Arc Light (10 page)

The soles of Stuart's boots scuffed on the first of the concrete as the dirt gave way to the pad. Climbing the slope of the mound, he looked up to see that the single hydraulically operated blast door was opened about three feet and that a man hung in the gap by suspension gear hooked to the door itself. He was taking readings of the hydraulic fluids in the system that, in the event of a launch, would hurtle the door open down its internal tracks in a fraction of a second and fling from it any tons of debris that might have accumulated from a near miss. Langford stepped up onto the thick concrete-and-steel door itself. Stuart stayed on the pad to the side and eyed the man in between the door and the opposite wall, which was shaped to conform to the massive door's irregular features, with an involuntary sense of discomfort.
If the door were to close,
Stuart thought, and then shook off the revolting image that his mind manufactured as if solely to test his response.

“Take a look,” Langford said from on top as he peered down into the silo.

“Hey, be careful,” Stuart warned as he edged gingerly toward
the opening, remembering the old Titan III missile in Arkansas that had blown and killed everyone around when someone dropped a wrench that penetrated its cellophane-thin fuselage and smashed into the liquid fuel tank.

As Stuart got closer, the silo chamber became visible through the opening and the internal floodlights shone on the cylindrical steel walls. He held onto the door and leaned, seeing the blunt, black nose of the MX missile just beneath the blast door. From a railing about a third of the way down the silo wall, an access bridge extended across the open space to the side of the fuselage, and several men were working on the massive missile. Shouts and the sound of activity drew Stuart's attention to several other crews working at various other points lower down the long jet-black body of the ICBM.

“What's going on?” he asked the sergeant suspended just inside the blast door.

“We were in the middle of the monthly go-over,” the man—Kline from the name stenciled on his breast pocket—replied in a twangy accent, carefully returning each tool to its assigned pouch. He was a senior NCO, Stuart noticed, his job not one entrusted to the young or the faint of heart. “When the base went to
DEFCON
2 they tol' us to close ‘er up.”

The three warheads on that old Titan had blown right out of the silo,
Stuart remembered.
There are ten warheads on the MX.
“Let's go, Scott.”

Langford smiled and stood on one foot near the edge of the opening, extending his arms out to either side for balance.

“Fuck you, man,” Stuart said as he turned to walk down from the heavy mound of blast-hardened reinforced concrete. “Come on.”

As Stuart walked through the darkness between the silo and the gate, a hand slapped his shoulder and he flinched, so slightly that Langford probably didn't notice. “You're acting like those things are dangerous, sport!” Langford said. “Don't you know that's the ‘Peacekeeper'—friend of small animals and schoolchildren alike.”

Stuart smiled, but didn't feel comfortable again until they were in the Humvee and headed to the launch center, several miles away.

“All right!” Zorin shouted as the officers bombarded him with reports from all sides. The concrete-walled office that would pass
for Zorin's personal quarters until he solidified his control of the disparate commands fell silent. The junior officers stood quietly now in the stark light from bare overhead fixtures that made all the room's contents, material and human, appear harsh and hard-edged. “Let's just all calm down here. Just calm down.” His voice shook, and he realized that he was exhausted. Two nights in a row with no sleep, and too much coffee to compensate.

“Leave me here,” Zorin said. “No interruptions—I've got to think.”
Concentrate!
he ordered himself. The humiliation of the half dozen phone calls he had made to commanders of various field units in and around Moscow who all politely refused to comply had stung Zorin badly. He shook his head angrily just after his door was pulled closed.

Zorin stood up and walked over to the sink, the loaded H&K by his side. Even here, 300 meters under the Kremlin in the concrete-enclosed cavern designed for wartime command, Zorin did not feel safe. The mere effort of standing had renewed his painful headache, and, lost in thought, he tapped the medicine bottle to drop another painkiller into his palm. Not the aspirin with which he had started a couple of days ago, but a narcotic from the first aid kit.

Zorin swallowed the pill and looked up into the small mirror.
Oh, God, I need sleep,
he thought, staring at the red, baggy eyes and pale, haggard face.
The pill should take care of my head, but for the sleep?
he thought to himself silently.
Just fifteen minutes and I'll call them back. Fifteen minutes and I'll feel one hundred percent better.
He opened the cabinet doors to the side of the sink and pulled out a bottle of vodka, filling an oversize shot glass.

He turned the glass up, and the warm liquid drained down his throat, causing him to wince slightly as it burned the lining of his stomach. He quickly stuffed into his mouth a half-eaten piece of the hard black bread that sat next to the sink. With his first breath after the shot, his throat caught fire, but before his next breath the vodka had already begun its chemical reaction with the painkiller in his bloodstream, and the little aches and pains began to dull.

Zorin held his now unsettled stomach and walked over to the sofa, his mind growing comfortably blank as he lay the machine pistol on the floor and sank absentmindedly onto the soft cushions.
I'll just close my eyes and think,
Zorin decided and was about to lay his head on a folded wool blanket when he saw that he had not capped the vodka bottle and that the light from the sink would shine right into his eyes on the sofa.

What could the Americans be doing?
he wondered as he padded over to the sink. The first communication from his liaison officer at PVO-Strany had reported the inexplicable American alert orders.

The nagging concern activated his brain as if a switch had been thrown. His mind raced, lurching from one disjointed thought to a randomly proposed conclusion. By the time he reached the sink, he was cursing the thoughts that ricocheted through his head.

He picked up the bottle and cap and looked into the mirror from which stared the haggard face with the loose necktie twisted off-center.
One more to kill the jitters,
he thought as he poured and drank another large shot. He turned out the sink light and made his way by the bright corridor lights that shown under the crack in the door. He was deep in sleep when there was a knock at the door and it opened.

Zorin stared bleary-eyed at the profile of a man who stood in front of the brilliant light from the corridor. “I told you no interruptions! What's your name?”

“Melnikov, sir.”

“Melnikov, if you value your career, you follow orders, do you understand? Now, what the hell do you want?”

The officer, in combat gear instead of staff dress uniform, said, “It's General Razov, sir. He's on the telephone.”

Zorin's head pounded from his own shouting, and with it still burned a blinding red glare of anger. He rose slowly to a sitting position. “You tell Razov to go to hell! I'm not in any mood to deal. Tell him, once he ceases his interference with my operations I'll talk to him.” The aide left him alone.

Zorin groped his way back to the sink in the dark, rubbing his eyes, which felt as if ice picks were jammed in them. He turned on the light and tried to open the bottle of pain pills, losing his patience and finally tearing at the top.
I've got a few tricks for you too, Razov!
he thought.
Planning, the finest of martial arts!
“You think you'll just waltz right in here? Hah!” he said out loud as the pills flew out of the bottle and into the sink, aggravating him further.
But what next?
he thought.
What will they try next?
His mind fogged and drew a blank, and he jammed the heels of his hands into his eyes until they hurt. In his exhausted state his frustration level skyrocketed, and he slammed the wall by the sink.

Looking down into the sink through vision blurred from the vigorous rubbing Zorin saw that two of the pain pills were wet. He washed them both down with a shot of vodka before their capsules softened. Calming, he placed the bottle of amphetamines that the medic had provided beside the sink for when he rose and then gargled with mouthwash to rid himself of the reek. “Got to keep up appearances!” he said out loud, turning off the light and finding his way back to the sofa.

No pain now,
he thought, smiling as he lay down to plot his strategy. He was asleep in moments.

David Chandler pulled his Volvo into an empty parking space and turned the car off. He looked down at his car phone. “No cellular or radio communications allowed on base, sir,” the air policeman had said, saluting David at the gate, forcing him to say his good-bye to Melissa too abruptly.

The quiet night air was split again with the crackling sound of jet engines. That had been the pattern ever since the interstate: a minute or so of quiet, and then a roar. David dipped his head, his hands still gripping the wheel, and looked up into the black night sky through the windshield to spot the departing aircraft. There, over that building, the streaking blue flame appeared as if shot out of thin air, the large body of the black four-engined aircraft sensed rather than seen as the few stars disappeared just before the exhaust flame passed.

He looked around him. He felt stuck, suspended between two worlds. The Volvo was an object from his other life, from the other side of the gulf that he could already feel forming between all that was before and whatever lay ahead. He had bought the car last year when Melissa and he had finally decided it was time to have a baby. In the back, the base to the as yet unused baby seat was buckled onto its seat belt, holding only his basketball in place. Chandler chuckled as he recalled the first time his golf buddies got a look at the car. “What, do you have to
drive
women away or something?” they had roared with laughter. The “babe magnet,” they called it.

Everything was quiet again.
How long will the car sit here,
he wondered as he fingered his wedding ring, the only piece of jewelry besides his watch that he had ever worn. The only time he'd ever even come close to taking the ring off his finger since his wedding day was once just out of idle curiosity, to see if it would slide past his second knuckle. It hadn't left his finger, stopping at the nail.

The ring slipped right off. It had to be done: regulations. He reached over, opened the glove compartment, and removed a tissue from a small packet, wrapping the ring in it and placing the package gently into the back of the glove compartment. He closed and locked the compartment's door.

I can't just leave it in the glove compartment,
David thought.
They'll never find it.
He got a scrap of paper and a pen and was going to write, “My ring is in the glove compartment.”
That's it?
he thought.
My ring is in the glove compartment and I loved you from the first moment I laid eyes on you until the very last breath passed from my lips.

“My wedding ring is in the glove compartment. I love you. David,” he wrote. He left the note face down on the passenger seat.

The words still echoed through David's head even as his feet carried him to the door. “Ma-a-jor Chandler,” the sergeant had said. “U.S. Army Reserve. Here we go. Intelligence. Division Staff, 4th Infantry Division.”
Division Intelligence,
Chandler thought.
A staff position at Division Headquarters.
His mental picture of himself sitting at a desk was a bit of a letdown, but it was a relief too.
At least I know how to do that. Years of practice.
“Flight 1451—Presov, Slovakia. That'd be through that door.”

Chandler opened the door and entered a huge open hangar filled with soldiers.

“Hey!” a kid said, a private first class's single chevron and rocker pinned on his collar slightly askew. “Oh, ‘scuse me, sir,” he apologized, stiffening up, “but everybody on this flight's s'posed ta pick up their personal weapons ‘fore they process through. I think that means officers too—pro'bly.”

Chandler followed the general body language and nod of the kid to another line in the cavernous hangar.
“Please pick up your personal weapons before you board the plane,”
an imaginary flight attendant was saying in his head. The letdown he'd felt on learning of his presumably comfortable desk job moments earlier now gave way to renewed uncertainty.

At the front of the line, over the door into a steel cage that rose up from the floor of the hangar, Chandler saw the sign
ARMORY.
There were numerous steel cages all around the hangar, Chandler noticed, each with its own line.
“Ya'll have a good flight now, ya hear,”
Chandler's imaginary flight attendant was now saying, waving cheerily from the jetway as the plane's door was closed.

The guy who had been just ahead of Chandler at the processing desk and was now in this line turned slightly to acknowledge him. “How'r ya doin', sir?” the man—a master sergeant, Chandler noted—asked.

“Well, okay, I guess,” Chandler said.

BARNES
was the name stamped over the man's left breast pocket. The NCO laughed politely as Chandler picked up his suitcase to edge forward.

Chandler looked up at the cage they were approaching and caught sight instead of a man up ahead who was craning his neck to look back in line. The man saw him and nodded, disappearing as he leaned over to pick up his pack and then walking back down the line to Chandler as if they were acquainted.