The Day Before Midnight

0800

Hapgood had tendencies toward comedy which he could not suppress. In his third grade class picture, for example, amid all the still, grave faces, his is the only blur; he is laughing at something private, his face gone in the smear of movement.

“Donny,” his mother had said, “Donny, I declare, what are we going to do with you?”

As it turned out, very little could be done with Donny. He laughed his way through high school and college and got extremely high grades. He laughed his way into a marriage and nearly out of it. In his profession, his humorous impulses continued subversively, for he made his living amid men who laughed at very little because there was very little to laugh at. But he could not resist: In his infantile scrawl he had crayoned a large sign on a piece of shirt cardboard and taped it above the heavy steel blast door to the launch control center, where its orange childishness fluttered against the rows and rows of switches, the bright red NO LONE ZONE imperatives from SAG stamped everywhere in sans serif — forbidding solitude in proximity to nuclear weapons systems — the constellations of red and green status lights, the big twenty-four-hour clock, and the dizzying mesh of wires, cables, and solid-state units that comprised a communications bank comparable to that of a small midwestern top-forty radio station.

WELCOME, the cardboard sign said, TO THE MIRV GRIFFIN SHOW.

Then, just today, on the console panel itself, above the launch enabling keyhole, the famous little metal slot which would, if penetrated, set in motion the probable end of the world in fire, he had added, in ball-point, on an index card, AND HEEEERE’S MIRV….

The star of the show, MIRV, was the Multiple Independently Targeted Reentry Vehicle, perched in a cluster atop the bird nested at the center of Hapgood’s command. The ten MIRVs and their second bananas, the W87/Mk-21 thirty-five-kiloton fissionable warhead, sat atop a tube of black titanium dubbed, with a sense of humor that the great Hapgood could only aim for, Peacekeeper.

This was more famous in the lexicon as MX, Missile Experimental. No longer an experiment, it stood now in its super-hard silo not one hundred feet from Hapgood, long, silent, and enigmatic. A large-payload solid-fuel cold-launch four-stage intercontinental ballistic missile, it was seventy-one feet long and ninety-two inches wide and at launch weight 193,000 pounds. It was fired by three solid-propellant booster motors, with storable liquid hypergolic propellant in the fourth-stage post-boost vehicle. It was guided by an advanced inertial reference sphere and delivered a payload of 7,200 pounds. Its targets included all Soviet “super-hard” control centers, fourth generation ICBM silos, and “very hard leadership bunkers.” It was, in short, a head hunter, a Kremlin buster, a leader killer, an assassin.

“If anybody from Squadron sees that,” his partner Romano informed him, pointing at the new bit of comedy taped to the launch board, “your ass is history. This is a no-laugh zone.”

“Squadron,” replied Hapgood with a snicker, “is two thousand miles away. Out in Wy-fucking-oming, if memory serves, where the deer and the antelope roam. We are all by our lonesomes in Burkittsville, Maryland, the ultimate lone zone of the entire universe. Moreover,” he continued in his grand voice, aching to get a smile out of the dour but focused Romano, “if I am going to unload thirty-five megatons of nuclear doom on top of the Soviet Union and face my maker as one-half of the greatest mass-murder team in history, I’d prefer to do it with a smile on my face and a song in my heart. You’re too fucking Air Force, man. Lighten up.”

Romano, a captain to Hapgood’s first lieutenant, two years older and maybe ten years wiser, simply made the unhappy face of a man sucking a ReaLemon bottle. Still, Romano would go easy on the kid: whatever his excesses, Hapgood was the best, the sharpest, the smartest missile officer Romano had ever seen. He knew the procedures and he knew the boards as if he’d invented them.

Besides, Hapgood was largely correct. He and his friend and superior officer occupied the only strategic missile silo east of the Mississippi. Originally a Titan prototype silo, from the late fifties when the liquid-fuel Titan seemed to be The Answer, it had never been completely developed and was left fallow after Air Force enthusiasm had shifted in favor of the western-states-based solid-fuel Minuteman in 1962. Now the installation, on a bit of government real estate in central Maryland, had been hastened into operational condition because it was available and obscure, being located halfway between the Pentagon in Washington and the National Alternate Military Command Center at Fort Richie, and also because the Titan configuration called for basing bird and LCC in the same hole rather than remote from each other, as was Minuteman doctrine.

“Rick, I just had a flash from God,” Hapgood suddenly blurted out. “He wants us to redecorate! Think about it, Rick! A launch control center done over in—knotty pine!”

In spite of himself, Romano smiled.

“God, Donny, what the fuck are we going to do with you?”

“Pray I turn my key, if turn it I must,” said Hapgood, touching the red titanium key he wore around his neck on a chain and tucked into his white jump suit’s breast pocket.

“But who knows,” Hapgood continued, “I might, like, not be in the right mood, you dig?”

Romano laughed at the kid again. If the word came, Donny would turn, on cue, and send the bird on its flight.

It was another day in the hole. They would pass it as they had passed so many others, one day in three, one hundred feet underground in the hardened command capsule of a missile launch site, aware that if World War HI were fought, they were the ones who would fight it, at exactly the same time they were convinced that their very presence guaranteed that it would never be fought.

The chamber of their drama was a one-piece capsule sunk deep into the earth so that its interior curved at the ceiling line, increasing the sense of claustrophobia; at forty-one by twenty-six feet, it looked like some kind of meditation chamber. The steel floor actually floated above the surface of the capsule, suspended from the roof of the vault by four hydraulic jacks, to better absorb the impact of a nuclear near-miss. The men sat at right angles to each other, twelve feet apart, in cushy swivel chairs complete with seat belts, quite comfortable, quite adjustable, very jet-age. Before each was the console, that is, a panel of switches, ten rows of labeled lights, red or green, each a checkoff to a certain missile function. All these lights were green, meaning the status was go. It looked like a fuse box in a large apartment building or the control room of a television station. There was a computer keyboard by which one entered the daily twelve-digit Permissive Action Link code, or PAL, freeing the machinery for terminal countdown and launch. There was a radio telephone mounted at the base of the console, and it also had a few rows of switches, which could zip the caller all around the installation on various lines. A huge clock hung between the two units. And, of course, the keyholes, marked LAUNCH ENABLER at each console, hinged red metal flaps encasing them. Assuming doomsday has been decreed, the launch siren is wailing, the proper Emergency Action Message has arrived to the encrypted uplink (“Let’s hope our EAM is true,” Hapgood once joked, squinting like a musical-comedy marksman) from any one of several command sources, and the proper PAL twelve-digit code has been entered in the security system, one has to yank the flap up, insert the key, then turn smoothly a quarter turn to the right, this within the same two-second time envelope as one’s pal down the console. One man may not start World War III; it takes brotherhood, the true meaning of SAC’s mandatory NO LONE ZONE signs. One minute after that — during which Peacekeeper gets a last go-over from its computer baby-sitters — the launch enabling circuits get a short blip of energy, the silo doors are blown, and off the bird flies, its ten warheads, like ten kings of hell, primed for deployment.

Against another section of wall there sat quite a bit of communications equipment, including several teletypes, a satellite communications terminal, and both high and low frequency radios; and at another, racks of metal-covered notebooks which contained hundreds of standing orders and regulations for silo procedure, and at still another, a cot, where either guy could grab a nap if necessary. There was one peculiarity to this capsule distinguishing it from the hundreds like it in the missile fields of the West: a small black glass window mounted to the left of Hapgood’s console, mounted in the very wall of the chamber itself. It was about a foot square and looked almost like a computer screen. Two words were stenciled across it in red paint: KEY VAULT.

The command capsule was reached by elevator, but not directly. Due to the configuration of the mountain, there was a long corridor between it and the elevator. Beyond the capsule the corridor continued, arriving eventually at a huge safety door, electrically controlled, by which technicians could access the missile itself. The whole thing was constructed of concrete doubly reinforced with steel rods and coated with a special polymer to discourage penetration by the electromagnetic pulse generated by an airborne nuclear explosion, or by the effects of a blast itself, that is, anything less than a direct hit by a Soviet SS-18, carrying a throwload in the twenty-five-megaton range. And sealing the capsule off from the rest of the installation was a huge blast door like a door on a bank vault, usually kept closed tight.

“Junie says we ought to have you guys over,” said Romano.

“Uh, not a good idea,” said Hapgood. “I think we’re in terminal countdown. She spends a lot of time on the phone to her mother. And she’s not exactly nuts about the trailer. And look at this.”

He made a fishy face, and held up the object of his contempt. It was a paper lunch sack with grease spots on it.

“Jeez, I remember when she made bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches, or Reubens, or hot turkey, that you could zap up in the microwave. Now look. The sad reality of my marriage.”

He pulled out a Baggie with a wilted sandwich in it.

“Peanut butter,” he announced.

There was a buzz on the installation phone.

“Oh, hell, now what?” Romano said. Their twenty-four-hour shift had another ten hours to run. Relief wasn’t due until 1800.

He picked up the phone.

“Security Alpha, this is Oscar-one-niner,” he said.

“Oscar-one-niner, just a security warning, SOP. Be advised I have some kind of disabled vehicle just beyond the gate. It looks to be a van of some sort, off the highway. Looks like some kids in it. Advise SAC or National Command?”

Romano looked swiftly to the console for his indicators for Outer Zone Security and saw no blinking lights, then glanced at Inner Zone Security and confirmed the status freeze. These lights were keyed to the installation’s low-level Doppler Ground Radar networks, which picked up intruders beyond the perimeter. Occasionally they’d go off if a small animal rushed through the zone, and a security team would be dispatched to investigate. But now he saw nothing.

“Security Alpha, what’s your security status? I have no OZ or IZ indicators showing.”

“Affirmative, Oscar-one-niner, I don’t either.”

“Have you notified Primary and Reserve Security Alert Teams?”

“Primary is suiting up, sir, and we woke Reserve, affirmative, sir. Still, I’d like to put a message through to Command—”

“Uh, let’s hold off, Security Alpha. It’s only a van, for crissakes. Keep it under observation, and let your PSAT do the walking. Report back in five.”

“Yessir,” said the security NCO topside.

“I’m surprised he didn’t shoot,” said Hapgood.

The Air Force Combat Security Policemen who maintained the defensive perimeters of the installation were traditionally not much loved by the missile officers. The missile guys viewed them as cops, the technologically uninitiated. Besides, the security people were known to have sent complaints to Missile Command if Capsule personnel showed up with unshined shoes or uncreased uniforms.

“Jesus,” Hapgood, a notorious security baiter, said, “those guys must think they’re in the military or something. I mean, what is this, the Air Force, for Christ’s sake?”

He went back to his homework, part of his program to get an MBA. It was a case study of difficulties encountered by a fictitious bicycle manufacturer in Dayton, Ohio. Now, with assets of $5 million, operating costs of $4.5 million, a decline in sales projected at 1.9 percent over the next five years, what should CEO Smith do? Buy a motorcycle, thought Hapgood.

“I wish he’d call back,” said Romano ten minutes later.

Dad was struggling with the spare tire. He crouched next to the vehicle just off the snowy roadway beyond the gate of the installation. The voices of impatient children lashed out from within the interior of the van.

“Dammit, settle down in there,” he bellowed. “This isn’t easy.”

Master Sergeant O’Malley of the Air Force Combat Security Police watched him from the guardhouse. Even from where he stood he could hear the children inside the van.

“This guy is making me nervous,” he said to the two policemen with him. All were dressed in the uniforms of a private security service, in keeping with the sign that stood above the gate house: SOUTH MOUNTAIN MICROWAVE PROCESSING STATION/ AT&T/ PRIVATE PROPERTY/ NO ADMITTANCE.

“You want us to frisk him?”

O’Malley vacillated. He looked again at his Alert Status board, and saw no change in the OZ and IZ lights. He gave a quick visual sweep of the mountain slope below him, and saw nothing but white snow and black stubble. He blinked, swallowed. He looked around. Where was his three-man Primary Security Alert Team? Jesus, those guys were slow!

Finally, he said, “No. We’re supposed to keep a low profile. I’ll just go help him along. I don’t want him spending the morning here.”

O’Malley drew his parka on and stepped out into the roadway, wincing at the brightness even through his aviator sunglasses. He walked across the hard, cold road.

“Sir, I have to ask you to move on,” he said. “This is private property. You aren’t even supposed to be back on this road.”

The dad looked up. He was a suntanned man with very white teeth. He looked, to the sergeant at any rate, like some kind of athlete, a boxer maybe. He had a broken nose.

It was a vivid morning, just a little after eight. The sun spread through the valley. The sky was flawless, dense blue. The chill in the air rubbed on O’Malley’s skin; he could feel the mucus in his nose freezing.

“I’m sorry,” the dad said. “I thought there was a McDonald’s up this way. I must have taken a wrong turn, and now I’ve got a flat. Just let me get this tire fixed and I’m gone.”

“Sir,” said O’Malley, “if you like, I can call a garage and they can send a tow truck up here.”

“I think I can get it,” said the man. “If I can just find the lug wrench in the toolbox.” He reached into the box, which was old and battered. In the background the kids began to cry.

The young sergeant was by nature suspicious — his profession demanded it — but when the dad brought out a silenced Heckler&Koch P9 in 9mm, his first impulse was not to reach for the Smith&Wesson.38 he carried on his belt, or to cry out. Rather, he was stunned at the incongruity of it, the sheer, appalling absurdity of such a weapon, here and now, in the man’s hand. But he had no time to react.

The major dropped to one knee, and, aiming from a two-handed isosceles position, shot O’Malley twice through the center chest from a range of seven feet, firing 115-grain Silvertips, which blossomed like spring tulips as they tumbled crazily through the young man’s chest, knocking him to the earth inside a second.

The major stepped back from the van and its rear double doors sprang open. Inside, two men fired a long burst from a bipod-mounted M-60 into the guardhouse, which shivered, its glass splintering with the impact of the 7.62-mm rounds. Inside, the two air policemen died almost instantly amid a spray of glass chips and wood bits.

The major jumped onto the running board of the van, whacked it with his gun butt, and the driver gunned it. It slithered, kicking up the dust, and whipped through a ninety-degree turn and smashed through the gate. Before him, the major could see three nondescript corrugated tin buildings inside the complex, one of which boasted a red and white radio tower of perhaps fifty feet.

According to plan, they had thirty seconds from the first shot until they took out the above-ground communications center.

Romano called back Security Alpha. There was no answer.

“I wonder what that guy is doing?” he said.

“Those cops. You never know.”

“Donny, take your key off your neck.”

“Huh?”

“Do what I say, Donny.” He dialed Communications. There was no answer. He went to the teletype. No messages had come through on their watch.

“Shit,” he said. “I wonder if—”

“Hey, Rick, ease off, man. So the guys haven’t answered the phone. What does that mean, nuclear war? You know as well as I do nobody’s getting down here unless we say so. We control the elevator.”

The post’s entire defensive response to the attack consisted of an air security man from the Primary Security Alert Team with a Winchester twelve-gauge pump. The man with the shotgun fired one shot from behind the Commo building at the major, who clung to the van as it rushed through the compound, but he hurried, missed him, spattering his burst against the van door. Then the van disappeared in a swirl of dust as it reached and slammed into the communications building.

The air security man rethrew his pump and waited for a target to emerge from the confusion. He had a queer sense, however, of being watched, and turned to peer at the Cyclone fence to the left of the gate. He had an impression of someone scurrying away, but as he brought his weapon to bear — it would have been a long shot, anyway, for a shotgun — five charges went off under the fence. It lifted and twisted in the concussions. The explosive was plastique, French-manufactured, detonated by a U.S. Army M-1 Delay Firing Device with a fifteen-second delay.

The young man was blown backward and down by the blasts. When he regained his senses, he could see troopers in snow smocks with automatic weapons moving very fast up the hill and through the gaps in the fence. He was amazed at how many there were, and with what precision they moved. He wondered where the hell they’d come from, how they’d gotten so fucking close. He understood, too, that he was probably doomed, that the post was overwhelmed, that unless the guys in Commo got an emergency message out to SAC that it was all over. His own inclination was to run, but he realized he couldn’t. A piece of shrapnel from the fence burst had torn into his knee. Then he realized he’d been hit in the chest too. There was blood all over the snow, flooding down around his combat boot. The shotgun slipped from his grip. He wished he’d killed one of the bastards.

There were three strong points in the compound. The first was the barracks, where the installation’s complement of air policemen was headquartered. One unit of the assault team broke off from the general rush and dashed toward it. Fifty yards out, the four men dropped prone as they deployed their chief weapon, a Heckler&Koch HK-21. The gunner pumped a three-hundred-round tracer belt into the building. The tracers flicked out and kicked through the corrugated tin walls. As the gunner was changing belts and his loader and one other man were supplying suppressing fire, the fourth member of the team dashed forward with a three-pound plastique package with a four-second time-delay mechanism. He primed it and hurled it through the window. The detonation was tremendous, blowing out three of the four walls and collapsing the roof. The barracks team moved through the wreckage of the building, shooting everything whether it moved or not.

The second strong point was the launch-control facility itself, with its elevator to the capsule beneath. Generally staffed by three men, it was this day staffed by only two: They died in the first seconds after the fence burst, when one superbly trained raider kicked the door open and fired a long burst from his Uzi.

The third strong point was Commo, the communications center, which the van team hit, led by the major, carrying an Uzi. There was smoke everywhere, and as the major kicked his way through the haze, he fired a burst into the shapes he encountered. Each went down.

He pushed his way back to the teletype machines and the computer encrypters and the hardened cables that fed into them.

“There,” he commanded.

A man came forward with a huge pair of industrial wire cutters.

“The red ones,” the major said. The man with the clippers was well trained. He knelt, and adroitly began to cut the post’s contact to the outside world, leaving only a single cable.

The major pushed his way through the rubble to the security officer’s office, off the main room. The man himself had already been killed with a machine pistol burst. He lay across the threshold of his office, having been the first of the major’s victims. A satiny pool of blood lapped across the linoleum.

The major stepped over him and went swiftly to the wall safe, where his demolitions man already crouched.

“Any problem?”

“It’s not titanium. You’d expect better stuff.”

“You can blow it?”

“No problem. I’ve almost got it rigged,” the demo man said. Swiftly, he pinched a latticework of plastique into the crannies of the safe. He worked like a sculptor, trying to build a cross current of pressure that would, upon detonation, spring the box. Then he pressed a small device called a time-pencil into one corner of the glop.

“Are we clear?” he asked.

The major, in the doorway, gestured his men out.

“Do it,” he said.

The demolitions man squeezed the bulb at the end of the pencil, which released a droplet of acid. As he raced from the building, his gear and weapons slapping against his body in his sprint, the acid began to eat through a restraining piece inside the time-pencil. It took seven seconds. When the wire yielded, a coiled spring snapped a striker down to a primer cap, which in turn detonated the explosive. The metal tore in the burst, and the safe was ripped from its moorings in the wall.

The major was the first in, rushing through the smoke. He rifled through the papers until he found what he wanted. Outside came the intermittent sounds of gunshots from the mop-up.

He beckoned to his radioman, took the microphone off the man’s backpack of gear.

“Alex to Landlord,” he said, “Alex to Landlord, are you there?”

“This is Landlord, affirmative.”

“Get the general.”

“He’s here.”

“Yes, I’m here, Alex,” came a new voice on the net.

“Sir, we’ve got it. We’re going down below.”

“Good.” The voice was cheerful. “I’ll meet you at the LCF elevator.”

Even the major was impressed. In the middle of the smoking battlefield the general still looked magnificent and unruffled. But then that was the general’s gift. Beyond the force of his intelligence and the depth of his vision, he radiated confidence, beauty, and supreme knowledge. He had a way of drawing you to him and making you his absolutely.

“Report, Major?” the general asked.

“Seizure procedure complete, General. We control the compound.”

The general nodded, then smiled. His features lit up; his eyes warmed. His sleek hair was gray, almost white, and had been expensively trimmed. He wore a Burberry trench coat over a well-cut jump suit. He seemed, somehow, more like an executive vice-president than a military officer.

“Casualties?”

“None, sir. The surprise was complete.”

“Good. No boys hurt. You planned well. Communications out?”

“Yessir.”

“Enemy casualties?”

“Sixteen, sir. Their entire complement.”

“The specs called for twenty-four. You’d think in an independent-launch-capable facility they’d be at full strength.”

“Yes, sir.”

“They had no idea anybody even knew they were here. Still, it wouldn’t have mattered, would it, Alex? Superb.”

“We try, sir,” said Alex. “I guess we were lucky. We got through the radar all right, and caught them asleep.”

“The elevator code?”

“Yessir.”

The major went to a computer terminal installed in the wall next to the double titanium blastproof doors that led to the launch command capsule; it was configured like a television screen over a typewriter keyboard and looked a little like a bank machine. He bent to it and typed in the twelve integers of that day’s Permissive Action Link, which he had just gained from the safe in the security officer’s room.

ACCESS OK, the machine responded.

The elevator doors opened.

“Final assault team forward,” said the major.

“Time to talk to the boys downstairs,” the general said with a smile.

“I’m going to call Command,” said Romano. He typed a quick message on the teletype, then hit the send button.

Nothing happened.

“Goddammit,” said Romano. “Get your pistol out.”

Both men carried Smith&Wesson.38s, not for defense but to execute the other in the event, however unlikely given the screening procedures, of some kind of psychotic attack.

“Mine’s not loaded,” said Hapgood. “I never — hey, come on. They aren’t going to—”

The phone buzzed.

“Jesus.” Romano jumped. Then he snatched the phone.

“Hello, this is Oscar-one-niner,” he said.

“Oscar-one-niner, Christ! You won’t believe it. We had a goddamn power failure up here. Emergency generators are on and we should have full power back in a sec.”

“What about that vehicle?”

“Sir, PSAT got his tire changed. He’s outta here. All clear, affirmative, and PSAT back inside the perimeter.”

“That’s a big hip hooray. Is this O’Malley?”

“Sir, no, it’s Greenberg, code authenticated Sierra-four, Delta-niner, Hotel-six—”

“That’s okay, Alpha Security, I have you authenticated.”

“Sir, just to remind you, SOP on power failures is for you to open the blast door. You wouldn’t want to be caught in there, sir, if we lose power again and the generators go.”

“Affirmative, Security Alpha, will do. Jesus, you guys had us scared,” Romano blurted out.

“Sorry about that, sir. Couldn’t be helped.”

Romano spun the cylinder on the door, and with a whoosh, the big thing opened. He leaned out into the corridor and took a deep breath.

“Jesus,” said Hapgood. “You were really sweating there.”

“Boy, I—”

But a woman’s voice suddenly filled the air. Her name was Betty and she was the voice of the computer.

“Warning,” she cooed, “access has been achieved.”

At that moment, at the end of the corridor the elevator doors burst open. A trooper with a laser-sighted Uzi put a beam of red light into Romano’s center chest and fired a burst. As Hapgood watched, his friend’s uniform exploded; Romano’s eyes went blank as he pitched forward, his head askew.

Hapgood knew he was going to die. He could hear them coming down the corridor, the swift, slapping pound of their boots, driven on by the shouts of their officer.

“The other one. Quick, the other one.”

Panic scampered through the young man’s mind and he felt his joints melt, his will scatter. He knew he could never get the blast door closed in time.

They’re coming for the bird, he thought.

And at that moment he remembered procedure. He turned and sprinted for the far wall. His one advantage came from Romano. “Take your key off, Donny.” It was a small thing. That was all, but it was enough.

For as Hapgood dashed to the wall, the major ducked forward into the capsule, and put three Silvertips from a range of ten feet through the young officer’s lungs; but the impact of the bullets only hurried him those last few feet. Before him he saw the black window set in the wall, the one that admitted no light and was the latest wrinkle in installation security. KEY VAULT.

And because Hapgood did not have to get the key off his neck, because he had it in his hand, he was able to punch through the glass—

“Nooo!” screamed the major, firing twice more; the man with the laser-guided Uzi fired the rest of his clip, the bullets slamming into Hapgood, who slid in bloody splendor down the wall. But he had already dropped the key into the key vault and, one second later, a half-ton titanium block slammed down, sealing the key off from reach.

The general wasted no time.

“It couldn’t be helped,” he said cheerily. “We’ve made contingency plans. We’ll get what we want. We just won’t get it right away.”

The general looked at the two combat missile officers soaking in their own blood. The young one, the boy, had been shot dozens of times. The back of his jump suit was a spatter of bullet holes and burned fabric. The general betrayed no surprise or regret. He simply passed on from the bodies to other issues.

“Get them out of here,” said the major. “And get the blood mopped up.”

The general turned.

“Commence our occupation phase, Alex,” he commanded. “Well be having visitors soon, and we’ve got much work to do.”

“Of course, sir.”

Alex issued orders quickly. “Get the trucks up here with Hummel and send the demolition team down to blow the road. Roll out the wire for the field telephones. Get the canvas strung out. And get the boys started digging in.”

The general turned to the teletype machines against the wall. Five of them — marked SAC, ERCS, UHF Satellite, Looking Glass, and SLFCS — were still, as if dead. The sixth — marked National Command — suddenly began to clatter away insanely.

The genera] touched Alex on the arm.

“Look, Alex,” he said. “They know. The key vault must be rigged to send a robot signal to Command when it’s deployed.”

He looked at his watch, a gold Rolex.

“About three minutes. Not bad. Not outstanding, but not bad.”

He pulled the message off the platen.

The machine spurted again. It was the same message.

“They must really be going crazy in the Pentagon about now,” the general said with something like a chuckle. “Lord, I wish I could see their faces.”

Alex nodded, and hustled out.

The general had two things to do now.

First, he went to the shortwave radio transmitter nestled between two of the teletypes. It was the Collins 32S-3 model, an older machine that had been installed in the capsule purely as an emergency backup method of communication. He flicked it on, bent to the band selector, and turned it to the 21.2 megahertz setting, then dialed in a more specific frequency on the tuner. That done, he simply twisted the emission dial to the CW setting and held it for five seconds exactly, sending out a burst of raw noise across the airwaves on his frequency. Then he turned it off.

All right, he thought, very good, according to plan. And now …

He pulled one of the chairs from the console over to the operative teletype. He pushed the red send button. Immediately, it stopped clattering.

He bent to the keys.

In one swift burst he typed out his message. He had no need to pause to think. He knew the words by memory, and it was in the spirit of memory that he delivered them.

Speak, Memory, he thought, as he hit the send button, and the lessons of the past reached out to twist the present into the future.