by Jeff Edwards
“Oh God,” she said. “Oh my God…”
* * *
Ice Pack, Southeastern Sea of Okhotsk:
The water at the center of the hole roiled and frothed, and the ice began to tremble madly. A final surge of expanding gas ruptured the surface of the water, and riding in its midst came the blunt-nosed profile of a Russian-built R-29R ballistic missile.
The 35-ton machine rose above its watery launching cradle, and the instant that it cleared the surface, the rocket engines of the missile’s first stage screamed to life in an orgy of burning fuel and manmade thunder.
The missile climbed toward the heavens on a pillar of silvery fire and smoke.
The displaced water had not even fallen back to the surface of the ice when the performance was repeated. Again the water at the center of the hole churned, and a second Russian nuclear missile leapt toward the stars in the black Siberian sky.
In seconds, both missiles were climbing faster than rifle bullets, and still accelerating rapidly as they roared away into the night.
* * *
USS Towers:
The captain’s voice was a shout, and it didn’t come over the net. “Weapons Control this is the Captain. Kill those missiles! Kill them now!”
The ship shuddered once in instant reply, and a friendly missile symbol appeared on the Aegis display. “One bird away,” the Weapons Control Officer reported. “No apparent casualties.”
For the first time, Chief McPherson lost track of the submarine. That was it. The missile cells were empty. There were two nuclear missiles streaking toward their targets, and only one missile to go after them. There were no more. The cupboard was bare.
A deathly quiet descended over Combat Information Center, broken only by the hum of cooling fans and the muffled sobbing of an unseen Sailor.
The spell held for several long seconds, until it was shattered by an amplified voice from the 29-MC speakers. “All Stations—Sonar. Loud underwater explosions with secondaries, bearing two-niner-zero. I think we just killed us a submarine.”
For the half-second before the Sonar Supervisor released the microphone button, the cheering of the Sonar team came faintly through the 29-MC. They had done their job, and they were celebrating. But they didn’t know what the CIC team knew.
On the Aegis display, three missile symbols rushed toward the sky—two of them red, the other blue.
Chief McPherson felt her eyes well with tears as she watched the writ of Armageddon play itself out in a dance of colored icons.
Someone behind her spoke. It was a man’s voice, but she didn’t turn to see who it belonged to.
“And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air,” the man said. “And there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, ‘It is done.’”
As the last word died down into silence, two symbols merged on the screen. A half second later, the Air Supervisor shouted. “Got one! We got one of the bastards! Splash one ballistic missile!”
Someone clapped the Air Supervisor on the back, but no one cheered. On the screen, the remaining missile symbol moved with increasing rapidity as the real ballistic missile gathered speed out there somewhere in the night. Already, it was beginning to edge to the east, toward the United States.
“We’re done here,” Captain Bowie said. He turned to the TAO. “Call the bridge. Tell the XO to take us home.”
He looked away from the screen. “If there’s any home left to go to.”
CHAPTER 57
WHITE HOUSE
PRESIDENTIAL EMERGENCY OPERATIONS CENTER
WASHINGTON, DC
THURSDAY; 07 MARCH
7:20 AM EST
“My God,” the president said. “I can’t believe this is happening again.”
On the wall-sized geographic display screen, a curving red trajectory line arced up from the Sea of Okhotsk toward the United States.
National Security Advisor Gregory Brenthoven sat at the briefing table. “I know, Mr. President,” he said. “But we can take a little comfort in knowing that this is the last one. USS Towers destroyed Zhukov’s submarine. That nutcase is all out of nuclear missiles.”
As he spoke, the curving red line on the screen flashed and grew longer. The unfinished end of the arc crept toward the U.S.
“One missile is enough,” the president said. “Last time, he was aiming for the ocean, and one of the warheads got past us. This time, I guarantee you he’s not aiming at the water.”
Brenthoven nodded. “I’m sure you’re right about that, sir.”
* * *
30th Space Wing, Vandenberg Air Force Base (Santa Barbara County, California):
Hydraulic pumps moaned, and the armored covers slid aside from four of the missile silos. The reinforced concrete silos were octagonal pits of shadow under the dark pre-dawn sky.
Billows of smoke boiled up out of each silo, and four Lockheed Martin booster rockets blasted into the air on snarling trails of fire.
More than 2,000 miles northwest of Vandenberg, three more interceptor missiles climbed away from the Army missile complex at Fort Greely, Alaska, and hurtled toward the fringes of space.
* * *
EKV:
Seventeen minutes later, and more than a thousand miles to the west, Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle #1 collided with the first reentry vehicle at 25,000 miles per hour. Millions of Newton-meters of kinetic energy were translated instantly to several hundred megajoules of thermal energy.
With a flash that would have dazzled the eyes of any human observer, the EKV and its target were annihilated.
* * *
U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska:
A hundred and fifty miles below, and four time zones to the east, the morning watch team in the Command and Control, Battle Management, and Communications Control Center witnessed the destruction of EKV #1 and its target on the tasking screens of their consoles.
Less than ten seconds later, EKV #4 killed another warhead, followed almost immediately by another successful kill as EKV #2 performed the task for which it had been built.
The Air Force personnel held their collective breath. They needed a miracle. And maybe … just maybe … they were going to get one.
A dozen or so seconds later, EKV #5 scored a bull’s-eye, bringing the score to a perfect four out of four. Just two more successful intercepts, and the nightmare would be over. Just two …
EKV #6 slammed home, and another of the Russian reentry vehicles disappeared in a flare of thermo-kinetic destruction.
If the unfolding situation had been an Ian Fleming movie, James Bond would have clipped the red wire at the last possible instant, staving off the threat of nuclear desolation until the super-spy’s next on-screen adventure. If it had been a Tom Clancy novel, President Jack Ryan would have ridden out the attack aboard a guided missile cruiser, lending moral support to the crew and cadging cigarettes as the plucky Sailors blotted the falling warhead from the sky.
But this was not a movie, and it wasn’t an adventure novel. EKV #3 missed its target by less than ten meters. It might as well have been ten million miles.
* * *
R-29R:
The last reentry vehicle fell tail-first into the atmosphere, streaking across the darkened sky like a shooting star.
Within the fat little cone of the heat shield, a relay clicked open, routing electrical power to the ring of high-voltage capacitors that encircled the core of the warhead. The capacitors began ramping up to full charge as the Soviet-built nuclear warhead armed itself for detonation.
* * *
Latitude 21.37N / Longitude 157.95W:
As the warhead fell past the 3,000-meter mark, ninety-six electrical initiators fired simultaneously, detonating ninety-six trapezoidal charges of high explosive encapsulating a hollow sphere of plutonium 239. Driven inward by the implosion, the shell collapsed toward its own center, super-compressing an envelope of tritium gas and triggering the secondary sta
ge of the bomb.
The local time was 2:38 AM and seven seconds. Dawn was still four hours away, and a yellow three-quarter moon was just climbing above the horizon, when the air above Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was shattered by a flash more than ten times as bright as the sun.
Every eye that happened to be looking toward that portion of the sky was instantaneously blinded. Tourists taking moonlight strolls on Waikiki beach saw an instant of unbearable brilliance and then their vision went dark as their retinas were cauterized. Cab drivers, homeless people, college students, dogs, and seagulls were struck blind without warning. There wasn’t even a sound yet, as the nuclear flash traveled at the speed of light, but the noise of the explosion was limited to the speed of sound, which was many thousands of times slower.
The aircrew of a Qantas 737 were facing directly toward the detonation as their plane was on climb-out from Honolulu International Airport. The sightless captain scrambled to set the automatic pilot by touch, while his First Officer made frantic mayday calls over the radio. Their efforts were useless. The electromagnetic pulse from the detonation fried every microchip and transistor on the plane.
Without computers and flight controls, the 737 ceased to be an aircraft, and became a hurtling collection of unflyable parts. It tumbled out of the air and plowed into a suburban neighborhood, gouging a flaming path of destruction through the homes of the sleeping residents. The aircrew, their eighty-five passengers, and the occupants of the mangled and burnt houses became the first human victims of nuclear attack in nearly three-quarters of a century. But the carnage was just beginning.
The atomic bomb that had devastated the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945 had yielded an explosive force of 13 kilotons. The warhead that struck Oahu on the morning of March the 7th was more than fifteen times as powerful.
Two hundred kilotons of nuclear energy were converted to nearly a billion megajoules of radiant heat. Thermal radiation burst outward from ground zero in an expanding wave that burned people, buildings, animals, plants, and vehicles with equal efficiency. The firestorm swept through Naval Station Pearl Harbor, and the surrounding communities of Pearl City, ‘Aiea, and Waipahu, searing everything and everyone in its path.
Gamma rays, neutrons, and x-rays shot out from the center of the chain reaction, bombarding everything in the area with lethal ionizing radiation.
Less than a second behind the thermal front came the shock wave, lashing out with the explosive force of 440 million pounds of TNT. Anything not already incinerated by the firestorm was ripped apart, or pulverized by the monstrous overpressure of the mechanical wave front.
Again the Naval Station and the surrounding cities were hammered by a destructive force that nothing and no one could withstand. Miles upon miles of buildings were crushed into powder or torn into minute fragments. Vehicles fluttered through the air like leaves in a hurricane. Roofs were peeled away; walls imploded; steel melted; stone shattered; and concrete crumbled. Airplanes and helicopters were swatted out of the air. Telephone poles, mailboxes, guardrails, fence posts, bodies, dirt, and broken window glass all became part of the roaring maelstrom of debris.
At two-thirty in the morning, the manning level of the naval base was at its low point. Slightly less than a thousand civilians and military personnel were on the base when the bomb exploded. Not one of them survived.
Eighty-percent of the residents of Pearl City, nearly 30,000 people, were dead or dying within five seconds of the blast. The adjoining towns of Waipahu and ‘Aiea were burned to cinders and smashed flat, killing another 40,000 people within seconds.
The hypocenter of the explosion occurred over the harbor itself. Thousands of tons of water were flash-vaporized, forming steam and radioactive water droplets that recondensed and drizzled from the sky like poison rain.
The rapid formation of super-heated low-density gases at low altitude created a Rayleigh-Taylor instability. An enormous volume of hot gas rose rapidly, causing turbulent vortices to curl downward along the outer perimeter of the rising column. Fire, smoke, dirt, debris, and water vapor were drawn upward by the same principle of physics that causes hot air to rise up a chimney.
The column of gas and debris became the stem of the infamous cloud formation. It continued to rise until it reached an altitude where the surrounding atmospheric pressure became lower than the pressure inside the column. The gases ballooned outward, forming a bulbous cap at the top of the column.
For the third time in the history of the species, the mushroom cloud rose above the cities of man.
CHAPTER 58
WHITE HOUSE
PRESIDENTIAL EMERGENCY OPERATIONS CENTER
WASHINGTON, DC
THURSDAY; 07 MARCH
9:38 AM EST
“The casualty figures are coming in now, sir,” the Secretary of Homeland Security said. Becka Solomon looked much older than her thirty-nine years. She was immaculately dressed, as always, but her face was haggard and the circles under her eyes were deep. Hers was a tough job during the most peaceful of times. It was a nightmare now.
Her political career wouldn’t survive this, President Chandler knew. And there was no justice in that. She was doing a good job of coping with the emergencies that had been tossed into her lap, and her advanced planning had been excellent. She was intelligent, forward-thinking, and genuinely dedicated. She was also not afraid to admit her mistakes, which was a rarity in political figures of any stripe.
Of course, the critics would ignore all of that. When the witch hunt started, if it hadn’t started already, the political opposition would scream that she hadn’t been prepared for Pearl Harbor, or the panic on the West Coast. As though anyone could have foreseen events that far outside the scope of human experience.
The president’s eyes were drawn to the wall-sized geographic display screen. It was blank now. No curving red trajectory lines. No incoming nuclear missiles. No escalation to doomsday. And yet, the damage had been quite awful enough.
He nodded. “How bad is it?”
“It’s pretty bad, Mr. President,” Secretary Solomon said. “The initial estimate is about 70,000 dead, about 20,000 injured, and an unknown number of cases of radiation exposure. We’re working with FEMA and the National Weather Service to calculate fallout footprints. We’ll be issuing radiation warnings in the affected areas, and we’ll need to initiate quarantine protocols. That will help us save some lives, but it’s still going to be ugly. If we handle everything properly, we’ll see something like 140,000 more deaths over the next five years from leukemia, cancer, and various long term side effects of radiation. If we mismanage the casualty response and cleanup, it’ll be a lot worse than that.”
Becka Solomon sighed. “The hospitals are overwhelmed, of course. The Secretary of the Navy is calling in the hospital ships USNS Mercy and USNS Comfort. The Mercy is fairly close; she’ll be on station in a couple of days. The Comfort is in the Caribbean so she’ll take several more days. In the meantime, the Coast Guard is …”
Her voice trailed away as she apparently realized that she didn’t have the president’s attention.
He was staring at the blank screen again.
“You’ve got a full Homeland Security briefing scheduled at one o’clock, Mr. President. We can go over the rest of this then. I just wanted to get you the early casualty figures.”
The president nodded. “Thank you, Becka.”
He was still looking at the screen when she left the room, but that wasn’t what was on his mind. He was thinking about the Single Integrated Operational Plan again.
Like it or not, he was going to have to order a retaliatory nuclear strike against Kamchatka. There really wasn’t any other option. America’s allies and enemies were both watching carefully, waiting for the U.S. response. If he allowed a foreign leader to nuke an American city and didn’t retaliate, the credibility of the nation’s nuclear deterrence would evaporate. He might as well declare open season. Every nutcase on the planet would decide that America was too
weak or too frightened to defend herself.
That could not be allowed to happen. He had to stop the next punch before it was thrown. And that meant sending an unambiguous message to the enemies of the United States that America could not be attacked with impunity.
He had to answer Zhukov’s attacks with a nuclear response. But he had absolutely no desire to actually do it. Owning the keys to the nuclear arsenal was not the same as wanting to use them.
And he wasn’t entirely sure that could he use them, without triggering another nuclear conflict. Kamchatka was a Russian province, after all. Now that Zhukov’s missile submarine had been eliminated, would the Russian government tolerate a retaliatory strike from the United States? Could he expect them to sit on their hands, while America launched nuclear missiles at targets on Russian soil?
The answer to those very questions walked in the door, in the guise of Gregory Brenthoven. The national security advisor nodded as he pulled out a chair and sat down. “Good morning, Mr. President.”
The president stared at him without speaking.
“Okay, poor choice of words,” Brenthoven said. “It is most definitely not a good morning. But I have a piece of news that you might find useful, in light of your current dilemma.”
The president turned his gaze back toward the blank display screen. “What have you got, Greg?”
Brenthoven laid a black diplomatic pouch on the table. “I’ve just finished up a meeting with Ambassador Kolesnik. He hand-delivered a very interesting proposal from President Turgenev. It’s counter-signed by Prime Minister Primakov, and a solid majority of the Russian Federal Assembly.”
“What are our Russian friends proposing?” the president asked.
Brenthoven leaned back and made a steeple of his fingers. “They suggest that the United States and the Russian Federation carry out joint retaliatory strikes against Kamchatka. They recommend that we act in concert, and that we hit Kamchatka hard.”
President Chandler looked around. “What? I think you must have misunderstood…”