CHAPTER TWENTY
The five men who sat facing one another in the Oval Office of the White House were grim and unsmiling. President Vaughan Nash kept his eyes fixed on the desk in front of him while he allowed time for the full effect of the news to sink in. CIM Secretary Irwin Schroder and ISA Director-General John Belford exchanged heavy glances while Krantz and Linsay remained silent and expressionless. Belford had just announced that a security-coded signal, decipherable only by him personally, had been received one hour previously from Janus. It had been sent by the commander of the small team of handpicked Air Force technical specialists who had gone up to Janus a month earlier posing as an ISA support group. The signal was brief—in fact it decoded into just one word: springbok. This was the code word that meant Omega had been successfully installed and checked without complications.
Omega—a fifty-megaton thermonuclear bomb concealed at a strategic point in a virtually inaccessible part of Janus’s structure and wired for remote detonation by a command beamed from Earth. Omega—the final letter of the Greek alphabet; the final resort should all else fail.
Only a handful of people apart from the five men gathered in the Oval Office were aware that precautions this extreme had been taken. Three coded keys, each generated separately by a randomizing computer, were needed in combination to unlock the device before it could detonate. Nash alone knew one of those commands; only Schroder knew the second, and Belford the third. Should any one of them be unable to participate for any reason, his deputy could, in precisely defined circumstances, obtain the code and learn of its purpose by opening an electronically sealed order. Omega could be activated only if and when all three accepted that an emergency of sufficient seriousness had arisen and that all other means of dealing with it had proved ineffective. Nobody knew what form such an emergency might conceivably take, but Janus was full of unknowns. The possibility that Omega might be necessary had to be faced. Should a situation arise for which Omega was the only solution, the consequences of not having Omega to fall back on would be incalculably worse than the world outrage that would almost certainly follow its being used. Were that not so, Omega would never have been devised in the first place.
At length Nash looked up and read the faces around him.
“I know it’s sick,” he said in a quiet but firm voice. “But it has to be. If it’s never used, then no harm can come of it. If it has to be used, then the whole experiment will have avoided something happening worldwide one day that we wouldn’t have been able to stop. Sometimes a few lives have to be gambled to protect many. At least these people are going through their own choice and they know it’s not intended as a picnic. A lot of others in history didn’t have the choice.”
“It’s okay for us to talk like that,” Schroder reminded him. “But Melvin and Mark are the only two of us who will actually be there. They’ll be the only two people on Janus who know about it. That’s a hell of a lonely position to be in.” He made the remark more from respect for the two who were going despite what they knew, rather than to say something that everybody in the room didn’t already know. Krantz and Linsay, of course, had a choice too. Nash looked at them as if inviting them to reaffirm the views that they had first expressed months before, when the question of Omega was first debated.
“It’s a soldier’s job,” Linsay said stiffly. “You can’t pick and choose. You take whatever comes with the job.”
Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton—Cassino, Normandy, the Ardennes—Linsay had studied them all and relived time and time again in the private world of his fantasies the days when generals commanded mighty armies and pitted themselves against worthy opponents. A man could prove himself to himself then. What was there to test the mettle of the warrior today? Endless ceremonial parades and occasional show-the-flag police expeditions to disarm a rabble of undisciplined savages or chase a few bandits away from unheard-of villages in unpronounceable places. And even then, the restrictions imposed by nervous diplomats on initiative and anything that might have called for even the rudiments of true generalship made the whole thing more like a college football match, except that the rules applied to one side only.
But to face an adversary unlike any faced before by any general in history—a real adversary for whom there were no rules. This was the battle for which destiny had shaped Mark Linsay. If Omega were ever needed he would have failed. To fail and die locked to the end in mortal combat would at least be more honorable than to return defeated. Either way he would go down in history as the first military commander to fight not for a religious emblem, a national flag or an ideological creed, but for the whole of his race.
Nash nodded and turned his eyes toward Krantz. Krantz shrugged and smiled contemptuously.
“You all know my feelings on the matter,” he said. “There is not the remotest possibility of the situation escalating to the point where something as drastic as Omega will ever have to be considered. The whole thing is a gross and ugly exaggeration—a product of the paranoia bred into the military mind or the politician’s compulsive addiction to insecurity.” He clapped the palms of his hands down onto his knees in a gesture of finality. “Omega will never be used. Therefore I do not take it into account as a factor in making my decision. After the experiment has been concluded the device will be quietly dismantled and the whole shoddy episode buried somewhere in the classified archives. The only effect it will have had will be to leave a sour taste in all our mouths. That’s all I have to say.”