The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

'General!' a major called to him.
'What is it?'
'Picking up some radio and microwave chatter. First guess is that Ivan's
alerting his missile regiments. Ditto in some naval bases. Flash traffic
outbound from Moscow.'
'Christ!' Borstein lifted his phone again.
***
'Never done it?' Elliot asked.
'Strange but true,' Borstein said. 'Even during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the
Russians never put their ICBMs on alert.'
'I don't believe it,' Fowler snorted. 'Never?'
'The General's right,' Ryan said. 'The reason is that their telephone system
historically has been in pretty bad shape. I guess they've finally gotten it
fixed enough – '
'What do you mean?'
'Mr President, God is in the details. You send alert messages by voice – we do
it that way, and so do the Soviets. The Russian phone system stinks, and you
don't want to use a flukey system for orders of that importance. That's why
they've been investing so much money in fixing it up, just as we have invested a
lot in our command-and-control-systems. They use a lot of fiber-optic cable now,
just like we do, plus a whole new set of microwave relays. That's how we're
catching it,' Jack explained. 'Scatter off the microwave repeaters.'
'Another couple of years, they'll be fully fiber-optic, and we wouldn't have
known,' General Fremont added. 'I don't like this.'
'Neither do I,' Ryan said, 'but we're at DEFCON-TWO also, aren't we?'
'They don't know that. We didn't tell them that,' Liz Elliot said.
'Unless they're reading our mail. I've told you we have reports that they've
penetrated our cipher systems.'
'NSA says you're crazy.'
'Maybe I am, but NSA's been wrong before, too.'
'What do you think Narmonov's mental state is?'
As scared as I am? Ryan wondered. 'Sir, there's no telling that.'
'And we don't even know if it's really him,' Elliot put in.
'Liz, I reject your hypothesis,' Jack snapped over the conference line. 'The
only thing you have to support it comes from my agency, and we have our doubts
about it.' Christ, I'm sorry I ever took that report in, he told himself.
'Cut that out, Ryan!' Fowler snarled back. 'I need facts, not arguments now,
okay?'
'Sir, as I keep pointing out, we do not as yet have sufficient information on
which to base any decision.'
'Balls,' the colonel next to General Fremont said.
'What do you mean?' CINC-SAC turned away from the speaker-phone.
'Dr Elliot is right, Sir. What she said earlier makes sense.'
'Mr President,' they heard a voice say. 'We have a Hot Line transmission coming
in.'
***
PRESIDENT FOWLER: