December Ultimatum (17 page)

‘You keeping count, Mr Daniels?’

‘But sir, we just can’t . . .’

‘You can, d’you hear. So can you all. Goddammit, you are officers of the United States Navy and you will obey your Captain at sea!’

‘But, sir, this is gross . . .’

‘You’ll do as you’re fucking well told and you will not question me in the presence of junior officers and ratings, d’you hear? Do you hear me? For God’s sake, I
am
your Captain.’

His eyes were suddenly wide and bulging, his face had become quickly very white and his forehead glistened with sweat under the peak of his cap.

‘We will not acknowledge the
Minsk,’
he shouted. ‘We will not acknowledge any other signal without my permission because I do not believe they are being sent by our people.’

‘Our people?’ Daniels and Ginsberg said together.

‘Our people—and God help your rotten deafness!’ His voice had gone to a higher pitch still, there was spittle in the corners of his mouth and the squash ball was distorted in the fury of his fingers.

‘Can’t I make any of you understand? Don’t you realize what they’re doing? The other side?’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Ginsberg, ignoring Daniel’s gesture to move back. ‘Are you saying you believe the signals ordering us to move south have been sent by the Soviets?’ Captain Hanks nodded and smiled. A trickle of sweat ran down the side of his right temple and into his eye, but he didn’t seem to notice.

‘Sometimes, Mr Ginsberg,’ he said, his voice suddenly quiet again, ‘I am able to persuade myself you understand English.’

Lieutenant Ginsberg looked at his Captain, and there was shock in his young face.

‘D’you
suppose,’ said Captain Hanks, ‘that the President of the United States would stand up and say what he did, issue an ultimatum to the Communists and then order his only warship in the area to run south? Does that make sense to you? Didn’t even the chicken-livered Carter, faced with the Iranians, send in his warships? Wasn’t the
Coral Sea
and the
Nimitz
and the
Kitty Hawk
immediately ordered in? Carter was yellow with fright, but he did that. And this President’s a hawk, a goddamned marvel and you suppose he would order us away? No sir, not in a million years. Wouldn’t he instead be planning reinforcements? Don’t you think that is exactly what is being prepared at this moment in the Pentagon? Is that so fucking preposterous?

‘So we’ve had a breakdown in our satellite communications link, a faulty computer maybe, there’s a lot of things to go wrong. Well, let me tell you it’s the first time it’s happened on this ship in all the years I have been in command. Just another coincidence? Balls! I’m telling you those motherfuckers out there have done it, jamming us, and I will not let those bastards through so they can put down their men and their planes for the fucking crippling commissars to deliver Saudi Arabia and its oil to the Kremlin. Let me tell you, when this is over, this ship will sail to Norfolk, Virginia to be scrapped—and so will I—but as God is my witness, the traditions of the United States Navy will not be buried with us. You want an answer for the
Minsk
? Very well, Mr Ginsberg, I’ll give you one. You will fire two rounds dead centre of the
Minsk,
and the
Ivan Rogov
—dead centre, mind you, and well short, so there’s no provocation. D’you hear? None!’

Lieutenant Ginsberg left the bridge, unsure suddenly of what was real and what wasn’t, of what he thought he had heard and what perhaps he might have imagined. Was it possible that their cut-off from the Pentagon was simply a communications failure, another defective computer? Or could he believe in a Soviet conspiracy?

But Lieutenant Ginsberg was only twenty-two years old, ever-doubtful, and a stranger to crisis on sea or on land. However his conscience advised him, whatever his instinct warned him of, he climbed down the steel rungs to the flight deck and, as ordered, went across to Gunnery Control. It was the nearness of the waiting aircraft that began it: a memory of something long past, a film years ago, a late-night television movie about a B-52 bomber armed with an H-bomb on its way to blast a Russian city and all because something had gone wrong with the computers in the Pentagon. The bomber pilot had ignored all contra-measures, had switched off radioed orders from the President himself, ignored even the pleading, sobbing voice of his wife telling him to return to base, because he thought it all a Soviet trick.

Lieutenant Ginsberg got into his control booth, strapped on his harness and switched on the intercom relay connecting him directly with his gun and missile stations. He remembered the end of the film, but he couldn’t remember the title. The pilot had dropped his bomb, on Kiev or Leningrad or some Soviet city and half a million people were annihilated. Admitting the mistake, and to prevent retaliation and a nuclear war, the US President ordered the destruction of Philadelphia. Or was it Maine?

He began the preliminary standby calls—alerting station five to load and prepare to fire. He leaned forward to the master switch which provided the electrical power to the missile launchers—a switch that controlled the current to every item of fire-power on board. It could not be overridden, and the square of fine steel mesh covering it could be unlocked by only two men on board the
Okinawa
—the Captain and the Gunnery Officer. And he was Gunnery Officer.

By the mesh, painted in red, were the two words:
FAIL SAFE,
and Lieutenant Ginsberg remembered the title of the film. Then he cross-checked the computer printout giving him the range and exact position, and held the relay switch.

‘Station five, prepare two rounds on co-ordinate 98— repeat 98—at one thousand yards. Acknowledge 98 at one thousand.’

WASHINGTON

‘In the next war the survivors will envy the dead’

Across the United States the reality of what was happening and of what the President had threatened would happen if he did not get his oil was only now beginning to be appreciated. Only now did people wonder whether they really were about to enter the Age of Less.

Little by little items of news filtered into the White House contributing to a growing pile of macabre and impossible happenings that in the President’s mind added up to global pandemonium.

Like the riots at Narita, Tokyo’s new airport, when demonstrators set alight four JAL airliners in protest, according to news-agency reports, against wastage of fuel—destroying in the process eighteen of the demonstrators, fourteen airline staff, and twenty thousand gallons of Avgas.

Or the demonstrators in Turin, Northern Italy, who rampaged through a geriatric hospital, smashing isolation wards and the operating theatre and throwing refrigerated bottles of blood-plasma out on to the streets because of erroneous reports that old women had died through hypothermia because of the lack of fuel for the central-heating system. The leaders of the rampage, members of an outraged local Communist party, later preferred to ignore the post mortem evidence and conclusions that the women had died of an uncommon virus and that the temperature of the wards had never fallen below the normal comfortable 62 degrees Fahrenheit.

Or like the convoy of five petrol tankers on their way from Le Havre to Paris, that were hijacked just after midnight on Autoroute de l’Ouest near Vauvray, each carrying two thousand gallons of fuel. The drivers were ordered at gunpoint to drive their tankers to a disused strip mine fifty miles away then drive one at a time into the shaft that ran four hundred yards deep in to the side of the workings. The five drivers were shot through the head as they sat in their cabs and the entrance to the mineshaft was blocked with boulders, leaving a supply of over ten thousand gallons of high-octane fuel hidden and waiting to be collected and distributed as soon as the prices had risen high enough to make the operation properly profitable.

The French police found out about it by the sheerest fluke. One of the hijackers, a man who had shot dead two of the drivers, had returned home to Le Havre in the early hours to find his wife had given birth to a boy child three weeks prematurely. Overwhelmed with gratitude, the hijacker went to his church for prayers and thanksgiving. Kneeling there on the floor before the altar and the icon of the Holy Mary, he also thought it right and proper, as a good Catholic, to confess his overnight sins, which he did at some length and out loud. The
dominie
, sitting out of sight by the organ and quietly polishing brass, was astonished at what he overheard and quickly did his duty to the laws of God and France.

All these things and more found their way back to the President in short precise reports edited by the Press Secretary, Schlesinger, together with reports from State Governors and the
FBI,
causing the President to wonder if perhaps too much had been done too soon, if ultimatums too early delivered gave no room and no time for manoeuvre and whether he had pumped adrenalin into the system at a time when it perhaps needed a depressant. He had asked for calm and he had got hysteria. He had appealed for sacrifice and he had got greed. He had asked them to rally and instead they had run.

‘There’s been a shoot-out in Dallas, Mr President; three National Guardsmen dead and a helluva lot of casualties. The hospital is refusing to accept any more. Seems they went for another tanker convoy with shotguns.’

‘Explosives have been thrown at the Egyptian Embassy here, sir, and at their Consulate in New York. Seems people don’t know yet who are friendly Arabs and who aren’t. Far as we know, only five dead. Happened fifteen minutes ago.’

‘Our Ambassador in Tripoli has had to be helped out. Still twenty people inside the Embassy, sir, and Gaddafi’s ignoring us.’

‘Oil tankers have been lost—possibly hijacked, Mr President. Air Force have been searching at sea for slicks and flotsams, but they’ve come up with nothing yet. It’s a big area, sir, could take days.’

‘FBI
reckon it’s East Coast Mafia, Mr President. There’s been a sudden petrol supply surplus in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Maine. They say it’s selling for five dollars a gallon and still they’re queuing for it.’

‘Truckers have packed their tankers against pumps in some of the big stations in Connecticut, sir, to prevent the sale of fuel. They’re demanding it’s for them. We’ve also had a report from the Houston, Galveston area of people dying from poisoning after syphoning petrol from car tanks.’

‘The oil pipelines from Galveston have been blown up. It’s the second attack in two days and we just don’t have the personnel to guard every yard of that line, sir. Same old story. Sunbelt against Snowbelt.’

‘And more campus riots, Mr President. North Western University in Chicago, Right versus Left. And there’s been some blood at the University of Michigan, Arab students attacked. Strung two of them up from a lamp-post. By their necks.’

The President sat there and slowly stroked his nose with his forefinger. Then with his wide fingertips he covered his eyes and massaged them. The men stood around him waiting. There was no noise in the Situation Room except for the low hum of the air conditioning fans and the occasional flick of a faulty condenser in one of the strip lights. The chair scratched across the rubber-tiled floor and the President stood up and walked slowly to a wall-map of the United States. He turned and leaned back against it. Then he said very quietly—in a whisper almost, ‘We couldn’t have known it would go this way. No way could we have known.’ He rested his head back against the map and looked up at the ceiling.

‘D’you know the most sickening thing I’ve yet seen? Did you see it? On the newscasts tonight? A Vietnam Veterans’ demo at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Christ! Less than half a mile away, guys in wheelchairs with plastic arms and legs—some for me, some against— men who only a few years ago had given all but their lives fighting together. And now fighting each other in wheelchairs, turning them over, pulling out power cables, slashing the tyres. My God!’ He suddenly pushed himself away from the wall-map and faced them, his eyes wide in anger.

‘I asked them to help me, and instead I see sprawling, legless Veterans fighting on the sidewalks of Washington. I addressed the nation, remember? When the chips are down, I said . . . what was that phrase? “The path we have chosen is full of hazards but it’s the one most consistent with our character and courage.” Shit! Character and courage, my ass! Killing National Guardsmen just so they fill up their lousy tanks . . . blowing up pipelines to let the bastards freeze . . . lynch rule on the campus, mob rule in the country. Jesus! I feel lousy with them . . . lousy d’you hear? I am ashamed, goddamned ashamed to be their President.’

His face was white and his jaw worked from side to side, and softly, very softly, he punched his left fist into the palm of his right hand. He looked at them each in turn, menacingly, like a drunk at a bar waiting for any response, any excuse, to hit them. But no one looked back. They looked at the floor, they looked at their finger-nails, at their shoes. No one looked at him. He went on in the same dangerous tone.

‘While I was up at Camp David yesterday, looking through the great speeches of great American Presidents, I read a lot of JFK’s, and I came across something I thought I’d forgotten, and my God, it hit me hard. “To recognize the possibilities of a nuclear war in the missile age without our citizens knowing what they should do or where they should go if the bombs begin to fall, would be a failure of Presidential responsibility.” I was temped to use it last night, just to warn those people out there what we might be up against. But I thought it might create a little panic. D’you hear? I was worried it might cause a little panic. And God help me now, but I really do believe that if the bombs began to fall, they’d still be running after gasoline.’ The neon light flicked again and the President’s hands were still. He sighed. His shoulders drooped. He turned on one foot, gently punched the wall-map of the United States, turned again and walked to his chair at the head of the long metal table. He sat down and beckoned the others to do the same. When the scraping of chairs had finished, he spoke again and quietly—the anger gone.

‘We should have waited just a little longer, George,’ he said. ‘Just a couple more days.’

‘No, sir,’ said General Warner, Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff. ‘More likely we should have gone straight in from the start. But what’s done’s done.’

‘I reckon,’ said General Louis Wilson of the Marines, ‘we should have gone in under cover of our evacuation planes and risked the casualties. We should have put our men on the ground from the start and used the same planes to bring the civilians out.’

‘That right, Jarvis?’ asked the President, turning to the General of the United Air Force.

‘Could have been done, sir. Logistically feasible. No doubt about it.’

‘Wasn’t what I asked, General.’

‘No, sir, it wasn’t, but I’m not prepared to make a retrospective judgement on something we all agreed on two days ago. Except perhaps just to say that even if we had held back a little longer I doubt if things would have turned out any better. The pandemonium would have been delayed that much longer, but it would still have come.’ For a minute or more the President did not speak. Then, ‘Gentlemen. There never was a moment of hysterical anger in this room. Nor an American President who disowned his people. It was something that could easily have happened, considering the strain and the disappointment, but not to this President. You understand? Not this one.’

He looked at each face in turn, holding the other man’s eyes acknowledging, or so it seemed, receipt of his message. Then he sat up erect in his chair, suddenly brightly alert.

‘General Jarvis. You say you have news?’

‘Bad, I’m afraid, Mr President.’

‘That’s how it’s going to be from now on.’

‘I’ve had some reports from our radar tracking stations in Turkey—Ankara and Sinop, came in fifteen minutes ago. A squadron of Soviet Antonovs, estimated over thirty aircraft, shuttling out of a base on the Caspian Sea, shifting two brigades, that’s about ten thousand men and armour, to airstrips in the South Yemen.

‘Radar followed them across Syria. They refuelled in Iraq, went down the centre of the Persian Gulf in a line from Abadan to Abu Dhabi, across Oman, then followed the coast of the Arabian peninsula to the airfields. Very blatant, Mr President. No attempt to hide their track. Almost as if they wanted us to know what they were about.’

‘And what are they about, General?’

‘Well, sir, we’ve another intelligence report that troopships have anchored off Aden, South Yemen, carrying another two brigades and a lot of mobile armour. We’ve good men there watching. They say Soviet merchant fleet freighters are unloading crated MiGs and Sam-6s. The Soviets already have fifteen thousand men stationed in Aden as part of a defence treaty two years ago. It looks, Mr President, as if they’re massing again. Maybe another Afghanistan?’

‘With half an army still in Kabul?’

‘Yes, sir, upwards of eighty thousand men.’

‘Flying time, General Jarvis?’

‘Kabul to the oil wells, sir, three and a half hours.’

‘And from Aden?’

‘Assuming they use their Antonovs, twelve hundred miles, three hours, sir.’

The President scribbled on the pad in front of him. ‘By my reckoning,’ he said, ‘that’s thirty-five thousand Soviet troops around three hours’ flying time from the oilfields and, say, another eighty thousand to draw on, three and a half hours away. And we have one veteran assault ship with six hundred men and, what did you say Admiral . . . thirty aircraft aboard?’

‘Thirty-eight, sir. And 609 men.’

‘Your little additions. Admiral, aren’t going to give us even odds.’ He looked across to General Rogers. ‘We’ve got our men ready?’

‘Yes, sir. Five thousand on standby, three thousand of the 82nd in Adana Turkey, another two thousand of the 101st Airmobile at base, south of Naples.’

‘And our planes are in a situation,’ added General Jarvis.

‘Mr President, we’re forgetting the
Minsk
and the
Ivan Rogov,’
said Admiral Holliwell. ‘They are at this time just outside the Strait of Hormuz. Those ships, remember, have upwards of two thousand combat marines aboard and the helos to take them right into those oilfields.’

‘And they are our problem, Mr President,’ said General Wilson. ‘They’re the closest and the quickest, and there’s no way I can see us beating them.’

For a minute the President said nothing. Then he leant back in his chair. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘is it militarily possible for Moscow to have mounted these sea and air operations in direct response to my speech last night?’ He looked to General Warner. Chief of Staff, for the answer, and General Warner in turn looked around the table at the shaking heads of the other generals and said, ‘No, Mr President, it is not feasible. It would have taken them some days, a week maybe, unless of course their planes and men have been on alert standby.’

‘So the slightest provocation, the slightest suspicion that we mean to go into those fields and they helo in off those ships, there before us and using our pretext as a peacekeeping force to beat us.’

The red light at the base of the white telephone flashed. He picked up the receiver and listened.

‘Send them in,’ he said. ‘And some coffee. Lots of coffee.’

Richard Johns, Director of the CIA, came into the Situation Room and held the door for Tom Sorenson, the Foreign Affairs adviser.

‘You look as if you’ve both come from a funeral,’ the President said. ‘What is it Tom?’

‘Best you hear it from Johns, Mr President.’

‘Go ahead. Things can’t get worse.’

‘Rahbar was put in by Moscow, Mr President,’ Johns said, ‘using Gaddafi, the Iraqis and
OPEC
to do it. Soviet- engineered, using
OPEC
to get rid of Fahd.’