Arc Light (25 page)

“We have the poor bastard,” Mishin said in disgust. “I'm of half a mind to put a bullet in his head myself.” They went on to discuss the successful consolidation of their commands under the newly constituted
STAVKA
. Razov would serve as commander of the Supreme High Command.

After signing off, Razov's aide said, “Sir, we have to move again. The wind has shifted.”

Razov turned to his aide and said, “Get me transportation to Moscow. I can't manage things from here.”

“I want an epidural!” Melissa banged her head back down against the pillow. “It hurts!”

“You're having a baby. It's supposed to hurt,” the nurse said calmly.

Melissa was crying and gasping for breath. “I want my epidu-u-u-ural!” she screamed again.

“Mrs. Chandler, the anesthesiologists are all busy right now.”

“Get one,” Melissa whimpered, pleading as the next contraction built. “P-please, get
o-o-one!”

She hardly heard the woman's explanation about why they were busy, about how she was sure Melissa understood. The pain was all she could understand, and it was excruciating.

Melissa awoke, and the first thing she saw was her baby, lying in a diaper far too big for it, with a gold heart taped onto its bare back. She blinked her eyes to clear the tears that welled up immediately, and the picture was just the same. The red glow over the now clean baby's skin grew in intensity, and Melissa looked up to see the electric lamp like the food warmers at a fast-food restaurant light up for a few seconds and then grow dim again.

She sniffed and rolled painfully over onto her back. At the foot of her bed, half obscured by a cloth partition that had been wheeled into place, a woman rolled from side to side in her bed moaning softly as a man in blue jeans held a wet cloth to her head. Squeezed in
beside her bed to her left, another woman lay elevated with a newborn at her breast.

The woman smiled at Melissa and whispered, “Pretty baby,” nodding at Melissa's before pulling her chin in to look down at her own, who had lost her nipple.
“It's a boy,”
the nurse had said, Melissa remembered, and she looked over at the tiny thing in his bed, his splotchy red back slowly rising and falling as he slept deeply.

There were noises outside the door, some louder, others muffled and indistinct. “I need whole blood!” someone yelled from just outside. “Two pints—stat!”

Melissa turned to the breast-feeding woman. “What's going on?” she whispered.

The woman, who had been smiling and murmured baby talk to her child as she used the fingers of her free hand to feed him the nipple again, looked up at Melissa as if she had just startled her with an angry shout, and then returned to her baby, smiling and cooing as if there had been no interruption. Melissa pulled the thin sheet off her legs. She could feel the pain from the incision between her legs, and on her shins in huge block letters was written, she guessed, some sort of patient ID in black marker ink.

There was a long, wailing moan of a shout from the corridor outside, followed by, “Jane-et! Janet! Help me get this one back down!”

With the greatest of effort and pain Melissa slid to the floor and walked slowly past the bed of the woman in labor.

She opened the door to a world of bright light, of swirling action as nurses and doctors and orderlies ran from patient to patient and wheeled gurneys through the thick maze of stretchers. People lay on the crowded floor of the hallway holding gauze over parts of their exposed bodies, the uncovered parts of many burned and ugly. Others in various states of nonhospital garb—some hurt themselves—milled about the more seriously wounded, helping or holding hands and weeping. Bloody and burned clothes littered the floor of the corridor where they had been tossed after being cut from injured bodies. A person—man or woman, Melissa couldn't tell—on the stretcher nearest Melissa let out a long moan through bandages that obscured his or her face completely. He or she lay there, all alone and moaning, abandoned.

“I'm sorry,” she heard as a hand pushed her out into the hallway. She turned to see the husband from inside her room closing the door, an apologetic look on his face.

Left standing in the hallway, Melissa grabbed a nurse who was walking briskly by in bloody scrubs, sweaty hair matted to her forehead. “I want to check out,” Melissa said. “I'm Melissa Chandler,
and I want to check out and I want to take my baby with me.”

“Okay,” the nurse snapped. “Go,” she said as she tried to pull free.

“Who do I see about the bill?” Melissa asked, holding onto the woman's sleeve by twisting her fingers into it.

“Bill?”
the woman shouted with a look of disbelief on her face, jerking her sleeve painfully through Melissa's fingers and rushing on. The faceless person on the stretcher next to her moaned again, an inhuman sound.

Over the soft background
whoosh
of jet flight, which had the odd effect of making Lambert drowsy, General Starnes said, “Our
CAOSOP
reports—the twelve different reports generated under the Coordination of Atomic Operations Standing Operating Procedures—indicate that the Phase II strikes from Quick Reaction Alert aircraft are going well.” He spoke in a voice raised loud enough to make sure that he was heard by Vice President Costanzo over the speakerphone. “We've taken minimal losses—two A-6s, an FB-111, and a B-52—and we're well into the strikes. Of course, the aircraft still have to exit, but the Russians are loading up on the inbound approaches and are less concerned with egress.”

“What have we hit?” the President asked, sounding numb.

Starnes looked down at his report. “Mainly with missiles, we've hit the sub bases at Petropavlovsk, Vladivostok, Ponoy, Murmansk, Polyarnyy, Pechenga, Dikson Ostrov, Kaliningrad, Matochin Shar, and Arkhangelsk. We hit Vladivostok and Murmansk with conventional weapons to limit civilian damage, although we also used two low-yield nuclear torpedoes at Vladivostok. We're using attack subs to root out the subsea tunnels off their piers one by one and will drag the deep fjords where they may be lying low. We have a 99.7 percent destroyed on the ICBM fields at Yedrovo, Kartaly, Kostroma, Teykovo, Yoshkar Ola, Perm, Tatishchevo, Dombarovskiy, Imeni Gostello, Aleysk, Uzhur, Gladkaya, Drovyanaya, Olovyannaya, and Svobodnyy. The Kozelsk shot fell short, and we're going after it with B-1Bs. We've also knocked out the bomber bases at Shimanaovsk, Gusinoozersk, Irkutsk, Pskov, Perm, Michurinsk, Prikumsk, Novaya Kazanka, and Monchegorsk. Some of their Backfires, Bisons, Bears, and Badger/Blinders and their tankers are airborne, presumably armed with nuclear weapons, but we're taking them down everywhere
we can or waiting for ‘em to land so that we can locate and hit their relocation bases when and as they put down. Finally, we've taken out about twenty early-warning sites and are going after Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk with carrier-based A-6s from the
Carl Vinson”

Lambert looked at the President, who seemed not to be listening. “What about their C
³
capabilities?” Lambert asked.

“We left a lot of it alone,” Starnes replied, looking at the President in the hopes that he would hear. “They've got pretty good communications, and their command and control should be intact. Nothing around Moscow, PVO-Strany included, has been touched.”

“What about our own air defenses?” Lambert asked on mention of PVO-Strany, the Russian
NORAD.

“Well, I see why Al said it was a piss-poor firing plot,” Starnes said. “We've got all our satellites intact. On the ground we've got Flyingdales left from the
BMEWS
line; the old DEW and Pine Tree lines to the north; the four Pave Paws SLBM systems to the east, west, and south; and the new Over-the-Horizon Backscatter systems watching the Atlantic and Pacific for bombers and cruise missiles. If we lose those, we could still patch our experimental tracking station in New Boston, New Hampshire; and the navy's space surveillance radars at Gila River, Arizona; Lake Kickapoo, Texas; and Jordan Lake, California, together with the FAA's radars, some Aegis Cruisers off the East and West coasts, and a couple of squadrons of
AWACS
. We could go another round with the bastards.”

“How are we working around our C
³
damage?” the Secretary of Defense asked.

“Everything is patched into the headquarters of the 23rd
NORAD
Region at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida,” Starnes answered, “which is a fully capable
NORAD
Back-Up Facility. If we lose Tyndall, we've got the headquarters of the Canadian
NORAD
Region at Canadian Forces Base in North Bay, Ontario, and then the four regional operations control rooms of the Joint Surveillance System. After them, there are seven
AWACS
that can control national air defense.”

“And you can stop any Russian bombers?” the President asked.

“There's not much we can do about standoff cruise missiles,” Starnes said, “but if the bastards come in to drop iron we'll rough ‘em up. We've issued a
NOTAM
—Notice to Airmen—informing civil aviation that we've extended the Air Defense Intercept Zone to two hundred miles and we'll fire on radar intercept if flight plans aren't cleared five hours in advance.
ADACC
—the Air Defense Air Combat Command—has put up combat air patrols out of their twenty-six alert facilities. They've got five air divisions, a total of ninety F-15Cs, and the Air National Guard is adding nine more air divisions or one hundred sixty-two F-15Cs and older F-4s and F-106s. Add to those
Canada's fifty-four CF-18 Hornets and Air Combat Command's augmentation forces of F-15Cs, and we'll attrit the hell out of ‘em unless they coordinate a whole lot better than in the first strike.”

“What about the submarines?” Vice President Costanzo asked over the speakerphone. “Any missile firings yet out of the Bastion?”

Admiral Dixon, the Chief of Naval Operations, said, “No strategic missiles, no, Mr. Vice President. They've fired a few surface-to-surface nonnuclear missiles at our antisubmarine units in the area, and we've taken some hits from those and from two separate torpedo engagements. The U.S.S.
Talbot,
a Brooke-class frigate, and the U.S.S.
Dahlgren,
a Coontz-class destroyer, were damaged, and we have an initial report of several dozen killed and wounded. It's uncertain whether the
Talbot
will make it, but the
Dahlgren
is making her own way and can put back to sea without dry dock.”

“What are the reports on Russian sub kills?” Thomas asked.

“Twenty-one boomers confirmed killed, one afloat and on fire, and six probables,” the CNO read through glasses at the end of his nose. “If the six are all kills, then we've pretty much cleaned up the blue water firing stations—maybe a stray sub or two lying low. They haven't interfered with the
SONUS
system of listening devices along the bottom of the ocean and we just made one ID along our GIUK line, the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom choke-point. That one's a goner, so that pretty much leaves us with just the Bastion to worry about.”

“Tell your boys good work,” General Thomas said.

“And, I should report, good work by the Royal Navy,” Admiral Dixon said. “Five of those kills are theirs. And the Canadian Defense Forces are responsible for two contacts leading to kills.”

“What about our other allies?” the President asked Lambert.

Lambert arched his eyebrows and looked at the Secretary of Defense, who said, “We're encountering some . . . difficulties with the Germans. We had a couple of damaged aircraft, an FB-111 and a B-1B, come in for emergency landings at German air force fields that are alternate recovery sites under NATO war plans. The German controllers refused permission to land.”

“What the hell happened?” President Livingston asked.

“They went ahead and put down. Rather than begin repairs of the aircraft, at least to get them back to the U.K. where we can turn them around and put them back in service, the Germans' initial position is that the aircraft are impounded for unauthorized landings.”

“And the pilots?”

“They're being held at the air bases. One is being treated in a military hospital for radiation wounds received in action. I have to tell you, Mr. President,” Lambert said shaking his head, “that as far
as our defense establishment is concerned this constitutes a breach of the NATO Treaty obligations by the Germans. In fact, the Germans and several other NATO countries have begun mobilizations, but the units assigned to the American NATO commanders in Brussels have quite pointedly not responded to alert orders sent out to prepare them for deployment. They are presumably awaiting some sort of political decision, but that's not the way it's supposed to work. There's no decision. A NATO member was attacked, and all other member nations are required to treat that attack as an attack on their own countries.”

“We'll have to keep an eye on the situation,” the President said. “I'll make a few calls.”

Just then an air force captain entered the conference room. He obviously had intended only to whisper into General Starnes' ear only, but the natural break in the briefing left only him to fill the void. “The Glass Eye Report is coming in, sir,” he said to the group.

“We'd better get FEMA on the line,” General Thomas said, picking up the telephone and asking for a conference with FEMA officials at Mount Weather.

“What's a Glass Eye Report?” the President asked.

The telephone chirped as Thomas began to reply. Thomas punched a button and said, “Yes?”