//------------------------------// // Interlude: White Hot War // Story: On Getting to the Bottom of this "Equestrian" Business // by McPoodle //------------------------------// Interlude: White Hot War The Kremlin, June 19, 1985. Marshal Dimitri Ustinov, Minister of Defense for the Soviet Union, walked slowly down a random hallway, his attention centered on the contents of a manila folder. He was quickly joined by Grigory Romanov, the man responsible for coordinating the USSR’s industries and in particular, its military-industrial complex. He looked around to be sure they were alone before speaking. “Have you heard the latest about Andopov?” “No,” said Ustinov, not looking up. “Liposarcoma. Tumor bigger than a football. I got the lead surgeon to tell me everything. He’s got six months, at the most. Thinks he got it from observing nuclear tests.” Ustinov grunted before turning over a page in the folder. “Andropov used to go to every one of those tests in the Forties and Fifties, got far closer to Ground Zero than the scientists said was safe. It’s how he first came to Stalin’s attention. He owned his career to those tests. If he had been honest about his condition six months ago, we never would have elected him secretary general.” “Thanks to that economic report, Tikhonov is completely discredited. I think that opens a clear path for you to become Andropov’s successor.” Ustinov stopped for just a moment to think this over then resumed walking. “Gorbachev has a substantial following.” “Gorbachev is weak,” insisted Romanov. “And he seems just as flummoxed about Far Shooter as the rest of us.” He pulled a paperback out of his coat pocket and placed it in the open folder. “If you started predicting and countering his moves, that should be enough to guarantee the election.” Ustinov picked up the book. “The Elements of Harmony,” he read aloud in English. “The holy book of the Markists?” “Closest thing they have to one,” explained Romanov. Ustinov stopped, tucked the folder under one arm, and hefted the book in his free hand before flipping through the pages. “Doesn’t look that bad. You know, I made myself read the entire Quran before we invaded Afghanistan. Wanted to have a better understanding of the people I’d be dealing with. But I’m perfectly happy where I am. Why don’t you go after the position yourself? You’ve got more than enough ideas on how to run the Union.” “I’m a Romanov,” the other man said with a shrug. “There’s no way that a Romanov will ever be trusted with supreme power in Russia ever again. And besides—” Hearing footsteps approaching, the two men ceased their semi-treasonous talk of replacing Andropov. Ustinov slipped the suspect book he had been given into his coat pocket. After a few seconds, the pair was approached by Andrei Gromyko (Minister of Foreign Affairs) and Viktor Chebrikov (Andropov’s successor as head of the KGB, a big step up from being a glorified messenger boy just the day before). “Greetings, comrades,” said Chebrikov. “Greetings,” Romanov replied, with a nod of the head. “Congratulations on your new position.” “I will do my utmost to be worthy of it. So, have you heard the news about our dear Secretary-General?” “Not too bad, I hope?” Romanov asked, his face a perfect projection of hope. “Not good—he’s in a medically induced coma,” said Gromyko. “We’ll know the exact diagnosis tomorrow. It’s a bad piece of timing. Have you heard the latest about Far Shooter?” “What did he do now?” Romanov asked. “He’s been shot.” “Shot?!” Romanov and Ustinov exclaimed in unison. “Yes, he is currently under observation. His bodyguards did an excellent job; he was only grazed across the temple. Actually, the blow to his head when he fell was more severe—there’s some talk of possible brain damage.” “Who was responsible?” asked Romanov, before turning to Chebrikov. “Were we behind it?” Chebrikov laughed. “If the KGB wanted to take out the American president, we’d be fools not to take care of the vice president at the same time. No, this was an American lone wolf, an anti-Markist fanatic who got lucky.” “Why would we need to take out the Vice President?” asked Romanov. “Because he’s One Bush,” answered Chebrikov, “the former director of the CIA, and the one Markist in government more virulently anti-Communist than the President.” “His name is actually ‘One Bush’?” asked Marshal Ustinov. “That’s nothing,” said Gromyko. “He has three sons with names just as odd. All together they are One Bush, Two Bush, Red Bush and Blue Bush. I hear that Blue Bush is rather the odd duck of the family.” “I’ll never understand this Markist business for as long as I live,” said Chebrikov. An awkward moment of silence enveloped the quartet, during which Ustinov unconsciously reached down and patted the pocket containing The Elements of Harmony. “So,” Gromyko finally said, pointing at Ustinov’s folder. “Have you got any news for us, or is that classified?” “Oh!” Ustinov exclaimed, looking down at it. “NATO is conducting a training exercise in the north Pacific—the largest gathering of ships and personnel in military history.” “A ‘training exercise’?!” exclaimed Romanov. “Do the Americans think we are stupid? Do they think we have forgotten that just such a ‘training exercise’—Operation Barbarossa—was how Adolf Hitler disguised his invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941?” The war survivor slammed a fist into his hand. “Not this time, not this time!” Marshal Ustinov nodded in agreement before continuing. “Obviously, the clear goal of this exercise is to provoke our military into doing something stupid—they are sending their fighter jets right up to the border of our airspace before turning around at the last possible second, over and over again.” He pointed to one particular photograph. “We have definite proof that they flew over the Kurile Islands last night, ‘by accident’.” “How do you plan to respond?” asked Gromyko. “I’ll propose to the Politburo that we send the exact same number and corresponding type of aircraft over the Aleutian Islands,” Ustinov replied. “Sounds reasonable,” said Romanov. “Furthermore,” Ustinov said, pointing at a photograph of an aircraft carrier covered with a tarp, “America is shipping new Pershing II missiles to Western Europe, missiles capable of destroying any of our missile silos or command bunkers in the western Soviet Union within six minutes of being launched, and able to be relocated at will, and be launched within minutes of that relocation.” The photograph had the stamp “RYaN” in the corner. “We…we can’t counter that,” said Chebrikov in shock. “America won’t even need S.D.I. to win the war now. An American first strike is guaranteed to succeed.” “And this is the moment when our leadership is paralyzed, and theirs is run by a war fanatic,” concluded Romanov. “Face it, comrades: the Cold War has suddenly become hot—thoroughly white hot.” & & & The near-incursions of Soviet airspace continued long into the night of June 19th. High above, a network of satellites known as Oko (Russian for “Eye”) monitored the airspace above America for the telltale infrared signature of a nuclear launch. The satellites, like the rest of the Soviet space program, operated as much on willpower as solid engineering. The network took a decade from conception to become operational, and were plagued with bugs, mostly of the computer variety in the monitoring stations outside Moscow and near the Pacific coast, but those were all fixed now. But there was one bug that had not manifested before the night of June 19th, a bug caused by sunlight reflecting off the tops of high-altitude clouds over North Dakota at precisely the wrong angle. Receiving the data from those satellites was another network, this one of bunkers dug far beneath the earth of both cities and farmland. Each bunker was a tiny bastion of bureaucratic conformity: the same clean walls and standardized prints of quiet landscapes, the same brands of state-built heaters and air conditioners to warm or cool, the same color of blue-white fluorescent light. Inside these rooms were clean-shaven men with white collars and perfectly-trimmed nails, men trained to be quiet and follow the one supreme order: to answer missile with missile, to use Mutually-Assured Destruction to guarantee the peace. The American network of underground bunkers was developed independently, but was almost entirely identical to the Soviet network. Stanislav Petrov, a 45-year old lieutenant colonel from Vladivostok, was the officer on duty at the Moscow bunker just after midnight—4 pm in North Dakota—when the Oko network announced that the Americans had just launched a missile over the North Pole towards the Soviet Union, accompanied by the loud howl of a warning klaxon. The computer network reported that the chance that this was a legitimate launch was 100%, after going through 30 levels of cross-checking. There was no way this was a fault of the bunker computers. Petrov stared long and hard at this display. A first strike—the beginning of the end of the world—that consisted of only one missile. A missile that would strike its target in 35 minutes. There were only two ways to validate the data from Oko: visual confirmation from Oko’s cameras, or ground radar. The pictures relayed by the satellites showed random sparkles and glare from the late afternoon American sun, but no telltale puffs of smoke from a launch. But the pictures were low resolution, easy to misread—in short, fallible. Ground radar was not, but ground radar couldn’t see over the horizon. Petrov switched off the alarm as the other men in the bunker stared at him. He stood there in the tense silence and waited, and waited, for better pictures from Oko, for radar confirmation, his hand resting on the phone to Central Command. One call, and the Soviet war machine would awaken, answering that lone missile with thousands of theirs. Then the alarm went off again. There was a second missile, followed by a third, a fourth and a fifth. The new missiles had all been launched from the same location in North Dakota. The phone rang. It was Marshal Ustinov himself, and he wanted to know whether this was an actual attack or not. It still didn’t make sense to Petrov—why only five missiles? He thought about how much damage five missiles would cause: hundreds of deaths, a handful of Soviet missile silos incapacitated. And then he thought about the damage that would be caused by the entire Soviet arsenal, even if the Americans never launched another missile after those five: hundreds of millions of deaths in a matter of seconds, the planet permanently poisoned. The Soviet Union victorious, only to slide into radiation poisoning and death within a decade. He calmly told the Marshal that it was a bug, despite the fact this bug appeared to be impossible. The klaxons rang around him, but Petrov stood his ground. Finally, fifteen minutes later, the ground radar network failed to pick up any of the North Dakotan missiles. And five minutes after that, the missiles disappeared from Oko’s sensors. The sun had moved just enough to remove the reflections. They were just a bug. The next day, Marshal Ustinov signed the paperwork firing Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov and smearing his reputation so badly that nobody would ever believe anything he said ever again. Of course he signed it. If the Politburo was unwilling to admit that their supreme leader was in a coma that he was never going to awaken from, they weren’t about to admit, to their own people or to the world, that their vaunted early warning system could be fooled by some rogue clouds. “In the old days, we would have had him sent to the gulags,” groused Romanov when Ustinov told him the story. “Yes, yes,” agreed Ustinov wearily. “But you still have a long-term problem. A tried and true Communist Party member failed to recommend war out of cowardice.” “The problem is that a man has to choose to start war,” said Ustinov. “I’m having devices installed in all of our monitoring bunkers, to invert the decision. When the right conditions are met, they will automatically start the countdown to launch, and it will be up to the bunker officers to countermand that decision if it is mistaken—and face the consequences. The system should be in place before the Pershing II missiles are installed.” “Congratulations!” Romanov exclaimed, slapping Ustinov on the back. “With these machines, we finally have a counter to the inevitable American first strike! They’ll never know what hit them!” “Yes, yes, of course,” Ustinov mumbled in reply. That night, Marshall Ustinov picked up the Quran for the first time since 1979, and started reading passages at random. He told himself he did it because he needed something boring to fall asleep to. The next day, he started reading The Elements of Harmony.