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Page 332
Karmann said the launch was automated, set for the seventh, at 0830 local time.
The Canadians were arguing back and forth about the feasibility of evacuating everyone within a 200-kilometer radius of the live warhead in the bay. But it would be like trying to bail out a sinking boat with a teaspoon. Between 61 degrees north, 90 degrees west, and along the Canadian Atlantic coast, there were perhaps two million Quebecois, and at least a quarter that many isolated Newfoundlanders. Who could evacuate them, and how? The total air, land, and sea lift capabilities of the United States and Canada might manage itin a year. It had taken five months for the U.S. Army and Navy to get a half million troops to Saudi Arabia.
And God help the poor jokers running America's answer to disasterthe Federal Emergency Management Agency, Morgan thought. It was one thing to plan for a nuclear attack, as the agency had been formed to do, and another to deal with the actuality of it. In the last few years, years in which floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes had ravaged large areas of the United States, critics had complained that Washington should have been better prepared for coping with those emergencies. Morgan wondered if anyone had told the agency honchos that their time had come with a vengeance.
Goddamn it, the Russians did this, he thought with a surge of anger. His grandfather had trained Russian pilots to fly American airplanes during World War II. He often told the story of one almost disastrous training flight. On a first takeoff in a Lend-Lease B-25, the Russian had attempted a slow roll at twenty feet. "I was scared shitless," Gramps had said," and I snatched the controls out of the fucker's hands. And you know what he said to me, laughing his head off? He said 'What's the matter, Amerikanski? You 'fraid to die?'"
Afraid to die, Morgan? You're damned right I am, Morgan thought. And I'm no saint. There is a kind of primeval, savage satisfaction in knowing that if a storm of radioactive debris killed a million or so Canadians and Europeans, the fallout

 
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