USS HENRY M. JACKSON. INDIAN OCEAN.
SEVEN HUNDRED MILES FROM THE COAST OF PAKISTAN
Captain Frank Bertolotti, commanding officer of the Ohio-class submarine, stood next to his executive officer in the rear of the control room.
The diving officer of the watch, or “dive,” sat in between the two submarine pilots facing the ship control panel. The left pilot, or “helm,” steered the vessel with the rudder and also managed the bow planes. The right pilot, or “outboard,” controlled the angle on the ship with the stern planes. Together, they brought the Jackson to a depth of 130 feet to carry out an order that Bertolotti had prayed for years would never come.
But he was ready. His crew was ready. His submarine was ready. They had trained endlessly for this moment. They had drilled to the point of obsession week after week, month after month. And the time had come to put their preparations to the test.
His country had been attacked, and the Jackson was the tip of the sword that would deliver the initial dose of American justice to the perpetrators.
The launch code had been received, authenticated, and concurred by all the right personnel. The launch keys had been retrieved from the safe and used to arm the system.
All that remained was for Bertolotti to give the final order to fire, which he did before swinging the periscope toward the stern. A moment later a blast of air bubbles preceded the long projectile as it left its tube and soared toward the surface.
The Trident II D5 ballistic missile, one of twenty-four carried by the Jackson, broke the water surface. The first stage ignited for sixty-five seconds, propelling it to the stratosphere before the second-stage motor accelerated it to eighteen thousand miles per hour in another sixty-five seconds.
The nose fairing separated from the missile as it reached low Earth orbit. There, the third-stage motor burned for forty seconds, thrusting it along the Earth’s curvature to the targeted area before the post-boost control system jettisoned it.
The stellar sighting navigation system oriented the MIRV and aligned it with the guidance flight plan before aiming the first of three MK4 reentry vehicles at the mesosphere over the Port of Karachi.
The MIRV continued on its northern trajectory while the first hypersonic RV shot toward the Earth. It pierced the atmosphere with the ablative shield protecting its delicate cargo: a single W76 one-hundred-kiloton nuclear warhead.
Unlike the ten-kiloton warhead that caused the Manhattan groundburst, the W76 detonated at an altitude of 150 miles, too high for its fireball, radiation, or shock wave to cause any damage to the vast port city.
But the gamma rays from the high-altitude detonation released high-energy electrons that interacted with the Earth’s magnetic field to trigger a powerful electromagnetic pulse. All unshielded electronics were instantly fried in a three-hundred-mile radius directly below the blast.
Five minutes later, the MIRV shot its second RV into the atmosphere over Quetta, three hundred miles north of Karachi and home of the largest ISI training complex in Pakistan. It triggered a second wide-area EMP.
A third EMP followed five minutes later over Islamabad, silencing all electronics across 70 percent of the country.