Overkill pr-1

by James Barrington

  Abbas leaned forward again, decision made. If he couldn’t carry out his orders, he would just have to do the best he could in the time he had left. At least, he thought, with a wry smile, nobody in al-Qaeda would be able to reproach him for it, because he knew with absolute certainty that he had only minutes left to live.

  He flicked the touchpad and sent the cursor across the screen and cancelled the ‘Total’ detonation routine. With another swift movement he selected ‘Individual’ and chose the first target on the alphabetically sorted list – Abilene, Texas.

  At the old mill, Ross looked at his watch for the eighth time since the group had left, then nodded to the sniper. The trooper squeezed the trigger of his rifle and sent the 7.62mm round screaming up the hill, to smash harmlessly into the solid stone wall of the outhouse. Then he reloaded and did it again, and again, and again.

  Badri jumped to his feet as the first bullet smashed into the two-feet-thick stone wall beside him.

  ‘That means they’re coming,’ Abbas called out, never taking his eyes off the screen of the computer. ‘Ignore the sniper – he will just be trying to distract us from the men approaching. Prepare.’

  With a grunt of satisfaction, Abbas pressed the last digit of the second authorization code for the Abilene weapon, flicked the cursor across the screen again, chose ‘Albany, New York’ and began inputting the first code requested by the system.

  Abilene, Texas

  The city of Abilene was founded in 1881 as the railhead for the Texas and Pacific Railway and as the new destination for the Texas cattle drives, taking over both the name and the business of the previous railhead – Abilene, Kansas. The city is situated in an area of low plains some one hundred and fifty miles west of Fort Worth, and straddles Taylor and Jones Counties. It is home to just under three hundred thousand people.

  The two-metre satellite dish had been positioned on the roof of the small downtown office building, located a few blocks north of McMurry University, by a local company some six months earlier, and the coaxial feed cable had been run down into the smallest of the three rooms which comprised the office suite. There had been neither television set nor satellite receiver in the room when the installation had been completed, so the aerial fitters had aligned the dish with one of the commercial satellites, as they had been asked to do by the dark-skinned businessman who had leased the premises, and left, cash tucked in their pockets.

  Three days, or rather nights, later, two men climbed on to the roof of the building with a signal strength meter and tools in their hands and re-aligned the dish to a more easterly satellite that didn’t appear in any of the Clarke Belt charts.

  Nobody noticed that the dish had been moved, and nor did anybody take much notice when the short, slim, dark-skinned businessman took delivery of a large and very heavy packing case two weeks later. And a month after that he left the office for the last time, heading for a new assignment on the west coast, in Los Angeles. The rent on the office had been paid a year in advance, much to the delight of the freeholder, the utility bills were all settled direct from a company bank account, and what little mail arrived was automatically intercepted and forwarded to another address, so nobody had any need to go anywhere near the office suite. Not that it would have made any difference if they had.

  When Hassan Abbas input the final digit of the second authorization code for the Abilene weapon, the Krutaya mainframe began an automated sequence of events. First it sent a ‘system test’ signal to the small computer attached to the selected weapon, which instructed it to carry out a check of all its circuits. Thirty seconds later the mainframe sent a ‘prepare’ signal, and thirty seconds after that the ‘detonate’ signal was sent via the satellite.

  None of this, of course, was apparent to anybody in Abilene. Inside the large locked steel case in the back room of the deserted office suite, a small orange light illuminated. Thirty seconds later a red light came on, and after another half-minute a green light. The entire process up to that point had been completely silent, but within two seconds of the green light illuminating there was a barely audible click from within the steel chest. That single faint sound was the noise of the trigger assembly being actuated, and it was followed by an extraordinarily rapid sequence of events.

  Within the case was a tempered-steel sphere which contained two sub-critical masses of uranium–235, surrounded by a shell of conventional chemical explosive. Outside this inner shell were further chemical explosives arranged as thirty-two critically shaped lenses. When these shaped charges detonated in a sequence that was accurate to the nearest millisecond, they focused shock waves which compressed and instantly ignited the inner chemical explosive shell, which in turn smashed together the two masses of uranium in the centre of the sphere, creating an immediate critical mass. Precisely one third of a second later the uranium tore itself to pieces as the fission reaction began.

  The atomic weapon that was dropped on Hiroshima was only about 1.4 per cent efficient, but weapons technology has always been a growth industry and advances in the casing design and the shaping of the conventional explosive charges have greatly improved the efficiency of modern nuclear weapons. So although the Abilene weapon was only a fraction of the size of the Little Boy and Fat Man twenty-kiloton bombs that had devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively, it had almost exactly the same calculated yield. The yield of each weapon had been specified by Dmitri Trushenko to be sufficient to completely destroy the heart of the city in which it was positioned. Abilene, Texas, is a small city, and the weapon located there was one of the smallest of the Podstava devices and one of the few fission weapons that had been deployed.

  Even so, its effects were immediate and devastating. The office building vaporized almost instantly, as did some four square miles of the centre of the city. Slightly over one hundred and seven thousand people died in less than one fifth of a second.

  Half a second after the detonation, the temperature at the epicentre of the explosion reached several million degrees, and a massive fireball rose from the ground and expanded to cover most of the city of Abilene, starting innumerable ground fires that flared out of control, burning the living and incinerating the bodies of the newly dead. Anything combustible burned. Garage fuel storage tanks, domestic gas supplies and automobile petrol tanks exploded, adding to the carnage. It was doubly unfortunate that a major part of Abilene’s industrial area is given over to the production of natural gas and petroleum, and the explosion of these highly combustible fuels significantly increased the devastation caused by the fireball. A further thirty-one thousand people perished directly as a result of the fireball.

  Another half a second later the shockwave from the weapon began to spread outwards at unbelievable speed in a circular pattern, demolishing the few remaining buildings and flinging vehicles and people high into the air. Its force would not be spent until it was well clear of the city limits, and even at the very edge of the city it was still strong enough to flatten houses. The shockwave killed another sixteen thousand people. Convection currents generated by the explosion sucked dust into the air, hauling it high above the shattered community and forming the terrifying and completely unmistakable shape of a mushroom cloud.

  Almost everyone within three miles of ground zero who survived the detonation died as well, but more slowly, killed by the lethal but invisible fusillades of neutrons and gamma radiation generated by the explosion.

  Even people several miles away from Abilene would die, even more slowly, over the succeeding weeks and months, killed by the fallout – the material vaporized in the fireball which would condense to form microscopically fine particles full of highly radioactive and long-lived contaminants like plutonium–239 and strontium–90. The final death toll from the Abilene weapon would top one hundred and eighty-five thousand, though nobody would ever be able to work out the exact number who perished, and the cost of the damage was quite literally incalculable.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Friday />
  St Médard, near Manciet, Midi-Pyrénées, France

  The trooper was within twenty yards of the outhouse before Jaafar Badri heard anything at all. This was partly due to the trooper’s skill in silent movement, and partly because of the constant cracking of the unsilenced sniper rifle a hundred metres away and the smashing of its bullets against stone. All Badri heard was a faint slither, but it was enough. He crouched down almost to floor level, cautiously extended the muzzle of the Kalashnikov around the broken doorframe, and waited, eyes wide and staring into the darkness.

  The trooper stopped moving, as he had been told to, lay flat on the ground and lobbed a small stone over to his right. Badri moved further out of the doorway, swinging his assault rifle to point at the sound he had just heard, and pulled the trigger. As the first round from the Kalashnikov crashed through the undergrowth, Colin Dekker, who had positioned himself to the left of the outhouse and with a clear view of the doorway, fired his silenced Hockler twice, hitting Badri in the chest and right shoulder.

  The Arab crashed against the doorway, but with a supreme effort of will sat almost upright, pulling the muzzle of the Kalashnikov around towards Dekker. It didn’t do him any good. Three Hocklers fired at him almost simultaneously, bullets ripping through his chest and torso, and he slumped to the ground, dead.

  Abbas ignored the sounds behind him, and concentrated on inputting the second firing authorization code for the Albany device. He had only three digits to go when Richter shot him in the back.

  North American Aerospace Defense Command, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado

  The normal silence of the NORAD control room was suddenly shattered by the sounds of warning bells and klaxons, and the giant vision screens flickered into life as lines of red text appeared. ‘Nuclear detonation, nuclear detonation! Location is Continental United States, south-central region. Central Texas. Detonation confirmed by seismic sensors. Stand by for estimate of ground zero position.’

  General Wayne Harmon ran from his office to the control room, sat down at his desk and snatched up his headset. There was a confused babble of voices, which he swiftly silenced. ‘No way it was an ICBM. It had to have been sub-launched. Why didn’t we get a launch detection?’ he snapped.

  ‘No idea. We saw nothing on radar from the DEW or anywhere else, and neither did the DSP birds.’

  Missile launches are detected by one of three Defence Support Programme surveillance satellites in geosynchronous orbit twenty-two thousand three hundred miles above the surface of the Earth. One is positioned over Central America, the second over the middle of the Pacific Ocean and the last above the Indian Ocean, and they maintain a constant watch of the Asian landmass and the oceans. Each DSP bird is fitted with a massive infra-red telescope which can identify the heat flare of the missile’s engines within one minute of launch. Only if there is heavy cloud above the launch site will the system not detect the missile until it clears the cloud tops. Launch and initial trajectory data are transmitted from the DSP satellite to the two Readout Stations located at Aurora, Colorado and Alice Springs, Australia, where the data is automatically compared with that from previous launches to determine whether or not the missile is on a ‘threat fan’ – that is to say, on a path ending in the United States or inside any allied nation.

  ‘Bullshit. Play back the tape – there must have been something and we missed it,’ Harmon said and reached for the JANET phone. ‘JANET’ is the Joint Chiefs of Staff Alerting Network, which links the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon and all other principal command headquarters.

  ‘Ground zero location confirmed as Abilene, Texas. Initial estimates from the seismographs suggest a weapon size of around thirty kilotons.’

  ‘Thirty kilotons? That’s bullshit too,’ Harmon snapped. ‘The Russians haven’t got any nuclear weapons that small – at least, none that they’d bother launching at us. This has just gotta be some kind of a screw-up.’

  Camp David, Maryland

  ‘There’s been a what?’ the President asked into the telephone, his face going pale. ‘Where?’

  ‘Satellite surveillance reports ground zero as Abilene, Texas, Mr President,’ General Harmon replied, ‘but the situation is still confused.’

  ‘What do you mean “confused”?’ the President snapped. ‘Are you telling me you don’t know if a nuclear weapon has been detonated or not?’

  ‘No, Mr President. Detonation of a device definitely took place – the seismic data has already confirmed that – but the rest of the data doesn’t make sense. First, we had no launch detection of any sort, so the weapon didn’t arrive here on an ICBM or in a missile from a Russian boomer. We’ve checked the recorded data and all our systems, and there was definitely no launch. Second, the weapon is way too small. The seismic data puts it at around thirty kilotons, maybe even less, and all the Russian first-strike weapons are way up in the multi-megaton range. This thing was more like a tactical weapon.’

  There was a pause as the President digested this information. ‘Thank you, General,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘Sir? What are your orders?’

  ‘I said I’ll be in touch. There are factors here that you will not be aware of, General, and I have to consider very carefully exactly what to do next.’

  St Médard, near Manciet, Midi-Pyrénées, France

  In the bedroom of Le Moulin au Pouchon the sniper suddenly stopped his rhythmic assault on the outhouse, but kept the rifle muzzle pointed straight up the hill as he stared through the Starlight scope.

  ‘Are they there?’ Ross asked.

  ‘Yes. I can see four figures behind the outhouse, now all standing up.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Ross murmured, then spoke into his microphone. ‘Dekker, Ross. SITREP?’

  ‘It’s over. One dead, we assume he was the bodyguard, and the other’s wounded and out of action.’

  ‘Right,’ Ross said. ‘I’ll let London know.’

  The bullet had taken Abbas just below the right shoulder and the force of its impact had tumbled him away from the laptop computer and against the wall. Richter gestured to Dekker to watch the Arab, and turned his attention to the laptop.

  He was no computer expert, but it was obvious even to Richter what Abbas had been trying to do. He studied the screen for several seconds. At the top of the screen the heading ‘Weapon: Albany, New York’ was displayed. Below that appeared the message ‘Authorization Code Six Accepted. For final Verification, Enter Authorization Code Two’, and below that was an oblong horizontal box with space for twelve digits. Nine of the twelve spaces were already occupied by an asterisk symbol.

  Richter touched the ‘Esc’ or ‘Escape’ key. As he had hoped, the screen display cleared and both the message and the oblong box vanished. The screen simply displayed the Albany weapon control page, but the system just sat there, waiting for his input.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ Richter muttered, and pulled out his mobile phone. He switched off silent ringing and punched in the direct line number for the computer suite. Baker answered almost immediately.

  ‘Baker.’

  ‘Richter. It’s over. I’m looking at this Arab bastard’s laptop, and we stopped him just before he detonated the weapon at Albany.’

  Even over the mobile phone network, the sadness and horror in Baker’s voice were unmistakable. ‘Pity you didn’t get to him a few minutes sooner,’ he said. ‘It’s all a bit confused, but according to CNN a nuclear weapon has just exploded in Abilene, Texas.’

  Richter said nothing, just sat back on his haunches, snapped the phone shut and put it back in his pocket. He looked across at Dekker, who was covering the Arab with his Hockler. Dekker had kicked Abbas’ Glock well out of reach, and had hauled the wounded Arab up against the wall of the outhouse where he sat hunched and groaning, but conscious.

  ‘We were too late,’ Richter said. ‘This bastard managed to detonate at least one weapon in the States. God knows how many people he’s killed, or what the A
mericans will do now.’

  Richter stood up, walked across the outhouse to where the Glock lay on the floor, bent down and picked it up. Showing no emotion, he walked back to where Abbas sat, placed the muzzle of the pistol against the Arab’s left kneecap and pulled the trigger. The report of the shot echoed from the stone walls, and was followed immediately by a howl of pain from Abbas. ‘That,’ Richter said, ‘is for Abilene.’ He transferred the weapon to Abbas’ right knee and fired again.

  ‘Albany?’ Dekker asked, looking at the information displayed on the laptop’s screen.

  ‘Albany,’ Richter agreed. ‘I know he didn’t detonate it, but it certainly wasn’t for want of trying.’ As Richter squatted down in front of the groaning Arab, his mobile phone rang again. ‘Richter.’

  ‘It’s Baker. It’s only just dawned on me – you said that you had Dernowi’s laptop?’

  ‘Yes. It’s right here beside me, connected to a mobile phone. When we took out the landlines I suppose he had no option but to use the mobile.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Baker said impatiently, ‘but the point is that you have a link to the Krutaya mainframe using the laptop, and with Dernowi’s access level you can disable all the weapons.’

  ‘I can try,’ Richter said doubtfully.

  ‘It’s not a problem. I can talk you through it right now.’

  ‘OK,’ Richter said, and sat down on the stone floor in front of the laptop.

  ‘Right,’ Baker said. ‘first you access the—’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Richter muttered, and looked in irritation at his phone. The battery strength was fine, but the signal strength read zero. He snatched up Abbas’ mobile and looked at that. The battery was about two-thirds exhausted and, like Richter’s Nokia, it was reading zero signal strength. Lacomte had taken his time getting the mobile phone cells switched off, but he had finally managed it.