The Bzadian explosive was very powerful. Although the amount was small, it was still enough to kill everybody in the room. Had it been a normal room.
But the command bunker in the basement of the Pentagon had been designed to withstand a direct missile strike, and the moment the chemical reaction began in the bomb, the room responded with its own defenses.
The air pressure in the room was deliberately kept as low as possible. The high domed ceiling, although it looked solid, was a thin metal, little more than tinfoil. Beyond it was a large chamber filled with nothing. Not even air. A vacuum. A sudden pressure change in the bunker, like an explosion, would tear the ceiling from its mountings, sucking most of the air from the bunker up into the vacuum chamber. A pressure wave needs a medium, like water or air, and without either, the energy of the bomb was quickly dissipated. The same switch triggered airbags built into each of the chairs at the oval table, instantly cocooning the occupants in a Kevlar balloon.
The table itself was a partial shield for those on the far side of it.
As the blast of the bomb was sucked up into the vacuum chamber above, the lack of air also suffocated any fire, and in the few seconds while the occupants of the chamber gasped for breath, a network of nozzles opened up from hidden locations in the walls, filling the room with a fine mist of water and extinguishing any remaining flames.
Only then did the automatic systems allow oxygen back into the room.
As instantaneous and as clever as the bombproofing systems were, they were not designed to cope with such a powerful explosive detonating inside the room. Several of the Kevlar cocoons were torn to shreds by the blast, which ripped in and around the chairs themselves.
Adjutants and aides, seated at workstations around the circumference of the room, fared worse, getting slammed into the walls or their computer workstations by the shock wave.
The searing heat, in the seconds before it was stifled by the vacuum and smothered by the watery mist, did even more damage.
Seven people were killed in the Pentagon bunker in that moment, and two more died on the way to hospital. A dozen were severely injured.