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Page 409
like this, Anna thought, since I woke up in the hospital all those months ago.
It was ten minutes before eight in the morning, still very dark, especially since the fire had almost burned itself out on the runway. Deep beneath this assemblage of hopeful souls was the damaged missile. Its microchip brain would decide in forty minutes if, in pursuit of its merciless mission, the warhead should be in the proper position over North America. Whether the warhead was twenty miles up in the stratosphere or fathoms below in the waters of Hudson Bay, if that electronic brain was satisfied, the warhead would detonate. And within seconds of that explosion, American warheads might retaliate over Russia.
The Trudeau had cast off from the platform and was steaming at flank speed away to the south. The icebreaker and those aboard were connected to the platform, the RPV, and this helo by microwave links bearing television pictures.
I still can't take it in, Anna thought, and I suspect none of us here really have the ability to imagine disaster on a thermonuclear scale. She thought about Ave's comments to her and flushed. We have wounds. You have moral dilemmas.
Jake and Sean lay somewhere on the muddy bottom of Hudson Bay very near here. And what if we had not flown over this spot, she wondered. The submarine would have slipped away unseen, its later loss unquestioningly attributed to a bungled mutiny. Poor Pierre Grau. Poor CCND observers on the Starlifter, one dead and one dying. In a way, Pierre and the whole group of well-intentioned activists would never have guessed the Canadian Committee for Nuclear Disinvestment had stumbled into a very high-stakes gamestakes higher than anyone could ever have imagined. Site X. What an uncommunicative name. The trail of individual deaths began here. The scale of impending death was much, much larger.
Up on the flight deck Avery Peters struck the landing alarm. The air was bumpy and the water would be rough. He

 
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