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  The room service breakfast arrived. Pat Healy sipped coffee and munched on her blueberry Danish, watching as McKittrick tipped the boy.

  “You know I’m aware of all that, John,” she said. “And while I didn’t know Falken, I know his work and your work and I believe in it as well All I’m saying, dear, is that this type-A behavior is going to give you a heart attack, and I don’t want to lose you.”

  McKittrick laughed. He sat down beside her on the bed and grabbed a Danish for himself. He was a fortyish man, dark and good-looking and a good boss. Pat had seduced him on a trip to Washington, D.C., almost a year ago, when they’d been there for a round of conferences with Defense Department folk. The first time had been out of curiosity and lust. Now, alas, she was in love with the maniac. Oh, the hazards of the working life...

  Patricia Healy had received her doctorate in computer science from the University of Maryland after what seemed ages of schooling and student assistantships. When she graduated, it was almost as though the Defense Department had been waiting on her doorstep. Her principal areas of study matched perfectly the specifications of the sort of person they needed. How would you like to work for your country? She wasn’t sure about that, but she did like the salary they offered, and the possibility of travel—especially after a failed marriage to a bastard of a Georgetown law student, and years of being mired in electronic academia. She’d worked in the Pentagon a couple of years, where her work had come to the attention of Dr. John McKittrick, distinguished advisor of the Defense Department.

  Another job with a larger salary was offered. A move to Colorado Springs—the location of Cheyenne Mountain subterranean headquarters for the North American Air Defense Command—was made, and so here she was, protecting the continent and fooling around with her boss on the side.

  “Look, John, you’re a marvelous persuader,” she said. “You know you’ll do fine. So for heaven’s sake, stop worrying. You’re going to have those carefully tailored top-echelon Washington bureaucrats in your pocket.”

  “You know, you’re truly a beautiful woman.”

  “And do you love me more than your computers, John?” she asked playfully.

  He smiled and messed up her hair. “Sorry.” He took out another cigarette. “Make yourself up nice, okay? You’re the one who’s going to meet Cabot and Watson. I want you to soften them up with your feminine wiles.”

  “I thought you said that the forcefulness of your argument would be sufficient.”

  “My dear, I need my full complement of armament today... and you just happen to be my favorite deadly weapon.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said with a mock salute.

  Dr. John McKittrick, senior advisor to the U.S. Department of Defense, head of NORAD’s computer facility, sat alone in a conference room below a hollowed-out mountain, notes and documents spread out before him, waiting impatiently for the arrival of the men from Washington.

  Today could be the day he’d waited years for.

  Nervously, he checked to make sure he had the video tape of the interview with Captain Hallorhan, the man who’d just failed to carry out the fake command in his North Dakota Minuteman capsule. Statistics were, after all, just statistics. Having a tape of the guy would bring home forcefully to these men the danger of the situation—at which point helpful John A. McKittrick would trot out his simple, elegant solution.

  McKittrick went to a window and looked out over the myriad computer consoles and electronic maps of NORAD’s combat operations center. The Crystal Palace, they called it, and with good reason. Lights and silicon, silicon and shiny metal, shiny metal and electricity. This was the nerve center for the North American defense system. The one central point that controlled the whole shooting match: submarines and computers, computers and ICBMs, ICBMs and jet bombers... all carrying their deadly nuclear warheads—capable of destroying the world several times over.

  The NORAD command post had once been in a topside building in nearby Colorado Springs—highly vulnerable to enemy attack. In the early 1960s, Cheyenne Mountain was selected as the new base. Tunneling began. Soon there was room for a complex of fifteen steel buildings. This complex soon teemed with computers, communications gear, aerospace technicians and display screens keeping track of all air and space vehicles with sky-sweeping sensors and information from other bases, mobile and static, around the world.

  The complex also now housed NORAD’s Missile Warning and Space Operations Center, a U.S. office of the Civil Defense National Warning Center, and NORAD’s weather support unit. Some seventeen hundred members of the U.S. Navy, Air Force, and Army, along with civilian technicians and Canadian forces, kept the complex functioning on a twenty-four-hour-a-day basis.

  For McKittrick, it was home.

  He’d helped to design a lot of the computers. They were his children. His and Falken’s.

  Falken. McKittrick thought about Falken and he smiled to himself. I’ll show you, you stuck-up son of a bitch, he said to the memory. You just watch.

  Even now those men from Washington in their shiny black Lincoln were probably turning off Colorado Highway 115, making the three-and-a-half-mile, thousand-foot climb to NORAD’s entrance, seven thousand feet above sea level.

  Pat Healy would meet them at the security gate, distribute red ID tags to clip to their jackets. Then they would travel a third of a mile down a rock-walled tunnel into the man-made grottoes, then through two huge blast doors to the five-acre grid of the complex, each building sitting clear of the rock walls on massive hydraulic shock absorbers. The blast doors were over three feet thick, weighed twenty-five tons each, and were encased in concrete collars. Nonetheless, they could be opened or closed in thirty seconds. The first door IA as flush against the rock wal: so that the heat and blast from a nuclear warhead detonated outside would sweep past, down the tunnel, to exit on the south side of the mountain. There was enough stored food, water power, and air in the command post to last thirty days if they had to seal it off.

  McKittrick had a curiously ambiguous feeling of both safety and anxiety inside this monstrous monument to war. But still it seemed like home.

  He was readying the tape player when Pat Healy arrived with their guests. Her lithe brunette charm seemed to have escaped them—they seemed terribly preoccupied, and John McKittrick could not blame them.

  McKittrick was familiar with them both, having had correspondence with them and their subordinates. But due to their high ranking, he had never had direct contact. Certainly not a meeting like this one, with so much at stake.

  Arthur Cabot’s handshake was brisk and brief, as his eyes flicked across the consoles and the gigantic maps in the war room below them. “Good to finally meet you, McKittrick. Sorry this has to have such a formal setting.”

  He was a wrinkled fellow with a crew cut and a double chin. Leathery was the word that McKittrick would use to describe him. Tough and leathery... looking more like a grizzled tank comander than a bureaucrat. His assistant, Lyle Watson, shook hands smoothly, coolly, professionally. Thin and elegant, much younger than Cabot, the man was clearly more suited to playing the diplomat than his boss.

  “Gentlemen, please sit down,” said Pat Healy.

  “Yes. General Berringer should be here at any moment,” said McKittrick. “Pat, could you operate the VCR? I’ve already set it up.”

  “Ah! You have the tape we requested,” Cabot said, settling down at the conference table and pouring himself a glass of ice water.

  “Shipped here via courier,” McKittrick said. “A good sample of our problem, I think. Ah—here comes the general.”

  General Jack Berringer and his aide Dougherty made a brusque, unhappy entrance. A beefy man, Berringer grumped a reluctant greeting to McKittrick, then made a more formal greeting and introduction with their guests.

  The bastard knows exactly what I’m up to, McKittrick thought. But there was nothing he could do now to stop him.

  “Dr. McKittrick,” said Pat Healy. “I’m ready to roll.”
>
  “Gentlemen,” said McKittrick, sitting at the head of the table. “I think we all know why we’re here today, so we’ll dispense with the briefing. Let it suffice to say that a couple of weeks ago, a routine test of one of our missile commanders, one Captain Jerry Hallorhan of our North Dakota Minuteman silo complex, resulted in Captain Hallorhan’s failure to turn his launch key. The captain naturally has been suspended of that duty... and this tape was made of an interview with him by a trained Air Force psychiatrist.” McKittrick nodded to his assistant. “Pat—if you would.”

  A television monitor was turned on, revealing Captain Hallorhan, a man is his late thirties, muscular, seated in a chair against a blue background. The psychiatrist’s voice came from offscreen.

  “Have you ever knowingly caused the death of a human being?”

  Hallorhan licked his lips. “I was in Vietnam, sir. I participated in air strikes.”

  “But you were younger then... much younger,” said the psychiatrist.

  Hallorhan looked down at his shoes. “Why is this necessary? I know as an Air Force officer I am pledged by oath to accept without question whatever assignment I’m given. Up to this point, as my records show, I’ve always performed my duties without question.”

  “Then what do you think happened? You had absolutely no idea it was a test?”

  “No sir,” Hallorhan replied. “I thought it was a real strike. I just couldn’t make myself turn that key.”

  The psychiatrist said, “Maybe this time you considered the personal moral consequences... a sense of responsibility.. guilt?”

  “Maybe so,” Hallorhan said. “Maybe so.”

  Pat Healy rose and turned the sound down on the monitor.

  “The interview goes on for another half hour. Apparently this was a case of a man who had last-minute ethical problems. He’s not alone. There have been others who simply cannot turn the key... and they have no explanation why. It’s as though they freeze up.”

  General Berringer was puffing nervously on a cigar. Its plumes rose up, slowly spreading a bluish pall over the room. “This man is typical,” he said in a curt professional voice. “They all have excellent previous records. We just don’t pick them at random. It’s an honor to be a missile commandet “

  Cabot sat stiffly. His voice met General Berringer’s bluff attitude head on. “General, over twenty percent of your missilemen failed or, worse yet, refused to launch during the test, like this fellow here. I’d say that so-called honor has very little meaning.”

  Watson leaned back in the chair.

  “Failure to perform duties is a widespread malaise throughout the armed forces,” he spoke softly to McKittrick. “But the President is especially concerned about our ICBM capability.”

  McKittrick nodded. Yes, yes, and I’m the man to help you out, folks, he thought.

  Cabot said, “And we are here because the President wants a solution... an immediate solution. As you know, the President is not exactly a wimp on the subject of the imperatives of our nation’s defense.”

  “You can tell the President,” said General Berringer, “that I have ordered a complete review of screening procedures.” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and put his cigar down in an ashtray. “We’ve called in some big men from the Menninger Clinic.”

  McKittrick thought, Here we go. “Excuse me, General,” he said, “but I think that’s a total waste of time. You’ve picked good men. The problem is what we’re asking them to do.”

  Cabot glanced at his watch. “Look,” he said wearily. “We’ve got to be on a plane in less than an hour. I’m the one who has to explain to the President why twenty-two percent of his missile commanders failed to launch their missiles. What the hell am I gonna tell him—that twenty-two percent ain’t so bad? He’ll eat me up like a handful of jelly beans!”

  Berringer was flustered. “I’m sure that with the improved screening procedure—”

  “General,” said McKittrick, grabbing for his chance again. “I don’t think we can ask these men to go back to Washington with a bunch of headshrinking bullshit.” He turned to them all, pausing dramatically. “The problem is, you can’t screen out human responses. Those men down there know what turning that key means. What we’ve got to do, gentlemen, is to get those men out of the loop.”

  Berringer was furious. “You’re out of line, McKittrick!”

  But Cabot was suddenly perking up. He was clearly intrigued. You’ve got him hooked, thought McKittrick. “You mean, take the men out of the launch capsules?”

  McKittrick said, “Why not?”

  Berringer stood up, so upset he forgot his cigar. He wagged his finger at McKittrick. “We’ve had men in those silos protecting our country since before any of you were watching Howdy Doody. I sleep well at night knowing those boys are down there.”

  What an asshole, McKittrick thought. “General,” he countered, calmly and quietly, “they’re fine men, I agree with you there... but isn’t it just a big charade? I mean, all they’re supposed to do is turn those keys when the computer tells them to turn the keys.”

  “You mean when the President orders them to,” Watson corrected.

  “Well, yes,” McKittrick continued. “But in the event of a nuclear strike, the President would order us to follow the war plan generated by the computer:”

  Watson attempted sarcasm, "I imagine the Joint Chiefs would have some input.”

  Berringer grabbed onto that. “You’re damned right they would.”

  Cabot shook his head. “Not a lot, I’m afraid, in this age. If the Soviets launch a surprise attack, we don’t have much time.”

  Pat Healy looked up. “Twenty-three minutes from warning till impact. Ten to fifteen minutes if they’re sub-launched.”

  Good ole Pat, thought McKittrick. No wonder I love her. “Six minutes,” McKittrick said. “Just enough time for the President to make his decision... and then it’s all up to the computers.” He gave them his best sincere look. “Gentlemen, can you spare five minutes? Let me show you just how it would work.”

  Dr. John McKittrick walked among his machines like a proud father among children. Everyone else can hold a Rembrandt painting, or a Flaubert novel, or a Beethoven symphony as pieces of art, he thought, but one of these babies will do me just fine. A field of microchips and relays intricately patterned, meshed into intertwining mechanisms—monuments to genius that didn’t just sit there and be beautiful but worked.

  As they strode along a catwalk, Pat Healy obliged the guests with a tour-guide history of the facility. However, clearly their minds were not on history but rather on the huge banks of computers with their multicolored screens, their blinking lights, the miles and miles of circuitry. The odd technician scurried about like a worker ant in a gigantic hive, while computer men and scientists flipped switches or drank coffee or spoke into their wire headsets below gigantic Mercator maps of North America, of Russia, of China, of the world that glowed in this subterranean dimness, like neon signs in the Times Square night.

  “This way, please, gentlemen,” John McKittrick said, guiding his party toward a glass-walled anteroom. Yes, if they accepted his suggestions, finally there would be some true efficiency in the department. And finally he would prove to all these bullheaded military folk what his machines could do. “If you will just come with me up these steps. Ah, good. Richter is here. Gentlemen, Paul Richter is.another of my assistants. Usually you don’t work this time, do you, Paul? But I thought it would be wise to have him here to help explain.”

  Paul Richter was a sweatered, bespectacled man who looked like the archetypal Freudian psychiatrist, with his goatee and paunch. Nervously, he nodded to the important guests, then leaned against a large gray machine, the size of a VW bug, that flanked a whole lineup of computers.

  “Quite a bit of apparatus, Dr. McKittrick,” said Cabot, assaying the equipment.

  “Mr. Cabot, Mr. Watson, I presume you know how the information that we act on is obtained,” said McKittrick.

>   Cabot chuckled, loosening up a bit. “I believe that’s in our job description, isn’t it, Watson? Intelligence satellites, reconnaissance planes, reports for agents and stations...”

  “Quite an intricate network,” Watson put in.

  “Yes, and it all funnels in here, to this command post. It goes up on the maps...” He paused, then gestured to the banks of blinking lights and tapes that made up the bulk of the room. “These computers give us instant access to the state of the world. Troop movements... Soviet missile tests... shifting weather patterns—it all flows into this room”—he walked up to the gray machine where Richter stood fiddling with his black skinny tie—“and into this... the WOPR computer.”

  “WOPR?” asked Watson.

  “That’s War Operation Plan Response.” He turned to his assistant. “Mr. Richter, would you please tell them how it works.”

  A ghost of a smile crept to Richter’s lips, then vanished. “Well.” He cleared his voice, obviously more used to communing with computers than communicating with humans. “The WOPR spends its time thinking about World War III twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. It plays an endless series of war games, using all available information on the state of the world.”

  McKittrick continued. “The WOPR has already fought World War III as a game any number of times, estimating Soviet responses and so on. Then it looks for ways to improve its score in a real war. The point is, the key decisions about every conceivable option in a nuclear crisis have already been made by the WOPR. If the day ever comes when the President orders us to follow the plans, I want to make damn sure they’re carried out. The point is, this little baby is the best general we’ve got, the best wager of war. Should the awful event of a nuclear war be necessary, this fellow will be able to fight it with a great margin of hope for victory.”