Hong Kong

CHAPTER TWELVE

Virgil Cole’s daughter, Elaine, was an associate professor of mathematics at Stanford University. She was attending a women’s political caucus in Washington, D.C., when she received a coded E-mail from her father. Like the message received by Eaton Steinbaugh, the E-mail consisted of a nonsense word, a dozen random letters, from an address in Hong Kong.

She received the message at noon when she checked her E-mail on her laptop in her hotel room. She got off-line, left the computer running, and gazed about her distractedly, the political meeting forgotten.

She opened the drapes on the window. Georgetown was visible but none of monumental Washington, which was out of sight to the right.

She had a small notebook in her computer case. She got it out now, opened it, and examined the notes she had written there. The handwriting was neat, almost compulsively so. She had made the notes the last time she was in Hong Kong visiting her father, over spring break.

Being Virgil Cole’s daughter had always been a mixed blessing. He was quiet and unassuming, brilliant and rich. Somehow her mother’s second husband never measured up. He was very nice, and yet… When she was young she had thought her mother was crazy for not staying with her father, but as an adult, she could see how difficult Cole was, especially for her mother, who was neither brilliant nor quiet and unassuming.

Perhaps it had all worked out for the best.

Except for her half brother, of course, who had never come to grips with the fire in his father’s soul.

A Chinese revolution. Yes, that was Virgil Cole. A great impossible crusade to which he could give all of his brains and energy and determination would attract him like a candle attracts a moth.

She had never seen him so full of life as he was in April during her visit.

A crusade! A holy war!

She had seen the fire in his eyes, so of course she said yes when he asked her to help. He didn’t come right out and baldly ask. He explained what was needed, how the worm programs were already in place and at the right time needed to be triggered from a location outside of Hong Kong, triggered in such a way that the identity of the person doing it could never be established… beyond a reasonable doubt.

He explained the worms, how they were designed, and she carefully wrote down the instructions she needed to make them dance.

She played with her computer keyboard, checked the E-mail again.

So the revolution was now.

And she was going to help.

And she might never see her father again.

She was mulling that hard fact when the execute message came. She turned off the computer and stored it carefully in its carrying case. She left the case on the bed and took only the notebook with her.

She caught a taxi in front of the hotel and told the driver she wanted to go to the main public library.

Sure enough, the library had a bank of computers that allowed Internet access. The librarian at the desk near the computers was a plump, middle-aged woman. “The fee is a dollar,” the lady told Elaine, who dug in her purse for a bill. “Such a terrible irony — the computers are here for people who can’t afford their own, but the users must help defray the cost.”

“I understand.”

“Everything costs, these days,” the librarian said. “We’re fighting the battle with the library board to get the fee eliminated, but so far they won’t yield.”

“Yes.”

“Our only rule is no pornography. If people keep calling up pornographic sites, I’m afraid the computers will have to be removed.”

“Do you check to see what people are viewing on the Net?” Elaine asked, pretending to be horrified at this privacy intrusion.

“Oh, no,” the librarian assured her. “But people do walk behind the cubicles, and they talk, you know!”

“Indeed they do. I’m here today to do some research for my thesis.”

“Let me know if you need any help,” the librarian said and turned to help the next person, a pimpled teen with unkempt long hair who looked as if he might be very interested in porno.coms. As Elaine walked away, the library lady began briefing this intent young man on the evils of cybersex.

With the notebook of passwords and computer codes on the table beside her, it took Elaine less than fifteen minutes to get through the security layers into the main computer of the central bank clearinghouse in Hong Kong. Once there, she began searching for the code that her father assured her would be there.

Virgil Cole answered the ringing cell phone on his office desk with his usual “Hello.” He listened a moment, then broke the connection.

“The York units are in,” he told Jake Grafton, who was stretched out on Cole’s couch thinking about his wife. “Want to see them?”

“I thought Sergeant York was a paper program.”

“It’s hardware now.”

“You got six?”

“That’s right.”

“Steal ‘em?”

“No.”

“Buy ‘em?”

“Not quite. Let’s say the American government retains legal title and I have custody.”

“Let’s go look.” Jake reached for his shoes. “I was wondering how you red-hot revolutionaries were going to avoid being massacred by the division of troops the PLA has stationed in Hong Kong. This is it, huh?”

There was not much traffic on the streets at this hour, but Jake Grafton paused in the entrance way of the consulate. Half hidden in the shadows, he restrained Cole with a touch on the arm while he scanned the street in both directions.

Only when he was sure there was no one waiting did he mutter at Cole and step through the entrance.

Cole led the way across the street and along the sidewalk for fifty yards. They went down the first alley they came to, then down a ramp to a loading dock under the skyscraper. A tractor-trailer rig was flush against the loading dock.

Cole climbed the stairs, nodded at two men sitting on the dock, and knocked on the door. A man carrying an assault rifle opened the door. Cole and Grafton went in.

The Sergeant York units were two-legged robots about six and a half feet tall. The legs had three knees — back, front, back — with three-pronged feet. They had articulated arms and, where human hands would be, three flexible grasping appendages, almost like jointed claws, which ended in sharp points. Two were hinged to close inward and one outward, almost like an opposed thumb.

Mounted on the right side of the torso on a flexible mount was a four-barreled Gatling gun that fired standard 5.56 millimeter rounds from a flexible belt feed. Capacity was two hundred rounds.

And the York units had heads mounted on flexible stalks that could turn right or left, be raised or lowered. Two Yorks were standing on the concrete floor back-to-back, turning their heads and looking about with an ominous curiosity.

“The best part,” Cole said with more enthusiasm than Grafton thought he had in him, “is the tail. What do you think of the tail?” The prehensile tail was only about eighteen inches long, thick where it came out of the body and tapering quickly.

“It’s cool.” Jake could think of no other reply.

“The engineers wanted three legs, and the army absolutely refused to buy the thing if it had more than two — they were worried about their image. The tail was my compromise. It helps with stability, balance, agility, shock absorption … With the tail the York is quicker and faster, and can leap higher. And it gives us room for more batteries, which are heavy.”

“What were those soldiers thinking?”

“Yeah.”

Three Chinese men were watching Kerry Kent walk a York out of the semitrailer. She used a small computer unit, much like a laptop. There were no wires. Like Grafton the Chinese men watched the Sergeant York robots and whispered to each other.

Jake Grafton felt mesmerized by the spectral stare of the robots that were outside the trailer. Their heads never stopped moving. They had no mouth or nose, but in the eye-socket position — the widest part of the head — were two cameras. The one on the right side had a lens turret on the face. As Jake inspected the nearest one, the turret rotated another lens in front of the left camera, if it was a camera.

“What the hell are these things looking at?” he asked Cole.

“Us, the room we’re in, everything. They are learning their surroundings.”

“Smart machines?”

“These things use a combination of digital and analog technology in their central processors so they can learn their surroundings without having to carry around computers the size of grand pianos. It’s a neural network, modeled on the human brain. That breakthrough in computer design was one of the advances that took robot technology to another level.”

“I see,” Jake said as the third robot walked to a spot beside the other two and came to a stop. It tilted its head a minute amount, almost quizzically, as it scrutinized the two men.

“One of the fascinating things about neural networks,” Cole continued, “is that the network needs rest periods or the error rate increases. Nap times.”

“What is that thing looking for?” Jake asked, indicating the curious York.

“Just checking for weapons. When they’re in a combat mode, they fire on unidentified persons carrying weapons.”

‘They can’t shoot at everyone with a weapon. How do the Yorks separate the good guys from the bad guys?”

“It’s a complex program, based on physical characteristics — such as size, clothing, sex, possession of a weapon — and aggressive behavior. Some behavioral scientists worked with our programmers to write it.”

“Sex?”

“Most soldiers are men. That’s a fact.”

“I see.”

“My main contributions to the Sergeant York project were some breakthroughs in ultrawide bandwidth radio technology. They communicate with their controller and with each other via UWB, which as you probably know has some unusual characteristics, unlike UHF or VHF.

“So these things talk to each other?”

“They are a true network — what one knows, they all know. Information is exchanged via UWB on a continuous basis, which means that these six are soon working from a very detailed three-dimensional database. Each unit also contains a UWB radar, so it can see through walls and solid objects. Very short-range, of course. The radars are off-the-shelf units, stuff being used to inspect bridge abutments for cracks and look for lost kids in storm sewers.”

“What about the stalk on top of the head?”

“There is a flexible lens there for looking around corners. The sensor on the right side of the head works with visible light, the left with infrared. At night the sensitivity on the right sensor automatically increases so it can handle starlight.”

The fourth York walked out of the truck and took a position beside the others but facing off at a ninety-degree angle.

“These units are prototypes,” Cole explained, “not the refined designs the U.S. army will get as production units. These lack sensors in the rear quadrant, so they usually want to face in different directions so they will get the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama.”

“They ‘want’?”

“Sergeant York has artificial intelligence. The operator can position the units, monitor their performance, override automatic features, approve target selection and the like, but these things can be turned loose on full automatic mode — then they fight like an army. They are an army. We developed them to fight and win on the conventional battlefield, the tactical nuke battlefield, and urban battlefields like Mogadishu. The Somali experience was the catalyst for their development.”

Jake whistled, and two of the York units turned their heads to look at him.

“I guess I forgot to mention audio. They have excellent hearing in a much wider frequency spectrum than the human ear can handle.”

“How much battle damage can they sustain?”

“A lot. They are constructed of titanium, the internal works are shielded with Kevlar, and Kevlar forms the outer skin. Still, mobility is their main defense.”

“Two legs and a tail… how mobile are they?” the admiral asked.

Cole pointed to the Kevlar-coated areas on the nearest York’s leg, the shapes of which were just visible under the skin. “The major muscles are hydraulic pistons; the minor ones are electromechanical servos — which means gears, motors, and magnets. A couple of ring-laser gyros provide the balance information for the computer, which knows the machine’s position in relation to the earth and where the extremities are; it uses the pistons and servos to keep the thing balanced. York is extremely agile, amazingly so considering it weighs four hundred and nine pounds without ammunition.”

“Power?”

“Alas, batteries. But these are top-of-the-line batteries and can be recharged quickly or just replaced in the field, a slip-out/slip-in deal. In addition, since the outer layer of each unit’s Kevlar skin is photoelectric, outdoors on a sunny day the batteries will stay pretty much charged up as long as excessive exertion is not required of the unit.”

Jake Grafton shook his head, slightly awed. “How much does one of these damned things cost?”

“Twice the price of a main battle tank, and worth every penny. They can use every portable weapon in the NATO inventory. Hell, they can even drive a hummer or a tank if you take out the seat and make room for the tail.”

“Uh-huh.”

All six were out of the semitrailer now. They arranged themselves in a circle, each facing outward. They made a small whining sound when they moved, a sound that would probably be inaudible with a typical urban ambient noise level.

“Preproduction prototypes,” Cole said when Jake mentioned the noise. “The production units won’t make those noises.”

Kerry Kent came over, her wireless computer in her hand. “Let me introduce you to Alvin, Bob, Charlie, Dog, Easy, and Fred.”

She was referring to the small letter on the back of each unit’s head and on both shoulders. The nicknames were slight twists on the military phonetic alphabet system.

“The New York Net,” Jake Grafton said. He wasn’t trying to be funny because he wasn’t in the mood: The thought merely whizzed through his cranium and popped out about as fast. Kent and Cole looked at him oddly without smiling.

She showed Jake the computer presentation. “Each unit can be controlled by its own computer, or one computer can control as many as ten units. When I’m in network mode, I can see what each unit is seeing or look at the composite picture.” She moved an icon with a finger and tapped it. Jake leaned forward. The picture did have a remarkable depth of field, although it was presented on a flat screen.

She tapped the screen again. “As you can see, I can designate targets, tell specific units to engage it, or let the computer pick a unit. I can assign each unit a task, tell it to go to a certain position, assign targets, basically run the fight with this computer. Or I can go to an automatic mode and let the system identify targets in a predetermined order of priority and engage them.”

“What if your computer fails or someone shoots you?”

“The system defaults to full automatic mode, which happens to be the preferred mode of operations anyway.”

Jake shook his head. “The bad guys are going to figure out what they are up against pretty quickly. Maybe rifle bullets will bounce off these guys, but grenades, rockets, mortars, artillery?”

“Mobility is the key to the York’s survival,” Kerry rejoined. She tapped the screen.

Charlie York stirred. It tilted its head back to give itself a better view of the overhead, which was about twelve feet up. It crouched, swung its arms, and leaped with arms extended.

It caught the edge of an exposed steel beam and hung there, its tail moving to counteract the swaying of its body. Everyone in the room exhaled at once.

Jake stood there for several seconds with his mouth agape before he remembered to close it. The dozen Chinese men in the room were equally mesmerized. After a moment they cheered.

“The units can leap about six feet high from a standing position,” Kerry Kent explained. “On the run they can clear a ten-foot fence. They normally stand six feet six inches high; at full leg extension they are eight feet tall.”

“Very athletic,” Cole said, nodding his head. He didn’t grin at Jake, but almost.

“How long are you going to let Charlie hang from the overhead?” the admiral asked Kent.

Her finger moved, and Charlie dropped to the floor. The unit seemed to catch itself perfectly, balancing with its hands, arms, and tail. Now Charlie looked at Jake, tilted its head a few inches.

In spite of himself, Jake Grafton smiled. “Wow,” he said.

A half dozen men began checking the Yorks, inspecting every visible inch. They had been trained at Cole’s company in California as part of a highly classified program. One man began plugging extension cords into the back of each unit to recharge the batteries. The other men busied themselves carrying crates of ammunition out of the back of the semitrailer and stacking them against a wall.

“So tomorrow is the day?” Jake muttered to his former bombardier-navigator.

“Yep,” said Tiger Cole.

“Another big demonstration in the Central District?”

“Yep. The army will be there. We’ll strap them on with the Yorks.”

“Jesus Christ! A lot of civilians are going to get caught in the cross fire.”

Cole nodded once, curtly.

“Do it at night, Tiger. Maximize the advantage that high tech gives you. These Yorks probably see in the dark as well as they do in the daytime.”

“This isn’t my show.” Tiger’s voice was bitter. “I argued all that and lost. Revolution is a political act, I was told, the first objective of which is to radicalize the population and turn them against the government. Daytime was the choice.”

“Explain to me the difference between your set of high-minded bloodletters and the high-minded bloodletters you are trying to overthrow.”

“That’s unfair and you know it. You know who and what the Communists are.”

Grafton let it drop. This wasn’t the time or place to argue politics, he decided. After a bit he asked, “Why only six of these things? Why not a dozen?”

“It will be a couple years before the first production models come off the assembly line,” Cole told him. “We got all there are.”

“I hope they’re enough.”

“By God, so do I,” Tiger Cole said fervently.

“Here’s a sandwich and some water, Don Quixote,” Babs Steinbaugh said. She scrutinized the computer monitor. The E-mail program was still there, waiting.

Eaton Steinbaugh sipped on the water. The sandwich looked like tuna salad. Babs read his mind: “You have to eat.”

He took the duty bite, then laid the sandwich down. Yep, tuna salad!

“China is so far away,” she mused. “What can you do from here?” Here was their snug little home in Sunnyvale.

“Everything. The Net is everywhere.” His answer was an oversimplification, of course. Steinbaugh didn’t speak a word of Chinese, yet he knew enough symbols to work with their computers. He wasn’t about to get into a discussion of the fine points with Babs, however, not if he could help it.

“This Cole… is he paying you anything?”

“No.”

“Did you even ask for money?”

“We never discussed it, all right? He didn’t mention it and neither did I.”

“Seems like if you’re going to do the crime, you oughta get enough out of it to pay the lawyers. For Christ’s sake, the man’s filthy rich.”

“Next time.”

She grunted and stalked away.

Babs just didn’t appreciate his keen wit. Next time, indeed!

As he waited he thought about the trapdoors — sometimes he referred to them as back doors, because he had installed them — which were secret passages into inner sanctums where he wasn’t supposed to go. While in Beijing he had worked on the main government computer networks in the Forbidden City. The powers that be didn’t want to let him touch the computers, but Cole’s company had the contract and the Chinese didn’t know how to find the problems and solve them, so they were between a rock and a hard place. After much bureaucratic posturing and grandstanding, they let him put his hands on their stuff.

The network security system was essentially nonexistent. That was deplorable, certainly, but understandable in a country where few people had access to computers. Constructing and installing a back door was child’s play once he figured out the Chinese symbols and Pinyin commands. A Pinyin dictionary helped enormously.

Installing back doors in other key government computer systems was not terribly difficult either, for these computers all were linked to the mainframes in the Forbidden City.

Like all top-down systems, the Communist bureaucracy with its uniform security guidelines and procedures was extremely vulnerable to cybersabotage. The best ways to screw with each computer system tended to be similar from system to system, but what worked best with railroad timetables and schedules usually didn’t work at all for financial systems. Putting it all together was a sublime challenge, the culmination of his lifelong interest in logical problems. Eaton Steinbaugh enjoyed himself immensely and was bitterly disappointed when the reality of his cancer symptoms could no longer be ignored.

His illness did create another problem, however, one that he took keen interest in solving. The whole point of triggering the inserted code programs from outside Hong Kong was to prevent compromising the computer facility there — Third Planet Communications. But the person doing the triggering was going to leave a trail through the Internet, a trail that government investigators could later follow back to the guilty party.

Unless the guilty party disguised his tracks, made the trail impossible to follow. One way to do that was to use a generic computer, one dedicated to public use, so the identity of the user could never be established beyond a reasonable doubt. Due to his illness, Steinbaugh thought he might be unable to leave his home. He spent a delightful week working up a way to cover his trail through cyberspace and thought he had the problem solved. He wrote a program that randomly changed the ID codes buried throughout his computer’s innards — called “cookies”—every time the codes were queried by another computer. He liked the program so much that when the China adventure was over he intended to post it on the Internet for the use of anyone seeking to screw with the commercial Web sites that were constructing profiles of visitors to sell to advertisers and each other, a practice that formed the slimy foundation of E-commerce. Of course, if he wasn’t as clever as he thought he was, the FBI was going to be knocking on his door one of these days.

Not that it mattered. In or out of jail, Eaton Steinbaugh only had a few months to live, at the most.

Today, when the computer on his desk began signaling that he had an incoming E-mail, he began pecking at the keys in feverish anticipation.

Yes, there it was. From Virgil Cole. A series of numerals. He counted them.

Eleven.

That was right. Eleven random numbers. The guys at NSA would undoubtedly rack their brains for days trying to crack the code that wasn’t there.

As soon as possible.

That was the message.

Start as soon as possible.

Too excited to sit, Steinbaugh got up, stretched, stared at the screen. Start with a bang, he decided.

He sat back down and began.

In less than a minute he was at the door of the main government computer in Beijing looking for his back door.

He typed. Pushed the Enter button.

Nothing.

Don’t tell me those bastards have changed the access codes.

Not to worry. He had anticipated that possibility.

There! He found it.

He typed some more, inputting a code that no one else on earth knew.

And voilà!

In, in, in!

Ha ha ha ha ha!

Eaton Steinbaugh consulted his notebook, the one in which he had painstakingly written everything, just in case. A copy of the book was in his lawyer’s hands, with instructions to send it to Cole when Steinbaugh died.

He found the menu he wanted, typed some more.

In three minutes he was face-to-face with a critical operational menu, one that gave him a variety of choices. He stared at the Pinyin, consulted his notebook, carefully scrolled the page… yes. Here it was.

He moved the mouse. Positioned the cursor over the icon just so. Clicked once.

Sure enough, the system now gave him access to yet another system, with another menu.

This menu had five choices: safe, arm, fire, self-destruct, exit.

He positioned the icon over the one he wanted, then clicked the button on the mouse.

Just like that. That was all it took.

Sue Lin Buckingham was waiting for Rip when he got home. He had written another story for the Buckingham newspapers predicting imminent revolution in Hong Kong and sent it to Sydney via E-mail. It would be published under his father’s byline, of course, as the first one was.

“Your father sent an E-mail,” Sue Lin said. “He will wire the money to Switzerland tomorrow.”

Rip just nodded. All the members of the Scarlet Team had been in the Third Planet office except Wu and Sonny Wong. Amazingly, the team was going on with the plan despite the fact that one of their members had kidnapped the leader.

Wu had put it together, pushed the entire population of Hong Kong — and China, for the revolutionary movement was nationwide — toward this day with the force of his personality and leadership ability. Now he was a prisoner, held for ransom to enrich Sonny Wong, and nothing could be done!

Rip Buckingham stared at his wife’s drawn features. “I don’t know what to say,” he told her. “I saw Wong earlier this evening at his restaurant. He has Wu, all right. Perhaps Wong will release your brother, perhaps he will kill him. Regardless, we march on.”

“Can’t the senior leadership force Wong to release Wu?”

“There isn’t time for that distraction, they say.” Rip’s upper lip curled. “Some of them seem to think Sonny will share the money with them.”

“You think?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

Rip threw himself in a chair. “I once saw an avalanche in the Andes,” he mused. “It started slowly enough, but once it began to move no power on earth could stop it. The moving snow carried everything with it — trees, rocks, dirt, more snow. It got bigger and bigger and moved faster and faster…”

He looked at his wife. “Perhaps they are right. Perhaps going forward is our only choice.”

She poured him a glass of wine.

“Have you told your mother?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

The military base in the arid lands of western China was not a garden spot. Too far from the ocean to receive much moisture, its weather was dominated by the Asian continental high. In the summer the area was too hot, in the winter far too cold, and too dry all the time. High peaks with year-round caps of snow were visible to the north and southwest. And always there was the wind, blowing constantly in a vast, clear, clean, open, empty sky.

The high desert was as physically different from the humid coastal lands of China as one could possibly imagine. Still, for the Chinese, the reality of the place was determined by a far different factor, one that had nothing to do with terrain or weather: The high desert was very sparsely populated.

For people who spent their lives in densely populated urban or rural environments, surrounded by relatives and cousins and lifelong friends, life in the empty desert was cultural shock of the worst sort. The isolation marked each and every one of the soldiers. Some it broke, some it made stronger, all it changed.

The primitive living conditions at the base didn’t help. True, China had developed the high-tech industries that created the nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles that were the reason the base existed, but the troop barracks were uninsulated and the men used latrines. The water was not purified, so minerals stained the teeth of the men who had been here for years.

Lieutenant Chen Fah Kwei hated the place. Tonight he was the duty officer in the underground bunker that housed the missile launch controls. There were six missiles in this complex, new ones outfitted with the latest fiber-optic ring-laser gyros and high-speed guidance systems. Truly it was an honor to be the soldier in charge of this arsenal of national power, but Lieutenant Chen wished his transfer to Shanghai would come through soon. He had honor enough to last a lifetime, and he wanted to live someplace with eligible women, laughter, music, books, films …

Tonight he thought longingly about these things while he inspected his teeth. He was using his knife blade for a mirror. As he studied the reflection of his open mouth in the highly polished blade, he decided that, indeed, the minerals were turning his teeth yellow. He tried to consume the minimum amount of water, swallowed it as quickly as he could, but still the minerals were ruining his teeth.

Glumly, he glanced at the monitors of the main computer, which displayed the status of the six missiles in their silos. Bored, sleepy, and homesick, he was playing with his knife when he felt the first thump, a physical concussion that actually rocked his chair.

At first he thought it was an earthquake, but nothing else happened.

He glanced at the monitor.

Missile One. The status had gone red. Silo temperature was off the scale, hot. Now the fire light began flashing.

Stunned, he stared at the monitor for several seconds while he tried to comprehend the information displayed there.

A fire! There was a fire in Silo One.

He flipped a switch on the panel before him, and instantly a black-and-white television picture of the inside of the silo appeared on a monitor mounted high in the corner of the control room.

He stared at the picture. He couldn’t see anything. The missile wasn’t there. All he could see was… was…

Flames.

Flames!

He pushed the red alarm button on his console. He could hear the distant klaxon, which was ringing here, in the barracks, and in the fire station. Men to fight the fire, that was what he needed.

He looked back at the television… and the set was blank. The fire had burned up the camera or the leads.

The computer monitor… Still getting readouts, but they were cycling. The temperature was going through thirteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Missile fuel and liquid oxygen must be feeding the fire. At those temperatures the concrete of the silo would burn, the cap would rupture, and nuclear material from the warhead might be ejected into the atmosphere, to be spread far and wide by the wind.

Lieutenant Chen Fah Kwei pushed another alarm button on his panel. The wail of the siren warning of a possible nuclear accident joined the blare of the klaxon.

What had happened?

The missile must have ruptured, spilling fuel all over the interior of the silo, where it caught fire.

That must be—

Even as those thoughts raced through Chen’s mind, he felt another thump in the seat of his pants.

The monitor. Silo Two!

His fingers danced across the controls, bringing up the camera.

A sea of fire.

Sabotage?

The telephone rang. Chen snagged it.

The colonel. “Report,” he demanded.

“Sir, the missiles are blowing up in the silos. Two have gone.”

Even as he spoke the third missile exploded.

“Impossible,” the colonel told him.

“The silos are on fire!” Chen screamed. “I can see the fire on the television monitors. The temperatures are unbelievable. The concrete will burn.”

“Activate the automatic firefighting system.”

“Which silos?”

“All of them,” the colonel roared.

Chen did as he was told. The firefighting system would spray tons of water into the silos as fast as the huge pumps could supply it.

The system was on and pumping as the missiles in Silos Four, Five, and Six exploded in order.

The control room was crammed with people shouting into telephones and talking to each other at the top of their lungs when Chen realized that one explanation of the tragedy was that the self-destruct circuits in the missiles had been triggered.

Of course, he had not triggered anything. The safety caps on the self-destruct switches were still safety-wired down. To destroy a missile in flight, the appropriate cap had to be forcibly lifted and the switch thrown before a self-destruct order was sent to the computer.

But what if the computer received or generated a self-destruct order without the button being pushed? Was that possible? It seemed to have happened six times!

Perhaps, Lieutenant Chen thought, the thing I should have done after the first explosion was turn off the main computer.