The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

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 long distance 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 used
one of the Anik-series Canadian satellites and reached Alaska, Canada, and the
North-Central US reasonably well with its programming, which was mainly old
network shows.
The KOLD building had once been Denver's first network television station, and
was constructed in the pattern originally required by the Federal Communications
Commission in the 1930s: monolithic reinforced concrete, fit to survive an enemy
bomb attack – the specifications pre-dated nuclear weapons. The only windows
were in the executive offices on the south side of the building. It was ten
minutes after the event that someone passed by the open door of the program
manager. He stopped cold, turned and ran back to the newsroom. In another
minute, a cameraman entered onto the freight elevator that ran all the way to
the roof. The picture, hard-wired into the control room and then sent out on a
Ku-Band transmitter to the Anik satellite, which was untouched by earlier
events, broke into the reruns of The Adventures of Dobie Gillis across Alaska,
Montana, North Dakota, Idaho, and three Canadian provinces. In Calgary, Alberta,
a reporter for a local paper who'd never got over her crush on Dwayne Hickman
was startled by the picture and the voice-over, and called her city desk.
Her breathless report went out at once on the Reuters wire. Soon thereafter, CBC
uplinked the video to Europe on one of their unaffected Anik satellites.
By that time, the Denver FBI had a pair of men entering the KOLD building. They
laid down the law to a news crew that protested about the First Amendment of the
U.S. Constitution, which argument carried less weight than the men with guns who
shut the power down to their transmitter. The FBI agents at least apologized as
they did so. They needn't have bothered. What had been a fool's errand from the
beginning was already an exercise in futility.