Critical Mass

by Whitley Strieber

  The glare of the explosion lit the south side of the Piazza Navona, causing it to burst into flames. People thronging the north side were astonished by what they saw—awnings, cars, diners at their meals in the mild night—suddenly all was fire. Before the blast struck, two seconds passed, during which a woman started to raise her hands to the flaming skin of her face, a waiter threw a glass of Cinzano he was carrying, cats scurried in the alley, a Chinese woman, achingly lonely, realized that she would die in the kitchen that was bursting into raging, inexplicable fire around her. She had been dreaming, as she shook a skillet of mushrooms over the belching stove, of rain in May in the hills of home.

  The ancient treasure-house that was Rome trembled as if being shaken by the fist of God. The Senate House of Diocletian in the Forum sank into itself, the oldest parliamentary structure in the world. The Pantheon, perhaps the finest piece of architecture on the planet, finally, after over two thousand years testifying to the orderly dignity of the human spirit, collapsed in on itself with a dusty sigh.

  Dust and smoke rushed everywhere, gushing through narrow streets, howling in eaves, crashing through windows. By the millions, roof tiles swept into the air, shattered, and became a kind of red snow by which the disaster would long be remembered, after the helicopters came in the morning and the glittering camera eyes returned images of the ruined city dyed red.

  The bomb was not as large as the one that had shattered Las Vegas. This one had been meant to destroy a symbol, not kill a community. But however carefully this evil act had been conceived, nuclear destruction remained something that was really beyond imagination, and its effects were far more terrible than its planners had anticipated.

  They had probably imagined a neat decapitation of the Vatican, not what actually occurred. Of course, Vatican City was destroyed, with virtually all of its treasures, the accumulation of so many years and so much human genius that it was like killing a part of an eternal soul.

  Not since the Arabs had attempted conquest of Italy in 846 had Muslim violence been directly enacted against Rome. In that year, the Saracens had robbed the Basilica of St. Peter, which was then outside the city walls.

  But this was not robbery, it was devastation, and moments after the explosion the Vatican appeared as a sort of mountain wreathed in smoke. The great, welcoming arms of the basilica, designed by Bernini in the seventeenth century, were splayed outward, their colonnades tossed like matchsticks, the statues of the saints rendered into dust. The piazza itself was crushed down into its own foundations, becoming a blackened pit.

  The Egyptian obelisk in the center had shattered. It had been moved there in 1586 from the nearby ruins of the Circus of Caligula, where it had been brought around the year 40. The absence of hieroglyphics on the obelisk had made its origin a mystery, but in any case, like so much that was destroyed on this night, it belonged to the depths of time and human consciousness. Its disappearance, although never remarked anywhere, left each human being less, as the loss of St. Peter’s, the libraries, the Sistine Chapel, the museums, and also the people of the Vatican themselves, consecrated as they were to carrying on their shoulders one of the deepest of Western institutions, left all people immeasurably less.

  In that instant of breathtaking cruelty and evil, the soul of man was made smaller, and a dark, brutal future seemed ready to spread in the hidden space within us all where the emblems that construct our civilizations are inscribed. Again, as in Las Vegas, it was the details—always the details—that were the places where the catastrophe was actually defined.

  For example, the area around the obelisk was completely shattered but not completely lost, as some of the emblems of the winds—Ponente, the West Wind; Tramontana, the North Wind—that were embedded in the piazza there, were flung in the debris for kilometers and landed in the gardens of the Villa Borghese across the Tiber. These gardens, which were swept as if by a howling storm as the debris from the Vatican came pouring from the sky, had first been planted by old Roman republicans such as the populist ally of Julius Caesar, Sallust, and the libertine Lucullus, who used to organize torch races among the ancestors of some of the trees that were now burning down to the root, never to grow again. On this night, the trees themselves became the torches.

  The baldachin that overhung the great altar of St. Peter’s smashed down into it, followed by most of the dome above, which led to the collapse of the crypt and drove the fires deep, where they would burn on for nearly a year.

  All the colleges, the abbeys, the institutes of the Vatican burst into flames. People who were not killed outright were set alight, and dashed burning against collapsing walls. In the end, nine out of every ten people in Vatican City were killed outright. The others, their bodies broken and burned, ruined by radiation, died within hours or days. Of the city’s 820 permanent residents, only 11 were still alive twenty-four hours after the blast. Another 216 employees who were in the city at the time of the explosion were all killed.

  Thus the entire central government of the Roman Catholic Church ceased in a moment to exist. But the damage did not end at the borders of Vatican City, which was, after all, a 108-acre enclave in the center of a dense metropolis.

  The Mufti was an old man and sleeping heavily when he burst into flames. He awoke to red haze and pain and then was dead. So, ironically, perhaps, the second great sack of Rome by Muslims also took the life of one of the most radical of Muslim leaders, but not one so radical as to countenance open and frank evil.

  At midnight, Rome was a sparkling, vividly alive city. Clubs were open, restaurants, theaters, bars, and coffee shops. People thronged the piazzas, the streets. On the sheltered side of the Navona, there was an eruption of complete panic, with people leaping sidewalk chairs and tables, dashing into the cover afforded by restaurant interiors, as the patrons inside rushed out.

  As the enormous, killing flash struck, there were uncountable moments of horror and confusion. Nobody within two kilometers of the blast actually heard it. Instead, they lost their hearing, being left with ringing or silence or hammering sounds in their heads, their ears bleeding, some of them blinded, but fewer than in Las Vegas, where more open space had led to wider sight lines.

  The whole center of Rome became a gigantic trap. Pushed down by the same overpressure that had crushed St. Peter’s, buildings across the city collapsed into the streets, blocking all escape. People on lower floors mostly survived, rushing out to avoid the choking fire that gushed down from the upper levels of structures, poured along stairways, smashed ceilings, and brought with it a dense cloud of smoke and dust.

  Four minutes after the blast, the power failed. That it had lasted so long was due only to the heroic efforts of station engineers in surrounding areas, none of whom knew exactly what had happened, but who flipped switches and turned knobs, moving loads in a flash around the country. But it was no use, the system had taken extraordinary damage, and no sooner had Rome gone down than the whole grid faltered and the entire southern half of the country was plunged into darkness.

  For all of their years of training and preparation for even the worst catastrophe, across the entire center of the city the fire brigade was rendered helpless. This was not because of the power failure. They could operate without power, and even deliver substantial water using only their own generating equipment. They were prepared to draw huge quantities of water from the Tiber, but they could not reach the Tiber, not with so many streets hopelessly blocked. Indeed, the spectacle that Rome presented after the explosion was of a complicated mass of destroyed towers and roofs floating in a sea of burning rubble. Few streets were even visible.

  Some of the Tiber bridges had been smashed, but not all, and one that remained was the Ponte Milvio, which was originally built over twenty-two hundred years ago by the Roman consul Gaius Claudius Nero. In 2006, Roman lovers had taken to commemorating the eternity of their vows by putting padlocks on one of the bridge’s lampposts. When the lamppost had become so choked with locks that it had nearly c
ollapsed, lovers had moved their vows instead to a website.

  Now, both the lamppost and the servers containing the website were destroyed, and with them so many young lives, which had with hopeful fingers locked those locks.

  As had happened in Las Vegas, communications initially failed completely. At the U.S. Air Force base at Aviano, there was an immediate alert. As was true the world over, there were patrols flying, here under overall command of NATO.

  “We have a fireball—” came a transmission from an F-15 on patrol over the Tyrrhenian Sea.

  “Say again?”

  The plane was still on radar, but there were no further transmissions. Immediately a signal was sent to NATO Headquarters in Brussels: “Possible major explosion, Rome area.”

  The Aeronautica Militare, which had numerous bases in the area and was flying active patrols over the city, also experienced a regional communications failure due to the pulse of electromagnetic energy emitted by the bomb. But NATO’s land-based communications infrastructure was left intact, and controllers who could not reach patrolling aircraft certainly could see, from bases around the city, that a mushroom cloud was rising over Rome. Second Air Region Command was instantly informed, but all attempts to reach the prime minister failed—as, indeed, all such efforts would continue to fail.

  Parliament was in session, and most of the government was present in Rome. Prime Minister D’Agostini had made an appearance at six with the pope and the Mufti, praying with them as the hour passed and all the world waited for Washington to be destroyed.

  When it was not, the mass in commemoration planned at seven became a mass in celebration. D’Agostini was one of hundreds of world leaders who had telephoned the president after it appeared that the danger had passed. He was one of many whom Fitzgerald, in the darkness where he dwelled, did not bother to answer.

  D’Agostini awoke to a flash so terrific he leaped from the bed, crying out, “It’s us, it’s us.” When his wife heard this, the perpetual fear that lives in the hearts of all world leaders and all who love them, instantly sped to the forefront of her mind. “A rocket,” she screamed.

  The prime minister did not know why the room was burning, but he thought perhaps the Islamists had indeed launched an attack against the residence. He had no chance to think more, though, as the blast followed almost instantly and the burning curtains, the window frame, the glass, and most of the wall around it exploded inward, tearing him and Mirania to pieces, burying the smoking chunks of their bodies in the fiery debris.

  So each soul started with a question, entered a moment of horror, then knew death.

  As in Las Vegas, the lucky died first. Because the bomb that had been detonated over Vegas was large, that had included most of the people exposed to its power. Not so here. Only the residents of the Vatican and those in taller structures or, like the prime minister, residing in a residence luxurious enough to be open to the sky were killed at once.

  Like other world governments, the Italian government had no decapitation plan in place, and this instant was therefore the beginning of what would stretch into two generations of costly, sometimes violent and disappointing conflict over the reconstruction of the state.

  Most Romans were trapped in what became a hell even more terrible than the hell of Las Vegas, as over a million separate fires commenced in ninety thousand structures and people with shattered limbs in apartments, in houses, in restaurants, busses, cars, everywhere they happened to be, soon saw flames and smoke, and began to burn in such numbers that the smoke drifting eastward with the prevailing wind smelled of cooking meat.

  This was how Rome died, in a conflagration greater by far than the one that had consumed it in the year 64, and that fire had reached a heat so intense that it melted brick.

  The true shock of what had happened almost at once began to be felt in the world. With the death of the Eternal City, a part of every decent human heart died, no matter if they were in Scotland or Syria, in China or Kansas.

  In Beijing, the Central Committee called another emergency meeting. Previously, Chinese intelligence had viewed this as a problem involving only the Americans. Nevertheless, a report from the “Autumn Orchid” group that watched political activities in Hong Kong had indicated that an American retaliatory strike against targets in both Malaysia and Indonesia was possible, judging from rumors being traded among politicians there.

  The primary concern of the Central Committee was not, however, the nuclear damage being done. It was the way that the upheaval would affect trade. Already, every cargo ship headed for the United States was stopped, on orders from the American authorities. The People’s Bank of China had frozen all dollar-related monetary activities, but the breathtaking collapse of the American currency had rendered China startlingly illiquid, and forced movement of value to the euro, the only other currency with enough liquidity to provide a useful basis for trade.

  Now, in a paroxysm of panic, the euro was also being sold in every bourse on the planet. In point of fact, value was being transferred by others to the yen and China’s own yuan. The movement was of historic enormity, and could only lead to one conclusion: the collapse of value in the Western currencies and the subsequent inability of the West to continue trade.

  Not since the fall of the Roman Empire had Western currency been so damaged, and the Chinese leadership, steeped in history in ways that Western leadership was not, remembered how profound the effects of that last unwinding of civil life in the West had been.

  Marxist theory taught that capitalist systems were highly susceptible to destabilization, and the discussion touched on this. The West was falling. How far would it fall? Would governments and corporate entities embrace Šar’ah law? If so, what of debt? Specifically, what of the gigantic debt that the West owed China, which was the world’s true banker? China had poured out the sweat of its people and the wealth of its lands, in return for IOUs from the West, and now they were becoming worthless.

  Outside of the theoretical value of currency and debt, there was not enough symbolic wealth to continue the functioning of the world economy. Not even with gold trading at present in London at six thousand euros an ounce was there enough of it to back a new world reserve currency. The only thing that could conceivably back such a currency might be the combined central banks of China, Taiwan, and Japan.

  So China began discussions with both countries, and never mind the difficulties with the illegal government in Taiwan. While Rome burned, Asia struggled to save whatever shreds of economic civilization that it could.

  And there were still bombs, more bombs, and waiting pilots, some eager, some too afraid to say no.

  In the Kremlin, there was increasingly frantic activity, as the reality of the conspiracy involving former KGB officers became more and more evident. Terror literally gripped the Putin government. If these bombs were determined to be of Russian origin, there would almost certainly be another revolution, followed by massive, crippling reparations to the West, if not a nuclear attack.

  Vladimir Putin had made a choice to isolate Russia and its client states from the West, so that he could manipulate world affairs in such a way that oil prices would stay high, but this was far more than he had bargained for, and he was, behind the scenes, a shattered, terrified man.

  Without his direct knowledge, the old KGB had been working outside governmental authority to break the superpower of the United States in the same way that the Russian superpower had been broken by the Cold War. In the KGB’s madness, they believed that this would leave Russia free to restore its ancient empire, because it was not thought that Europe, in the absence of organized American support, would stand against any Russian reoccupation of lost territories, such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and, the greatest prize, Poland.

  In history, the independence of these states had never lasted long, and the secretive former KGB officers did not intend that it would last much longer now. Russia needed a territorial buffer to its west. Who knew when another Napoléon or
Hitler would arise? Given the ferment in the ramshackle democracies that England and the United States had imposed on Europe after World War II, anything could happen.

  Vladimir Putin paced his office. When FSB chief Alexandrov appeared, Putin looked at him, Alexandrov thought, with the same infamous beady-eyed fury that Stalin had, in legend, regarded his staff with.

  “We’re going to be held responsible,” Putin said. “But we are not responsible.”

  “Now the Americans will release Dream Angel,” Alexandrov said.

  “That may happen,” Putin replied.

  “Do we open our silos? What do we do?”

  “Do you think it matters?” Putin asked.

  “Our missiles are the only real deterrent to theirs on the planet!”

  Putin scoffed at him. How could the man be so naïve? “What the military conceals from us cannot be capability,” he said, trying to force a mildness into his voice that was at odds with the anger and panic he was trying to control. “The generals conceal only their inabilities. When have you received a readiness report that you could believe?”