That was but a preview of what was yet to come.
The second warhead and penetrator capitalized on the fractural damage caused to the mountain by the first explosion. Impacting at a higher altitude than the first warhead, it completely sheared off the mountain peak, leaving the upper levels of the NORAD complex dangerously exposed. A blast wave tore through the main access tunnel and ripped loose both of the twenty ton steel doors that led into the complex. One of the buildings was imploded by overpressure; its occupants instantaneously reduced to pulp.
A third SS-18 followed, but was deflected by the updraft caused by its predecessors. It skidded harmlessly over the new, lower mountain peak, shot through the air and finally came to rest in a leafy clearing more than half a mile away.
NORAD’s structural foundations were beginning to fail now. Those who were still alive felt nauseous as the complex vibrated and the air began to compress.
Their misery was not to last. The fourth warhead detonated at the base of the mountain. Friction caused by the penetrator’s sheer speed vaporized the surrounding granite even before the warhead exploded. When it did, the blastwave found a narrow cavity that led into an airshaft. Superheated gases blew the cavity wide open, carving a route for the trailing wave of overpressure directly into NORAD’s heart.
A human being can sustain levels of overpressure up to thirty PSI. Instantly, the atmosphere within the NORAD complex was pressurized to levels of more than one million PSI. The net effect was the molecular disintegration of every living being and organism within the facility, including General Allen and his staff.
Eight more warheads had yet to impact.
ABOARD UA4171, OVER THE EASTERN ATLANTIC
The tannoy announcement came as a relief to Richie Gellis. For the last two hours, he had been nodding amiably while his neighbor, an investment banker from New Jersey, rambled on about all the places in Europe he’d visited and all the bars in which he’d passed out drunk. Meanwhile, Gellis had been wondering if any of those places still existed.
“Mr. Richard Gellis,” announced the flight attendant’s voice. “Richard Gellis, could you please come forward to the cockpit. Thank you.”
“Excuse me,” Gellis smiled politely to his neighbor.
“Sure thing, buddy.”
Gellis felt cold, and it had nothing to do with the in-flight air conditioning. He had the ability to read moods just by a tone of voice. The attendant’s tone hadn’t sounded promising. It had sounded scared.
She was waiting for him outside the cockpit. Her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. When she spoke, Gellis detected a slight tremor in her voice.
“Mr. Gellis, the Captain would like a quick word with you.”
His heart skipped a beat. “Is this about…”
She cut him short, opening the cockpit door for him. “I think it’s best if the Captain tells you.”
He entered the cockpit with some apprehension and saw that the pilot and co-pilot were manning their controls as if nothing were wrong. A flight navigator sat at his console, monitoring instruments and pressing buttons. All of them had their backs turned to him.
“Excuse me,” Gellis said, unsure whether they even knew he was there.
“Mr. Gellis,” the Captain acknowledged him without turning around. “I understand you’re a reporter for the New York Post, is that right?”
“That’s correct.” Get to the point. Gellis realized that his palms were sweating.
“And you know what happened to Moscow earlier, right?”
“One of the flight attendants told me, yes.”
The Captain didn’t even pause. He reported the news in a flat, matter-of-fact monotone. And still he didn’t turn to look at the reporter. “Well, the same thing has happened to Washington. And Seattle. And Houston. And a pile of other places in between.”
Gellis’s first reaction was to laugh, but it was a laugh edged with terror. “You’re pulling my leg. It can’t have happened,” he insisted. “The flight attendant put you up to this, right?”
“Mr. Gellis, I would not joke about such a thing. I assure you that much of America is in ruins right now.”
The news wouldn’t really sink in until much later, when he could see it for himself. Right now, a cynical part of his mind still believed that this entire episode was a sick joke, contrived solely for his benefit. “How did it happen?” he asked calmly, the reporter in him beginning to probe. “Who started it?”
“I’m afraid that’s all I know,” the Captain replied. Gellis would have given anything to see his eyes at that moment, but something in the Captain’s voice warned him against pressing the issue. The co-pilot and navigator remained silent, lost in whatever thoughts they were thinking. Gellis wondered what was going through their minds.
He struggled to think of something to say, but no words seemed appropriate any more.
“Thank you.”
He turned and left the cockpit.
B-2A BOMBER - “SPIRIT 16” - OVER NEBRASKA
“Shit!” Logan growled when the Blast Warning indicator started blinking on his console, accompanied by a constant, high-pitched alarm. “Get your visor down, McCann,” he yelled, already fumbling to lower his own.
Momentarily, McCann froze. Every strategic bomber pilot knew what the tone meant, and it was a sound they feared like no other. She suddenly had an overwhelming urge to urinate.
“I said, lower your goddamn visor,” Logan barked. “That’s an order.”
She fixed him with a dirty look, but followed his instructions nonetheless. The darkened visor was coated with aluminum to provide protection against retinal burns. Of course, were a one-megaton bomb to detonate within five miles of the B-2, no amount of aluminum would make much difference.
The skies outside were still full of commercial traffic whose pilots were probably ignorant of what was coming. As she tightened the safety harness around her waist, McCann offered a silent prayer for the pilots, their passengers and for everybody else who would die tonight, not least of all her own husband and kids, who had been in Kansas City, adjacent to Whiteman AFB.
For a few seconds, nothing happened and she hoped that the alarm might be false. But then her radar screen fuzzed over like a television suffering interference. The focus of the distortion seemed to be about ten miles behind them. Then came the white flash. Even through her visor, she squinted against the tremendous light that filled the B-2s cockpit. It lasted for barely two seconds. Her eyes took another couple of seconds to readjust.
“Ground burst, five ‘o’ clock, eleven miles,” she reported, quickly scanning her instruments. The first thing she noticed was that at least three of the five commercial jets on her radar screen had disappeared. They had been within the blast zone. The remaining two appeared to be in some trouble, judging by the speed of their descent. She had to concentrate to expel from her mind the image of screaming, terrified passengers plummeting to a fiery doom.
May God have mercy on their souls.
“Shockwave,” Logan yelled urgently. “Brace.”
Both pilots assumed brace positions at precisely the same moment that the shockwave rolled over the B-2. The bomber’s weight was as nothing to the godlike forces that first lifted it, then tossed it into a twenty-degree frontal spin. Logan knew precisely how vulnerable they were. The B-2 was built of graphite rather than aluminum. This had the advantage of trapping radar signals inside the jet, rather than reflecting them, but it also made the stealth bomber considerably more fragile than most other warplanes.
Logan could barely hear the creaking and groaning of the B-2’s airframe above the orchestra of alarms that simultaneously warned of myriad system failures. Both he and McCann were powerless against the mighty forces assaulting their plane. He caught a glimpse of his altimeter, which showed them dropping sharply. His increasingly blurred vision was coupled with an overwhelming sense of nausea as the perpetual spin simulated more than eight G’s. His G-suit automatically inflated to compensate,
but it was not enough for him to cope with the sudden loss of orientation.
He closed his eyes, knowing that he wasn’t going to come through this alive, and hoping that the end came quickly.
But, in fact, the end didn’t come at all. The shockwave passed over the B-2, leaving it in a frontal spin, sustained by its own momentum. The bomber was still intact, but in serious trouble. A repetitive tone, rising and falling like a police siren, told them that the plane was about to stall. Logan groped for his joystick, but it didn’t seem to be where it normally was. In his disorientated state, it was no longer clear to him which way was up and which was down. The sensation was not unlike being caught in a washing machine on fast spin.
“Take the controls,” he cried at McCann. “I’m losing it.”
“I’ve got it,” she yelled back, no less uncertain of her bearings than her co-pilot. She was acting on pure instinct now. Three years of intensive training and physical conditioning with the 325thBomb Squadron at Whiteman came back to her. She fought with the aircraft to force a counterspin, leveling out the pitch and yaw that had been created by the shockwave. At least two of the alarms fell silent. But the B-2 was still losing altitude fast. As her senses began to report in, she realized that altitude had fallen to barely 1,500 feet and was dropping by more than 150 feet per second. She gently brought the nose of the plane up, simultaneously increasing throttle.
“1,200 feet,” she reported calmly, professionalism taking over.
Logan prayed.
“1,000 feet.”
“240 knots,” Logan announced, regaining his bearings. “We’re gonna make it. Keep pushing, honey.”
“700 feet.”
The rate of fall began to decrease as the B-2’s engines, at full throttle, just about accumulated enough power to maintain altitude.
“550 feet.” McCann exhaled a deep sigh of relief. “Come on, baby… Come to me… Leveling out at 420 feet,” she reported with an audible sigh of relief.
“Take her up,” Logan ordered, panting heavily. For not the first time, he thanked God for pairing him with such a calm, efficient co-pilot. But that didn’t detract him from the knowledge that, for a few critical moments back there, he had lost it. McCann wouldn’t say anything, of course. She was too much of a pro for that. But she knew and, more importantly,he knew, and that was enough to damage his pride and confidence. The effect was made all the worse by the fact that he outranked her. How could she respect a CO who hadn’t been able to cut it when it had mattered most of all? Damn!
He glanced over at McCann, wondering what she was thinking. She had raised her visor and was staring wide-eyed at the frontal view. Her mouth was half open in a silent cry of horror. He lifted his own visor and followed her gaze.
The horizon was peppered with nuclear mushroom clouds. Six of them were about twenty miles away, and eight more were visible in the far distance. Omaha, he realized. They’ve taken out Omaha.
Logan checked his rear view monitor and saw another five clouds behind them. Twenty-one altogether. Twenty-One! Even when his wing had been scrambled, he hadn’t truly believed that it would come to this. But what until a few minutes’ earlier had been an abstract possibility was now awful reality. Although he had been trained for this moment, he had never expected to have to really face it.
“They must’ve hit everything between Omaha and Wichita,” McCann remarked incredulously. “They’ve killed everybody.”
“Not everybody,” Logan assured her. She looked up at him, her brow furrowing a question. “We’re still alive,” he elaborated. “And we’ve got a job to do.”
McCann stifled a sarcastic laugh. “What the hell for?”
He pointed through the window. “To make sure the bastards who did that fry in hell.”
But even as he said the words, one thought dominated Logan’s mind.
I’ll never see my Beth again.
PLEASANT RIDGE, MISSOURI
The first indications of a mass exodus had manifested with remarkable suddenness. Roads that had been silent just a few hours’ earlier were now clogged with traffic. The result was chaotic. Cars loaded with people and possessions, horns blaring, their drivers showing scant regard to road signs and lane markings. Hikers trying to hitch a lift on the roadside. A few people on bicycles and motorcycles, weaving in and out of the larger vehicles. All of them had just two things in common; they were heading north, and they all wanted to get there as quickly as possible.
Despite all the traffic, Beth was still maintaining an average speed of no less than sixty miles per hour as she weaved through the thickening army of vehicles. She overtook a trailer whose driver responded by giving her the finger. She didn’t notice, didn’t care.
“Beth, slow down,” Cathy ordered, feeling more nervous of her daughter-in-law’s disregard for the State speed limits than of the nuclear terror about to descend from the skies.
“No way, no way,” Beth insisted. “We’re running out of time.”
“My God,” Cathy sighed, taking in the chaotic scenes around her. “What’s with all these people? They’re acting like animals.”
“They’re acting like people who want to live,” Patrick corrected her.
Beth slammed the steering wheel in frustration as she found herself caught in the right lane. A bus, crammed with passengers, was coming up hard on her left. Immediately in front of her was a battered white van, testing its own mechanical limits at forty miles per hour. Beth had nowhere to go. She was locked in.
“Get out of my fucking way, dammit!” she cried, as the trailer came up hard on her rear.
Cathy was appalled. “Mind your language, Bethany!”
Beth’s reply was cut short by a dullthwump behind her. It was a sound that could only mean one thing. No sooner had her mind registered that thought than her entire world was bathed in a dazzling chalky white light, brighter than anything she’d ever seen. Instinctively, she slammed on the brakes, causing the trailer behind to slam into her rear. Her airbag activated immediately, preventing her from flying through the windscreen.
In the back seat, Patrick wasn’t so lucky. He was thrown forward by the impact, his head smashing into the front passenger seat. In the maelstrom, Cathy somehow landed in an unruly heap on the floor.
Beth was confined by the airbag, screaming into it. She heard the rumble getting closer and sensed that her entire future could be measured in mere seconds.
But by the time the blastwave reached the car, it had lost much of its strength and the overpressure succeeded only in smashing every window in the vehicle that hadn’t already been broken by the collision. A shard of glass sliced through the airbag, causing it to rapidly deflate.
Beth forced the door open and collapsed out onto the asphalt road surface. As she looked up, she saw:
Three fiery mushroom clouds towering into the atmosphere, their luminescence lighting up the sky, partly concealing several more in the far distance.
The entire horizon seemingly ablaze.
Other drivers and passengers staggering out of their own vehicles to stare at the hellish spectacle.
“Holy God,” she muttered to herself, unable to stop herself staring.
And then she became aware of the desperate screams, cries and moans that saturated the air. Some people had been flashblinded by the blast. Others had died or been seriously injured in road accidents. Half a mile behind her, a gas tanker exploded, creating a mushroom cloud that was but a tiny facsimile of those dominating the horizon. Several vehicles were ablaze, their occupants still inside.
But she could not stop staring at the nuclear clouds.
That’s Whiteman, she realized with horror. Martin!
She turned to her car and opened the back door. Cathy was sprawled out on the floor, mumbling something incomprehensible. Beneath her was Patrick. He wasn’t making a sound.
“Come on, Cath,” Beth said, pulling her mother-in-law out of the vehicle. She laid her on the asphalt. Cathy was delirious, obviously concussed
.
But still not a peep from Patrick.
Beth reached in and felt for a pulse.
Nothing.
She reached to check for dilation in his eyes, but as she touched his face she realized that his head was twisted at an impossible angle. And then she realized.
Oh God, his neck is broken.
As that realization struck her, she heard the distantthwump of another bomb.
XI
TRANSITION
“Anyone who considers using a weapon of mass destruction against the United States or its allies must first consider the consequences. … We would not specify in advance what our response would be, but it would be both overwhelming and devastating”
(Secretary of Defense William Perry, April 1996)
ABOARD KNEECAP
The stunned silence that filled the conference room was broken only by the steady hum of the E-4’s jet engines as it cruised over a devastated America. Lewis took an inventory of the faces around the conference table, all confronting their own personal grief for the first time. The eyes of those around him were either downcast or bleakly contemplating what had happened and - worse still - what was yet to come.
The President was taking it harder than anybody, Lewis saw. His face was ashen, unblinking eyes staring at a fixed point in space. He was the one who would have to explain to what remained of the American people why they had been attacked. The First Lady caught Lewis’s eye and nodded almost imperceptibly, her expression saying: I’ll take care of him. Don’t worry.
But Lewis wasn’t worried about the President. He was worried about Jo, the one person about whom he truly cared. He wouldn’t have minded so much had he known for sure whether she was alive or dead, but the uncertainty provided a lingering torture that was more than a psychological pain. It was physical. He could feel it in every molecule of his body.
His mind replayed their last telephone conversation with each other, some six months earlier. Jo had called him to ask whether he wanted the set of rare pewter spoons that his late grandmother had bought for him as a child. The spoons were all handcarved, each of them representing a scene from a Charles Dickens’ story. He had left them, along with many of his belongings, at the Maryland home he’d shared with Jo; perhaps in the subconscious hope that he would return there one day. Now both the spoons and - he imagined - Jo had almost certainly been destroyed.
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