by James Philip
Their second love-making was a slower, greedier affair which had started lazily and built towards a frenzied, loud climax. The man had pumped maniacally at the end and then they had collapsed in each other’s arms.
Afterwards they had waited.
Neither had the least inclination to move.
“I’m not a slut,” Judy announced in the blackness.
Sam said nothing.
“But I was going to do this someday, sometime...”
“Why?” He asked. She had curled in the crook of his right arm, pressing every part of herself that she possibly could against his skin, flesh to flesh in hot, febrile yearning.
“All my life I’ve done the right thing. All it ever got me was a bad marriage, and a crappy job in a dead end town. And now the World has gone crazy.”
Okay, he saw a kind of skewed logic in that.
“So, if it wasn’t me it would have been somebody else?”
“Maybe. But it was you.”
One day he would write a great song, a ballad, about tonight.
He guessed there would be a lot of ballads and elegies written and sung about the end of the World. Always assuming somebody survived to tell the tale.
“You looked kind of lost,” Judy went on. “And cute.”
Nobody had called Sam ‘cute’ since he was five years old.
“We ought to go down to your basement,” he decided. “If there’s another big bang near here we’d be...”
“Screwed?” Judy laughed.
That was when he kissed her for the first time.
Chapter 8
00:04 Hours Zulu (Washington DC Time)
Sunday 28th October 1962
B-52 ‘The Big Cigar’ 48 miles west of Vorkuta, Komi Republic of the USSR
First Lieutenant Nathan Zabriski, the navigator and bombardier of the B-52 The Big Cigar of the 525th Bombardment Squadron of the 4136th Strategic Wing, did not need to inform the rest of the crew that the aircraft had flown north of the Arctic Circle in the last few minutes. In addition to the failure of most of the elements of the bomber’s electronics suite, the cabin heaters were barely taking the edge off the bitter cold. The instruments showed over sixty degrees of frost outside as The Big Cigar cruised towards her polar rendezvous with the waiting KC-135 tankers still an hour’s flying time distant.
The blast over-pressure waves of the Gorky and Dzerzhinsk bombs had shaken them up - momentarily, they had all been convinced the bomber was going to disintegrate when the first wave caught up with them - but it was the proximity to the 3.8 megaton air bursts’ electromagnetic pulses which had comprehensively blinded The Big Cigar. Only the instrument landing system, the intercom and a couple of the jamming gizmos remained serviceable; mainly because they had been switched off during the bomb run. It they got back home they might - at a pinch - be able to navigate over the North American continent and land or more likely, crash the bird; right now they were defenceless in the vastness of the Russian night. Moreover, unless the tankers turned on their beacons – Nathan liked to think that if he was on a KC-135 on a night like this he would be calling his wounded and fuel-hungry ‘big friends’ to ‘come home to Mama’– The Big Cigar would run out of fuel and crash somewhere over the North Pole.
The trouble was that the tankers would have to disregard SOP – standard operating procedure – to advertise their presence this close to Soviet airspace, so basically, nobody onboard the B-52 was getting his hopes up.
There had been very little chit chat on the intercom since the bomb run.
Nathan had been glad to focus on dead reckoning navigation; trying hard not to think how badly lost The Big Cigar already was if the compasses had been damaged. The loss of the entire electrical and sensor suite was a thing they trained for; in combat it was different because nobody was trying to kill you in an exercise. That the B-52 was flying into the darkness of the Arctic night was little comfort, nor was the tacit assumption that this far north the Soviet air defence net must be spread so thin as to be positively porous.
The pilot’s voice cut through the static.
“I have the glow of big fires to the east.”
In Strategic Air Command every navigator was a graduate level university geographer who was expected to know the political and physical map of the Northern Hemisphere not as intimately as the back of his hands, but much better. In fact, the standard required was ‘perfection’. Flight times, distances from the nearest centre of population, why a town or a city was where it was, which rivers flowed through it, the changing character and topography of the surrounding countryside from one season of the year to another, on and on, ad infinitum.
Vorkuta.
What was there at a small mining town in the boondocks of Northern Russia that could possibly be worth attacking with a nuke? Vorkuta, located in the Pechora coal basin of the Usa River had a population of somewhere around one hundred thousand. There had been big labour camps around the town to service the coal mines until recently; and for all Nathan Zabriski knew, there still were. Militarily the place was a backwater. There were no known major bases, radar stations or missile batteries located with a hundred miles of Vorkuta.
“That will be Vorkuta, skipper!” He called back over the intercom.
The pilot’s drawl was so relaxed that in other circumstances members of the crew might have got the impression the co-pilot had to keep poking him in the ribs with a sharp pointed stick to stop him dropping off to sleep.
“That’s good, Nathan.” A pause. “Just so all you good old boys back there know the colour of my money,” the pilot went on, chuckling laconically, “we’re about an hour away from the nearest gas stop. No sweat, The Big Cigar is flying like she wants to go home as badly as we do and we’ve got a couple of hours of gas in the tank. That is all.”
Chapter 9
00:13 Hours (Eastern Standard Time)
Sunday 28th October 1962
Buffalo, New York State
The city of Buffalo in western New York State was located on the eastern side of Lake Erie at the head of the Niagara Peninsula opposite the Canadian city of Fort Erie on the Ontario shore. The city of Buffalo and its surrounding metropolitan area had a population of well over one million people, making it the largest urban populous of any city in Upper New York State.
Buffalo was still enjoying the warm glow of the post-1945 American economic boom but insurmountable problems lay in its future, problems that its city fathers and state administrators in the capital, Albany, saw on the horizon but had elected not to do anything about in case they risked bringing on the troubles ahead of time. And in any case, in these enlightened times the view from the Governor’s mansion in Albany was that the days when the Federal Government left the great cities of the Republic in the lurch were a thing of history. In the modern age all things were possible.
It was a cruel irony that the inevitability of Buffalo’s future decline was the direct corollary of its successful past. The city had begun as a tiny trading post on Buffalo Creek, growing fast after the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 of which it was its western terminus. Like other Great Lakes cities; Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Toledo, Milwaukee and Cleveland, Buffalo’s expansion and development had been fuelled by the cheap, easy water-borne flow of raw materials and grain. At the zenith of its success early in the twentieth century Buffalo was the eighth largest city in the United States of America, a great railroad hub and the home of the biggest combined grain storage and milling operation in Christendom.
Buffalo’s pre-eminence had depended entirely on the historical accident of its location at the Atlantic end of four of the Laurentian Great Lakes; from west to east, Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, Lake Huron and Lake Erie. But already in the fall of 1962, the completion three years before of the St Lawrence Seaway enabling even the biggest ocean going ships to transit directly from Lake Erie to the Atlantic – and therefore the rest of the World – via Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence River, had fatally undermined Buff
alo’s previously unrivalled status as the gateway to both the western and the eastern markets of the North American continent. Far sighted planners had long foreseen the inevitable decline of the grain industry, the collapse of the vital trans-shipping business and the subsequent death of the city as a key national railway centre. They understood that shipping in the Great Lakes would eventually bypass Buffalo, that the Great Lakes system would be opened up to ships from elsewhere in the World bringing with them imports that would destroy the old heavy industries, shut down the steel mills and in time, lead to the relative impoverishment of what had been for over a century one of the richest cities in America.
But on that night in late October 1962 most of that decline still lay in Buffalo’s future; many, many years down the road. In 1962 the city was enjoying the last Indian summer of its glory days, justly proud in its civic history and of the role it had played in the story of America’s unstoppable rise to be the World’s foremost economic powerhouse.
Therein lay the real tragedy of war.
The city fathers’ worries about the downside of an unknown and possibly unknowable future, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent and unsuspecting men, women and children were snuffed out in a split second by the fifty million degree fireball of the 5.3 megaton airburst which erupted at 00:13 Eastern Standard Time approximately four thousand feet above the eastern boundary of the campus of Buffalo State College.
The Soviet R-16 inter-continental ballistic missile which had delivered the hammer blow had been launched from a pad in north-west Kazakhstan fourteen minutes and seven seconds prior to warhead initiation over Buffalo.
The Type R-16 was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic’s first truly operational ICBM, having been first deployed in the field a little over a year ago. Manufactured by Plant 586 – the Makarov Southern Machine-Building Plant at Dnepropetrovsk in the Ukraine – missile 8K64/017 had been delivered to the 33rd Guards Rocket Army in early May 1962. In the next three years the Soviets planned to deploy approximately two hundred R-16s, including a variant designed to be silo launched. However, the missile aimed at Buffalo was one of only a handful of operationally certified R-16s armed and available to launch when the ‘strike’ command had been transmitted from the command bunker of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces Headquarters outside Moscow, minutes before it was bracketed by and completely destroyed by two Minutemen.
Soviet ICBMs tended to be much more massive than their American counterparts because Soviet H-bomb technology was less sophisticated than that of its enemies. On average Soviet warheads were two to three times heavier than weapons of comparative yields in the US arsenal, hence, Soviet rockets were monsters, and ironically, initially much better suited to shooting satellites into low Earth orbits. Yuri Gagarin had ridden into space in 1961 on the back of an R-7 variant of the Soviet Union’s first ICBM.
The R-16 was a brute of a rocket; one hundred feet long and weighing over one hundred and forty tons at blast off. Basically, it was a two-stage, liquid fuelled death trap universally viewed by its rocket crews as an accident waiting to happen. In a launch pad ‘incident’ at the Baikonur test range a prototype R-16 had blown up on the launch pad after the second stage unexpectedly initiated, killing over a hundred people, including most of the original project team and the then commander of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, Marshal Mitrofan Ivanovich Nedelin.
The R-16 which had travelled over the Arctic before deploying its single warhead on a sub-orbital terminal trajectory over Hudson Bay had been rolled out onto its unshielded pad two hours and forty-eight minutes prior to its scheduled launch. It had been fuelled at breakneck, reckless speed with unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine – a hydrazine derivative often referred to as UDMH – a stable compound resistant to ignition by shock which only becomes viable as a rocket propellant when combined with an oxidizer, in this case dinitrogen tetroxide. Although missiles loaded with UDMH could theoretically be kept at readiness for several days, because of the corrosive properties of dinitrogen tetroxide an R-16 could only stand at launch readiness for a maximum of seventy-two hours. Afterwards, the fuel would have to be removed - a very dangerous procedure - and the missile returned to Plant 586 in the Ukraine to be completely rebuilt.
To say that the R-16 was extremely vulnerable to an enemy counter strike in the hours before it was fired would have been an understatement of truly monumental proportions. Even when it was fully fuelled it still took over thirty minutes to spin up the rocket’s navigational gyroscopes, and to check and configure its inertial guidance and targeting co-ordinates. This was no mere formality; the rocket was launched vertically and had to be programmed to alter course to conform to a low Earth orbit where it would in effect, free fall the greater part of the journey to its target where its warhead would be set to detonate at either a specific height above the ground, or after impact with the ground. Although the mathematics involved in formulating this ballistic trajectory was straightforward, in practice the actual calculations were fiendishly convoluted. The main complication being the fact that while the missile was in the air the tangential speed of the Earth’s rotation differed from one latitudinal point; its launch pad to that at which it was intended to impact. At the equator – zero degrees of latitude - the speed of rotation of the Earth is of the order of 1,040.4 miles per hour; whereas to establish the correct tangential speed of the Earth’s rotation for Buffalo, latitude 42° 54′ 17″ N, the calculation which needed to be achieved was 1,674.4 kilometres per hour (1,040.4 mph) × cosine (42.904722) to ensure that the R-16 ‘led’ Buffalo’s actual ground position at the time of launch by approximately two hundred nautical miles when it arrived at its designated air burst height fourteen minutes and seven seconds later. For the unfortunate and extraordinarily courageous Soviet missile technician responsible for checking this final calculation with a slide rule on the top of a hundred foot gantry - standing next to over a hundred tons of rocket fuel which had an evilly proven propensity to blow up without warning - while his, or her concentration was being constantly interrupted by the flash of distant thermonuclear air bursts, it was anything but a routine business. Only a man - or a woman, for many of the engineers, mathematicians, chemists and physicists who worked on the Soviet Strategic Missile Program were women unlike in the ‘free’ West where such work was judged ‘inappropriate’ for members of the fairer sex - possessed of superhuman powers of concentration, not to mention nerves of steel, would check and re-check until they were absolutely confident that everything was in order before reporting that the rocket was ready in all respects for launch.
And then presumably, absent himself or herself, as quickly as possible from the scene.
The men ‘in the hole’ at NORAD would have been deeply alarmed, possibly panicked, had they known that launch crew of Missile 8K64/017 had actually received orders to prepare for launch over an hour before the first American missiles popped up over the horizons of the USSR’s northern radar shield. Had it not been for the disruption of the 33rd Guards Rocket Army’s radio communications by the initial US strikes on the Moscow Military District, and a series of minor technical issues with 8K64/017’s inertial guidance system caused by errors in its original coding, the missile would probably have been one of the first to hit the North American continent.
As it was, Missile 8K64/017 was the last inter-continental ballistic missile fired by the 33rd Guards Rocket Army before its command centre outside Semipalatinsk was destroyed by a near miss by a 3.8 megaton W39 free fall bomb dropped by a B-52.
At 00:13 hours on the morning of Sunday 28th October a hydrogen bomb with an explosive yield equivalent to over five megatons of TNT detonated above the city, and the surrounding countryside, of Buffalo.
Five megatons of TNT represents nearly twice the total explosive power released by all the combatants in the whole six years of World War II. The entire metropolitan area of Buffalo ceased to exist in a millisecond.
Within seconds Port Erie, Welland and St Ca
therine’s on the Canadian side of the Niagara had also ceased to exist. North of the air burst on the American shore in Tonawanda, Getzville, and Lockport; twenty-seven miles west as far as Akron, and twenty to thirty miles south to Lake View, Derby, Eden and Hamburg ninety percent of the population was dead or dying within minutes.
And then the firestorms began to engulf the ruins.
Chapter 10
00:45 Eastern Standard Time
Sunday 28th October 1964
Meriden, Connecticut
The road signs in New England informed the most casual observer exactly who had colonised this particular part of the New World. The coast road west of New Haven went through Milford, Bridgeport and Fairfield on the way down towards Stamford and Greenwich, heading east the Connecticut Turnpike went through Branford, Old Saybrook and Old Lyme on the way to New London. Heading north to Meriden one passed signs for Cheshire and Durham, and drove through Wallingford; while at Meriden roads forked toward Waterbury, Bristol, Cromwell, Glastonbury and New Britain.
In other circumstances Dan Brenckmann would have enjoyed the fast drive along darkened, twisting roads; tonight, he distracted his mind from his immediate worries and kept his terrors in check by playing with the quirky old town and county names of this part of his country’s colonial history. However, it was not long before his thoughts turned inward. He had never been capable – or frankly, motivated – to match Walt junior’s, his older brother’s straight up and down practicality in all things. Walt was only fourteen months older but he had always been very much the big brother to his younger siblings; an example to Dan and Sam of how a life should be lived and of how the good old-fashioned virtues of hard work and steadfast application eventually overcame all obstacles. It had been Walter who had sat Dan down three years ago and asked him exactly what he thought he was ‘doing with his life?’