Forrester nodded. In the hall mirror he glimpsed his own face and saw the hard glitter of the yellow-flecked eyes. “You had to see that for yourself, Top. The Agency is already looking for Belsky and maybe they’ll find him and maybe they won’t. I don’t think we’d improve the chances of finding him by telling the Agency what we know. It would increase the risk of exposure without increasing the chance of success.”

“But you’re ready to let me walk out the door anyhow and call them if I want to, if I think it has to be done. Why? Because I’ve got Les’s gun in my pocket?”

“No. Because it has to be your decision, not mine.”

“I don’t see that,” Spode said.

“If you thought you could head off a world war by walking out that door, and if I told you not to walk out that door, and if I told you I was right and you were wrong and by walking out that door you would be starting a world war, not stopping one, and if after all that you were still dead certain you could prevent war by walking out that door, what would you do?”

“Hell, I’d walk out the door.”

“Then if I meant to keep you here against your own judgment I’d have to kill you, wouldn’t I. Because if you thought the fate of the world was at stake you’d take every chance to get away and spread the alarm. The only way I could insure your silence permanently would be to kill you.”

Spode was watching him with fascinated alarm. Forrester said, “It simply isn’t in me to kill you, Top, and that’s why it has to be your own decision.”

There was a long interval with the rain clattering on the porch steps and thunder crashing around the house and finally Top said, “Christ people are always after me to make the stinking decisions.”

“It’s up to you. I can’t decide for you.” Forrester walked away from him, toward Ronnie.

Spode said, “There’s the alternative. Bring Ronnie around. She’s the only thing we have to get close to the rest of them. Try ammonia. Slap her if you have to.”

Forrester looked up and saw Spode belting the slicker on.

Forrester’s head dipped. “You’re going, then.”

“Not to blow the whistle.”

“Then where?”

“Outside. On the hill. I’ll dig a hole for Les. If I bury him before it quits raining the storm should wash away the signs of digging. All right?”

Forrester inhaled deeply and slowly, let it out tightly and said, “All right.”

Chapter Nineteen

Lieutenant Colonel Fred Winslow left his underground headquarters at four o’clock Saturday afternoon and said to the First Lieutenant in the Outer office, “Just going to have a look around. Page me on the PA system if I’m needed.”

“Yes, sir. You’re not going off the base.”

“That’s right,” Winslow replied dismally and went out into the corridor. To his left it sloped upward toward the above-ground entrance a hundred yards and two forty-five-degree bends away. He turned to the right, into the long ringing concrete tunnel that went nearly three hundred yards to the hub from which a spider of side tunnels gave access to the several ROG commands and beyond them the silos. Enlisted men in hard hats saluted him as they went by, holding their ID badges ready for the checkpoints. It was hermetically cool and dry but sweat rolled freely along his flushed face and dark circles stained the armpits of his shirt. Fatigue was gritty in his eyes; he walked flatfooted, his physical exhaustion compounded by the strain. Twenty-six and a half hours yet to go; he popped a go-pill into his mouth, knowing it would make his tongue dry and screw his nerves to a jittery tautness, knowing he would need more pills before it was done, knowing he would survive them (if he survived nothing else) because gradually he was learning that he was capable of doing and suffering things he could barely imagine.

At the door to the Communications Center he plucked his shirt away from his chest and plugged his ID card into the KMS machine and when the door clicked he went inside and nodded to the sentry.

Eight enlisted men manned the phones and radios and although only one of them had had significance for him before today, he now knew that all eight of them were Amergrad alumni. At the end of the narrow chamber the small steel door stood open so that he saw the tangle of cables and wires in the service tunnel beyond. Ludlum had his head in the doorway but the sentry spoke and Ludlum’s back registered Winslow’s presence; Ludlum straightened up, turned and grinned at him with the satisfaction of a workman whose hands were turning out a good job. He had been given an order and he was doing a superb job of carrying it out and that was all that ever mattered.

Ludlum hitched at his trousers with the flats of his wrists and beckoned. “Come have a look.”

Winslow made his way between the radiomen’s stools and when Ludlum climbed into the service tunnel Winslow followed him, folding his body over to fit through the small doorway.

Six men were at work with oxyacetylene torches, cutters, pliers, screwdrivers, soldering guns, wires and cables insulated in plastic of various hues. The smell of the sweat of the men’s tension reeked in the air. One man was canted vertiginously over a bracing strut, reaching and pulling at a cable; Winslow heard gristle snap in the man’s shoulder and saw a drop of sweat drip from the man’s nose onto the knotted wiring below. The men were amorphous shapes in the strange light: the tunnel had ceiling fixtures but the workmen had augmented them with battery floods to get cross-lighting that would mat out the confusion of sharp wire shadows.

“We’re fat on it,” Ludlum said. “Christ it pays to be prepared. Like Boy Scouts, hey Fred? See, the hot-line phones come in right through here along with all the rest of the communications. Those co-ax cables there. We’re taking our time, splicing and tapping into all the phone lines. We’ve got room enough to post our own dummy NORAD and hot-line operators in here when the time comes—they’ll sound exactly as if they’re in Colorado Springs and Washington. We’ve got plenty of time and I don’t figure to cut the real lines until the very last minute. Der Tag. Nobody’s going to have a clue beforehand and nobody’s going to have time to get suspicious once the party starts.”

“What about incoming calls?”

“We’ll be plugged into those too. Our operators will answer as if everything was normal down here. It’s no sweat, Nick got us the codes and signals right on schedule this morning.”

“Isn’t it a bigger headache cutting off the radio net?”

“Not as bad as it looks. It all goes out on underground antenna wire to aerials above ground. Christ some of those outside aerials are forty miles from here so communications won’t get cut off if there’s a direct hit topside. But nobody ever thought about cutting off communications this side of the aerials. Why should they? So we can cut into all the antenna wires right in this tunnel; that’s the beauty of it. We hook into the relay-signal boosters and use the boosters as if they were primary sending and receiving stations. The operators won’t be picking up or sending a single legitimate message on those radios, but they’ll never know it because they’ll be receiving from us and sending to us. When we’re ready to go tomorrow night we just throw a switch and it disconnects everything and the whole wing’s isolated totally from the outside world—without knowing it.”

“How about contact with Dangerfield?”

“I’ve already tested it and it works fine. He’ll be close enough to use a walkie-talkie and at this end we’ll be receiving through one of the aerials we’ve cut off from the rest of the base.”

“In other words the line of contact goes from Dangerfield to you, and then there’s a break, and then it goes from you to me. So you’ll have to relay orders to me?”