"You'll see," Buell said. He had a lukewarm smile.
The redhead was exuding from a shiny lame swimsuit.
"What will I see?" she asked.
"Do you like mushrooms?"
"Only to chew, not to eat," she said.
"Good. You're going to be seeing a lot of them over the horizon. Great effects. Multicolored clouds. Sunrises all over."
The redhead inhaled a string of white powder. Abner Buell had the best cocaine on the Coast. He never used it; it bored him.
"You ought to try this. This is mean mother coke," said the model.
"Won't be time for that," Buell said. He was sure they would be able to see the naval base at San Diego go up in an intense orange ball.
In Michenko's missile station, World War III was getting under way. All the buttons went, one after another, triggering other stations in an entire massive Russian response. Automatically, the first and second waves of missiles were ignited, their loads of death primed and ready. Michenko poured flagons of vodka for every man in the station, then pressed the fire button.
He led a toast to Mother Russia. He drank to the people of their great country. He drank to the Communist party. He even drank to the old czars.
Then a sergeant spoke up.
"Shouldn't we have felt the ground shiver from the thrust of the rockets?"
"I don't feel anything," said a lieutenant. "I haven't since the first toast."
"But, comrade lieutenant, I remember when we all fired the practice missile into the Pacific."
"The one that landed in the Antarctic?"
"Yes, comrade officer. The one aimed at the Pacific."
"Yes. I remember."
"Well, the ground shook," the sergeant said.
"Yes, it shook. Our boosters are powerful. Russia is powerful."
"But we just fired all our rockets and we didn't feel one little shake," the sergeant said nervously.
The officer slapped the sergeant.
"Are you saying we failed our duty?"
"No, comrade lieutenant. We never failed our duty. The Jews failed us. The Germans failed us," said the sergeant, referring to the purge from the Missile Command of any Russian who had German or Jewish lineage. They were considered untrustworthy to defend Mother Russia. Only White Russians operated the missile bases.
"That's possible," said the lieutenant.
"They didn't go off," said Marshal Michenko. "They didn't go off."
He attempted to reach Moscow again. There was an answer this time. No, there had been no attack on Moscow, and no, there were no orders to fire missiles. Why? Had any been fired?
Michenko sent officers out to the silos. They peered into each one.
"No. Not one has been fired," Michenko was able to report.
Nor had the other nineteen main bases fired a missile.
The horror of it struck home.
The main wave of Russia's missile defense did not work.
A major strategic decision now faced the leaders in the Kremlin.
When they had shot down the Korean passenger liner over eastern Russia, they had signaled a warning four times to the airplane. Four different radio stations had warned the passenger jet. Unfortunately, the four different stations had used Russian radios and it wasn't until the aircraft had been shot down that the Russian commanders had realized that the Koreans weren't ignoring the commands; they just hadn't received them.
The question then for Russia was whether to admit the weakness of their instruments or to accept the moral outrage of the world. That was a simple question and the Kremlin decided immediately to let the world believe it had coldly blown three hundred civilians from the skies with no provocation.
But this was a harder decision to make.
They could let the missiles sit uselessly in the silos and let the world keep believing that Russia still had the capability of using them.
Or they could fix them. If they fixed them, the Americans might find out something was wrong. If they didn't fix them, the Americans might still find out, and then everyone could kiss foreign policy good-bye.
They decided to fix.
And in the crisis, they needed people totally familiar with the American technology they had stolen. There was only one country to turn to.
The Japanese had three hundred technicians in Moscow by midnight. Not only could they guarantee that the missiles would work, but they were willing to redesign the silos and make construction cheaper and upgrade the nuclear fallout to include such virulent carbon poisons that even plants wouldn't grow in America for two hundred years.
They demanded a fast answer from the Russians, because the leaders of their delegation had to return to Japan to prepare Hiroshima Day, protesting America's use of atomic weapons on Japan to end a war Japan had started.
Before American intelligence found out about the missile failures, the Japanese had the missiles all working better than they ever had and had established four car dealerships in Missile Base Michenko to boot.
The cars, somehow, would be the only ones that worked well in the Siberian winter.
When there were no mushroom clouds and when San Diego remained unlit far down the California coast, Abner Buell realized something had gone wrong. He went to work rechecking his program and found the Russian missile flaws before they did. The weapons had all been designed and set up correctly, but there had been no upkeep on them and in the harsh Siberian winter, their metal parts had corroded. The Russian missile commanders had pressed useless buttons.
The redheaded model whose name was Marcia was still in the house, leaning over his shoulder as he manipulated his computers, and when he told her that the world wasn't going to be destroyed right away, she looked disappointed, and Abner Buell thought he might be in love.
"Why are you disappointed?" he asked.
"Because I wanted to see the explosions and the dead."
"Why?"