The sum of all fears - Tom Clancy [393]
"Good idea," Narmonov thought. "Make it so," he ordered Defense.
"We will soon hear from the Americans on the Hot Line," Narmonov said. "What will they say?"
"That is hard to guess, but whatever it is, we should have a reply ready for them, just to settle things down, to make sure they know we had nothing to do with it."
Narmonov nodded. That made good sense. "Start working on it."
The Soviet defense-communications agency operators grumbled at the signal they'd been ordered to dispatch. For ease of transmission, the meat of the signal should have been contained in a single five-letter code group that could be transmitted, decrypted, and comprehended instantly by all recipients, but that was not possible now. The additional sentences had to be edited down to keep the transmission from being too long. A major did this, got it approved by his boss, a Major General, and sent it out over no less than thirty communications links. The message was further altered to apply to specific military services.
The Admiral Lunin had only been on her new course for five minutes when a second ELF signal arrived. The communications officer fairly ran into the control room with it.
GENERAL ALERT LEVEL TWO. THERE HAS BEEN A NUCLEAR DETONATION OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN IN THE UNITED STATES. AMERICAN STRATEGIC AND CONVENTIONAL FORCES HAVE BEEN ALERTED FOR POSSIBLE WAR. ALL NAVAL FORCES WILL SORTIE AT ONCE. TAKE ALL NECESSARY PROTECTIVE MEASURES.
"Has the world gone mad?" the captain asked the message. He got no reply. "That's all?"
"That is all, no cueing to put the antenna up."
"These are not proper instructions," Dubinin objected. " 'All necessary protective measures'? What do they mean by that? Protecting ourselves, protecting the Motherland - what the hell do they mean?"
"Captain," the Starpom said, "General Alert Two carries its own rules of action."
"I know that," Dubinin said, "but do they apply here?"
"Why else would the signal have been sent?" A Level Two General Alert was something unprecedented for the Soviet Military. It meant that the rules of action were not those of a war but not those of peace either. Though Dubinin, like every other Soviet ship captain, fully understood his duties, the implications of the order seemed far too frightening The thought passed, however. He was a naval officer. He had his orders. Whoever had given those orders must have understood the situation better than he. The commanding officer of the Admiral Lunin stood erect and turned to his second-in-command. "Increase speed to twenty-five knots. Battle stations."
It happened just as fast as men could move. The New York FBI office, set in the Jacob Javits Federal Office Building on the southern end of Manhattan, dispatched its men north, and the light Sunday traffic made it easy. The unmarked but powerful cars screamed uptown to the various network headquarters buildings. The same thing happened in Atlanta, where agents left the Martin Luther King Building for CNN Headquarters. In each case, no fewer than three agents marched into the master control rooms and laid down the law: nothing from Denver would go out. In no case did the network employees know why this was so, they were so busy trying to reestablish contact. The same thing happened in Colorado, where, under the direction of Assistant Special-Agent-in-Charge Walter Hoskins, the local field division's agents invaded all the network affiliates, and the local phone company, where they cut all longdistance lines over the furious objections of the Bell employees. But Hoskins had made one mistake. It came from the fact that he didn't watch much television.
KOLD was an independent station that was also trying to become a superstation. Like TBS, WOR, and a few others, it had its own satellite link to cover a wide viewing area. A daring financial gamble, it had not yet paid off for the investors who were running the station on a highly leveraged shoestring out of an old and almost windowless building northeast of the city. The station