In Atlanta CDC–Center for Disease Control — another skull-and-crossbones pin, this one for the state of New York, was stuck into the map of the United States. There were now twenty-three pins clustered along the eastern seaboard, near Chicago and the Midwest, the others sprinkled throughout California, the major clusters of “stings,” meaning five or more acts of sabotage, in Silicone Valley, the site of some of the country’s leading electronic defense system manufacturers.
What was first thought to be only a New York problem because of the sabotage of Croton, Hillsview, and the other main reservoirs for New York, affecting eleven million people, was now a national crisis, affecting seventy-two million. Over a thousand cases of “arson” had been reported — many of the fires impossible to extinguish by water from city reservoirs because the water, once evaporated, left lethal residues of airborne poison. All but two of the twenty-three cities, Salt Lake City and Portland, declared martial law and curfews in an effort to contain growing crowds clamoring for water supplies. In Norfolk, Virginia, and in Puget Sound, north of Seattle, at the Bangor Sub Base, several nuclear submarines in for maintenance were ordered to stay in port, their salt/freshwater converters providing emergency drinking water for households with a ration of two gallons of water per day for a family of four.
National Guard units throughout the country on “shoot-to-kill” orders surrounded distilleries and bottled water depots, and in Colorado, more Guard units were deployed to turn back ad hoc convoys of armed civilians heading for Aspen and other winter resorts where fresh snow had not yet melted down into the contaminated water tables. Atlanta CDC issued a national alert — so urgent that it could not wait for the chiefs of staff’s normal clearance and so was disseminated under President Mayne’s “Executive Order” signature. The CDC alert was a warning that because of the poisoning that by now had been conveyed via myriad underground aquifers into the major U.S. water tables, “no water other than rainwater directly trapped by uncontaminated vessels would be safe” for at least three months. When President Mayne realized the enormity of the problem, he knew he was confronted by a danger whose implications posed a greater threat to the public than that posed to Lincoln during the threat of disunion. Already looting and attendant crime were the worst they had ever been.
As the president moved from his White House work study around to the Oval Office to address the nation, the kleig lights seemed to stun him momentarily and he used his notes, with Xeroxes of the Atlanta CDC crisis map, to shield himself from the glare.
“How long have we got?” he asked Trainor, who was grumpily telling the CBS mobile crew to clear the hallway.
“Six minutes, Mr. President,” Trainor replied.
As he raised his cup of coffee seconds before going on national TV to try to calm the nation, Mayne looked at the black liquid and put the cup down.
“It’s been tested, Mr. President,” an aide informed him. “Washington’s supply hasn’t been affected — so far.”
“Why not?” he asked. “Surely the capital would be the prime target?”
“We think,” suggested Trainor, “it’s a message. U.S. leadership can survive if it comes to terms.”
“With what? Chemical warfare?” snapped Mayne.
“With their terms,” responded Trainor.
One of the TV crew stepped forward beneath the kleig lights and put a glass of water on the president’s desk. There were ten seconds to go. “Take it away,” said Mayne, indicating the glass. “Can’t show that on television. Cause a goddamn revolution!”
“Get it away!” hissed the TV producer. The red light turned green.
Unbeknownst to President Mayne as he began his speech, red lights all across the frozen tundra of northern Canada and Alaska came on in every one of NORAD’s — North American Air Defense — early-warning stations reporting “Bogeys, fifty plus.”
It was the third time that week that NORAD jets, engines constantly warmed in the hardened snow-white hangars, scrambled to meet the Soviet bombers who, with all Canadian and American F-18s airborne, turned back before they reached the BI — Baffin Island — circle. Duty officers were watching the operators as much as the big screens. This game of cat and mouse, constantly testing each other’s state of readiness, did much more than tell the other side whether you were ready or not, forcing the NORAD fighters to gulp thousands of gallons of precious fuel during each scramble. It also wore down the nerves of potential attackers and defenders alike, especially those of radar operators on the NORAD line, any one of whose “yea” or “nay” could inadvertently start the chain of events catapulting both sides into all-out nuclear war.
Trainor read the message handed him by the TV producer. Ahead of the Pentagon, the wire services were reporting ten massive forest fires, apparently deliberately set and now raging on the north-south spine of the Sierra Nevada, causing the evacuation of over thirty communities and producing a thick pall of smoke and ash over ten thousand square miles in the western United States. As Trainor walked quietly back to the White House press room, he glanced at the monitor, ever conscious of the president’s appearance as well as what he was saying. But in this crisis, Trainor knew that it hardly mattered what the president looked like so long as he projected calm— and did not come across as being as stressed out as he was.
Hearing the president’s speech en route to Washington, D.C., on Eastern Airlines flight 147 out of San Diego, Frank Shirer, who had been dreaming of Lana, now had a fairly good idea of why he, as one of the top five American aces, had been recalled. What bothered him, however, was that if SAC had recalled him to pilot one of the two “Looking Glass” twenty-four-hour command planes, each E-48 with fifty battle staff and communications experts, a week before the president’s speech, then things must be much worse now. Or perhaps he hadn’t been recalled to fly Looking Glass at all.
Perhaps, Shirer flattered himself, the president, like the country’s chief executives before him, wanted a firsthand account of exactly what the precarious Aleutians campaign was like.
Within a few minutes of touching down at Dulles International in Washington, D.C, Shirer would learn he was wrong on both counts.
The sixteen SPETS who carried out the sabotage in New York were among the first citizens to support the president, and joined crowds in burning effigies of Premier Suzlov outside the now boarded-up though still guarded Soviet Embassy. In the next twenty-four hours, more than three thousand reports of sabotage poured in, the most hysterical callers screaming about the vulnerability of the country’s nuclear power plants, which had already been placed under heavy protection by National Guard units.
In Detroit it was reported that large concentrations of deadly PCBs, once used in old electric power station generators, had been dumped into Detroit’s, and on the Canadian side, Windsor’s, water supply. A bottler of “mountain-fresh water” in Cleveland, Ohio, was arrested when tests showed he’d been bottling water that had been contaminated by highly toxic PCBs.