Piranha: Firing Point mp-5

by Michael Dimercurio

  “Boss, we’ll name the SSNX the USS Devilfish. And we’ll tell Warner that she’ll go to sea, one way or the other, on schedule. Trachea will have to eat that goddamned headline. And don’t worry about me or the Unified Submarine Command. I’m on the case.”

  O’Shaughnessy smiled, clapped him on the shoulder, and the two men abandoned the study for the dinner table. The smell of the filet made Pacino hungry for the first time he could remember in almost a year.

  But as the staff car drove Pacino back to the Annapolis house, he felt the cockiness leave him again, the emptiness filling him back up. Eileen was gone, Donchez was gone, and now, again, it felt like he himself was gone.

  Maybe it had been the scotch talking when he’d told O’Shaughnessy he’d stay, he thought. He wondered whether he’d been right the first time, whether he should resign.

  He looked down at the gold embroidered ball cap.

  How would it look if instead of reading USS DEVILFISH SSN-666 it read USS DEVILFISH SSNX–I? Would it change anything in a life that had seen too many changes?

  ACROSS THE LINE

  Chapter 6

  Monday November 4

  SHANGHAI, WHITE CHINA

  It was a few minutes past two in the morning. A few miles out to sea from the shimmering lights of Shanghai, the Shining March cruise missile’s onboard computer noted the stars’ positions overhead, giving it a stellar fix.

  It was time to turn back west, in accordance with the mission profile. The fins in the aft part of the ten-ton missile rotated, putting the weapon into a two G-force turn. The onboard gyro rotated through the numerals, the stars spinning overhead. The lights of the city appeared in the nose-cone camera, the reflections glittering on the black water five meters below as the missile sailed west, throttling up to attack velocity. The airframe shuddered momentarily as the unit passed through sonic velocity on the way to MacH 1.2. Over the water, the sonic boom was unnoticed. The city lights grew brighter as Shanghai approached.

  The target was within the city center. A palace surrounded by rows of fences, patrols of security troops, and airborne helicopter patrols. The missile was designated as unit number one, its target considered the highest in priority for its mission planners. Along with another three missiles cruising under the detection altitude of the fourteen air-traffic-control radars and the occasional military air-search radar, there was a squadron of Mig-51 Flicker fighters, four of them assigned the same target as missile number one.

  The attack would be coordinated. The missiles were arriving from the four points of the compass, missile number one to hit first, the north, west, and south units to come in at 1.5-second intervals afterward. The Flicker squadron aircraft assigned to the palace would come in two waves, the first ten seconds after the last missile, the second thirty seconds after that. In order to accomplish this pinpoint timing, the missile required exact navigation aids. The star fix obtained before was sufficiently imprecise as to mandate another fix on the shoreline.

  The coastline approached rapidly. The throttles on the turbojet engine slowed, descending back below sonic velocity.

  The weapon was slightly ahead of schedule, and the mission profile called for it to fly slowly past its initial navigation aids. A casino building, the Spade Palace, came into view. The edifice was lit up brighter than a lighthouse, lights of every color shining from each facet of the crystal facade, blinking lights outlining the planes of the soaring skyscraper. Chinese and English signs invited gamblers to enter, even at this late — or early— hour. The casino was the first of three way points the missile needed. It aimed south of the building. The shoreline passed beneath the fuselage as the missile headed over dry land.

  Within a hundred meters of the Spade Palace, the missile turned north-northeast, speeding up to approach the second way point, a monument erected to General Wong Chen, who had beat back the Red Chinese during the civil war and was a founding father for White China.

  The Wong Monument was in the form of a giant military sword, anchored at its base and soaring two hundred meters above the seaward approach to the bay. The entire carved blade was illuminated by harsh floodlights, with a single red aircraft-warning strobe bulb flashing at the very tip of the sword. Missile number one flew around the Wong Sword at its base, carving a tight circle around the statute, then throttled up the engines. The mission profile called for a swift approach to the Presidential Palace.

  The third way point was the Hilton Hotel, soaring over four hundred meters into the night sky. The grandiose monstrosity had been built in the year after White Chinese independence, another tribute to capitalism.

  The shining lights of the hotel were visible for dozens of kilometers to sea, the giant English block letters spelling hilton down the seaward edge of the black cylinder.

  The missile had been directed to pass three blocks west of the Hilton, sufficiently far that its windows would not shatter from the low-level sonic boom. Reaching MacH 1.2 again, the missile shot toward the Presidential Palace.

  As the missile flew over the thirty-meter high whitewashed wall of the palace complex, it was a full twenty-three milliseconds behind schedule. Less than twenty percent fuel remained in the reinforced tanks of the missile’s belly, making the missile lighter, and as the throttle valves opened fully, the missile was able to speed up slightly, flying in at MacH 1.24. It sped toward an inner wall. As the missile flashed overhead, several black dogs below barely had time to begin to curl their lips, their heads just beginning to turn upward, the first growl emerging from their throats a tenth of a second later, which would prove to be forty-five milliseconds too late.

  The outer ring of buildings flew under the fuselage next, the three rows of office buildings and housing facilities laid out in an ornate geometry. The central row came by next, the buildings dark with the sleeping staff members. Finally the inner ring of buildings slipped past, surrounding a beautiful open courtyard, arranged with several dozen fountains spurting water illuminated by spotlights. Exotic landscaping divided the open space into at least three dozen different conversational areas.

  Ahead, unlit except by the wash of lights from the courtyard’s fountains, the Presidential Palace loomed.

  The palace was a mere three stories tall, but was over a kilometer wide. The facade was made of Italian marble with carved pilasters, a columned entrance to a high rotunda leading up steps to ornate bronze carved doors.

  In the north wing, on the third floor, the president’s living quarters overlooked the greenery of the courtyard and the majesty of the inner palace complex. The living quarters had soaring plateglass windows, framed by heavy curtains, fronted by a small tiled deck filled with outdoor furniture, potted trees, and a fair-sized swimming pool.

  The nose cone of the Shining March missile impacted the thick bulletproof plate glass of the president’s bedroom suite. The glass blew outward toward the deck.

  That was the signal to the fuse software to detonate the explosives. A charged capacitor sent out an intense electrical pulse, lighting the fuse blasting cap. The cap flared into incandescence, setting off the primary explosive train deep in the heart of the warhead.

  In a few milliseconds the missile passed all the way into the cavernous bedroom, under the carved marble ceilings almost fifteen meters above the polished hardwood floor. By the time the tail fins — sheared off by the shattering glass of the window — disintegrated, the explosion train was half through detonating. The secondary explosive train temperature rose to that of a bonfire.

  Three missile lengths into the room, the weapon still five meters from the sleeping president’s bed, the tertiary explosive train ignited. Still no trace of the interior heat was visible on the dark skin of the missile, though the tertiary explosives raised the temperature of the high-density molecular explosive to that of the surface of the sun.

  At last the skin of the missile vaporized as the detonation blew outward from it. The warhead turned into a fireball of pure plasma energy, the atoms and molecu
les of what had been solid matter turning to liquid, then to vapor, then to gas. As the temperature rose to thermonuclear range, the atoms’ electrons spun off into space, leaving their nuclei in a high-energy glow. The plasma expanded outward, the radiant heat of it turning the flesh of the president immediately to superheated gas, an expanding cloud that blew away from the plasma ball at sonic velocity. His bones liquefied next, then vaporized, joining the plasma front as the volume of energy expanded, now encompassing the entire room. All that had been solid microseconds before had all become glowing photons and spheres of protons and neutrons, electron waves flashing out into the abyss.

  In the 1,500 milliseconds before the second missile entered the presidential palace, the plasma expanded outward, the flame front ahead of it blowing the walls and ceiling of the surrounding rooms away, until the upper floor within one hundred meters of the presidential living quarters was completely eliminated, burned cleanly off in a black arc.

  Missiles two, three, and four flew in next, their detonators going off more by timing than by impact, and the remainder of the palace grew more insubstantial with each hit. By the time missile four’s explosion had become nothing more than an orange mushroom cloud flaming and rising above the courtyard where the palace had once been, the first wave of Flicker fighters streaked overhead. Detaching their bombs, the fighters pulled hard to the right and left to avoid the missile explosions.

  Twenty Cultural Revolution bombs tumbled into the black and orange fireball of the palace, all of them detonating into white-hot fury in the already hellish conflagration.

  The initial twenty-five seconds of the Shanghai attack had vaporized the primary target, and the second wave of Flicker fighters pulled up and turned away to their secondary targets.

  Two minutes after the first missile’s detonation, there was a black carbonized crater, fully thirty meters deep, where the palace, courtyard, and inner circle of palace complex buildings had once proudly stood. The center row of buildings was little more than piles of rubble, bricks and marble and electrical wire, mournful fingers of steel-reinforcement rods sticking into the fiery night, melted glass resolidifying in ugly pools at the bases of the rubble. The outer ring of buildings, the few that were still standing, were in flames, fire pouring from the windows and rooftops. The two circles of walls, built to hold off terrorists and truck bombers, had crumbled but for a few uneven remnants.

  In the city, 125 other Shining March cruise missiles had hit their targets. The 100 Flicker fighters sent in as backup had added to the chaos, making the previous century’s destruction of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Tehran, and Cairo seem minor by comparison. The Hilton hotel was blown to its foundation, the only thing recognizable the three-meter-tall red block letter H lying on top of what once had been a glass elevator, the glass shattered, half molten and black. Nothing was left of the Sword of Wong except granite dust, lying in a pile at the site.

  Cargo ships were burning in the harbor, and one supertanker laden with crude oil exploded in a kilometer-wide fireball, the shock wave of it blasting through a city where almost five hundred shock waves had already passed.

  No building taller than three stories stood. There was not a recognizable car left in the city, all the iron and steel and rubber that wasn’t crushed having burned in the city’s massive fires. Not a single tree or blade of grass within tens of kilometers was left.

  And not a single person within twenty kilometers of the Presidential Palace survived. Those in the circle inside ninety kilometers walked through burning streets, their clothes sooty, their eyes glazed, tears streaming down their cheeks. A father stumbled through the gutted streets, silently crying, carrying two young daughters, their legs as thin as twigs, their pajamas burned off in sections. Both children were dead, the small one’s face burned off, the other’s intact with her small eyes staring unblinkingly into space.

  Capturing the scene was the lens of a Satellite News Network camera, the images transmitted to the backpack of the sooty-faced cameraman, from the antenna on the backpack to a transmission van a kilometer away, and from there to the SNN orbiting communications satellite, relayed from there to SNN’s network news center in Denver, Colorado, and from there to television and Writepad receivers all over the globe.

  * * *

  Two in the morning on a Monday in Shanghai was two o’clock in the afternoon on Sunday, November 3, on the U.S. East Coast, week ten of the season of the National Football League. The quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys took the snap in the shotgun formation, pulled his arm back, and fired off a bullet-trajectory pass to wide receiver Kevin McConkey in the Redskins’ end zone. The football was spiraling through the air when the screen flashed, fading into the face of a reporter.

  The legend at the bottom of the screen read: breaking news — white china firebombed. The image of the reporter vanished, replaced by the scene of the crying father holding two dead and burned children in a Shanghai street.

  “We interrupt this program to bring you breaking news from Shanghai, White China, where only minutes ago an incendiary bomb attack leveled the city. These images, courtesy of the Satellite News Network, show the incredible carnage as—”

  In front of the widescreen television. National Security Adviser Stephen Cogster clanked his beer bottle on the coffee table and pulled his satellite phone from his belt. He punched a single button on it before lifting it to his ear.

  “Code seven, NSA for number one. Get her on the phone now. I repeat, code seven.”

  It took less than ten seconds for her voice to come through the phone. And when it did, the voice of President Jaisal Warner was furious.

  * * *

  She was wearing a black miniskirt, holding the ten-foot handle of a paint roller, her feet bare on the wooden platform of a scaffold. It was Eileen. Her blond hair cascaded down past her shoulders as she dipped the roller in the red paint. She arched her body, rolling the red paint onto a curving wall above her, a few paint drops falling on the dress. Suddenly she looked over at him. Her face was a shattered and bloody pulp. He felt a desire to go to her, to hold her, but somehow knew she was angry. He wondered if she was angry at the loss of her face. She seemed so serious, not like herself, as she painted the curving wall in swift yet careful strokes.

  Before he could open his mouth, she spoke to him without creating sound, without moving her lips.

  Red subs, Mikey. You’re up against the Reds.

  She started fading into the distance, the curved wall above her becoming a cylinder, a rudder appearing in the foreground, stern planes, a propulsor-turbine shroud. The floating dock around the hull. It was the SSNX, its lower stern section now a gleaming red. Eileen still painted as she drifted farther away. She turned to him and shouted.

  Hurry, we’ve got to go!

  “What?” he said, his voice still a phlegmy croak.

  “Hurry, sir, we’ve got to go!” The voice wasn’t Eileen’s anymore. It belonged to a man…

  “Sir, O’Shaughnessy’s plane is waiting. They said they’d call you — dammit,” Paully White said, picking up the dead phone, tossing it across the room. His voice became high and whining, filling with frustration. “Sir, what are you doing asleep at two-thirty in the damned afternoon? Christ.”

  Pacino sat up, looking dazedly at his wrist. His Rolex was gone. He found it on the nightstand. “What are you doing here, Paully? What the hell is going on?”

  White had found a remote control and clicked the widescreen to life. Pacino rubbed his hair as the reporter came up in mid-speech.

  “… armored divisions crossed the White Chinese border at Zhengzhou and occupied the city within an hour. Meanwhile several tank divisions have crossed the northwest border in what seems to be a rush toward the central city of Xuzhou. In the south, several hundred infantry divisions crossed the border at Quangzhou in what appears to be a march toward Hong Kong. In the central regions, a mountain crossing has been accomplished by a dozen armored and infantry divisions in an attempt to c
ut off the north of the country from the south. The infantry and tank troops have been supported by hundreds of bombers, fighters, and helicopters of the Red Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Details from the central campaign are sketchy, but so far White Chinese forces seem to have been completely surprised and overwhelmed, falling back and absorbing tremendous losses as the Reds advance toward the shores of the East China Sea. This is Christie Cronkite reporting for SNN, Tsingtao, White China. Back to you, Bernard.”

  “Thank you, Christie. We turn now to Brett Hedley in Hong Kong, which in the last few minutes has come under air attack. Brett, can you tell us what’s going on? Brett? Brett? We seem to have lost Brett due to technical difficulties; we’ll return to him in a moment. For those of you just tuning in, again, Red China has attacked White China in what looks like the biggest land offensive since the Battle of Iran. We go now to our presidential correspondent outside the president’s compound at Teton Village, Wyoming. Diane—”

  White clicked off the widescreen and tossed the remote onto the bed. Pacino stared at the blank screen for a moment, his eyes wide, then looked at Paully White.

  “What the hell…?”

  “We can watch more of that on O’Shaughnessy’s 777.”

  Pacino rose to his feet, walking to the bathroom.

  “We’re due at Andrews Air Force Base in an hour.”

  The water of the shower came on, and Paully called over it. “That gives you about eight minutes to shower and pack.”

  White found the remote and turned the TV back on, staring at it, barely blinking.

  MARYLAND ROUTE 50 / 1595

  OUTSIDE BOWIE, MARYLAND

  The Lincoln staff car rocketed ahead at 135 miles per hour.

  This time the state police had not been notified, because the phones and radios and Writepad links were otherwise occupied. When a Maryland trooper’s cruiser came up behind them, beacons flashing, the staff driver ignored him. Eventually the cruiser pulled up alongside the Lincoln, waving to pull over. Paully White, on the satellite phone, pushed a button to make his window clear. The black polarization vanished, and the intense afternoon sunlight streamed into the car. Still barking orders into the phone, he held up a sign, handmade by the aide riding in front, reading ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE.