Jack Archer (Book 3): Year Zero

by Taylor, Keith

  “It was a lucky escape for Portland, too,” MacAuliffe continued. “Seems there was a pileup on highway 84 that had everything jammed up all the way back from Troutdale. There were still maybe two hundred thousand people stuck in the city when the missile was launched, and if it had hit its target…” MacAuliffe trailed off, chewing thoughtfully on the end of his cigar.

  “I can’t help but wonder if God stepped in to lend a hand,” he eventually continued. “See, every other city on the coast evacuated pretty smoothly. I mean, as well as you could hope for under the circumstances. Most people managed to get out before the attacks, but Portland… Portland was a God damn nightmare. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The main routes out of the city have been jammed up by roadworks for weeks, so it didn’t take long for everything to fall to pieces. As soon as the missile was launched the military channels were flooded with reports that it was gonna be a bloodbath, and then just like that,” he snapped his fingers. “Just like that it veers off course. How else do you explain that but divine intervention?”

  Jack thought about it for a moment. “Well, either that or… no, never mind.” He waved away a half formed thought and pointed at the words scrawled in red by the list. Why dial them down? “What’s this?”

  MacAuliffe frowned, plucking the paper from Jack’s hand. “This,” he sighed, “is the thing that’s been pecking at my brain all day. This is the thing that doesn’t make a lick of God damned sense.” He stabbed a finger at the Portland entry. “The W80 warhead is what we call variable yield, or dial-a-yield to the folks in the business of blowing shit up. I don’t pretend to understand how it works – something to do with tritium gas injection or some such sorcery – but the long and short of it is that the operator can remotely adjust the explosive power of the warhead right up until a few seconds before detonation.”

  He tapped the entry for the MC Nakharov. “See this here? The folks at the Pentagon estimate that the W80 out on the Nakharov exploded with a yield of something like twenty five kilotons. It’s seems safe to say these guys weren’t planning to detonate that bomb on the boat. I figure they were planning to hit San Diego, but when we sent out a bunch of Marines to board the ship they got spooked and blew it early. Now I’d bet my left butt cheek that twenty five kilotons was the default yield set up for the device. I’m guessing they didn’t have time to set a custom yield before they had to blow the thing.”

  He pointed back to the Portland entry. “Now the W80 they detonated over Oregon was dialed all the way up to 150 kilotons. That’s the maximum possible yield for this warhead. They set it at one fifty because they wanted to create an EMP, and for that you want as powerful an explosion as possible. But look at the rest of the attacks.”

  He ran a finger down the list. “All the other bombs, all five of them, were dialed down to just five kilotons. That’s the lowest possible yield, only a third as powerful as the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima.” MacAuliffe shook his head, staring down at the list with a frown. “That’s… in nuclear terms that’s a cherry bomb. It’s a firecracker, a damned warning shot across the bows. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Jack suspected he was missing something, some obvious detail that would make everything clear. He could sense something hovering right at the edge of his mind, but when he reached out to grasp it it slipped away.

  “You’re right,” he muttered. “There’s just something… I don’t know, something off about the whole thing.”

  “You can say that again.” MacAuliffe pulled the cigar from his mouth and tossed it on the dash. “If you have access to nukes and you’re crazy enough to use them, why would you dial the yield down to the lowest possible power? They obviously knew how to do it, so whoever fired those nukes made a choice to dial them down. Why?”

  Jack felt a chill pass through him. “Wait. You’re not suggesting they didn’t want to do much damage because they’re planning to invade, are you?”

  MacAuliffe shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. It wouldn’t make any sense. If they planned to invade their first priority would be to take out C2.”

  “C2?”

  “Command and control,” MacAuliffe explained. “They’d want to target the command structure from the President on down. If you can knock out links in the chain of command you can throw a nation into disarray and soften it up for invasion, so by the time you get boots on the ground everyone’s running around like headless chickens. If invasion was the objective the first target would almost certainly have been Washington D.C., then key military sites.”

  He held up the list. “This, though… this just doesn’t make any sense. If you’re a nation state looking to invade you take out C2, then before anyone knows what hit ‘em you roll in the tanks with Motörhead playing on the loudspeakers like a God damn baddass. If you’re a terrorist group with limited resources you go for whichever target gives you the biggest bang for your buck, and the toughest psychological blow. You fly a jet into the Twin Towers or set off a dirty bomb on the National Mall. You blow up Times Square and make sure every camera on the planet is pointed at it, then you claim responsibility, sit back and enjoy the chaos. But this?” He shook his head. “Nuking Fresno? Bakersfield? These targets have no strategic value. They don’t even have much cultural value.”

  “Well,” Jack protested mildly, “to be fair they were pretty nice cities.”

  “Huh? No, that’s not what I mean,” MacAuliffe replied. “I’m sure they were just fine, but these cities don’t exist in the… I guess you’d call it the national psyche. They don’t hold a place in our hearts, not like New York or LA. Most people have never been to either of them, and they don’t have a mental picture in their head. Destroying them when you’ve already taken out LA and San Francisco is just… well, it’s a hat on a hat, know what I mean? In strategic terms it’s a waste of a good nuke. It’s overkill, but at the same time it’s underkill.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean doing all this, needlessly attacking all of these cities, but then dialing the warheads back to five kilotons. It just doesn’t make strategic sense. It hardly makes any difference on the ground. A five kiloton nuke will flatten every last building in a half mile radius from the blast, and a hundred fifty kiloton bomb will do the same over a mile and a half. The city’s destroyed either way, so why not go for maximum damage? Why would you half ass a nuclear attack?”

  Jack pondered the question, still feeling as if there was something obvious waiting just beyond his view. “Well… is that the only difference? Between five and one fifty kilotons, I mean. Is it just a slightly bigger blast radius?”

  MacAuliffe shrugged. “Pretty much, yeah.” He fell silent for a moment. “I guess the mushroom cloud on the one fifty would be a lot bigger, but apart from that… yeah, there’s not a whole lot of difference.”

  “How much bigger? In terms of altitude, I mean.”

  The colonel frowned, leafing through his bundle of papers. “Hold on, I’ve got the projections here somewhere.” Eventually he picked the right sheet from the bundle. “OK, here we go. Ummm… OK, yeah. The cloud from a five kiloton blast would top out at around fifteen thousand feet. A one fifty blast would be… somewhere around forty four thousand. Why?”

  “Hmmm.” Jack sat back, scratching his stubble as he thought. The seed of an idea was forming in his head. He wasn’t quite sure if it made any sense, but he wanted to hear it out loud. Maybe the colonel could poke enough holes to sink it, but maybe… maybe it made sense.

  “OK, bear with me, I’m just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks.” He spoke slowly, deliberately. “So imagine you’re a bad guy. Foreign government, Bin Laden’s even more evil twin brother, doesn’t matter. You’re a bad guy, you’ve decided you’re mad at the States and you have a bunch of nukes burning a hole in your pocket.”

  MacAuliffe nodded. “OK, I’ll bite. I’m a bad guy. What am I doing now?”

  “You’ve already detonated one warhead way out in
the ocean where it barely kills anyone, but now you’ve been discovered. We’ve noticed your other ships, and we know you can launch against us at any moment.” Jack paused for a moment, still working out his theory as he spoke.

  “But you don’t. You could have caught us with our pants down. You could have killed millions before we’d even figured out what you’re doing, but instead you wait, what, two, three hours before launching the rest of your missiles?”

  MacAuliffe chewed on his cigar for a moment before speaking. “Maybe you caught me with my pants down. Maybe I’m not ready yet. Maybe I have to plot in the guidance or coordinate the attacks with the other ships.”

  “Maybe,” Jack conceded, “but for whatever reason you hold off while the cities start to evacuate. You’re losing victims by the minute. And then you launch all six of your missiles at the same time. All six are headed for cities, but a few minutes before they reach their targets you hear that one of them hasn’t evacuated yet. There are still hundreds of thousands of people stuck there, and rather than kill them all you decide to send your missile off course.”

  “So you think they didn’t want to kill people?”

  Jack shook his head. “No, of course they did. If they didn’t want to kill people they would have gone to the movies instead of nuking six cities. I’m just saying maybe they didn’t want to kill millions of people. I’m saying maybe it was the spectacle they were looking for, not the body count. They wanted the imagery of an entire coast destroyed, cities large and small razed to the ground, but they wanted to do it with as few deaths as they could get away with.”

  MacAuliffe shook his head, confused. “But if they’re trying to kill as few people as possible, why allow people to evacuate the cities and then attack them again when they reach the refugee camp?”

  Jack frowned. “Now that I can’t answer.” He thought about it for a moment before something struck him. “But then again… I mean, they didn’t actually blow up the camp, did they?”

  “They damn well tried. If our guys hadn’t found that truck we’d be looking at tens of thousands dead.”

  “Maybe, but maybe not.” Jack turned it over in his head. “How do you detonate a bomb like the W80? It’s designed to be mounted on a missile, right? Not just set off on its own?”

  The colonel nodded. “That’s right. The W80 is essentially just a modified B61 gravity bomb. The original design was intended to be dropped from a bomber, and the basic setup of the W80 wasn’t much changed when it was modified for use as a warhead. Usually the detonation would be triggered on impact with the ground, but obviously that wasn’t the case here. I can only imagine it was triggered in laydown mode.”

  “Laydown mode?”

  “Yeah, it’s a… a delayed detonation. There’s a time delay fuse that holds the detonation long enough for the bomber to clear the area. It’s designed for low altitude drops, because a pilot would never clear the blast radius in time if he released for a ground burst at a couple hundred feet. Laydown mode isn’t really useful for the W80 since it’s missile mounted, but they didn’t bother to change the design between models.”

  “OK, so someone… what, lit the fuse and ran?”

  “No, son,” MacAuliffe shook his head, chuckling at Jack’s understanding of nuclear weapons. “The warhead doesn’t have Acme written on the side in big letters. This isn’t a fuse like you’d get in a firework. It’s electronic. And besides, you couldn’t just set it and run. The fuse on a W80 isn’t like an egg timer. It’s set for exactly 31 seconds, and it’s completely tamperproof. You can’t adjust the timing, and you can’t replace it without disabling the device. You trigger the bomb remotely, and then 31 seconds later it…”

  MacAuliffe trailed off for a moment. He'd finally figured out what Jack was saying. “My God, they decided when to detonate the bomb. Without the satellite network they must have been close enough to trigger it by line of sight. That means they were no more than a few dozen miles away when it went off. They were watching.”

  “They never planned to blow up the safe zone,” Jack nodded. “They wanted your men to find it, and they waited until your captain got it far enough away from the camp before they set it off. Maybe the message they were trying to send is We’re not done yet. We can still hurt you no matter how far you run.” He shrugged. “Or maybe they’re just insane. What do I know?”

  For a moment MacAuliffe sat in silence, staring out the window deep in thought. “OK,” he finally said. “Let’s say you’re right about all of this. Let’s say I agree that they didn’t plan to kill millions of people, and they’re just trying to… what, just terrorize us? All of that I can buy, but I still don’t get one thing.” He turned back to Jack. “What does any of this have to do with the size of the mushroom clouds?”

  Jack pointed up at the sky. “The jet stream.”

  MacAuliffe frowned. “What about it?”

  “High altitude winds start at around twenty thousand feet, blowing a gale west to east at more than a hundred miles per hour. If you detonate a five kiloton bomb at ground level the mushroom cloud will top out at… what did you say, fifteen thousand? I’m only guessing, but I’d imagine the worst of the fallout would drift just a few dozen miles before it reaches the ground. Maybe a hundred at a pinch. People in the immediate area would be pretty screwed, but in the grand scheme of things it’s not the end of the world.”

  MacAuliffe glanced in the rear view mirror at the mushroom cloud that was already collapsing, drifting back to the ground. “But if you get the fallout high enough to enter the jet stream…”

  “You get babies in Ohio born with gills.” Jack gave MacAuliffe a weak smile. “Think about it. The only bomb they dialed up to a hundred fifty kilotons was the one they detonated in the atmosphere, where it wouldn’t generate any appreciable fallout. All the other missiles were dialed back just enough to keep the damage from spreading beyond the west coast. It’s as if whoever did this went out of their way to do something as destructive as possible, but with as few fatalities as possible.”

  MacAuliffe shook his head in disbelief. “I just… OK, I can see how that makes some kind of sense, but the question remains: why? Why would an enemy attack us like this if they want to minimize casualties? Why launch a nuclear attack if you don’t want to kill millions of people?”

  Jack threw up his hands. “I can’t even begin to imagine.” He shrugged and puffed out his cheeks, “I have no idea how to even get into the mindset of someone crazy enough to launch a nuke, let alone a bunch of them.” He leaned back in his seat and chewed on his thumbnail. “I mean… well, the only way it makes any sense to me is if we staged the attacks ourselves and wanted to make it look insanely convincing. But that’d be crazy, of course.”

  MacAuliffe turned slowly in his seat to face Jack, his eyes wide and his face suddenly drained of color. Jack met his gaze, confused.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  ΅

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  JUST LIKE MY FATHER

  “I DON'T THINK it’s broken.”

  Karen perched on the rattling tailgate of the tan brown troop truck, clinging to the frame to keep herself from being jolted out when the tires hit one of the countless potholes in the road. With her free hand she held Emily tight around the waist as she watched Ramos tending to Krasinski’s wrist. His surgery was a few square feet of clear space in amongst the dozens of wooden crates that loomed over their heads.

  “It feels broken,” Ted winced, resting the tender, swollen arm in his free hand. “Can you check again? I can barely move my hand.”

  Ramos shook his head, grabbing a bottle of Tylenol from one of the open crates. “Just a good sprain, Ted,” he assured him, popping the cap from the bottle and shaking out a few tablets. “I’m pretty sure you’ll live. And hey, look on the bright side. After years in accounting you’ve finally got a good story to impress girls. You survived a helicopter crash and jumped from the wreckage in the shadow of a mushroom cloud.” He gr
inned and patted him on the shoulder. “That’s gotta be worth at least first base, right?”

  Ted grimaced. “Well thanks, but you managed to get the same story, and you got through it without a scratch.”

  “I guess some of us have all the luck,” Ramos shrugged. “All I can say is suck it up.” He lowered his voice, nodding his head in Valerie’s direction. “And count yourself lucky you got out with just a sprained wrist, huh? Could have been a hell of a lot worse.”

  Ted turned to find Valerie sitting alone on top of a crate in the depths of the truck, her knees tucked up to her chest. He nodded in agreement and lowered his voice to match Ramos’. “Yeah, OK, I get you.”

  Valerie had barely spoken a word since the crash. She’d withdrawn into herself the moment the adrenaline had burned itself out. When the heart thumping fight or flight energy abandoned her she’d been left with nothing but the terrible realization that the pilot had sacrificed his life to save her. Karen watched as Ramos carefully approached and hopped up beside her on the crate, and she wasn’t at all surprised to see Valerie turn away from him as he tried to comfort her.

  Karen understood how she was feeling. She wasn’t ready to deal with people yet. She wasn’t ready for the comforting hug, and and she definitely wasn’t ready for the schmaltzy it’s not your fault Good Will Hunting pep talk. Before she could get there she needed to brood a little first. She needed to sit alone in the dark with her thoughts. She needed to let the guilt take her to pieces before she could begin to put herself back together, and Karen knew that right now one train of thought in particular would be much, much louder than all the others.

  Why me? Why did I survive and he died? What makes me so special?