the threat of Communism is over forever.”

“Do nothing,” Swenson said quietly.

Groteschele was tough. Swenson was an amateur historian and a student of modern leadership. He had learned that all of the powerful leaders had known when to wait. The capacity to do nothing at the right time was part of great statesmanship. Swenson did not for a moment accept Groteschele’s analysis or his evidence. But his condusion might be right.

“Mr. Secretary, I think all of that is a lot of crap,” General Bogan’s voice cut in harshly from Omaha. “Look, I am under the gun more than any of you. I have to take all of this stuff from the computers and translate it into action. Don’t kid yourself. There are going to be three or four Russian generals at crucial spots who will react exactly the way I do: the best defense is a good offense. They will attack without giving a damn about what Marx or anyone else said.”

“Any other comments?” Swenson asked.

Groteschele had seated himself, but he was bent forward in his chair, tense with excitement. By his own act of will, he was almost at the point of committing the total energies of one hundred and ninety million people in an enormous military decision.

Swenson glanced at Black.

“Everything in Groteschele’s argument depends upon the extent to which Russian leaders are dominated by Marxist ideology,” Black said. “He believes that domination is complete. I think he is wrong. The CIA -did -a long study on this and it came to the conclusion that Soviet leaders made their decisions as

Russians and later justified them as Marxists. Forget they are Communists and judge their acts objectively and they behave much like leaders in any other country.”

On the Big Board the fighter blips were seemingly only inches away from the Vindicators. Everyone listened to Black, but they were watching the Big Board. The lead blip suddenly ejected two tiny phosphorescent dots that sped out ahead of it. Then the blip began a long lazy downward curving arc. Black knew that the plane had flamed out because of a lack of fuel, had fired its missiles, and was now falling toward the icy waters. He sensed the pilot’s first sensation of terror, the awful feeling of a dead plane under one’s hands. The suspense of waiting for the capsule to eject, the slow swinging parachute’s descent into the icy arctic waters, and the last few numbing moments before death…

Swenson’s voice cut in with authority.

“The lead fighter has gone in,” he said. “We can assume that none of the others will be successful. Now where do we stand?”

Groteschele made an oblique approach to pin down his position.

“Mr. Secretary, let me remind you about the Doomsday tapes. Both the Soviet Union and we have the ability to launch a first strike, to have most of the missile sites survive an enemy strike, and to launch a second strike,” Groteschele said. “Assume that every person in America were killed by Russia’s second strike. The Russians know that the Doomsday tapes would then go into operation. This means that weeks or even months after all of us were dead the silos scattered in hard and locked-up sites around the United States would go into action and destroy what is left of the Soviet Union. What is more important is that the Russians know we have those tapes. And that we would use them. Group 6, however its accident happened, has provided a God-given opportunity. One of our groups is well launched toward. Russia with a reasonable chance of success. I am convinced that the moment the Russians realize that, they will surrender. They know they cannot escape our second strike or ultimately our Doomsday tapes. Group 6 has given us a fantastic historic advantage. By accident they have forced us into making the first move, the move we would never have made deliberately. By making that first move, by cracking the gigantic tension, we will get a premature surrender from our enemy. We should advise the President that no efforts be made to recall them. At the same time we should tell the Soviet leaders that they have been launched by accident.”

The second and third fighters launched their futile missiles and went into the long spiral which ended in icy death.

Swenson waited a moment, as if allowing the subtleties of Groteschele’s argument to sink in.

“We must still tell the President how this happened,” Swenson said. “We have heard Colonel Casdo’s theory that it might be a Russian subterfuge or trick. Any other ideas?”

“I do not think that Colonel Cascio is correct, but one part of his argument is helpful,” Black said. “If the Russians did think that Group 6 was part of a planned attack, they would at once try to jam its radio signals so that we could not give it guidance or instructions.

“But why would they not leave the channels open so that we could recall the group if it was a mistake?”

Swenson asked.

“Because they are as suspicious as we are,” Black said. “Our standard operating procedure is to try at once to isolate any Russian bomber group which launches what looks like an offensive against us or our allies. Here we are both victims of our suspicions.

Though we both know that there is a possibility of bombers ‘getting loose’ by accident, we assume the other side would do it deliberately. Hence we try to frustrate their efforts to contact their bombers or to control the flight of their ICBMs.”

There was a murmur of voices from Omaha. Swenson cocked his bead to one side. Then General Bogan’s voice came out loud and dear. “Knapp probably knows as much about the electronic gear as anyone else,” General Bogan said. “He is a little reluctant to talk but I have asked him to. Is that agreeable, Mr. Secretary?”

“Yes,” Swenson uttered the single word. It underlined the sense of urgency.

The new voice came on, weak and reedy at first, then gaining in confidence. “The more complex an electronics system gets, the more accident-prone it is,” Knapp said. “Take our missiles. Each of them is, in the design- stage, checked, double-checked and thoroughly pretested. All of their characteristics have been put through simulated conditions long before the missile is even built. All along the line everything checks out perfectly. Each of the missiles should fire and fly beautifully. But it never happens that way in practice. The Atlas is the most reliable missile we possess. But what happens: we make our first moon shot and it misses by 25,000 miles. Take the old X-15. It was a very small piece of equipment. It was perfect on computers, flew like a dream. It was a beautiful little computerized space needle launched from a mother plane. But there were very few X-15 flights in which something entirely unforeseen did not go wrong.”

“How does this apply to our situation, Mr. Knapp?”

Swenson asked abruptly.

“In this very direct way, Mr. Secretary,” Mr. Knapp said, his voice rising. “Pile all those electronic systems on top of one another and sooner or later there will be a deteriorated transistor or a faulty rectifier, and the thing breaks down. Sometimes even those marvelous computers suffer from fatigue. They start to get erratic just like overworked humans.”

“Mr. Secretary, what Mr. Knapp is saying is wrong because it overlooks one factor,” Groteschele cut in angrily. “Even if the machines fail they are supervised by humans. The human could always reverse or correct the decision of the machine.”

Knapp laughed and it was a thin, abrupt, and pitiless laugh. “I wish, sir, you were right,” Knapp said. “The fact of the matter is that the machines move so fast, are capable of such subtle mistakes, are so intricate, that in a real war situation a man might not have the time to know whether a machine was in error or was telling him the truth.”

Black felt a sharp sense of relief. If Knapp had not said this he would have had to. Coming from the “outside” it carried more weight.

“Mr. Secretary, I don’t know if you want a politician’s guess,” Congressman Raskob’s voice said from Omaha, “but you’re going to get it. No politician, and I don’t give a damn whether he is a dictator or a democrat, could survive if he allowed one of his largest cities to be destroyed without taking some kind of action against the enemy. People can be awfully damned vengeful. I don’t know how Khrushchev thinks, but one thing is sure: if he lets Moscow get blown up without taking action against us, he won’t live to write about it in his memoirs.”

The red phone rang. Swenson picked it up smoothly, with no more emotion than if it were a social call at home. No one in the room knew precisely what he would say. But what he said would be the official opinion of an institution made up of millions of men and billions of dollars of equipment and a staggering amount of information. Black looked at Groteschele. Groteschele had, now that the decision was dose, relaxed in his chair.

“Mr. President, it is our opinion that Group 6 did actually fly through their Fail-Safe point,” Swenson said. “This was probably due to a compound mechanical error. There is an outside chance that the Soviets might have triggered or contributed to the mistake by making some experiment or jamming procedure of their own. We doubt that there has been a human error or that the Commander of Group 6 has gone berserk.”

He stared at the pad in front of him. He began to make some notes; There was an almost visible rise in tension in the room. They had given an opinion.

There was, as yet, no decision.

Swenson looked up and spoke to the table at large, the phone held loosely in his hand, his voice calm.

“The President wants to know what the chances are of those six planes getting through to Moscow,” he asked. He looked at Black.

“One or two of the six will probably get through,” Black answered promptly. “Maybe more.”

“Two,” Swenson said into the phone. He listened, looked up again.

“Even with the entire Soviet defensive apparatus concentrating on them?” Swenson repeated the President’s question.

“Our Vindicators fly so fast that they won’t be able to use all of their defensive apparatus,” Black said. “They just can’t get it in front of the Vindicators in time. They will have to shoot down the Vindicators with what is already there plus maybe a few additional fighters. It’s an intricate calculation, but we have made it scores of times and it is based on a consideration of what the Soviets have in the way of defense and what our Vindicators have in the way of evasive capacity.”

“They will be unable to concentrate effectively against the Vindicators because of their speed,” Swenson said into the phone.

Swenson put the phone down.

“The President is assuming that two of the planes will get through,” he said slowly. “We have moved into a genuine crisis. He is going to talk to Khrushchev on the phone.”

“I think we are ready to talk to Premier Khrushchev, Buck,” the President said. “The operator is prepared for the call. Just tell her to complete the Moscow-connection.”

Buck picked up the phone. Instantly the operator said, “Yes, sir?”

He gave her the instructions. At once there were the sounds of a long-distance call being completed, but there was a strange lack of static on the line. As the operator worked, Buck looked at the President.

The President seemed almost asleep. Buck had heard of his capacity to take quick short naps. Buck realized that the President had also developed a capacity to live with crisis. If he allowed each crisis to take its toll he would have died long ago of anxiety.

Now, his eyes half-closed, his face relaxed, the President looked younger, closer to his real age. No one, Buck thought, ever makes the complete adjustment to constant tension. Responsibility had laid pouches under the President’s eyes, etched lines around his mouth, given his powerful hands the slightest tremor.

“Hello,” a voice said suddenly in Russian. “Khrushchev is here.”

“Premier Khrushchev, the President of the United States is calling,” Buck said quickly.

The President came quickly forward in his seat, picking up his phone.

“Who else?” Khrushchev said. Incredibly, his tone sounded almost jovial to Buck. “That is what the line was set up for.”

Buck translated for the President.

“Premier Khrushchev, I am using the telephone line which your government and mine agreed should always be kept open. This is the first time it has been used. I am calling you on a matter of great urgency.”

This time another voice on the Moscow end of the line began to translate what the American President had said. At once the President nodded to Buck and then began to speak. Buck translated quickly, speaking over the voice of the Moscow translator.

“Premier Khrushchev, because of the urgency of the matter I hope that you will agree to the use of a single translator,” the President said. “Of course, I have no objection to your translator listening to make sure that my translator is giving you a faithful rendition of what I say, but time is very short and the problem is urgent. Two translators would only complicate it.”

There was a long moment of tension after Buck had translated. Buck felt squeezed buglike between the wills of two men. Although they were separated by thousands of miles it was almost as if their strength poured through the line. Buck, for the first time in his career, felt uncomfortable while translating. He sensed that this first clash of wills was important. He wanted to -be out of the room, to remove himself physically, yet, at the same time, he was fascinated by what was happening.

Khrushchev yielded, but without giving much. “It is a little thing,” he said. “I agree to using your translator.”

“Premier Khrushchev, I am calling you on what may turn out to be a small matter,” the President said. “But it is the first time it has happened and it could be tragic if it is misunderstood.”

“Does it have to do with the aircraft we have detected flying toward Russia from - the Bering Sea?” Khrushchev asked bluntly.

The President’s eyes widened a bit. He recovered and then incredibly, he winked at Buck.

“Yes, Premier, that is why I am calling,” the President said. “I am sure that your radar and tracking devices are as competent as ours and that they detected a somewhat unusual pattern.”

“They reported it to me fifteen minutes ago,” Khrushchev said. His voice was flat. It revealed nothing. Buck felt a game of word-poker was being played through him. Khrushchev continued speaking levelly. “We have not yet made a positive identification. I presume you are calling to inform me that it is another of those allegedly off-course reconnaissance flights. Mr. President, I have warned you in speeches, in diplomatic notes, through military channels, that your constant flying of armed planes around the periphery of the Soviet Union was a menace to peace. The scandalous U-2 incident was only the most dramatic example of your constant provocation. Have you ever wondered how long the patience of-”

“This is a mistake and it is a serious mistake,” the President cut in coldly. Be nodded for Buck to translate, Buck talked over the voice of Khrushchev, his voice somewhat shaky. Khrushchev came to a halt. Buck repeated what the President had said.

Khrushchev grunted. “All right, tell me,” he said, in a tough peasantlike voice. “Tell me the secret.”

“It is not a secret,” the President said. “A group of bombers has flown past its Fail-Safe point. I assume that you understand our Fail-Safe system?”

“Yes, I understand what you call your Fail-Safe system,” Khrushchev said. “You have talked enough about it in the papers. Has it turned out not always fail-safe?” What sounded like a laugh came through the phone.

The President turned white at the corners of his mouth. Then he also laughed.

“That is correct,” he said. Buck sensed that the laugh came hard, but was somehow necessary. “A group of our bombers with a speed of over 1,500 miles per hour and each loaded with two 20-megaton bombs is flying toward Russia.”

Khrushchev, spoke in a musing, tolerant, shrewd voice, the voice which an older man uses when rebuking a boy.

“We shall watch with great interest while you recall them. Only two weeks ago in a speech you gave to the young soldiers of your Air Academy in Colorado you said that the Air Force could never be a threat to peace, only a deterrent to war,” Khrushchev said softly. “I hope this little incident will change your mind.”

The President moved a pencil in his fingers, drew a hard circle on the yellow pad in front of him.

“Premier Khrushchev, this is not the time for moral-lung. It is much more serious than you think. So far we have been unable to recall them,” the President said, and his voice also was soft and tolerant. “Accidents can occur anywhere and be made by anyone. If the captain of your submarine the Kalinin were alive he could tell you that.”

The President was referring to a secret incident in which a Soviet submarine had ventured inside the three-mile limit off San Francisco eight months previously and had immediately been tracked and sunk by U.S. Navy destroyers and helicopters. Neither Russia nor the United States had ever mentioned the incident in public. -

The silence which spread through the vacant seconds was ominous; when Khrushchev spoke his words came slowly, each one edged with bitterness. “Are the planes from the Bering Sea being flown by madmen?”

“We are not sure, Premier Khrushchev,” the President said. “It may have been a mechanical failure. Your radio-jamming devices may have made it impossible for us to establish contact with the planes. Right now they are, apparently, flying on orders which are normally received by mechanical transmissions. But we are not sure. All I can tell you is that it is an accident. This is not an attempt to provoke war, it is not a part of a general attack.”

“And how is an ignorant Russian like me supposed to know that?” Khrushchev asked. His voice was harsh, but still somehow condescending, rebuking. “How do I know that you do not have hundreds of planes coming in so low that our radar cannot pick them up? How do I know—”

Again the President nodded at Buck and interrupted Khrushchev.

“Because, Premier Khrushchev, you have detection devices that give you almost the same information that I have,” the President said. “Also if you will give me the time to explain I hope to prove to you that we regard it as a serious accident, take responsibility for it, and are trying to correct it.”

The President stopped. The silence drew out, went past what was a polite break in conversation, became a test of will. Buck shifted in his chair. Again he had the sensation of being caught, buglike and about to be squashed, between two powerful forces. It was physically unpleasant.

“Go on, Mr. President,” Khrushchev said.

“As your people have told you, there is a flight of high-speed fighters which accompany each group of our bombers as they fly toward the Fail-Safe point,” the President said. “Your detection apparatus will soon tell you that those fighter planes have been flying at full speed, using afterburners, to try’ and overtake

- and shoot down our bombers. They are doing that at my direct order. Three of them have already run out of fuel and have, presumably, gone into the sea.”

There was a short silence, but it possessed a new quality. When Khrushchev spoke Buck could tell he was startled.

“You mean you are ordering American fighter planes to shoot down American bombers?”

“That is precisely what I mean,” the President said. “I have already given that order. If you have access to a plotting board you should have been able to see the fighters reverse their course and try to overtake the bombers.”

“Mr. President, I am sitting in front of a plotting board,” Khrushchev said. “My experts have already detected the change in number of your fighters.” He paused. “We wete not sure that they really launched air-to-air missiles at your bombers. We are still not sure that they have run out of fuel. Perhaps they are diving at a low altitude to escape our radar and are flying back to their bases-or into Russia.”

“Then sir, your radar apparatus is defective,” the President said. “We dearly saw three of the planes shoot their rockets and then fall into the ocean. At 20,000 feet the pilots were automatically ejected and their capsules were clearly visible on our radar.”

Khrushchev grunted softly. “They were clear on our radar also, Mr. President,” he said. “I really did not doubt that they were making an effort. I wanted only to hear your explanation. I also wanted to know if they had made the pursuit at your specific order.” He paused and when he spoke his voice was oddly neutral. “It is a hard thing to order men to certain death, is it not?”

“It is,” the President said simply.

Again there was the sound of background conversation on the Moscow end of the conference line. Buck could pick up only a few of the words. He quickly wrote a sentence on a pad and turned it to the President. It said, “Someone is trying to persuade him that it is a trick, arguing for ‘strike-back in full power’ or something close to that.”

Suddenly Khrushchev’s voice came distinctly over the line. “Nyet,” he said savagely. “I will make my own decisions.”

Then his voice went level and was under control.

“Mr. President, some of my advisers are convinced that this ‘accidental attack’ and your phone call are a ruse,” Khrushchev said. “They want to strike back at once. I have forbidden it. After all, Soviet air space has not yet been invaded. I must tell you, however, that if your fighters are not successful in shooting down your attacking planes we will be forced to shoot down the bombers ourselves. Then we will come to an alert and will prepare our ICBMs and other retaliatory devices. We must do this to make sure that the ‘accidental attack’ is not a mask for something more serious. Your single group of bombers does not disturb me in the least. We can handle them. Your real intention I do not yet know. I will protect myself.”

“Premier Khrushchev, I understand that you must take these steps. I hope you will be able to shoot them down. But let me urge you to take no steps which are irrevocable. I give you my word that this is a mistake. But you are also aware that if you start to launch missiles I cannot forbid our forces to do the same. If that happens there will be very little left of the world.”

“I think we will be able to take care of our interests, Mr. President,” Khrushchev said and his voice was tougher.

“I want to make sure that you understand that this is an accident and to ask you to do nothing which is irrevocable,” the President said evenly.

“I understand,” Khrushchev said grimly. “Is there anything more you wish to say?”

“Yes, Premier,” the President said. “I have made arrangements for a second conference line to be established between our tactical Air Force headquarters in Omaha and your counterpart officials in the Soviet Union. If you will give permission, that conference line can be established at once.” The voice hesitated. Buck looked up. The President took a deep breath, like a tired pitcher before he winds up and throws again. “Our people in Omaha will give every assistance to your forces in shooting down our bombers should our fighters fail.”

Khrushchev was silent for a few seconds. When he spoke, the words snapped out with what Buck considered genuine rage.

“Mr. President, the forces of the USSR are perfectly capable of defending our country. We do not need or welcome your technical assistance.”

“The choice is yours,” the President said evenly. Then his voice went low, so low that Buck had to ask him to repeat the words. Looking at the President, he realized that the President was doing this deliberately. “Premier Khrushchev, I must, with regret, tell you that regardless of what you do, two of those six planes will, in all probability, be able to fight through to their target. We have new evasive devices and masking techniques, which I don’t think you know anything about. My experts tell me that two of the planes will probably hit the target.”

Instantly Khrushchev’s voice changed. “What is their target?”

“Moscow.”

The silence that ensued lasted almost twenty seconds. It was broken by Khrushchev.

“I will call you back, Mr. President, when we have seen how the fighters do. Keep that second conference line you mentioned ready for use.” His voice was opaque, seamless, pitiless, completely unrevealing of emotion. -

The President put down the phone and looked at Buck. Then he stood up.

“Let’s go out and look at the board,” he said.

He led Buck into the next room, where his special assistants were gathered before a miniature version of the Big Board in the War Room at the Pentagon. None of the assistants turned to look at the President. They stood up, but they kept their eyes on the board. They knew he was there to watch the consequences of his own acts.

In the five minutes that followed not a word was spoken in the room. Two things happened. The last of the fighter planes shot its rockets in futile pursuit of the Vindicators and went off the screen. The Vindicators came up to and then passed over the light green line which marked the Siberian border of the Soviet Union.

The President waited another minute. He nodded at Buck and they went back into the smaller office.

Buck knew what had happened. The technical conditions of war now existed. An invasion had been made.

Now the world was living on two levels. There was an overt public level and a covert secret leveL On the overt level the world’s business proceeded serenely, innocently, and in its normal fashion: men worked, died, loved, and rested in their accustomed ways. But alongside this normal world, and ignored by it, the covert world went about its huge task of bringing two war plans to readiness. At that moment the covert, counterpoised world of war was in a waidng stage; its war dance had come to a high level of preparation and then stood arrested, held in a miraculous balance, a marvelous intricate suspension brought about by suspicions, intentions, information, and lack of information.

They waited. They waited in conference rooms, in war rooms, at rocket silos, in combat information centers on aircraft carriers, on submarines lying in muck at the bottom of the ocean, in fighter planes, in ready rooms, at computing consoles. Even men in motion were waiting. Over Russia fighter planes rose in waves, flew toward the edge of Soviet air space… and waited. Rockets came up from deep pits… and waited. Missiles were trained toward the east… and waited. Radar sets were warmed up… and their operators waited. Conventional antiaircraft weapons were readied and manned… and waited. On two continents whole armies of men, fleets of planes, scores of bizarre weapons were brought to a hair trigger of preparation and carefully restrained.

Everywhere the military muscles and nerves tightened, came to a hard attention. For some it was an ignorant attentiow thousands of men did a task they had practiced hundreds of times before without the slightest notion of whether this performance was urgent or casuaL Most of the men worked with only a tiny fragment of knowledge. But in a few places there were men who could see the full picture of what was happening, or, worse, what might happen. For these men the waiting was exquisitely painful; - the quiet screamed; the peace was agonizing.

One such place was the War Room at Omaha. Every man and instrument in the War Room was at readiness. The place glowed. The lights from thousands of little dials, the merged loom from scores of scopes, and the light from the big world map on the wall had wiped out the pools of shadow.

General Bogan sat at the desk directly in front of the map. He was aware of the many men who were sitting quietly, but tensely, at desks or in front of consoles or watching the faces of various machines. Now the entire operation was working at capacity. Every machine whirred, every man was attentive, there was a beautiful symmetry to the operation. Only one thing was different. That was the sure knowledge that this was reality, the end of practice, the ultimate point.

General Bogan sat quietly at his desk, his eyes watching the motion of various dots across the world map.

“Let’s get a dose-up on Group 6,” General Bogan said.

The projection on the map began to change at a dizzy speed, as if a camera were swooping down from some great height. General Bogan marveled at the ingenuity of the machine’s design. Using radar which was housed in one of the satellites launched a few years before, they were able to pick up a radar image of any locality in the world simply by tuning in on different satellites in different locations. This radar picture was then linked to an actual map of the Soviet Union and the progress of runaway Group 6 could be traced.

Group 6 had spread out before the actual penetration of Soviet Russia. To fly too dose to one another would increase the chance of two planes being destroyed by an enemy missile. Now Group 6 was a few miles inside the Soviet border, which was drawn in a heavy red line on the projection.

The few men in the War Room who were talking fell silent.

“Put the Soviet fighter planes on the projection,” General Bogan said.

A flock of small white blips appeared, all of them meticulously grouped on the Soviet side of the red line.

“This is Enemy Defense Performance Desk, General Bogan,” a mechanical voice said. The desk was keyed to come on with an interpretation when its information was projected onto the Big Board. “The No. 6 plane, which carries only defensive equipment and devices has moved into the lead. Apparently it has already launched some masking devices for, as you can see, the Soviet fighters are not grouping at the point where Group 6 crossed the border. On their radars the targets probably appear spread over several hundred miles and they are starting to get blips on a good number of objects without being able to determine which are real and which are decoys.”

“Have they launched missiles of any kind?” General Bogan asked.

“Not yet,” the Enemy Defense Desk said.

At that moment the Soviet fighter command ordered its planes into action. Instantly the Big Board began to blossom. Blips raced up the board, homed on decoys, raced relentlessly down their electronic tracks and then detonated themselves in little mushrooming blips which quiddy disappeared.

“The little dots that appear suddenly and then disappear are missiles,” the Enemy Defense expert said. “The largest blips are fighter-bombers which are probably equipped with their own radar and air-to-air missiles. So far none of the antiaircraft shots have been nuclear. They are the conventional warhead. As you can see, our diversion and evasive devices are working well. The No. 6 plane which is now angling away will probably drop a new set of window.”

Each of the planes was equipped with radar-jamming and obscuring devices which were called “window” and were advanced developments from the older strips of foil designed to produce false images on enemy radar screens. The Vindicators also carried other decoys, some of which could be launched by small rockets, and antimissile missiles and automatic devices to detect and identify approaching enemy missiles and compute the precise time for firing the antimissile missiles.

“Right now the Soviet radar is probably picking up some hundreds of blips and they are running each of them down systematically,” the voice went on. “On the scope that you see the decoys had not been projected. Our equipment is programmed to ignore signals from our own window. On the Soviet projection the only thing they are sure of is the location of their own missiles and fighter planes. For the Soviets it is a pretty difficult task, General, trying to follow a couple of hundred blips and vector their own planes in on them over air space of several million cubic miles.”

General Bogan felt an odd mixture of pride and helplessness. For years every man in the room, every piece of machinery, had worked and drilled and practiced for the first terrible moment of action. Now it had begun. But there was a bewildering difference. When this magnificently balanced mechanism was being perfected, no one had ever contemplated that it would be used to counter some terrible mistake. Even so, General Bogan could not restrain a sense of admiration for the efficiency with which the Vindicator bombers were feinting, fighting back, and pushing on the attack.

He could not put down a sense of guilt. If the attack had been legitimately ordered the Vindicators would be receiving help. A B-52 especially equipped with jamming equipment and more elaborate decoys than the Vindicators could carry would be accompanying them. Jamming and masking devices located around the borders of the Soviet Union would have gone into action. But these parts of the mechanism had been ordered to stand down. The Vindicators were fighting through entirely on their own. General Bogan also felt a deeper uneasiness. If he were able to give the Soviets the information he had, their chances of shooting down the Vindicators would be greatly increased. But he forced the idea down into some black recess of his mind.

“How much of their defensive armament have the Vindicators had to fire so far?” General Bogan asked.

“So far they have been following standard operating procedure with No. 6 plane firing air-to-air missiles at any missile or plane that is dosing a real target,” the mechanical voice said. “No. 6 has run through 55 per cent of her armament. The other planes each have a full load of air-to-air missiles.”

On, the screen one of the Soviet fighters suddenly altered direction and started to fly directly at the lead plane in the Vindicator formation. The two planes were dosing on one another at a combined speed of over 3,000 miles per hour. General Bogan felt his chest go tight. His viscera warred with his mind. His mind willed that the Soviet fighter would be successfuL His viscera, conditioned by years of training, was knotted in a desperate sympathy with the Vindicator.

Suddenly the decision was made. A small blip fell away from the No. 6 plane, hung suspended for a moment, and then, like a meteorite trailing a miniature phosphorescent tail, it began to speed toward the Soviet fighter. It was a Bloodhound and General Bogan estimated that its speed was over 1,500 miles an hour. The Soviet fighter suddenly began to zigzag in the air as some mechanism aboard the plane sensed the rush of the missile. Finally, when the Bloodhound was only a few miles from the Soviet bomber, the Soviet fighter itself dropped an air-to-air missile which turned in the direction of the Bloodhound. It was too late. In the next second there was a great mushrooming blotch on the screen. The warhead of the Bloodhound had gone off. The Soviet air-to-air missile and fighter and Bloodhound all disappeared in the blotch. The American bomber veered away from the blotch, which spread out like a green, dangerous fungus growth. Then abruptly it dimmed and the blotch disappeared.

“Jesus, I’ll bet the crew on that Vindicator got a shaking up,” a voice said in the rear of the room.

North of the Vindicators another Soviet fighter suddenly altered course and was joined by a second. They both ran down their electronic tracks, stalking the invisible targets. No. 6 plane veered toward them, but at that moment each of the Soviet fighters released two air-to-air missiles. They streaked, amoebalike but at great speed, toward the closest Vindicator. The attacked Vindicator and No. 6 simultaneously loosed a total of six air-to-air missiles toward the two fighters. The four Soviet missiles came at a much slower speed. The Vindicator missiles sped toward the Soviet missiles, wavered a moment, and then went on toward the larger targets.

“Oh, Christ,” Colonel Casdo whispered. “They went right by the missiles.”

Two seconds later the two Soviet fighters went up in a rolling green blip. But their four missiles continued to bore in. The attacked Vindicator began to jink in the air, rapidly altering course and altitude. It also shot off four more missiles. But the Soviet missiles were too close. They closed on the Vindicator, seemed to converge and then the Vindicator disappeared in the explosion.

There was utter silence in the War Room. It was the first time that most of the men had “seen” a plane destroyed. For General Bogan it was not. In World War II he had seen planes destroyed on radar and with his own eyes. Now, he knew, was the time to establish the mood of the War Room. He turned on the intercom so that everyone in the room could hear him.

“Apparently the Soviets have a very slow missile which compensates by a long range,” be said distinctly. “That is a longer range than we had calculated their missiles possessed. The computing systems built into our air-to-air missiles detected the four Soviet air-to-air missiles, but ‘calculated’ that they were moving so slowly that they must be drones or reconnaissance planes, and so they ignored them and continued toward the Soviet fighters. You can’t win ’em all.”

Instantly he was aware of the unintended irony. The Vindicators must lose, must all be destroyed, or God knew what might happen. But all his deepest reflexes were with the Vindicators. They were his. He felt slightly sick, torn by cross-currents of loyalty and of logic.

“General, it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” someone said to him.

He turned and it was Raskob standing with his legs apart, a dead cigar in his mouth, staring at the board. Even in the dim light, General Bogan could see that Raskob was very pale.

“You’re right, sir, it’s going to get much worse,” General Bogan said.

“Will all our men hold firm?” Raskob asked. “Not just the ones here, but the ones in the air? After all, those are our men getting killed out there and it’s tough just to stand by and watch it. Is anyone likely to rack?”

“Not likely, Congressman Raskob,” General Bogan aid. “They’ve been screened, tested, rehearsed, and hilled until they can’t be sure what’s a drill and what’s for real.”

“I hope you’re right, General Bogan,” Raskob said. “I don’t know what the President is doing, but whatever it is he’d better be right. Khrushchev isn’t going o sit around forever and watch those planes move in on Moscow. The whole thing rests on the President’s Lbility to persuade Khrushchev it was an accident. If ie doesn’t, then we’re going to have all-out, 100 per cent, slam-bang, hell-bent war. That’s right, isn’t it, General?”

“Yes, sir, that is right,” General Bogan said.

He felt a sudden sympathy with Raskob. He was a though man, quick at making calculations and then at icing up to them. It was the first time that General

Bogan had faced the fact that everything now rested with the President. Barring some miracle, one or two of the bombers would get through. And if the Soviets did not believe the attack was innocent or made in error they would be forced to respond.

“No notion of how it happened, eh, General?” Raskob asked.

General Bogan felt an odd fuzziness, a thin coating of confusion, slide over his mind.

“No, sir, not the slightest,” he said. “They told us that the system was foolproof. Oh, some parts might break down from time to time, but the whole system would check itself out, they told us.”

“They told you,” Knapp said and there was wonderment in his voice. “Always that unknown they. Those of us who manufactured the gear, who had some notion of what it was being used for-we never told any. one that it was infallible. But somewhere in Washington they had to say it was perfect, that it couldn’t make a mistake. General, there is no such thing as a perfect system and they should have told you that.”

“Look, friend, in Washington you don’t get appropriations and bigger staff and more personnel by saying that what you’re doing is not perfect,” Raskob said roughly. “You stand up in front of the Appropriations Committee and you convince yourself that the system is perfect and then you tell the Committee it is perfect. And there isn’t a mother’s son on that Committee who can say you nay. Because we just ain’t boy geniuses at electronics and all this stuff. So we give them the dough. What the hell else can we do?”

“Nothing, not a thing,” Knapp said. “Except listen to the right people. Look, for years there has been a fellow named Fredikle, who has been working with the Rand Corporation and the Air Force on how to

reduce war by accident. He has found flaw after flaw in the system, at just. the same time that the newspapers were saying it was perfect. Kendrew over in England has talked about accidental war for years.- loud and clear. So have dozens of others. Most of us, the best of us on the civilian side,” and he spoke without pride, “we knew that a perfect system is impossible. The mistake was that no one told the public and the Congress.”

“What should we have done?” Colonel Cascio said suddenly, and his voice held a kind of baffled anger. “Just sit on our duffs while our enemy goes ahead and arms to the teeth and finally gets to a position where he can tell us to surrender and we know we have to do it?”

“No, son, we had to do what we did,” Raskob said wearily. “In politics if you sit still you are dead. I guess it’s the same in the military game. But maybe we should have recognized that past a certain point the whole damned thing was silly.”

General Bogan sensed that Knapp was in a terrible agony. His hunched and hard-driven body, his burning eyes, his ravished face, looked like a statue of anxiety. General Bogan could guess the reason: much of the machinery in that room had been developed and manufactured by Knapp and he had carried the burden of knowledge within him that it was far from foolproof. Right now he was wondering why he had not spoken out.

Only Raskob, the politically toughened man, could see the other side. His eyes remained glued on the board and when he spoke his voice was a mixture of pity and hard-bitten reality.

“Well-that’s one bomber gone. If those Soviet fighters start shaping up a bit maybe we can avoid the worst.”

The small group felt rather than saw Colonel Casdo turn in his chair. His eyes burned up at Raskob. He was oddly bent as if his body were undergoing an invisible physical torture. He did not speak, he only stared with hatred at Raskob.

Raskob looked down at him without emotion.

“There can be much worse things than the loss of six bombers, son,” Raskob said. “It’s a pity that those eighteen men have to fight their way in and. probably get killed in the process. But think a minute about all of the people, millions and billions of them, all around the world, walking around in total ignorance that they might be killed in the next few hours. Do you ever think about them? Well, that’s what politics is all about and that poor guy in the White House who has to make the big decision knows that.”

Colonel Cascio’s eyes did not change. He blinked once and then turned back to his controls.

The remaining five Vindicators were now widely scattered, but in a carefully calculated dispersion. Each was at the maximum range at which they could protect one another and be protected by the No. 6 plane. Still they were so dispersed that no single Soviet shot could down two of them.

“How are the Soviet fighters doing?” General Bogan asked, still on the intercom.

The Enemy Defense Desk responded at once.

“Apparently, General, they are badly confused by our masking and window,” the voice said. “They have not yet started to concentrate on Group 6. They are still scattered, chasing decoys.”

Somewhere in the War Room a voice cheered and instantly was joined by a score of others. General Bogan felt a kind of exultation start in his own throat, but quickly repressed it. There was a strange perversion about his feelings, a heightened sense of paradox. Again the thought flicked in and Out of his mind that he, standing before the board in the War Room, could help the Russians distinguish between plane and decoy. When he spoke there was a hard lash in his voice.

“Let’s knock that off,” he said. “This is no Goddamned football game.” There was instant silence. “Remember that. It might get hard in the next few hours.”

He looked around and saw the glint of resentment in a dozen eyes, shoulders hunched with anger. They were well trained, but not for this sort of incredible game.

“How much of her defensive gear does No. 6 still have?” General Bogan asked.

“Twenty-five per cent,” the voice said. “She is slowing down the rate of defensive fire, apparently to conserve missiles for the run on Moscow.”

On the southern flank of the Vindicators a Soviet fighter began to firm up on an intercepting course toward the closest Vindicator. The Vindicator turned away, but the Soviet blip also altered course. They Would still make an intercept.

“Fire, fire,” a voice said very close to General Bogan. He looked over and saw it was Colonel Cascio. He was half out of his chair, his teeth wet and prominent, his lips drawn back. “Fire before the bastard gets one of those long slow ones off at you.”

“Colonel, if you say one more word like that I will throw you out of this room and have you court-martialed,” General Bogan said in a low voice.

No one else in the War Room had heard the exchange.

Colonel Cascio whirled in his half-bent posture, like a boxer badly hurt and covering. He stared at General Bogan and then his eyes cleared. He sat down.

The Soviet fighter was joined by three other fighters and they formed a long box formation as they ran down their intercept. The Vindicator jinked once more. So did the Soviet fighters. Instantly the Vindicator fired four missiles. The Soviet planes each fired a single missile and continued to speed toward the Vindicator. At the same moment their detection gear told them they were fired upon and the Soviet fighters turned sharply away. It was too late. Five seconds later all of them were destroyed. But their four missiles ran with an agonizing slowness toward the Vindicator. It turned and ran, but was not fast enough. The missiles came in remorselessly. Again there was the merging, again the slow, exploding, engulfing blip.

General Bogan felt his fingertips shaking against his trousers. He felt for a moment as if he were being exposed to some strange torture; some spikeike split of his allegiance; some rupturing of his life. He yearned for the bottle of whisky in a faraway office.

As if by order, the breaths of two-score men were released from their lungs. It made a weird contrapuntal chorus of sighs. Congressman Raskob muttered something to himself. It sounded like “Four more to go.”

The phone on the President’s desk rang. It was a strong unbroken ring. The President looked at Buck, arched his eyebrows, and Buck picked up his phone.

It was Moscow.

The first voice that spoke was that of Khrushchev.

The moment he heard the voice something in Buck’s mind went alert. He heard perfectly and literally what Khrushchev said, but he also sensed something else. It was the same person speaking but in a different voice. The voice ended each sentence with an odd lifting sound.

As Buck translated the literal words he searched back over his experience. Something was there, elusive and subtle, but heavy with meaning.

“We have only a few hours left, Mr. President,” Khrushchev said. “How should we use them? You have launched an offensive attack against our country. Without provocation or cause. You state it is an accident. But meanwhile we lie defenseless before you.”

“Not quite defenseless, Premier Khrushchev,” the President said. “You have hundreds of fighter planes, countless ICBMs, missiles for defense. In fact in your recent Warsaw speech you boasted of the invulnerability of the Soviet forces.”

Krushchev grunted. Then oddly and out of character, he sighed.

Instantly things fell into place in Buck’s mind. He recalled listening to a record at the Monterey Language School made by a Russian peasant in which the ultimate in resignation and despair was precisely this sequence of petulance, a grunt, and a sigh. Even when joined to the most ordinary words their meaning was one of great sorrow-a sorrow so great that no words could convey it. It was not a matter even of inflection. It was a matter of sound and wind and something deep in the chest.

Buck reached for a pad of paper in front of him and in quick bold letters he wrote “Khrushchev’s mood is sorrow.” The President read it upside down as quiddy as Buck wrote it. When he had finished the President drew a large circle around the statement to indicate he understood.

The silence on the line went past the point of tension. The tiny, and usually inaudible, screech of static now seemed to be a scream in their ears. The President started to doodle on the pad in front of him. He traced the head of an arrow, started to draw the shaft and then, very deliberately, lifted his pencil from the pad and held it between his forefingers, the eraser touching the forefinger of his left hand, the sharp point of lead pushed into the flesh of his right forefinger. His hands were steady.

When Khrushchev spoke, it was to Buck like a bell fractured, a flash that ripped darkness, a pinprick through the eardrum. And yet, oddly, his voice was gentle.

“It is ironic, gentlemen, but now, at this moment when we still have time left, the time that is left is empty and without use,” Khrushchev said. Buck’s confidence was strengthened. He was certain that Khrushchev was in a sorrow so deep that it was close to agony. “There is a period during which we can do nothing. After that? I do not know. If the bombs fall on Moscow I know. We will strike back.”

Buck translated quickly, but the President seemed to be listening abstractedly, his head cocked to one side as if he were making a difficult calculation. He nodded at Buck, the calculation made.

“What luck have you had in your attacks on our bombers?” the President asked.

“Luck? No luck at all,” Khrushchev said. “But earned results, yes. By earned results we have gotten 860 of our supersonic fighters vectored in on the hundreds of targets which suddenly appeared on our radar. scope. That, Mr. President, was a tender moment. One group of our experts was convinced that your scientists had developed a method of camouflaging the approach of bombers until they were actually in our territory. They argued that what appeared as decoys were actually real bombers. They urged that we retaliate instantly with all of our ICBMs and our bombers.”

“Why did you not do that?” the President asked. Buck looked at him sharply. The President nodded for him to translate the question. To Buck it seemed brusque and antagonistic.

“Ah, that is a nice question,” Khrushchev said. Buck was bewildered by some inflection, some subtle inclination, so the fugitive meaning. Khrushchev’s words were as ironic and heavy as before, but his delivery was evasive.

“Why did you not launch an offensive?” the President said again.

Buck hesitated. The word “offensive” in Russian can take several different meanings. In one sense it means to question a man’s virility. In another to be crudely egotistical. In another to be a challenge. Buck looked at the President. With the gnawing tension growing within, he knew he must not give the wrong word to Khrushchev. It might be enough to trigger the peasant temper, to bring the powerful fingers stabbing down on the buttons.

Buck made up his mind.

“Why did you not defend yourself by counterattacking?” he translated the President’s words.

Khrushchev said in a quiet voice, “I held back the retaliation because I still had time to take the gamble that you were sincere. Also I knew that it would be the end for both of us. A peasant who becomes a politician, Mr. President, is not without insight. The generals are not happy. Just as I can guess your generals are not happy with you. But there is a time for common sense… which occurs as often among the low as among the mighty.”

The President started to speak and to his own surprise Buck found himself lifting his hand, restraining the President. The Russian was thinking aloud and Buck sensed some gain in not interrupting him. The President nodded.

“Of the 860 planes we sent up 70 were, by great valor and ingenuity, able to attack one or another of your Vindicators,” Khrushchev went on. He paused. “We have been able to destroy only two of your planes.”

“What were your casualties?” the President asked.

“Very high,” Khrushchev said. “Out of the 70 planes which launched attacks somewhere around 65 were destroyed. And by means of which we have no understanding. Most of them simply exploded in midair. And for that we got two of your bombers.”

“What of the other four?” the President asked.

“There is little to be optimistic about,” Khrushchev said.

Incredibly, doubting his senses, Buck heard Khrushchev yawn. He looked up sharply at the President. The President had heard it also and his lips went white. Then, again from some buried part of his mind, Buck remembered a Russian at Monterey who had yawned all during a seminar-and committed suicide the next morning.

“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Khrushchev said.

Now his voice had something of the old toughness in it. “Only time will tell.”

“Time must not be allowed to tell,” the President said, and his voice was so cold that Buck was startled. “I offered to give you our help in shooting down those Vindicators. You refused it. What is your attitude now?”

Khrushchev hesitated. The President bad put it as nakedly, as bluntly, as one could put it. Buck licked his lips. Instantly he wondered if Khrushchev was doing the same.

“Mr. President, I agree to setting up the conference line between your tactical people in Omaha and my people in Kiev,” Khrushchev said. His tone was still quiet. “If there is a chance, we must try and kill the Vindicators. Wait-while I make arrangements.”

The President pressed a button on his desk and an aide appeared. Briefly the President instructed him about the line between Omaha and Kiev. Buck surmised that Khrushchev was doing the same thing.

When Khrushchev came back on the line, the President picked up the conversation in an entirely different tone-calmly, almost idly, it seemed to Buck.

“Premier Khrushchev, we know now that Soviet and United States bombers, and indeed our whole offensive and defensive apparatus, are almost mirror images of one another. But let me ask you a question. What sort of experimental work have your military and scientific people been directing at our planes as they orbit at the Fail-Safe point?”

“Ah, ah, ah, that is a good one,” Khrushchev said. “That is something that I have just found Out about in the last hour.”

Buck’s tongue translated, but his mind and his intuition were frozen. First, the President bad come to a hard attention; his eyes glittered like those of a mongoose before it closes in under the venomous muscular curve of a cobra’s body. But at the same time Buck realized that the President had already won some dim and obscure, but terribly critical, point. Khrushchev’s expressions were those of a man in a deep and fundamental turmoil. The words were still intact, the syntax irreproachable, but like an animal in its final cul-de-sac that wheels and faces its enemy, there was a note of ultimate calamity.

“Yes, but what is the answer?” the President said.

When Khrushchev spoke, his voice had steadied. He had made a decision.

“Mr. President, in the last hour I learned of a piece of research which we have been undertaking but which was unknown to me,” Khrushchev said. “I am certain, Mr. President, that such things could take place in your country.”

“Of course, Mr. Khrushchev,” the President said. “I am aware that I am unaware of a great deal.”

Khrushchev laughed softly.

“This particular experiment was undertaken by a joint research team of mathematicians, radar experts, computing-machine specialists and weapons-systems experts,” Khrushchev said. “We were aware of your general strategic approach, the system of planes aloft, planes on standby, and the rest of the procedure including the Fail-Safe point. This did not take much intelligence. But this particular team had orders from our general staff in Moscow to see if it would be possible to discriminate an actual attack from a routine Fail-Safe flight. Our observations told us where your Fail-Safe lines must be. We then established mathematically another line which, if penetrated by your planes, would indicate a true attack.”

“What are you getting at?” the President asked. Buck could tell from his face that he already knew the answer. The President had gained some of the offensive.

“Today. Mr. President, our analyzers calculated that a true attack might be imminent. They may have been wrong. But we figured our only chance to prevent it was to try jamming all radio frequencies so that your bombers would be unable to receive the ‘go’ signal ordering them through their Fail-Safe line. We bad to prevent you from changing the standard Fail-Safe control into an ordered attack. Mr. President, we may have succeeded. But who knows?”

“Holy Jesus,” the words slipped from the President’s mouth. “What an irony. The whole operation was calculated on the basis of a trust in the infallibility of our Fail-Safe controls. We’ve both put too damn much trust in the system.”

“Yes, Mr. President, and it is even more ironic than that. We don’t know whether our jamming efforts succeeded and were a contributing cause, and neither do you. But we do know that these are your bombers and they are attacking Moscow. All right, maybe accidents on both sides. But right now, what do we do? Now, quickly, Mr. President, how can you convince me that your planes are on an innocent mission?”

“Just a moment, Mr. Khrushchev,” the President said. “From what you have just said it must be obvious that our planes do not bear all the guilt. Your own scientists have told you that they were trying to jam our radios. The guilt, if there be any, surely must be shared.”

“Mr. President, there was no reason in the world why I needed to tell you that we had conducted, perhaps mistakenly, that jamming operation this morning,” Khrushchev said. “The fact that an obscure team of scientists may have miscalculated is of absolutely no relevance. In the eyes of the world you have wantonly and without provocation attacked the Soviet Union and may, in fact, destroy Moscow. What Indian or Thai or Japanese or African or European will believe that so monstrous a thing was really tripped by our jamming your radios? No one. More importantly, no Russian would tolerate for a moment the destruction of Moscow without retaliation. Forget the mechanical mistakes and traps and countermeasures. The mistake, you agree, started on your side. But we may suffer the consequences.”

“What do you intend to do, Mr. Khrushchev?” the President asked.

“I am trapped, Mr. President,” Mr. Khrushchev said. His voice was riddled with despair. “I am perfectly prepared, Mr. President, to order our whole offensive apparatus to take action. In fact, I intend to do precisely that unless you can persuade me that your intentions were not hostile and that there is some chance for peace.”

“Your experts should be able to tell you that I have ordered all American bombers to fly toward their bases and land,” the President said. “Not a single American plane, aside from those in Group 6, is making a hostile gesture toward you. Does that sound like the preparation for an all-out war?”

“The military people have already told me that,” Khrushchev said and his voice, was tired. “On the face of.it you look innocent, but how do we know what else is happening? What other plots do you have up your sleeve? Where else will your electronic systems break down?”

“We have no plots of any kind,” the President said. “Your people will be able to verify that in plain voice and with top priority I am sending a personal message to all Polaris submarines not to fire, not even to prepare to fire, their missiles, unless they receive a direct order from me.” His voice was not pleading, but he spoke with an urgency which even Khrushchev must detect. “I cannot give a guarantee against further mechanical failure. Neither can you.”

Khrushchev sighed. From a long distance came the single word “No.”

Buck almost groaned. He waved to the President, a sign that no more could be asked. Khrushchev had given everything.

“Premier Khrushchev, I think it would be wise for you to remove yourself from Moscow so that you will be out of danger,” the President said. “That will allow us to continue to negotiate even if the worst happens and the bombers get through. I pray that it will not happen, but it may.”

“I have already made arrangements to remove myself and some of my staff from Moscow by helicopter,” Khrushchev said at once, in a firm voice that suddenly toughened. “Moscow will not be evacuated. There is no time. It lies here innocent and open, defenseless. If it is destroyed there will be little time to talk, Mr. Press dent.”

“I am aware of that,” the President said. “But I will do anything in my power to demonstrate our good will. I. only ask that you not take any irrevocable step. Once you launch bombers and ICBMs everything is finished. I will not be able to hold back our retaliatory forces and then it would be utter devastation for both of us.”

“I know, Mr. President,” Khrushchev said. “We have been over that before; each of us has made the calculations endlessly in his own mind, has heard them from his advisers. But if Moscow is obliterated”—a kind of helpless rage shook his voice—“am I supposed to sit still, watch our biggest city destroyed, and then come hat in hand to you and ask that we reopen peace talks in Geneva? It would be absurd. I am not a man, we are not a people, that likes to look absurd.”

“I agree with much of what you say,” the President said. For the first time Buck saw great physical tension, even pain, in the President’s face.

There was a long hesitation. Then Khrushchev spoke again.

“I will come back on the line when I am a safe distance from Moscow,” Khrushchev said. His voice was toneless, flat, empty.

The line clicked dead.

“Mr. President,” Buck said, “may I say that you handled him beautifully. He acknowledged the possibility that they might be wrong and-”

Buck stopped. The President was not listening. His face was slack, softened by despair. He was staring at his scratch pad, searching the firm black cabalistic signs for some meaning.

Again Buck had the sense that something had slipped by him, that in the literal meaning of the words he had missed some larger import.

“You have broken him, Mr. President,” Buck said. “He is shaken.”

The President looked up. His eyes were dark, but the pupils glittered like small pools of agony.

“He is not broken, Mr. Buck,” the President said, “He has his back to the wall and he is suffering, but he is not broken. Unless we can show him that this is an accident, that we are not doing it deliberately, he will launch an all-out attack on us.”

Buck felt his stomach knot. In the rush of translation, in the thrill of the negotiation, he had forgotten the stakes. He stared at the President.

“What do we do now?” Buck whispered.

The President looked across the table at Buck. Re shook his head slowly as if to clear it.

“We do what we must,” he said slowly. “Get General Black at the Pentagon.”

While Buck put the call through the President leaned back in his chair. He put his hands over his eyes, his teeth clenched together, the muscles at the back of his jaw tightened into hard knots. Then he relaxed.

“General Black, Mr. President,” Buck said. The President held out his hand. He took the phone without opening his eyes.

“Blackie” the President said, his voice quiet and firm. “Do you remember the story of Abraham in the Old Testament? Old Bridges at Groton used to use it at least six times a year for chapel.”

Oh my God, he’s cracking, Buck thought, cracking wide open, and the whole world with him. He found himself actually looking around for means to escape, for a door to run through. But the general’s voice came back calm and reassuring.

“I remember, sir,” Black said. He stood awkwardly over Swenson, holding the red phone. The others around the table in the Pentagon War Room continued the discussion and also watched the board. Black felt a peculiar unreality about the situation. Simultaneously he sensed that this was, somehow, a time for first names, but he could not do it. The half-dozen times he and the President had met in the past few years, the President had always been warm but had called him “General Black” with a grin. But now there was a new tone in the President’s voice. Or perhaps it was the old intimate tone.

“Blackie, keep the story of Abraham in mind for the next few hours,” the President said. Then he paused. “Are Betty and the family in New York?”

“Yes,” Black said. A dread premonition came over him.

“I need your help,” the President said slowly. “Get. out to Andrews Field immediately. Further instructions will be waiting for you there. Things are not good, Blackie. I may be asking a great deal of you.”

“I’ll do what you say,” Black said. He paused. He knew the President was in some private agony. “And you do what has to be done.”

“Good luck, Blackie,” the President said.

Immediately Black wanted to call Betty-to talk with her, and with his two boys. But it was out of the question, he knew. Then he felt a wave of apprehension, vague and inexplicable. He remembered-Betty was spending the day across town with a friend. She and the boys would not be together until late afternoon. The knowledge was unsettling to Black. For a brief instant, memory of the Dream flashed back into his mind. No time. He shook the thoughts off and strode rapidly toward the door.

After hanging up, the President sat perfectly still for a full minute, his eyes dosed. Then he swung his feet from the desk, and looked at Buck.

“Tell the switchboard to get our Ambassador to Moscow and also the Soviet Delegate to the United Nations,” the President said quietly. “Put them directly onto the line which connectj us with Khrushchev. The moment that we can talk to Khrushchev open the conference line again.”

As Buck talked into the phone he looked at the President. The President’s face had undergone a strange transfiguration. Some muscles had relaxed, others had tightened, his eyes were closed. A stranger could not have guessed the President’s age. Nor the meaning of his expression. Then Buck identified it: the President’s face reflected the ageless, often repeated, doomed look of utter tragedy. A tragedy which is no single person’s but the world’s, which relates not to One man’s misfortunes, large or small, but to the human condition.

For The first time since he was a boy of fourteen, Peter Buck felt the need to weep.

On General Bogan’s desk was a “touch” phone which had not been operated in all the time that he had been at Omaha. One operated it merely by touching a button, and out of a small square box the voice at the other end of the line came out magnified and enlarged.

This particular “touch” phone was reserved for the possibility of direct communication with any potential enemy military leaders.

A peculiar aura surrounded it. It was like a piece of contaminated equipment, oddly disconcerting, unnerving, contradictory. The men who tested it did so with distaste. While almost every other piece of equipment in the room was associated with some man, was his “personal” equipment, no one wanted to be associated with the touch telephone. It was almost like the physical presence of the enemy in the War Room. Everyone knew that the phone could not actually overhear them, that it had to be passed through a number of careful checks before it was actually operative, but even so it was a totem of the enemy, awesome, ill-regarded.

Some minutes before, General Bogan had received a call from one of the President’s aides telling him to activate the touch phone as arrangements were being made for direct radio communication with Soviet tactical officers in Russia. Now the light below the touch button glowed red. General Bogan quietly reached forward and pushed the button. There was utter silence in the room. Even those men who were out of hearing range watched tensely.

“General Bogan, Strategic Air Command, Omaha, here,” General Bogan said.

There was a slight static, then a voice spoke in flawless English.

“I am the translator for Marshal Nevsky, Soviet Air Defense Command,” the voice said. “Marshal Nevsky sends his greetings. He tells you that reception here on our end is five by five. How do you read us?”

“We read you five by five,” General Bogan said. “I have no instructions on what we are to discuss. Have you received instructions, Marshal Nevsky?”

The translator spoke Russian very rapidly. An even, strong voice replied.

“We have received no instructions, General,” the translator said. “Only that we should set up communications with your headquarters.”

Then there was silence. Colonel Casdo moved his eyes from General Bogan’s face to the touch phone. He seemed mesmerized, fascinated, by something enormously seductive, but also revolting. The red phone rang.

“General Bogan, this is the President and I should like you to put this call on your intercom so that everyone in the room can hear what I say,” the President said. “I should also like you to open your, touch phone to the Soviet Air Command so that they also can hear me.”

“One moment, Mr. President,” General Bogan said. He turned to Colonel Cascio and gave instructions. The arrangements took only ten seconds.

“Mr. President, when you speak your voice will be beard by everyone,” General Bogan said.

“Gentlemen, this is the President,” the President began and his strong young voice rang through the room, drowning out the endless hum of the machines. The men had, quite unconsciously, all come to attention, their thumbs neatly lined alongside the seams of their trousers, their eyes staring straight ahead. “What I am saying can be heard by the Soviet Air Command, Premier Khrushchev’s personal staff in the Kremlin, our Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon, our SAC group in Omaha, our Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and the Soviet delegate to the United Nations. Whatever orders I give to American military or civilian personnel are to be considered as direct personal orders from the Commander in Chief. They are to be obeyed fully, without reservation and instantly.”

The President paused. General Bogan looked around the room. He had a sense of unreality, a kind of smoky twisting in his mind, a surrealistic sense of things dissolving. The whole thing was dreamlike, but it was iron hard and inescapable. There was no possibility of awakening to something else.

“We are caught in a desperate situation,” the President said slowly and emphatically. Over the touch phone General Bogan could hear small hushed Russian voices translating. “By some sort of error, probably mechanical, a group of American bombers has penetrated Soviet air space. It is our best estimate that they will try to press home an attack on Moscow. Each of the bombers is equipped with two 20-megaton bombs. Though all of the planes are under heavy attack from Soviet defenses, in all probability at least two of these bombers will get through. This is a tragic mistake. It is not, I repeat, not, our intention to engage the Soviet Union in warfare. Premier Khrushchev is, at this moment, en route to a headquarters located outside of Moscow. When he again contacts me I will do everything in my power to persuade him of our sincerity.”

Again the President paused. When he resumed speaking his voice was so slow that each word seemed to dangle.

“Those of us on this hookup are the only people who can save the world from an atomic holocaust,” he said. “We must all do everything possible to prevent our planes from attacking Moscow. At the same time, we must make it absolutely clear to the Russians that this is an accident and in no way part of or prelude to an American attack. Already I have done everything I can by myself to achieve these two goals. Recall of our planes has proved impossible, but it has been constantly attempted. All other American offensive and defensive forces have been withdrawn from Condition Red. This the Russians were able to verify on their monitoring systems. The Russians now concede that their Air Defense Command may not be able to intercept our Group 6. They have a momentous decision to make: should they order a retaliatory attack against the United States? Premier Khrushchev tells me that some of his military leaders favor such an attack.” The voice paused or faltered and then came on again. “This is understandable.”

Colonel Cascio listened, immediately understood, and was filled with a terrible confusion. He knew that in the position of these outraged Russian officers he Would feel the same way. Cascio glanced around the room. Everyone was immobilized by the strangeness of the situation.

The President’s voice continued “Premier Khrushchev has behaved as I believe I would under similar conditions. He has delayed retaliation. And I think he believes that this is an accident. But we must convince him, and his chief advisers, that it is. I order every American to cooperate fully with Soviet officers in whatever attempts they make to shoot down our invading bombers. This is a firm and unalterable command. You are to give whatever information the Soviet officers may request of you. Let me emphasize that any hesitation, any withholding of information, may have the most tragic consequences. Are there any questions?”

The President paused. There were no questions.

“Gentlemen, I wish you success,” the President said. “This is a difficult situation for all of us. I expect you to conduct yourselves as patriots and to carry out my orders without hesitation.”

The President’s line clicked dead.

General Bogan turned to look at Colonel Cascio. Cascio’s eyes were green and they had a hard glow in the dim light.

Suddenly a voice came up on the “touch” phone. It was the voice of the Russian translator in the Soviet Union.

“Does the Bloodhound have both infrared and radar homing capabilities?” he asked. “A number of our fighter planes have been destroyed by a missile which seems to home not on the infrared source, but the radar transmitter. Is that possible?”

“Colonel Cascio will answer your question, sir,” Gem. eral Bogan said. He nodded at Cascio.

Colonel Cascio looked at General Bogan. Even in the dim light General Bogan could tell that the blood had drained from Cascio’s face. His eyes rolled slightly in his head. Then his throat began to work as if the muscles were out of control, seized by a convulsion. It was the throat of a man sobbing, but no sound came from Colonel Cascio’s lips. He shook his head. His hand reached for the button below the “touch” phone and then, his finger only an inch from the button, he Went rigid. His entire body seemed frozen, gripped by a spasm of immobility. He did not tremble, he did not ipeak, he simply arched into a posture that ached with tension.

General Bogan felt nausea rise in his stomach. He was not an emotional man, he knew he lacked intuition. But he understood perfectly the awful thing he was watching. For years Colonel Cascio had been trained to guard information, to be secretive, to be Suspicious of the Soviets. For half his life he had carried in his mind facts that bore the words TOP SECRET, and, with a tireless and unending diligence, he had locked them into a private part of his brain. And now he was asked to reverse all these reflexes, to shatter the training of a lifetime. But he had also been trained to obey orders, only orders which came from legitimate superiors. All of this was too much and Colonel Cascio was locked in a dilemma so cruel and sharp that he could not move.

General Bogan reached out and touched Colonel Cascio’s arm. It was like touching marble. With his Other hand General Bogan punched the “touch” button.

“Answer the question, Colonel,” General Bogan said. He spoke in a firm imperative voice. “The Soviets are listening to what I am saying.”

Around the War Room the tension became a pressure on the eardrums.

“That is a direct order,” General Bogan said.

Colonel Cascio’s mouth opened. The lips came back from the teeth. He swung his unseeing eyes toward General Bogan.

“A direct order,” General Bogan repeated softly.

Colonel Casdo made a sound. It was low, primitive, agonized. It was a growl of despair. His body relaxed. He shook his head.

“Marshal Nevsky, the Colonel who is our expert on this subject has suffered some sort of seizure,” General Bogan said. The translator spoke and over the “touch” phone there was a muttering of voices that grew in volume as Bogan listened. “We have prepared for such situations. Each of the men in the War Room has a standby who possesses the precise information which the active-duty man possesses.” General Bogan paused. He looked around the room. Lieutenant Colonel Handel was there, Cascio’s understudy. But Handel’s eyes were glued on Cascio. They were dose friends.

General Bogan struggled to keep control, to think dearly. He must quiet what he guessed was a rising suspicion in the distant Soviet headquarters. There could be no chancing a repetition of Cascio’s behavior. His finger started down a list of names. He skipped over Handel and stopped at the master sergeant who backed up both colonels.

“Sergeant Collins, report to the Commanding General’s desk at once,” he said.

A door at the side of the War Room opened and a sergeant, rotund and middle-aged, came trotting toward the general’s desk. He came to a stiff halt.

“Sergeant Collins, does the Bloodhound have both an infrared- and radar-seeking capacity?” General Bogan said.

“Yes, sir, it has both capacities,” Collins said, a cherubic smile on his face.

“Can the radar-seeking mechanism be overloaded by increasing the strength of the signal?” the Russian translator said quickly. The voices in the background of the Soviet headquarters had died away.

General Bogan felt his body sag. Apparently they bad decided to believe him.

“Yes, sir, it can be overloaded by increasing the transmission power output and by sliding through radar frequencies as quickly as possible,” Sergeant Collins sakL He was still smiling his anxious cherubic smile, quite unaware of the other men in the room staring at him, quite oblivious that he was unwittingly playing the role of Judas. “What happens is that the firing mechanism reads the higher amperage as proximity to the target and detonates the warhead.”

“Thank you, General Bogan,” the translator said quietly. “We have already communicated the information. We have rearranged our communications net so that tactical defensive maneuvers are controlled from this room.”

General Bogan realized with a quick simple insight that with the new communication network his War Room was actually directing the defensive operations of the Soviets.

The new information was reflected almost instantly on the Big Board. Two Soviet blips began to move toward one of the Vindicators. When they were five miles distant the Vindicator dropped. two tiny blips and the Bloodhounds hung almost motionless as their rockets began to ignite. They had barely separated from the bigger blip of the Vindicator when they were detonated by the information which Sergeant Collins had transmitted. Instantly the green fungus-like splotch on the Big Board enveloped the Vindicator. Then the ugly blip exploded into enormousness. The two Soviet fighters were caught in the spreading blast and disappeared.

The light on the “touch” phone went off. Sergeant Collins turned and walked slowly from the room, seeming to deflate as he went.

General Bogan looked at Colonel Casdo. The recovery was unbelievable. The man seemed relaxed, the hard glitter gone from his eyes. He appeared perfectly normal and spoke apologetically about what had just taken place.

“I am sorry, General,” he said. “I just could not do it. I don’t quite remember what happened. The back of my eyes seemed to turn white and I couldn’t see anything or say anything. I think I am all right now.”

“Colonel, it could happen to anyone,” General Bogan said. He knew this to be untrue, as did Cascio.

Actually General Bogan was watching his colonel carefully. He considered the possibility of replacing him with Sergeant Collins. In theory Collins knew as much as Cascio about technical details. But Colonel Cascio, by a combination of training, intuition, and skill, was a much more valuable person. General Bogan knew he would have to keep him on the desk. He was turning away when Cascio grabbed his arm.

“General, I think it is a Soviet entrapment,” Cascio said tensely. His voice was tight but under control. “We’ve known for weeks that they have been fooling around with our Fail-Safe mechanism. I think they wanted this to happen. I think we should tell the President that we think it is an entrapment, that the Soviets are using the time to ready their ICBMs and to fly their bombers to advantageous position for a second strike.”

“But we do not have any evidence that they are moving their bombers,” General Bogan said sharply.

“But, General, they might be flying bombers in the grass,” Cascio said with urgency. “For all we know they might have hundreds of planes, already over the Arctic and heading for us. Also they may have fired ICBMs and put them in the trajectories of the known

and identified satellites. Remember, sir, we computed that problem and decided that satellites could be used to mask ICBMs.’?

“Maybe, but I am not going to report anything that I do not know for sure,” General Bogan said.

“I think we should recommend a full-strength strike immediately by all air-borne units to be followed by other strikes as soon as ICBMs and standby units can be activated,” Colonel Cascio said.

“That decision rests with the Pentagon and the President,” General Bogan said slowly.

“Look, General,, those people at the Pentagon don’t know the situation the way we know it,” Colonel Cascio said. “They have secondhand information, they are not trained to evaluate an enemy who knows every trick in the book. They are in the political game. So is the President. We, those of us in this room, we are in the war business. We know it better than anyone else. If we move now and decisively we can still save the situation. Even though we’ve backed down from Condition Red we have enough bombers in the air to launch a crippling first strike. As you can see on the Big Board, the Soviets don’t have anywhere near the defensive capacity we thought they might have.”

General Bogan’s head ached. He felt as if the neurons of his brain had begun to burn, like filaments that were overburdened with electricity. He stared at the Big Board and the blips and signs seemed like enormous and threatening mysteries. By a single action, one command, he could simplify everything. He sat down.

Colonel Cascio went on talking, but General Bogan did not hear the precise words, only the sound of persuasion.

General Bogan felt an odd and sudden companionship with Colonel Cascio. He was bitter toward an undefined authority, toward the “they” in Washington who had overburdened him. He turned in the chair. He felt smaller, more secure, more elemental. His fingers knotted into fists, his mouth opened slightly and gasped for air. He felt a terrible self-pity, an infantile sense of being asked to do too much. His body curled in the chair, he felt saliva gather in the corners of his mouth. He had the sensation that he could remember nothing of what he had just heard. His memory stopped and was only a second long. With a sense of relief he felt a sensuous sliding away into irresponsibility, into numbness, into something primordial. He felt a gurgle begin in his chest, a kind of primitive and very comforting voice. He felt warm, enclosed, removed. The sound reached his lips.

Then Colonel Cascio turned and looked at him full face. That look was enough. For a change had taken place. The hard, fixed stare was back in Cascio’s eyes. Colonel Cascio was mad, crazy. The heat was gone from General Bogan’s mind. Slowly he came to an upright position. He smiled the smile of a civilized man at Colonel Cascio.

“Colonel, you may not be aware of it, but you are talking mutiny,” General Bogan said quietly. “One more exchange like this and I will have you taken from the War Room.”

Colonel Casdo nodded, but his expression remained rigid.

The President’s voice flooded back into the room. “General Bogan, will Group 6 break radio silence as they approach Moscow?”

“Yes, sir, just before they get within lob range of their target they have insu&ictions to open regular radio communications.”

“And when will that be?” the President asked.

General Bogan calculated quiddy, “Well, sir, it should be just about any time now.”

“Very well,” said the President, “make arrangements for me to talk personally with the commanding officer of Group 6 as soon as he reopens radio communications.”

“Very well, sir.” Bogan pointed a silent order to Lieutenant Colonel Handel, who rushed from the room to make the necessary arrangements.

The light on the “touch” phone went on. A voice spoke quickly in Russian, the translator overriding the Russian, translating even as the other voice spoke.

“This is Marshal Nevsky in Ziev,” the voice said.

“We recently developed a radar-masking device which is installed on all our bombers. It picks up enemy radar signals and automatically distorts them. When your radar signal comes back it has been skewed anywhere from five to one hundred miles. We assume your planes have similar devices. Does your detection apparatus also pick up an incorrect location?”

“No, sir,” General Bogan said. “On our plotting boards we have the correct latitude and longitude of our planes because of a compensating device on our radar which automatically corrects the radar signal which comes back from our planes.”

General Bogan knew what the next question would be.

“Can you give us the longitude and latitude of the three planes left in the air?” Marshal Nevsky asked.

“We can do that, but we cannot give you their altitude,” General Bogan said. “We have not been able to correct our altitude.determining radar to compensate for the distorting signals from the planes.”

“Will you please give us the position of the three planes?” Marshal Nevsky asked. “We can fly fighters at various altitudes once we know their approximate position.”

General Bogan felt weary. He leaned forward to push the lever which would open the intercom to the appropriate desk-console. Suddenly there was a stunning pain against his skull, a ringing in his ears; the room reeled and he had the quixotic impression that electricity had suddenly poured out of the telephone into his head. He was on the floor staring up at the lean contorted face of Colonel Cascio. And Casdo was talking in a firm and authoritative voice over the War Room intercom, the heavy crystal ash tray with which he had hit General Bogan still in his hand.

Group Commander Grady flew in total blackness, broken only by a single glowing scope. This scope combined both range and altitude radar results in such a way that it gave a stereoscopic image of the terrain ahead of them. At this altitude and speed the eye could not perceive a hill or tree or power line or smoke stack in sufficient time to take evasive action. But the scope picked out even the smallest raised obstades and projected them blackly on the screen so that Grady merely had to lift the plane at the indicated spots to clear.

Occasionally when the scope showed fifty or sixty miles of dear terrain ahead, he glanced out of the windows into the quiet Russian night. He could see the lights of villages. Trucks and cars moved along highways. Occasionally the lights of a factory would glow in a great complex. Somehow the sight of normal activity disturbed Grady. He knew that a blackout was no protection against a nuclear bomb but it was also clear that the Russians were making no attempt to go to their bomb shelters.

Grady was beyond the point of rational analysis. The stress of fighting off the Soviet attacks, the bitter and blunt fact of watching his own planes go off in great smears of blast and light—all of this had reduced him to a tough, skeletal, and very single-minded person. He knew only one thing: get to the target.

“How is No. 2 plane doing?” he asked the Defensive Operator.

“She is hard to track so low but occasionally I can catch her,” the operator said. “She’s about fifty miles away and at nine o’clock. I think she may be losing a little speed and might be damaged.”

“In a few minutes we will be at lob range. Let me know five minutes before we get there,” Grady said. “We can come up on the TBS and find out what shape she is in then.”

At lob point the Vindicators could elevate their noses, turn to afterburners, and “lob” their bombs onto the target. The “lob” distance could, depending on speed and missiles, range up to fifty miles. If they broke radio silence before that time there was a possibility that the Soviets would launch rockets designed to run the reciprocal of a radio beam and home in on the Vindicators. Once they approached the lob range, however, SAC headquarters wanted to know it, for it was virtually a certainty that the bombs could then be delivered and an evaluation made of the American strike. Past the lob-range point the planes were also free to communicate with one another if they desired.

“Six minutes to lob point,” the navigator said. On the terrain scope a long, low range of hills came up slowly. They were twenty miles away and they would be reached in approximately forty seconds. Grady began to lift the nose of the Vindicator slightly.

“We are five minutes to lob point,” the navigator said triumphantly.

“Turkey 2, Turkey 2,” Grady spoke into the TBS microphone. “This is Turkey 6. What is your condition?”

“Turkey 6, this is Turkey 2,” a voice said with remarkable distinctness. “We have suffered some slight wing damage because of shrapnel, but all it has done is reduce our speed. We are down to 1,350 miles an hour and the drag seems to be even.”

“Turkey 2, our condition is excellent,” Grady said.

“As far as I know we have not been hit. We are now four minutes to lob point and I am going to report to base.”

Grady reached forward and picked up another microphone.

“Ultimate No. 2, Ultimate No. 2.” Grady said crisply. “This is Turkey 6. Do you hear me?”

“We read you five by five,” a dear voice said in his ear. “We have a message for you.”

“I am not authorized to receive messages,” Grady said. “I am merely reporting that we are approaching the lob point and are undamaged.”

A new voice broke in over Grady’s radio. He recognized it immediately. An involuntary shock went through his body. The voice he heard was that of the President. But it could not be. He glanced at the Fail-Safe box. The “go” signal was clear and reassuring.

“Colonel Grady, this is the President of the United States, your Commander in Chief. The mission you are flying has been triggered by some mechanical failure. I order you and the other planes under your command to return to your base immediately.”

Grady sat stunned, disbelieving. He did not speak. His hand moved toward the radio toggle switch, stopped three inches short. He looked at it. The hand dropped to his knee.

Grady looked at the navigator and then at the defense operator. They had also heard the message. Their eyes were fixed coldly upon Grady. He felt helpless. He was sinking. He wished he were somewhere else—anywhere else. He wanted to cry. His mind moaned a piteous complaint and abdicated; subconscious emotions were welling up within him and he was in their control. He reverted to childlike thoughts. He wanted God. He was a little boy who needed his mother. He wanted to dose his eyes-to dose out this nightmare and open them again as that little boy. He tried. He dosed his eyes. He opened them. No, it was true. The voice came back over the radio at him.

“Colonel Grady, I repeat. This is the President.”

Again the distinctive New England accent bored into Grady’s consciousness. But this time it had the opposite effect. His mind focused. He saw dearly it was an enemy ruse. How easy the President’s voice was to mimic, he thought, remembering the many briefing sessions in which this possibility had been discussed. His nerves steeled. He interrupted the voice briskly: “I am not authorized to receive tactical alterations by voice once past Fail-Safe. What you are telling me I have been specifically ordered not to do.”

“I know that, damn it, but this is—” Grady had reached forward and flicked off the radio, leaving the remainder of the President’s frantic plea dangling in space.

The War Room was frozen in mid-action like a collection of children stopped rigid in a game of “Statues.”

“Gentlemen,” said Cascio, ignoring the body of General Bogan at his feet, “I am taking over command of this post at the specific order of the President of the United States. He has long been aware that General Bogan is psychologically unbalanced and he specifically warned me to observe him closely. The negotiations which General Bogan has been conducting with Marshal Nevsky are not authorized by the White House and are the acts of a madman. By the direct authority of the President of the United States I now authorize you to take all orders from me.”

General Bogan felt a strange sense of wonderment. it was true, he realized dully, that the madman had a great advantage over the sane. Having only moments before walked up to the edge of lunacy himself, Bogan had an almost fatherly appreciation of Cascio’s sure intuition. The colonel was performing beautifully, with the marvelous sensitivity to audience which marked the great actor.

General Bogan climbed to his knees, then carefully came to an upright position. He moved slowly, careful not to provoke Cascio into striking him again. General Bogan looked around the room. There was a balance so delicate that it was almost palpable. Over the months General Bogan had come to know the personalities of the various officers and enlisted men in the War Room. Some of them already had the red of hatred and rebellion in their eyes. They would be willing to follow Cascio. The middle range, the officers who would serve long tenures as light colonels and retire as full colonels, were vacillating. The brighter of the officers, that small fraction destined for a rapid rise and a generalship, had already started to move. They were moving toward Cascio and against him.

But their movements were unnecessary. Out of the gloom of a far corner appeared two Air Force enlisted men wearing brassards and .45-caliber pistols. General Bogan had known that they were there, he had known it for months, but today he had forgotten them. They bad become like furniture. He watched with an awed regard for their capacity to remain silent and invisible for months and then to move with such relentless stalking skill. They came like ballet dancers doing a piece of practiced choreography. They flowed by each chair and desk and person as if this were a daily routine. They came up behind Cascio quietly and with an enormous confidence.

One of the airmen tapped Colonel Cascio on the shoulder. He turned and saw the brassard and at once started to turn his head and to scream into the speaker, but his hand was empty. The other airman, with a blow that was swift and precise, had chopped at Cas. do’s wrist. The speaker had flipped neatly into the airman’s hand. Cascio was screaming into an empty palm.

“Colonel, if you speak another word, our orders are to render you unconscious,” the first airman said, and his lips broke into a smile at the extravagance of the language.

“I guarantee you, Colonel, that we can do it quicker than you can speak the next word,” the other airman said.

Cascio had already fallen silent. In some way he iensed the end of his brief power. His face went suddenly lax. The sharp aquiline-profile which had been rigidly composed for hours now suddenly went idiot. It seemed almost to puff out. General Bogan turned away. He realized that Cascio had gone through the terrible temptation, and yielded-the temptation to which General Bogan had been exposed only a few moments before. The first of the airmen tapped Cascio on the elbow; and turned him with a robot docility. Bogan watched the man, Cascio, cave in as he walked away between the two airmen. By the time they reached the first exit Cascio seemed to be a shrunken, monkeylike version of the commanding figure he had been just thirty seconds before.

General Bogan turned quickly back to the touch phone.

“Marshal Nevsky, there has been a slight interruption in our operations here,” General Bogan said. The touch phone had been on continuously. “I am now prepared to give you the longitude and latitude of our bombers, in accordance with your earlier request.”

“General Bogan, I was aware of your difficulty,” Marshal Nevsky said. “We have had one or two problems like that ourselves. One cannot foresee every situation. I await your information.”

General Bogan quickly scanned the men in the room. His command was sure now. No need to be concerned about Handel or anyone else. Cascio had, in a perverse way, served his country. He had exhibited what every man—including Bogan himself—felt. His yielding to the insanely mutinous impulse had purged the similar impulses from the rest of them.

“Colonel Handel, I order you to give your best estimate of the longitude and latitude and the heading of all planes in Group 6,” General Bogan said.

Colonel Handel read off the longitudes and latitudes and his voice went directly into the touch phone.

Immediately the planes closest to the Vindicators began to regroup, to dose in. Now the fighters were flying at different altitudes searching for the Vindicators. The decoys were no longer effective.

Three of the Soviet fighters almost simultaneously linked on to the lead Vindicator. The Vindicator jinked, went into a dive, lost luminosity. So did the Soviet fighter blips.

“Marshal Nevsky, when the group is down to two surviving planes standard operating procedure is for those two planes to dive to the lowest feasible altitude and continue their attack as dose to the ground as possible,” General Bogan explained. “In this way they hope to escape your radar. The plane which your three fighters are now engaging is a defensive plane only. It has no bombs aboard. It carries only defensive devices.”

Bogan’s heart sank on hearing Nevsky’s voice. He suspected what the changed tone of the Russian marshal meant. The words from the translator were: