FOREWORD

by Ten To Midnight--Free(Lit)

  “Radiation effects, sir,” the Chairman explained, returning to his seat. “The black spots mark ground zero for each bomb. The tails indicate the path of radiation clouds.”

  The President felt his jaw sag with horror. It was worse than he had ever feared. Not being an expert in nuclear physics, he had assumed naively that fallout would be restricted only to areas hit by bombs. But according to the Glass Eye report, at least half the country had been affected. The largest tails seemed to be emanating from Colorado, Wyoming, Missouri and Nebraska. Smaller clouds from other sites covered - among others - the cities of Los Angeles, Boston, Dallas and Kansas City. How many millions would die in the misplaced belief that that they had survived the attack?

  “Are you certain this is accurate?” he asked finally.

  “The Glass Eye report is based on data provided by weather satellites over the U.S.,” Westwood told him. “A computer at StratCom collates the information by calculating the effects of prevailing wind patterns and other environmental factors. So that’s about the most accurate picture you can get.”

  The President considered issuing an order to the FEMA Director to evacuate as many people as possible from the affected cities, but his train of thought was interrupted when one of his own private lines began to ring. It was the red phone. The bad one that rang only in times of extreme emergency. Mitchell’s blood ran cold. His mouth ran dry. He became aware of his heart racing much faster than it should. He could see that his fear was reflected on the faces of those around him. Unbidden, he held his breath.

  The President lifted the receiver, his voice edged with a nervous tremor. “Yes?”

  The voice belonged toAlice on the Looking Glass aircraft. “Mr. President,” he said urgently, “we’ve just detected another Russian missile launch from Omsk. We’ve got positive verification of twenty six - repeat two six - inbounds.”

  “Destination?” A bead of sweat trickled down the President’s brow and stung his eye.

  “We won’t know that for at least another ten minutes, sir, since we’ve lost our BMEWS stations. Omsk was one of the ICBM bases we didn’t destroy totally. It houses SS-18’s, sir.”

  SS-18’s,the President recalled. City killers. “Keep me posted,” he toldAlice . “I’ve got work to do.” He was sweating profusely, but it was a cold sweat unlike anything he’d ever experienced before. Instinctively, Margaret grabbed his hand. It was freezing. That caused the First Lady to stare at her husband in alarm.

  The door flew open and a harried looking Nielsen entered, flanked by General Shelley and two Secret Service agents.

  In the same instant, the President’s eyes glassed over and his pallor seemed to worsen. He gasped desperately for air, but his lungs didn’t seem to accept the oxygen they took in. He wasn’t to know that this was because was because his aorta had ruptured, causing internal bleeding and restricting blood flow to the heart.

  “Ed?” Margaret gasped, beginning to react. “What’s wrong?”

  Excruciating pain paralyzed the left side of his body. Unbidden, he clutched his chest and keeled over the conference table, his last vision that of the conference room spinning around him. A Secret Service agent was already behind the President, moving to provide urgent assistance. Margaret let out a cry of horror and leapt from her chair.

  “Code Blue, Code Blue!” the agent yelled into her radio. “Request urgent medical assistance to the conference room. Teacheris down, repeat,Teacher is down.”Teacher was the Secret Service’s codename for the President, a reference to his former occupation as an Economics lecturer.

  Within seconds, three more USSS agents were in the room. Two of them laid the President flat on the floor; a third held a large black bag containing various medication and resuscitation equipment. The agent carrying the bag – a youthful black man called Jefferson – was a qualified paramedic. He took the President’s pulse and blood pressure and grimaced. Not good. Meanwhile, Margaret looked on anxiously as her husband drifted into unconsciousness without even a murmur.

  “He’s out,” Jefferson reported, glancing up worriedly at the lead agent, Angela Nichols. “BP is 170 over 110. We have to get him to a hospital, right the hell now.”

  “Well, then do it!” Margaret cried at Nichols. The agent glanced at Nielsen, who was now the senior executive present. SecDef nodded his consent, his face white with shock. Somehow, this was affecting him worse than anything else that had happened in the past few hours. Since America was technically at war, constitutional provisions existed for the Secretary of Defense to assume National Command Authority in the absence of both the President and Vice President. In peacetime, the Speaker of the House would have been next in line of succession to the Vice President - which was, after all, how Gerald Ford had come to power - but peacetime was as distant a concept as any right now.

  Bishop, Westwood, Copeland, Reynolds and Dunster were watching anxiously as Jefferson attended to the President. Lewis was on his feet, knowing that he should be doing something, but unable to think what that something might be. Yes, he was accomplished at the taking of life, but not so much the saving of it. Jo was the doctor in the family. Oh shit, I wish she was here now.

  Nichols muttered something into her radio and listened to the response. She turned to the First Lady. “We’re about a hundred miles off the Delaware coast at the moment, Ma’am. The pilot says the nearest safe airport is Baltimore-Washington. We can be there in ten minutes and have a chopper waiting to take him either to the FEMA bunker at Olney or to Bethesda.”

  “They’re both too close to Washington,” Margaret protested. “It isn’t safe.”

  Lewis picked up the Glass Eye report. “Not necessarily, Ma’am. The prevailing winds are blowing to the southeast. Olney’s about fifty miles north of D.C.. Bethesda’s a little closer, but I think they’ll already be overwhelmed with casualties. At least Olney is shielded against the effects of radiation.” He knew of the existence of the FEMA facility at Olney. Technically, its role had been downgraded after the Cold War from that of a secondary government bunker to that of a Communications/Early Warning center. But, as a key FEMA facility, it still housed a fully equipped medical wing designed to cope with almost any eventuality. And not all of its Cold War functionality had disappeared, although this was a fact that had never been made public.

  “Dr Stein’s correct,” Nichols agreed. “Olney is probably the safest place for him to go. Civilian hospitals won’t be able to give him the attention he needs, and the logistics of getting the President there in the middle of a national crisis don’t bear thinking about.”

  Margaret nodded her reluctant agreement as two more agents arrived with a stretcher and gently lifted the President onto it.

  “Go with him, Ma’am,” Lewis said quietly, placing a reassuring hand on her arm. “He’ll be okay, trust me.”

  Both of them knew that was probably a lie, but Margaret nevertheless took Lewis’s hand in her own. “Thank you, Lewis. All I ask is that you do your job. Help get us out of this mess, huh?”

  He felt a lump in his throat. Not only because he genuinely liked the President, and not only because Margaret was a very dear friend to him and he hated to see her suffer so, but because he was beginning to fear that the President’s successor might inadvertently destroy the planet. Lewis knew that he could trust only himself to prevent that happening.

  “I’ll try,” he said quietly, imagining that the odds of mankind’s annihilation had just drastically fallen. He didn’t know whether Nielsen would listen to him, much less take his advice. But he had to try, didn’t he? He was still the National Security Advisor. He hadn’t wanted the job, but he was here now and it was down to him to turn this situation around. For the first time in his adult life, he felt truly vulnerable. He had nobody to fall back on now - not even Margaret.

  Before leaving the room with her husband and a phalanx of USSS agents, Margaret fixed Nielsen with a hard glare. She voiced the thought that had already crossed the minds of everybody else
in the room.

  “This planet is home to all of us,” she reminded the new Commander-in-Chief. “Just remember that.”

  BETHANY, MISSOURI

  Checking her watch, Beth realized that the dawn light should have been illuminating the sky by now. But, as she looked up, she saw that the sky was still as black as sackcloth. Not the normal darkness of night, but a turbulent, low hanging blackness that prohibited any sunlight from reaching the ravaged earth.

  She and Cathy had been weaving their way north through the stationary traffic, neither of them saying a word as they did so. They were just two of hundreds of refugees marching silently in search of absolution; a parade of misery. The only sounds to be heard were those of the occasional baby crying, someone screaming, injured moans and secondary explosions in the far distance. The sense of shock that seemed to blanket the survivors forbade normal conversation. Beth feared that she would never again hear the joyous sound of laughter or music. Simple pleasures that, only twenty-four hours earlier, she had taken for granted. But pleasures - simple or not - had no place in this hellish new world.

  Cathy’s head was hung low as she walked, as if to avert her eyes from the awful sights that surrounded her. Indeed, some of them went far beyond awful. Beth had seen burn victims, their clothes scorched from them, skin hanging from their bodies like strips of torn ribbon. She had seen blackened faces coughing blood. Terrible sights that surpassed her worst nightmares. Every time she thought nothing else could shock her, she was confronted by another sight that proved her wrong. It amazed her that the human body could suffer so much damage yet continue to live. Would I want to live if I’d been injured that badly?

  Beth was aware of how fortunate she and Cathy had been, compared to many of those around her. But fortunate was a relative term nowadays, wasn’t it? The truly fortunate, she thought, had been at ground zero; vaporized even before their brains had time to register the fact.

  The sound of a helicopter’s whining engine caused her to look up. It was coming from the north. From civilization! As the other survivors became aware of the chopper’s approach, they began to stir.

  It was tracing the Interstate at about 100 feet altitude, heading south towards the bomb zone. Some of those around Beth began to wave and scream at the helicopter, desperate for any kind of contact with civilization. The chopper probed the Interstate with a dazzling searchlight, forcing many of the survivors to shield their eyes.

  As it got closer, Beth could tell that it had Army markings. She wondered what was going through the minds of the crew as they passed over the apocalyptic scene below. Had they lost loved ones too?

  She was still wondering about this when the chopper passed overhead, continuing relentlessly south towards the blazing southern horizon.

  When the survivors realized it was not going to stop for them, a despondent cry filled the air.

  A chorus of desolation.

  ABOARD KNEECAP

  The procedure that had enabled Paul Nielsen to succeed President Mitchell was irregular, owing to the nature of the crisis at hand, but nevertheless constitutional. Even in the midst of a nuclear war, there are some things that can be done quickly. One of them is the appointment of a Presidential successor. No sooner had Mitchell collapsed than moves were underway to replace him.

  During brief consultations with the Attorney General, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and the Speaker of the House - all of whom were at Mount Weather - it was agreed that, as Secretary of Defense, Nielsen should assume the President’s duties until such time as the war was over, when the Speaker would become peacetime Commander-in-Chief. The Air Force chaplain on board KNEECAP conducted the hurried swearing in of Paul Nielsen. Meanwhile, the Looking Glass and TACAMO command planes generated new nuclear launch codes so that those on Nielsen’s SIOP card were recognized as those of National Command Authority.

  The entire process had taken no more than five minutes. It was now seven minutes since the second Russian launch. Quickly easing himself into the role that he had always seen as his ultimate destiny, Nielsen was quickly regaining his composure, knowing that he could not afford to show any sign of weakness at this pivotal moment in history. He had acquired Absolute Power, something that he had spent his entire career working towards. And he had no intentions of allowing human weaknesses to deny him his moment of glory. No; when it came to writing the great book of human history, his name would be mentioned in the same breath as that of Churchill or Eisenhower or even George Washington himself (Nielsen remembered that Churchill had only come to power following the disgraceful resignation of a quisling predecessor). He was surrounded by lesser men than he, but that wasn’t his fault was it? It certainly wasn’t his fault that they hadn’t been blessed with his intelligence and aptitude for leadership. It was all a matter of breeding. He had it, they didn’t. Breeding. That was why he - and not anybody else - was responsible for saving the world from Russian domination. God had meant it to be so, he thought to himself. Perhaps God was an American after all.

  It was still unclear as to whom the Russian launch was directed at, given that America’s primary early warning systems had been destroyed, but everything was already clear to Nielsen. A power struggle in Moscow had resulted in hardliners seizing control and consolidating their grip on power by inflicting further punishment on the nation that had ravaged theirs. That nation was the United States of America.

  Well, that was to be a costly mistake, he thought, looking up at Westwood. “General, I’m going to ask you a question and I want you to answer it honestly.”

  Westwood narrowed his eyes slightly. He had never been anythingbut honest and prided himself upon the fact. Any implication to the contrary offended his very soul. But this was not the time or place to say that. “Of course, sir.”

  “Can we stop the Russian bombers?”

  “Well, sir, those bombers are still at least four to five hours away from their targets in America. I would hope that we can diffuse this crisis before it comes to that.”

  Nielsen snorted contemptuously. “The Russians have just initiated a second launch and you’re talking aboutdiffusing the crisis. Give me a break.”

  “We don’t know that they’ve launched against us, sir. We should wait until we have confirmation.”

  “Well, perhaps you could enlighten us on who else they might have launched their missiles against. Now, I asked you a question General, and I demand a straight answer.” He rephrased the question, slowly pronouncing each syllable. “Can we stop their bombers?”

  Westwood fought to maintain his composure. It wasn’t hard; he’d had a lifetime of practice. “It’s impossible to say. We’ve got enough fighters left to mount a cohesive defense, but a few bombers might still get through.”

  Nielsen placed his hands together on the table; not flatly, but in an inverted V. “Let me put the question another way. Will more of their bombers get through than ours?”

  He thinks it’s a fucking game,Lewis realized. He thinks he can just add up the points and see who comes out on top. He couldn’t maintain his silence any longer. “Mr. Nielsen,” he said, unable to bring himself to refer to Mitchell’s successor asMr. President while Mitchell was still alive. “I’m not sure that’s the issue here. We can’t afford to think that a nuclear war is winnable. It quite simply isn’t.”

  Nielsen fixed the National Security Advisor with a malevolent glare. “Firstly, Dr Stein, I asked the question of General Westwood, not you. Secondly, we didn’t escalate this conflict. Theydid. And if they want to throw a war, we’re sure as hell gonna come. And we’ll win. Why? Because the American people will demand victory. Perhaps, as a foreigner, you’re not in a position to understand quite how determined the American people can be.”

  Had Nielsen been an ordinary citizen, Lewis might have felt compelled to punch him. The Secret Service agents at the door, however, deterred such a possibility. Instead, he used words with which to attack the acting Leader Of The Free World. “Have you ever fought fo
r your country, sir? Have you ever risked your life for it?”

  “Lewis,” Bishop warned, gently touching Lewis’s arm to calm him down. Lewis swiped it away and continued unabated.

  “I have. I’ve done things for my country that are so fucking classified that not even you have high enough clearance to know about them. I’ve killed for my country, sir. Do you know what that means? To look into somebody’s eyes and kill them? It means you’ve got to be prepared to die yourself. Well, I am prepared to die for my country. Always have been. But nobody gave me the right to make that decision for the millions of poor bastards out there. Certainly nobody gave you the right either. My country, sir, is the United States of America. So don’t ever lecture me on the hardiness of the American people.” His anger spent, he reclined in his chair, bracing himself for Nielsen’s retort. “I may speak with an English accent, but I’m as much an American as you’ll ever be. And I will not sit here and watch you pass a death sentence on my country. My world.”

  Nielsen’s retort took a couple of moments to come. When it did, it was notable for its lack of vitriol. His smile and tone, however, was more condescending than ever. “Thank you for that brief biography, Dr Stein. But the fact remains that I am the President of the United States and I, not you, will have to answer for my actions to themillions of poor bastards out there , as you so eloquently term them. Anyway,” he waved a dismissive hand, “we haven’t got time to argue about abstractions. So I ask the question once again. General Westwood, will more of our bombers get through than theirs?”

  Westwood was clearly reluctant to answer the question, but he kept to himself whatever private feelings he had for his new commander-in-chief. “More than likely, sir, yes. The 509thBomb Wing out of Whiteman got all its B-2 Stealth Bombers off the ground before the base was hit, and they’ll be extremely difficult to stop. In fact, I imagine that Russia’s air defenses are currently in such disarray that they wouldn’t have much more success with our B-1s.”