by Ray Gorham
Sighing with satisfaction, Jibril reflected on the past years. He had proven himself so dedicated that he had been trusted to lead the most radical strike ever attempted against the Americans. He understood that there were others attempting the same thing, but in the future, his name would be spoken in the same, hushed tones as those martyrs who had died in New York City so many years before. His only living son would beam with pride, knowing what his father had sacrificed himself for.
A tear of joy formed in the corner of Jibril’s eye, building slowly until it broke free and streaked his cheek.
NORAD Headquarters, Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado 16:00 EST
Air Force Command Sergeant Alan Gagnon sat at his desk keying an email to his wife at the end of another uneventful week during another uneventful summer.
It was 16:00:05 EST when the alarm sounded. In the nine years he’d been in his current position this particular alarm had never gone off without him knowing about it beforehand, and until this instant, he had expected it never would. Alan jumped from his desk and was in the main control room in five rapid strides. Officers were responding as they had been trained, and for all they knew this was just another drill. With his heart racing, Alan quickly assessed the situation. Rows of glowing monitors at the front of the command room showed two missiles in American airspace, relaying their locations and projecting their flight paths with faint orange cones that took in much of the continent. It was too early to pinpoint where they were headed, but obvious the missiles had not traveled from foreign soil.
“What do we know?” Alan barked as he strode to the center of the room, dodging underlings who ran in every direction. “There are no scheduled tests, correct?” He already knew the answer but asked anyway.
Lieutenant Rodger Olsen, one of his most capable assistants and the only other person who would know ahead of time if a test was scheduled, sat with his eyes locked on the screen in front of him, processing the information. “There are no tests or drills scheduled, sir. These are real, and they’re not ours. Both missiles were launched simultaneously from areas with no identified military vessels, foreign or domestic. Tracking shows they are not headed directly inland at this point. They’re just gaining altitude.”
Alan picked up the phone on the closest desk. “Give me General Doss!” he shouted into the mouthpiece, then waited impatiently for the connection to be made. When he heard the general speak Alan cut him off. “General, this is Alan. It’s bad. We show two missiles, both launched from international waters, one off each coast. Both are in American airspace with indeterminate targets and unknown payloads.”
Monitors filled the front wall of the room and Alan’s eyes darted from screen to screen as he continued to relay what little information he had to the General. The largest screen showed two separate lines tracking the flights of the incoming missiles. It was now seventy three seconds since they had launched, and tracking showed the missiles to be at an elevation of just over eighty-two miles.
As Alan scanned the monitors, another alarm sounded and the screen flashed as the line tracking the missile launched from the west began to blink. He covered the mouthpiece and shouted at Lt. Olsen. “What just happened?!”
The lieutenant shook his head. “I don’t know, sir. That one just seems to have disappeared.”
“What do you mean disappeared? Did it detonate?”
“Negative, sir. Or if it did, it wasn’t nuclear. Our satellites indicate some kind of explosion, but I have to assume malfunction.
“Sir?” Alan spoke into the phone. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think any cities are targeted, but I can’t say that with any certainty. Listen, one of the missiles has just disappeared from radar. Looks like it malfunctioned. That leaves just one, but it’s gaining too much elevation for a direct strike to make sense. I think the intent is to detonate in space. It’s likely the second missile was meant as a backup. I think the country is the target, sir, not D.C. or New York.”
Alan caught his breath as the meaning of his last statement sunk in, knowing there wasn’t anything that could be done. The missile defense budget had been all but eliminated years ago; probably to make room for some government handout designed to win votes for a senator up for re-election in a tight race. Even if missile defense had not been shelved, the chances of an American missile launched from this close being accurate enough to knock out an incoming missile at an altitude of hundreds of miles were slim. But with the current situation, and no response beyond crossed fingers and desperate prayers, Alan would have liked to have had something to throw at it, proven or not.
Alan finished his conversation with General Doss and hung up. They both had calls to make, and he didn’t have much time -- five, maybe six minutes at the most, before all hell broke loose and America was turned on its head. The military had war gamed this scenario for years, and every outcome was bad. How severe the results would be depended on three things: the location of detonation, the tonnage of the missile, and the efficiency of the weapon.
In the military’s planning it always came down to the fact that once the missiles were in the air, there was almost no way to stop them. That was why they worked so hard to keep these weapons from getting into the wrong hands. This was America’s Achilles heel, the proverbial knockout punch that any rogue nation could throw if they had the money, the resources, and the willingness to weather the inevitable retaliation.
George Bush International Airport, Houston, Texas 16:03 EST
With the captain’s announcement that their plane was cleared for takeoff, the flight attendants rushed to get trays put up and seats returned to their upright positions before strapping themselves in.
Kyle folded down the top corner of the page in his book, set it in his lap, and glanced out the window. The plane had taxied down the runway and was now in line for takeoff. Kyle could see another plane ahead of them and three stacked up to land.
“I guess we’re going to miss our free tickets,” Ed commented.
Kyle looked at him, puzzled. “What free tickets?”
“I was starting to hope we’d get stuck a little longer. If you have to wait too long, sometimes the airlines will give you a couple of free tickets so you don’t hate them too much. Happened to my daughter last time she visited. Now, we just get put behind, and the airline doesn’t do anything, barely even an apology.”
Ed spoke with a grin, so Kyle guessed he wasn’t too serious, but the thought of free tickets intrigued him. His anniversary was coming up, and surprising Jennifer with something more than their traditional dinner out would have been nice.
“What are you reading?” asked Ed, changing the subject.
“It’s a mystery. I bought it at the airport on the way down and am trying to finish it before I get home. There’s never seems to be enough time for reading at home, and I’d like to see how it ends.”
“Is it any good?”
Kyle thought for a second. “So far so good, but you can never be sure until it wraps up. If I finish before we touch down, I’ll give you a full review.”
Deer Creek, Montana 16:06 EST
Jennifer Tait struggled into the house from the garage, her arms loaded with a week’s worth of groceries. The day’s mail was shoved into one of the bags, and a corner of an envelope had torn a gaping hole in the side, threatening to dump an assortment of canned goods onto the kitchen floor. As the door swung closed, she heard a wail from the small figure struggling along behind her.
“You okay, Spencer?” Jennifer called out.
He didn’t answer.
She could hear him fighting with the door, so hurried and swung the bags in her arms onto the table. A can of tomato soup, hanging part way out of the hole opened by the envelope, caught the corner of the table and extended the gash, dumping the contents onto the linoleum floor. Jennifer muttered under her breath. It had been a bad day, and this was just one more item to add to the list of things that had gone wrong. Kyle had been gone for two weeks, and she was loo
king forward to finally having him home again. She loved their kids, but being a single mother wasn’t what she had signed up for.
As she bent to pick up the cans scattering across the kitchen floor, she heard Spencer’s voice from out in the garage.
“Mom!” he called.
“What is it, Spencer?” she replied, gathering the cans.
“I need some help,” he called back.
“I’ll be right there. Just give me a minute.”
“No, Mom! Not just a minute. I need help now,” he said, irritation evident in his voice.
Jennifer giggled at his demand, marveling to herself how quickly he was growing up and reflecting on the joys of being able to watch her kids as they matured. Spencer was her baby, but he wasn’t so much a baby anymore. He had been attending kindergarten for three weeks now, and she already missed having him home with her on those days she didn’t work.
“Alright, I’m coming,” she answered as she grabbed a can of mushrooms that had come to stop against the leg of a chair.
Setting the can on the table, Jennifer went to the door and pushed it open for Spencer, who was still struggling to get in. He smiled as she carefully opened the door wide enough for him to enter.
“That’s a pretty big box,” she said, tussling his hair. “You sure you have it alright?”
“I’m fine,” he answered, a look of determination riveted on his face.
“Thanks so much for being such a good helper, big guy. You sure are growing up.”
“I’m not big guy. I’m Spencer,” came the terse reply.
“Yes, you are. You’re my Spencer, aren’t you?” Jennifer kissed her son on the forehead as he marched by.
Spencer grinned and reached up with his free arm to give her a hug, dropping the box of Corn Flakes on the floor as he did so. “Oops, sorry Mom,” he said. “I’ll get it.”
Jennifer straightened back up and heard the beep of the answering machine in the bedroom, making a mental note to check the messages once the groceries were put away. “Can’t have the ice cream melting while I listen to some salesman,” she told herself.
She grabbed the remaining bags of groceries from the car and slammed the trunk shut. Noticing that Spencer hadn’t shut his car door tight, Jennifer fixed that, waved to the neighbor who was outside working in her garden, and went back inside the house.
She was putting away the cereal when Spencer stomped into the kitchen from the play room. “Mom, the TV just turned off!” he whined.
“Just give me a minute,” she replied. After putting the rest of the cans away, Jennifer took Spencer by the hand and led him down the hall to see what was wrong with the TV.
NORAD Headquarters, Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado 16:07 EST
Alan watched with a cold, technical detachment as the remaining missile’s course tracked across the screen, the speed and elevation numbers on the bottom of the screen registering the details of the rocket’s flight. He was shocked by his lack of emotion, something similar, he assumed, to an Emergency Room doctor forced to treat his own child. You should be a wreck, but the technical side of the brain takes over and you simply do what you’ve been trained to do.
During the seven minutes of the missile’s flight, Alan had already spoken with three of his superiors and knew, by the sound of their voices, they were in a state somewhere between panic and unbelief.
Monitors showed that the missile had been airborne for just under eight minutes, the longest eight minutes of Alan’s life, and its altitude was 306 miles.
When the missiles had first been detected, Alan had hoped that specific cities were targeted because, relatively speaking, that would have been easier to recover from. This, he knew, was going to be much, much worse.
Everyone around him was outwardly calm, and considering that the country to which they had pledged their lives was under attack, it was unnerving in a way. A few spoke on the phone, calmly relating to some unseen person the information displayed on their monitors. Others sat at their desks, watching wide-eyed as the missile tracked over Missouri towards the center of the theoretical bulls-eye. Tears streaked down more than one face.
Alan felt the room spin around him, and he reached for a chair to steady himself. Never in his life had he felt so helpless. For the sixty-six long years of his life, Alan had always known the appropriate response, could think his way out of every situation. This time he couldn’t. The only hope the country had was another failure, a failure like the one that had happened to the missile launched from the Pacific.
Alan held his breath and prayed, too scared to blink in case something happened in that instant. As the missile tracked farther than expected, the possibility that NORAD was the target flashed through Alan’s mind just as the largest screen in the room flashed red, and an additional alarm sounded. Detonation.
For a brief moment the room went totally silent, as if all the air had been sucked out of the building. When the lights flickered, someone cursed, and then the roar of voices began to swell as backup generators kicked on and the room brightened again.
Alan knew they would have power for months. The rest of the country wasn’t going to be so lucky.
CHAPTER 3
Lawrence, Kansas 16:08 EST
High above the sun-baked prairies of Lawrence, Kansas, the missile reached its target. No one on the ground even noticed the blast. Perhaps had someone been looking at precisely the right location, at precisely the right time, they might have noticed a tiny, momentary spark in the bright afternoon sky. Had they seen the flash, it likely would have been attributed to the glint of sunlight reflecting off a passing airplane. From every vantage point below the detonation, there was no sense of the destructive capacity contained in that tiny speck of light. More than 300 miles above the earth, a nuclear explosion impacts nothing with the force of its blast. It is merely a large bomb going off in a vacuum, creating no shockwaves, no fireballs, no radiation, not even any sound.
Despite the lack of explosive destruction, this was now the most lethal weapon to be unleashed in the history of the world, but it was a weapon that would have had absolutely no discernable affect on mankind 200 years ago, other than creating a more colorful aurora. Upon detonation, the bomb expelled an intense wave of gamma radiation in every direction. The gamma rays traveling earthward interacted with the upper levels of the atmosphere and created a chain reaction of displaced electrons that rushed towards the surface of the earth at the speed of light. Most of the these displaced electrons passed rapidly through the atmosphere and grounded themselves harmlessly in the earth.
A small percentage, however, encountered conductive materials: metal, antennas, copper wiring, and silicon chips. As these conductors absorbed untold billions of free electrons, they experienced sudden surges in both voltage and current. In simple items, like a garden rake, this surge was manifested as a harmless static electricity-like spark. But in larger networks and sensitive objects, the consequences of the electron overload were devastating.
Across the country, millions and millions of miles of power lines absorbed these displaced electrons and delivered them to every home and to every power plant in the country, melting the electrical lines in the process. Safety systems designed to arrest voltage spikes were unable to react to the overwhelming size and speed of the surge, allowing this massive wave of power to flow unchecked throughout the grid.
In Akron, Ohio, Kevin Leishman was using his computer to look up driving directions as he prepared to head out for the long weekend. He watched in dismay as his monitor suddenly glowed brighter for a moment, and then faded to black, the smoke of his cigarette masking the smell of the melting electrical components.
Erika Smith was sitting at a traffic light in Winnipeg, Manitoba when the engine of her new Honda Accord simply shut off. Confused, she glanced up and noticed the traffic lights were no longer operating, then watched as a semi-truck turning across the intersection in front of her seemed to lose control of its steering and brakes and
crashed into a corner gas station, knocking over two gas pumps and causing an explosion that hurtled pieces of burning debris across the intersection and onto the hood of her car.
Jefferson Harris was reading an old issue of Sports Illustrated during his break at Northern Sierra Power when the safety alarms went off. He ran to the control room and watched in horror as one monitor after another flashed warnings or shut down. Then the generators went offline and he heard an unfamiliar sound from the turbines across the compound. Jefferson knew that if something went wrong, the computers were programmed to shut down the plant in a safe, orderly fashion. What he didn’t know was that the system designed to handle the shutdown had also failed, and the control that maintained lubrication for the turbine was offline. In the thirty seconds it took Jefferson to determine the telephones weren’t working, the temperature in the turbines rose from 300º F to just under 1,100º F. As he stood with the dead phone in his hand, trying to decide what to do, Jefferson heard new alarms go off, alarms that drowned out the sound of shrieking metal. The ground rumbled in the moment before the generator building exploded. Shockwaves from the blast blew out the window behind Jefferson and propelled shards of glass in every direction. As he turned to run for the exit, Jefferson slipped in a pool of his own blood, pumped from a deep gash in his thigh, the first indication he had that he’d been mortally wounded.
Officer Greg Henninger was issuing a ticket on the shoulder of Interstate 70, just east of the Hays, Kansas exit. Traffic was busy, and the driver of the red Mustang he’d pulled over was voicing her displeasure. As Officer Henninger explained the details of the citation, he sensed that something was wrong behind him, and turned just in time to see a semi-truck smash into the back of his patrol car, launching it into the back window of the Mustang. Greg tried to run but was hit before he could move his feet, leaving his boots where he’d stood on the road as his body hurtled through the air.