The door flew open. “Brent, get me a new phone,” McCracken said. “Goddamn sumbitch hung up on me.”
He went back into his office and slammed the door behind him. The staffers gave each other another round of nervous looks, and one of them called down to maintenance, then unplugged his own phone and carried it into the governor's office. One of the others made the sign of the cross at him, as though administering the last rites. That got grins, but nobody made a sound.
The staffer with the phone came back out of the office alive and unskinned, and mimed with two fingers: the governor was pacing up and down his office. That meant something worse than an explosion was coming. The staffers gulped and got busy again, as quietly as they could.
“Maria?” It was McCracken's voice, over the intercom. “Get me Olney and Kammersdorf. Tell ’em I don't care what they're doing. I need to talk to them now.”
“Yes sir,” said the secretary, and started calling. General Tom Olney was an old Army buddy of McCracken's who commanded the Texas National Guard, Ben Kammersdorf a close political ally who headed the Texas Rangers. Both were under Homeland Security authority by executive order for the duration of the crisis, but McCracken had both of them on the phone within minutes, and a clash between Washington orders and Texas loyalties could have only one result.
When he was finished, the governor called Homeland Security back. “You listen to me, sumbitch,” he said, stabbing the air with a finger the size of a sausage. “You're out of a job. The Texas National Guard and the Texas Rangers will be handling public safety in this state, under my command.”
“You can't do that,” the official spluttered.
“Try me.” Another jab with the finger. “Get your thugs out of my state in twenty-four hours. You hear me? Twenty-four hours.” He slammed down the phone, hard. Minutes later, on another new phone, he was calling drinking and hunting buddies of his who happened to be the governors of half a dozen Southern states.
19 September 2029: North of Khoramshahr, on the Iran-Iraq border
“Yes,” said General Birjani, and hung up the phone. It was the only word he had said during the entire call. His staff expected as much, waited for orders with the serene patience of those who had long since accepted a martyr's fate. Iran's Revolutionary Guards had many such men, and the shock troops who had been hurried to the western borders in the first days of September were more zealous than most. All of them knew, as their convoys snaked through the Zagros mountains on winding roads, that they had in all probability been sent there to die.
“We have been chosen to lead the assault,” Birjani said.
“The time, sir?” This from his chief of staff.
“Now.”
Eyebrows went up. The men were ready, that was beyond question, and orders had been given the night before. Still, the suddenness of it…
“Allah is great,” said the chief of staff.
All at once the headquarters was a flurry of activity; keyboards clattered, voices in Farsi spoke into a dozen phones. Birjani walked through the middle of it to the door, stepped out into the cool air. The first hint of the approaching dawn was just beginning to silhouette the mountains to the east. Allah would forgive him and his men for missing morning prayers; a different religious duty summoned them.
By the time he reached the armored personnel carrier that would be his command vehicle, tank engines were roaring to life and men were running to their stations. The distant drumming of helicopters told him that air cover would be in place. He allowed himself a broad smile. After so long, so much waiting, so many exercises and drills, the day was here—and if the next thing that happened after his armored division crossed the border was an American missile screaming down to lift them all into the sky in one great mushroom cloud, why, then they would be in heaven with Hassan and Husayn that much sooner.
The crew of his command vehicle were waiting for him, the engine already roaring. He climbed inside, took his familiar seat, nodded to his aides. “Ready?”
“More than ready, sir.”
“Go.”
The armored personnel carrier lurched into motion.
Ten minutes later, Birjani's division rolled into Iraqi territory, scattering a few terrified border guards. Scouts in fast vehicles rushed ahead, securing the necessary bridges and letting the local people know that the invasion was not directed at them—a message that, Birjani knew, was being communicated by diplomats to a stunned Iraqi government in Baghdad at the same time. The maps beside Birjani's seat told the rest of the story: across Basra province to Kuwait, through Kuwait to the Saudi border, south along the coast, west to Riyadh, and then—
Then, Allah willing, the Holy Cities in Shi'a hands at last.
EIGHTEEN
19 September 2029: Mount Weather, Virginia
“I'll take the call,” Weed said, and pressed a key, muting the intercom.
The computer screen in front of him, full of details of the Iranian assault, left no question in his mind what the call would be about. He picked up the handset and said, “Prince Khalid? Yes, I've heard the news.”
“Mr. President.” The Saudi ambassador's voice was edged with tension. “I am glad to hear that. May I ask what you intend to do about this.”
“At this moment,” said Weed, “we're not in a position to be able to help you.”
The line hissed softly at him for a long moment. “Do I hear you correctly, Mr. President? This is a matter of life and death for the kingdom.”
“In case you haven't heard,” Weed snapped, “we're facing something similar ourselves just at the moment.”
“Of your own choosing,” said the ambassador.
That the man was right didn't improve Weed's mood at all. “All our assets are committed to the nuclear crisis,” he said. “Once that's resolved, of course we'll offer the kingdom all the help we can. I know that that doesn't help you at all right now, but it's the best the United States can do.”
“Very well,” said Khalid. “I will pass on your message to His Majesty. I trust you understand that the kingdom will take the actions it needs to take, whether those turn out to be in your nation's interests or otherwise.”
“Of course,” said Weed.
A few more formalities and the call was over. Weed put down the phone and stared at the computer screen. It galled him that the most powerful nation in the world didn't have the option of intervening when the Middle East was blowing sky-high, but that was the hard reality of the situation; with the Navy's carriers sitting ducks for anybody who had supersonic cruise missiles, the Air Force reeling from a decisive defeat, and the threat of nuclear war demanding every resource the armed services and the country had left, the Iranians and the Saudis were going to have to fight their war themselves.
He tapped at the trackball to get the latest update from the satellites, and wondered what the Saudis were going to do.
19 September 2029: Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia
The first fireball went up just before dusk, a vast globe of flame mirroring the setting sun.
The orders had come from Riyadh earlier that day, minutes after the news from the northern border. Technicians in the vast Ras Tanura oil shipping facility blanched, but hurried to their tasks. No one had any question what to do; they'd been through the sequence in drill after drill, under the watchful eyes of government officials and princes of the royal family—but none of them thought that the thing would ever happen.
A second fireball followed, rising from the middle of one of the storage tank farms. The third came almost immediately after, a huge gout of flame from one of the pumping stations that scattered flaming debris over most of a square mile.
“Yes, Your Highness,” said one of the technicians into his cell phone. He was standing by his car, several miles inland, facing the facility. “I am watching the explosions now.” A shockwave hit, breaking over the technician like thunder. “Perhaps Your Highness heard that.”
He listened for a few moments, while more fl
ashes and fireballs burst over the facility. “Yes, Your Highness. The technical staff have all been evacuated to Mubarraz; the common laborers—well, there is no need for Your Highness to be concerned about them. There will be nothing here they could use anyway.”
Another flash, larger, and then all at once the whole heart of the facility dissolved in a series of explosions. The demolition charges had been well placed.
“Yes, Your Highness,” he sald. “If you will excuse me—”
The shockwaves arrived, landing like blows. The technician waited until they were done. “My apologies—that last set of blasts made it impossible for me to hear Your Highness's voice. You were saying?” A long silence, then. “Yes. Yes, of course, Your Highness. Salaam aleikum.”
He shut the thing off, got into the car, drove away. If the Iranians were already well past the Kuwaiti border, it was time, past time, to get to a place of safety.
19 September 2029: Facility 6335, West of Sverdlovsk
“Anything further?” Kuznetsov glanced from face to face, nodded. “I will be in my office. If anything happens I am to be alerted at once.” He turned before the staff could respond, went out the door of the situation room.
He was in his office a few minutes later. The clock on his desk showed the time: just under three hours until the American ultimatum expired.
He sat down, slumped back in his chair, allowed his eyes to drift shut, tried to push aside the pressures of the moment: the thousand and one details of the crisis, this new war just now getting started in the Middle East, and the looming threat behind it all, the mushroom clouds that might shortly reduce the world's three most powerful nations into smoldering ash. The effort failed. After a moment, he opened his eyes again, leaned forward, checked the computer screen on the desk: nothing new, and no new updates expected for another ten minutes.
Then he reached for one of the desk drawers, opened it, and pulled out a photo in an ornate little frame of silver. A flick of one finger popped out the stand on the back. Kuznetsov set the photo on his desk, considered it: a man in his thirties, dark-haired and smiling, wearing the uniform of an officer in the old Soviet Army.
Would it astonish you, Kuznetsov asked the image, to hear that the Americans are threatening to blow us all to the devil if they can't get their way? Would that surprise you at all, Father? I think not.
By then the memories were unrolling, moment by moment. His litany, he had come to call it, like the litanies the priests and staretsi were chanting at that moment in cathedrals and churches across holy Russia: praying to God for forgiveness and peace. He envied them, envied all those who could find it in themselves to believe in a God.
He was walking home from school. He could remember every step, talking and laughing with his friends, splashing through puddles left behind by the melting snow, the tall apartment blocks of Novosibirsk rising up above them into the pale blue sky of spring. It had been a good day, good enough that for a moment he could forget about the troubled times, the paychecks his father should have been getting and wasn't, the worried conversations running late into the night about what that drunken fool Yeltsin was doing to Russia—Yeltsin, and the plutocrats who owned him, and the Americans who owned them, whose babble about democracy and freedom the plutocrats mouthed as they plundered Russia like a conquered province.
Stopping at the door of the apartment building, laughing and saying goodbye to his friends, waiting while the elevator clattered and groaned its way down to the lobby: all of it, moment by moment. Up to the fourteenth floor, turn left, six doors down, rattle the key just so to get the door to unlock, and then calling out, “Father, I—”
And then the dark shape in the center of the living room, not touching the floor, that resolved itself into his father's body, hanging from the light fixture. He'd put on his uniform, the one he'd worn in the Afghanistan war, pinned his medals across his chest—Hero of the Soviet Union and the rest of them—knotted the rope, climbed on the chair, and taken the only way out of poverty and failure that a proud man driven to his knees by desperation could still find.
And the scream that burst from the boy's mouth as he realized what he was seeing—
The litany ended, the memories shattered into fragments like a glass thrown against a wall. Kuznetsov drew in a long unsteady breath, released it, clenched his hands into fists, mastering himself.
If they launch their missiles, he told himself, we shall launch ours, and that will be the end of us all. And if they do not…
If they spare us and the world, then there will be an accounting. Somehow, in some way, there will be an accounting.
19 September 2029: Mount Weather, Virginia
The clock on the wall ticked quietly to itself. Weed tried to ignore it, and could not. It was old enough to have hands, and just now they traced a vertical line, the lower half thick, the top half slender and rising to a point, for all the world like a missile ready to launch.
Six o'clock, on what by all accounts was a lovely September evening up on the surface; eighteen hundred hours in the military-speak of the command facility around him. The ultimatum had exactly sixty minutes left to run.
“Sir?”
Weed looked up at the door, realized only then that the voice came from the speakers on his computer. “What is it?”
“Ms. Harbin—”
“Tell her she can wait.”
“Yes, sir.”
He propped his elbows on his desk, put his head in his hands. Harbin kept insisting that there had to be a way to take out the Russian and Chinese nukes, or force them to back down, or something. There had been something close to a screaming match that morning when Harbin demanded that the Strategic Command staff give her an operational plan for a decapitation strike on the Russian and Chinese leadership and the Air Force general in charge of STRATCOM told her to her face that she belonged in a padded cell. Weed had hired her because of her reputation for innovative thinking, but her kind of innovation was the last thing he needed now.
The clock ticked away: fifty-five minutes to go.
All over the world, Weed knew, tens of thousands of American servicepeople waited for his orders. A click of his trackball could bring up details of every strategic asset the United States had: Minuteman missiles in silos under North Dakota farmland, Trident submarines in the deep waters of the world's oceans, B-52 bombers with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles circling in the skies or cycling their engines at a score of air bases, two other delivery systems so secret that fewer than 100 people in the US government even knew their code names. Another click could bring up everything that was known of the Chinese and Russian strategic arsenals, with their own missiles, bombers, submarines, and ace-in-the-hole secret weapons. Behind those bare names and numbers were tens of thousands of young men and women who wore different uniforms but waited for what amounted to the same orders.
A few words into the intercom would be enough to bring the Air Force officer with the “football,” the case full of nuclear launch codes, into Weed's office, and set the whole thing in motion. An hour later, something like a billion people would be dead or dying, and perhaps a billion more would be condemned to death as the fallout clouds drifted with the prevailing winds. It would be so very easy.
Fifty minutes to go.
He reached for the trackball, clicked on the icon that brought up the live feed from Mount Weather's communications center. He'd last checked it half an hour earlier, and close to thirty new messages had been sent his way since then: reports about Trenton, reports about Texas, reports from a dozen states where the National Command Authorities could no longer be quite sure that anybody was listening to their commands. In Seattle, National Guard units sent to control a riot had dissolved into the crowd, taking their guns with them; in Cincinnati, city and state police sent to keep the freeways open for emergency use had torn down the barricades and waved drivers through; something was up in Alabama but nobody knew what, because the Homeland Security director there couldn't be reache
d at all and the state police, National Guard, and governor's office weren't responding to messages from the federal government. The contingency plans for nuclear war covered any number of possibilities, but a collapse of federal authority even before the missiles started flying wasn't one of them.
Forty-five minutes.
He paged through the messages, looking for foreign datelines. The war in the Gulf was spinning out of control, with rebels fighting Saudi military units in Qatif and Dammam and Iranian tanks roaring across the Saudi border. Word was that the Saudis had dynamited their oil shipping facility at Ras Tanura and were blowing up pipelines as they retreated. Even without an insurgency to cope with, the Saudi military wasn't a match for Iran's, and a scorched earth policy was one of the few options the Saudis had; most of what would be scorched by it was in Europe and the United States, but it wasn't as though the Saudis had any particular reason to care.
Meanwhile, rioters in Paris were besieging the Elysée Palace, demanding France's immediate withdrawal from NATO. The US embassy in Jakarta had been looted and burned to the ground by a mob and the Indonesian government had no information about the whereabouts of the ambassador and her staff. Everywhere he looked, the American position was crumbling, and the one thing that might save it—the smallest hint of concession from the Chinese—was not going to happen.
They've called my bluff, Weed thought, and realized in the same moment that it was a bluff, that the final step to nuclear war was one step further than he could go.
Forty minutes.
He drew in a long ragged breath and let it out again, knowing what he had to do. He tapped the onscreen button that activated the intercom. “Lois?”
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