37

HUMAN EFFECTS

“Captain, we have an Emergency Action Message on the ELF.”

“What?” Ricks asked, turning away from the chart table.

“Emergency Action Message, Captain.” The communications officer handed over the brief code group.

“Great time for a drill.” Ricks shook his head and said, “Battle Stations. Alert-One.”

A petty officer immediately activated the 1-MC and made the announcement. “General Quarters, General Quarters, all hands man your battle stations.” Next came an electronic alarm sure to end the most captivating of dreams.

“Mr. Pitney,” Ricks said over the noise. “Antenna depth.”

“Aye, Captain. Diving officer, make your depth six-zero feet.”

“Make my depth six-zero feet, aye. Helm, ten degrees up on the fairwater planes.”

“Ten degrees up on the fairwater planes, aye.” The young crewman—helm duty is typically given to very junior men—pulled back on the aircraftlike wheel. “Sir, my planes are up ten degrees.”

“Very well.”

Barely had that been done when people flooded into the control room. The Chief of the Boat—Maine’s senior enlisted man—took his battle station at the air-manifold panel. He was the submarine’s senior Diving Officer. Lieutenant Commander Claggett entered the conn to back the Captain up. Pitney, the boat’s navigator, was already at his post, which was conning officer. Various enlisted men took their seats at weapons consoles. Aft, officers and men assumed their positions as different as the Missile Control Center—MCC—which monitored the status of Maine’s twenty-four Trident missiles, and the auxiliary equipment room, which was mainly concerned with the ship’s backup diesel engine.

In the control room, the IC—internal communications—man of the watch called off the compartments as they reported in as manned and ready.

“What gives?” Claggett asked Ricks. The Captain merely handed over the brief EAM slip.

“Drill?”

“I suppose. Why not?” Ricks asked. “It’s a Sunday, right?”

“Still bumpy up on the roof?”

As though on cue, Maine started taking rolls. The depth gauge showed 290 feet, and the massive submarine suddenly rocked 10 degrees to starboard. Throughout the vessel, men rolled their eyes and grumbled. There was scarcely a man aboard who hadn’t lost it at least once. This was the perfect environment for motion sickness. With no outside references—submarines are conspicuously short of windows and portholes—the eyes saw something that clearly was not moving while the inner ears reported that movement was definitely taking place. The same thing that had affected nearly all of the Apollo astronauts began to affect these sailors. Unconsciously, men shook their heads sharply, as though to repel a bothersome insect. They uniformly hoped that whatever the hell they were up to—no one from Ricks on down knew as yet what was happening—they’d soon be able to get back where they belonged—four hundred feet, where the ship’s motion was imperceptible.

“Level at six-zero feet, sir.”

“Very well,” Pitney replied.

“Conn, sonar, contact lost on Sierra-16. Surface noise is screwing us all up.”

“What’s the last position?” Ricks asked.

“Last bearing was two-seven-zero, estimated range four-nine thousand yards,” Ensign Shaw replied.

“Okay. Run up the UHF antenna. Up ’scope,” he also ordered the quartermaster of the watch. Maine was taking 20-degree rolls now, and Ricks wanted to see why. The quartermaster rotated the red-and-white control wheel, and the oiled cylinder hissed up on hydraulic power.

“Wow,” the Captain said as he put his hands on the handles. He could feel the power of the sea slapping the exposed top of the instrument. He bent down to look.

“We have a UHF signal coming in now, sir,” the communications officer reported.

“That’s nice,” Ricks said. “I’d call that thirty-foot seas, people, mostly rollers, some are breaking over. Well, we can shoot through that if we have to,” he added almost as a joke. After all, this had to be a drill.

“How’s the sky?” Claggett asked.

“Overcast—no stars.” Ricks stood back and slapped the handles up. “Down ’scope.” He turned to Claggett. “X, we want to get back tracking our friend just as soon as we can.”

“Aye, Cap’n.”

Ricks was about to lift the phone to MCC. He wanted to tell the missile-control crew that he wanted this drill over just as fast as they could arrange it. The communications officer was in the compartment before he could push the proper button.

“Captain, this isn’t a drill.”

“What do you mean?” Ricks noticed that the Lieutenant didn’t look very happy.

“DEFCON-TWO, sir.” He handed over the message.

“What?” Ricks scanned the message, which was brief and chillingly to the point. “What the hell’s going on?” He handed it off to Dutch Claggett.

“DEFCON-TWO? We’ve never been at DEFCON-TWO, not as long as I’ve been in ... I remember a DEFCON-THREE once, but I was a plebe then....”

Around the compartment, men traded glances. The American military has five alert levels, numbered five through one. DEFCON-FIVE was denoted normal peacetime operations. FOUR was slightly higher, calling for increased manning of certain posts, keeping more people—mainly meaning pilots and soldiers—close to their airplanes or tanks, as the case might be. DEFCON-THREE was far more serious. At that point units were fully manned for operational deployment. At DEFCON-TWO units began to deploy, and this level was saved for the imminent threat of war. DEFCON-ONE was a level to which American forces had never been called. At that point, war was to be considered something more than a threat. Weapons were loaded and aimed in anticipation of orders to shoot.

But the entire DEFCON system was more haphazard than one might imagine. Submarines generally kept a higher-than-normal state of alert as a part of routine operations. Missile submarines, always ready to launch their birds in a matter of minutes, were effectively at DEFCON-TWO all the time. The notice from the FLTSATCOM merely made it official, and a lot more ominous.

“What else?” Ricks asked communications.

“That’s it, sir.”

“Any news come in, any threat warning?”

“Sir, we got the usual news broadcast yesterday. I was planning to get the next one in about five hours—you know, so we’d have the Super Bowl score.” The Lieutenant paused. “Sir, there was nothing in the news, and nothing official about any crisis.”

“So what the hell is going on?” Ricks asked rhetorically. “Well, that doesn’t really matter, does it?”

“Captain,” Claggett said, “for starters, I think we need to break off from our friend at two-seven-zero.”

“Yeah. Bring her around northeast, X. He’s not due for another turn soon, and that’ll open the range pretty fast, then we’ll head north to open further.”

Claggett looked at the chart, mainly as a matter of habit to see that the water was deep. It was. They were, in fact, astride the great-circle route from Seattle to Japan. On command, USS Maine turned to port. A right turn would have been just as easy, but this way they would immediately start opening the range on the Akula which they’d been tracking for several days. In a minute this put the submarine broadside to the thirty-footers rolling just a few feet over their heads and made the submarine’s sail almost exactly that, a target for the natural forces at work. The boat took a 40-degree roll. All over the submarine, men braced and grabbed for loose gear.

“Take her down a little, Captain?” Claggett asked.

“In a few minutes. Let’s see if there’s any follow-up on the satellite channel.”

Three pieces of what had once been one of the most magnificent evergreen trees in Oregon had now been in the North Pacific for several weeks. The logs had still been green and heavy when they’d fallen off the MV George McReady. Since becoming just another entry in the flotsam on the sea, they’d soaked in more water, and the heavy steel chain that held them together changed what should have been a slightly positive buoyancy into neutral buoyancy. They could not quite get to the surface, at least not in these weather conditions. The pounding of the seas defeated every attempt at rising to the sunlight—of which there was none at the moment—and they hovered like blimps, turning slowly as the sea struggled mightily to break their chains.

A junior sonarman aboard Maine heard something, something at zero-four-one, almost dead ahead. It was an odd sound, he thought, metallic, like a tinkle but deeper. Not a ship, he thought, not a biologic. It was almost lost in the surface noise, and wouldn’t settle down on bearing....

“Shit!” He keyed his microphone. “Conn, sonar—sonar contact close aboard!”

“What?” Ricks dashed into sonar.

“Don’t know what, but it’s close, sir!”

“Where?”

“Can’t tell, like both sides of the bow—not a ship, I don’t know what the hell it is, sir!” The petty officer checked off the pip on his screen while his ears strained to identify the sound. “Not a point source—it’s close, sir!”

“But—” Ricks stopped, turned, and shouted on reflex: “Emergency dive!” He knew it was too late for that.

The entire length of USS Maine reverberated like a bass drum as one of the logs struck the fiberglass dome over the bow sonar array.

There were three sections of what had once been a single tree. The first hit axially just on the edge of the sonar dome, doing very little damage because the submarine was only doing a few knots, and everything about her hull was built for strength. The noise was bad enough. The first log was shunted aside, but there were two more, and the center one tapped the hull once just outside the control room.

The helmsman responded at once to the Captain’s command, pushing his control yoke all the way to the stops. The stern of the submarine rose at once, into the path of the logs. Maine had a cruciform stern. There was a rudder both above and below the propeller shaft. To the left and right were the stern planes, which operated like the stabilizers of an aircraft. On the outer surface of each was another vertical structure that looked like an auxiliary rudder, but was in fact a fitting for sonar sensors. The chain between two of the logs fouled on that. Two logs were outboard, and one inboard. The inboard one was just long enough to reach the spinning propeller. The resulting noise was the worst anyone had ever heard. Maine’s seven-bladed screw was made of manganese-bronze alloy that had been shaped into its nearly perfect configuration over a period of seven months. It was immensely strong, but not this strong. Its scimitar-shaped blades struck the logs one after another, like a slow, inefficient saw. Each impact gouged or dented the outboard edges. The officer in the maneuvering room, aft, had already decided to stop the shaft before the order to do so arrived. Outside the hull, not a hundred feet from his post, he heard the screams of abused metal as the sonar fitting was wrenched off the starboard stern plane; along with it went the additional fitting that held the submarine’s towed-array sonar. At that point the logs, one of them now badly splintered, fell off into the submarine’s wake, and the worst of the noise stopped.

“What the fuck was that?” Ricks nearly screamed.

“Tail’s gone, sir. We just lost the tail,” a sonarman said. “Right-side lateral array is damaged, sir.” Ricks was already out of the room. The petty officer was talking to himself.

“Conn, maneuvering room,” a speaker was saying. “Something just pounded the hell out of our screw. I’m checking for damage to the shaft now.”

“Stern planes are damaged, sir. Very sluggish on the controls,” the helmsman said. The Chief of the Boat pulled the youngster off the seat and took his place. Slowly and carefully, the Master Chief worked the control wheel.

“Damaged hydraulics, feels like. The trim tabs”—these were electrically powered—“look okay.” He worked the wheel left and right. “Rudder is okay, sir.”

“Lock the stern planes in neutral. Ten degrees up on the fairwater planes.” This order came from the XO.

“Aye”.

 

“So, what was it?” Dubinin asked.

“Metallic—an enormous mechanical transient, bearing zero-five-one.” The officer tapped the blazing mark on his screen. “Low frequency as you see, like a drum ... but this noise here, much higher pitch. I heard that on my phones, sounded like a machine gun. Wait a minute ...” Senior Lieutenant Rykov said, thinking rapidly. “The frequency—I mean the interval of the impulses—that was a blade-rate, that was a propeller ... only thing it could be....”

“And now?” the Captain asked.

“Gone completely.”

“I want the entire sonar crew on duty.” Captain Dubinin returned to control. “Come about, new course zero-four-zero. Speed ten.”

 

Getting a Soviet Army truck was simplicity itself. They’d stolen it, along with a staff car. It was just after midnight in Berlin, and since it was a Sunday night, the streets were empty. Berlin is as lively a city as any in the world, but Monday there is a workday, and work is something that Germans take seriously. What little traffic there was came from people late to leave their local Gasthaus, or perhaps a few workers whose jobs required round-the-clock manning. What mattered was that traffic was agreeably light, allowing them to get to their destination right on time.

There used to be a wall, Günther Bock thought. On one side was the American Berlin detachment, and on the other a Soviet detachment, each with a small but heavily used exercise area adjacent to their barracks. The wall was gone now, leaving nothing but grass between two mechanized forces. The staff car pulled up to the Soviet gate. The sentry there was a senior sergeant of twenty years with pimples on his face and an untidy uniform. His eyes went a little wide when he saw the three stars on Keitel’s shoulder boards.

“Stand at attention!” Keitel roared in perfect Russian. The boy complied at once. “I am here from Army Command to conduct an unannounced readiness inspection. You will not report our arrival to anyone. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Colonel!”

“Carry on—and clean up that filthy uniform before I come back through here or you’ll find yourself on the Chinese border! Move!” Keitel ordered Bock, who was sitting at the wheel.

“Zu Befehl, Herr Oberst,” Bock replied after he moved off. It was funny, actually. There were a few humorous aspects to all this, Bock thought. A few. But you had to have the right sense of humor for it.

The regimental headquarters was in an old building once used by Hitler’s Wehrmacht that the Russians had used more than they had maintained. It did have the usual garden outside, and in the summer one could see the flowers arranged to duplicate the unit’s patch. This one was a Guards Tank Regiment, though one with a history to which its soldiers paid little attention, judging by the sentry at the gate. Bock pulled right up to the door. Keitel and the rest dismounted from their vehicles and walked into the front door like gods in a bad mood.

“Who’s the duty officer of this whorehouse?” Keitel bellowed. A corporal just pointed. Corporals do not dispute the orders of staff-grade officers. The duty officer, they found, was a major, perhaps thirty years of age.

“What is this?” the young officer asked.

“I am Colonel Ivanenko of the Inspectorate. This is an unannounced operational-readiness inspection. Hit your alarm!” The Major walked two steps and punched a button that set off sirens all over the camp area.

“Next, call your regimental commander, and get his drunken ass over here! What is your readiness state, Major?” Keitel demanded without giving the man a chance to take a breath. The junior officer stopped in midreach for the phone, not knowing which order he was supposed to follow first. “Well?”

“Our readiness is in accordance with unit norms, Colonel Ivanenko.”

“You have a chance to prove that.” Keitel turned to one of the others. “Take this child’s name!”

Less than two thousand meters away, they could see lights going on at the American base in what had so recently been West Berlin.

“They’re having a drill also,” Keitel/Ivanenko observed. “Splendid. We’d better be faster than they are,” he added.

“What is this?” The regimental commander, also a colonel, arrived without his buttons done.

“This looks like a sorry spectacle!” Keitel boomed. “This is an unannounced readiness inspection. You have a regiment to lead, Colonel. I suggest you get to it without asking any further questions.”

“But—”

“But what?” Keitel demanded. “Don’t you know what a readiness inspection is?”

There was one thing about dealing with Russians, Keitel thought. They were arrogant, overbearing, and they hated Germans, however much they protested otherwise. On the other hand, when browbeaten, they were predictable. Even though his rank insignia was no higher than this man’s, he had a louder voice, and that was all he needed.

“I’ll show you what my boys can do.”

“We’ll be outside to watch,” Keitel assured him.

 

“Dr. Ryan, you’d better get down here.” The line clicked off.

“Okay,” Jack said. He grabbed his cigarettes and walked down to room 7-F-27, the CIA’s Operations Center. Located on the north side of the building, it was the counterpart to operations rooms in many other government agencies. In the center of the twenty-by-thirty-foot room, once you got past the cipher lock on the door, was a large circular table with a lazy-Susan bookcase in the center and six seats around it. The seats had overhead plaques to designate their functions: Senior Duty Officer, Press, Africa—Latin America, Europe—USSR, Near-East-Terrorism, and South Asia—East Asia—Pacific. The wall clocks showed the time in Moscow, Beijing, Beirut, Tripoli, and, of course, Greenwich Mean. There was an adjacent conference room that looked down on the CIA’s internal courtyard.

“What gives?” Jack asked, arriving with Goodley in his wake.

“According to NORAD a nuclear device just went off in Denver.”

“I hope that’s a fucking joke!” Jack replied. That, too, was a reflex. Before the man had a chance to respond, Ryan’s stomach turned over. Nobody made jokes like that one.

“I wish it were,” the Senior Duty Officer replied.

“What do we know?”

“Not much.”

“Anything? Threat board?” Jack asked. Again it was reflexive. If there had been anything, he would have heard it by now. “Okay—where’s Marcus?”

“Coming home in the C-141, somewhere between Japan and the Aleutians. You’re it, sir,” the SDO pointed out, quietly thanking a beneficent God that it wasn’t himself. “President’s at Camp David. SecDef and SecState—”

“Dead?” Ryan asked.

“It would appear so, sir.”

Ryan closed his eyes. “Holy Jesus. The Vice President?”

“At his official residence. We’ve only been going about three minutes. The NMCC watch officer is a Captain James Rosselli. General Wilkes is on the way in. DIA’s on line. They—I mean the President just ordered DEFCON-TWO on our strategic forces.”

“Anything from the Russians?”

“Nothing unusual at all. There’s a regional air-defense exercise under way in Eastern Siberia. That’s all.”

“Okay, alert all the stations. Put the word out that I want to hear anything they might have—anything. They are to hit every source they can just as fast as they can.” Jack paused one more time. “How sure are we that this really happened?”

“Sir, two DSPS satellites copied the flash. We have a KH-11 that’s going to be overhead in about twenty minutes, and I’ve directed NPIC to put every camera they have on Denver. NORAD says it’s a definite nuclear detonation, but there’s no word on yield or damage. The explosion seems to be in the immediate area of the stadium—like Black Sunday, sir, but real. This is definitely not a drill, not if we’re jacking the strategic forces to DEFCON-TWO, sir.”

“Inbound ballistic track? Aircraft delivery?”

“Negative on the first, there was no launch warning, and no ballistic radar track.”

“What about a FOBS?” Goodley asked. A weapon could be delivered by satellite. That was the purpose of a Fractional-Orbital Bombardment System.

“They would have caught that,” the SDO replied. “I already asked. On the aircraft side, they don’t know yet. They’re trying to check air-traffic-control tapes.”

“So we don’t know jack shit.”

“Correct.”

“President check in with us yet?” Ryan asked.

“No, but we have an open line there. He has the National Security Advisor there also.”

“Most likely scenario?”

“I’d say terrorism.”

Ryan nodded. “So would I. I’m taking over the conference room. Okay, I want DO, DI, DS&T in here immediately. If you need choppers to fetch them in, order ’em.” Ryan walked into the room, leaving the door open.

“Christ,” Goodley said. “You sure you want me here?”

“Yes, and when you have an idea, you say it out loud. I forgot about FOBS.” Jack lifted the phone and punched the FBI button.

“Command Center.”

“This is CIA, Deputy Director Ryan speaking. Who is this?”

“Inspector Pat O’Day. I have Deputy Assistant Director Murray here also. You’re on speaker, sir.”

“Talk to me, Dan.” Jack put his phone on speaker also. A watch officer handed him a cup of coffee.

“We don’t know anything. No heads-up at all, Jack. Thinking terrorists?”

“At the moment it seems the most plausible alternative.”

“How sure are you of that?”

“Sure?” Ryan shook his head at the phone, Goodley saw. “What’s ‘sure’ mean, Dan?”

“I hear you. We’re still trying to figure out what happened here, too. I can’t even get CNN on the TV to work.”

“What?”

“One of my communications people says the satellites are all out,” Murray explained. “Didn’t you know that?”

“No.” Jack pointed for Goodley to get back into the Ops Center and find out. “If that’s true, it could scratch the terrorism idea. Jesus, that’s scary!”

“It’s true, Jack. We’ve checked.”

“They think ten commercial commosats are nonfunctional,” Goodley said. “All the defense birds are on line, though. Our commlinks are okay.”

“Find the most senior S&T guy you can find—or one of our commo people—and ask him what could snuff out satellites. Move!” Jack ordered. “Where’s Shaw?”

“On his way in. Going to be awhile the way the roads are.”

“Dan, I’ll give you everything I get here.”

“It’ll be a two-way street.” The line went dead.

The most horrible thing was that Ryan didn’t know what to do next. It was his job to gather data and forward it to the President, but he had no data. What information there was would come in through military circuits. CIA had failed again, Ryan told himself. Someone had done something to his country and he hadn’t warned anyone. People were dead because his agency had failed in its mission. Ryan was Deputy Director, the man who really ran the shop for the political drone placed over his head. The failure was personal. A million people dead, maybe, and there he was, all alone in an elegant little conference room staring at a wall with nothing on it. He hunted a line to NORAD and punched it.

“NORAD,” a disembodied voice answered.

“This is the CIA Operations Center, Deputy Director Ryan speaking. I need information.”

“We do not have much, sir. We think the bomb exploded in the immediate vicinity of the Skydome. We are trying to estimate yield, but nothing yet. A helicopter has been dispatched from Lowry Air Force Base.”

“Will you keep us posted?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you.” That was a big help, Ryan thought. Now he knew that someone else didn’t know anything.

 

There was nothing magical about a mushroom cloud, Battalion Chief Mike Callaghan of the Denver City Fire Department knew. He’d seen one before, as a rookie firefighter. It had been a fire in the Burlington yards just outside the city, in 1968. A propane tank-car had let go, right next to another trainload of bombs en route to the Navy’s munitions terminal at Oakland, California. The chief back then had had the good sense to pull his men back when the tank ruptured, and from a quarter mile away they’d watched a hundred tons of bombs go off in a hellish firecracker series. There had been a mushroom then also. A large mass of hot air rose, roiling as it went into an annular shape. It created an updraft, drawing air upward into its donut-shaped center, making the stem of the mushroom....

But this one was much larger.

He was behind the wheel of his red-painted command car, following the first alarm, three Seagrave pumper units, an aerial ladder truck, and two ambulances. It was a pitiful first response. Callaghan lifted his radio and ordered a general alarm. Next he ordered his men to approach from upwind.

Christ, what had happened here?

It couldn’t be that ... most of the city was still intact.

Chief Callaghan didn’t know much, but he knew there was a fire to fight and people to rescue. As his car turned off the last sidestreet onto the boulevard leading to the stadium, he saw the main smoke mass. The parking lot, of course. It had to be. The mushroom cloud was blowing rapidly southwest toward the mountains. The parking lot was a mass of fire and flame from burning gasoline and oil and auto parts. A powerful gust of wind cleared the smoke briefly, just enough that he could see that there had been a stadium here ... a few sections were still ... not intact, but you could tell what they were—had been only a few minutes before. Callaghan shut that out. He had a fire to fight. He had people to rescue. The first pump unit pulled up at a hydrant. They had good water here. The stadium was fully sprinklered, and that system fed off two 36-inch, high-pressure mains that gridded around the complex.

He parked his car next to the first big Seagrave and left it to climb on top of the fire engine. Some heavy structural material—the stadium roof, he supposed—was in the parking lot to his right. More had landed a quarter mile away in the mercifully empty parking lot of a shopping center. Callaghan used his portable radio to order the next wave of rescue units to check both the shopping center and the residential area that lay beyond it. The smaller fires would have to wait. There were people in the stadium who needed help, but his firefighters would have to fight through two hundred yards of burning cars to get to them....

Just then he looked up to see a blue Air Force rescue helicopter. The UH-1N landed thirty yards away. Callaghan ran over toward it. The officer inside the back, he saw, was an Army major.

“Callaghan,” he said. “Battalion chief.”

“Griggs,” the Major replied. “You need a look-around?”

“Right.”

“’Kay.” The Major spoke into his headset and the helicopter lifted off. Callaghan grabbed a seat belt but didn’t strap in.

It didn’t take long. What appeared to be a wall of smoke from street level became discrete pillars of black and gray smoke from overhead. Perhaps half of the cars had ignited. He could use one of the driving lanes to get closer in, but some of the way was blocked by wrecked and burning cars. The chopper made a single circuit, bouncing through the roiled, hot air. Looking down, Callaghan could see a mass of melted asphalt, some of it still glowing red. The only spot not giving off smoke was the south end of the stadium itself, which seemed to glisten, though he didn’t know why. What they could see appeared to be a crater whose dimensions were hard to judge, since they could only catch bits and pieces of it at a time. It took a long look to determine that parts of the stadium structure remained standing, perhaps four or five sections, Callaghan thought. There had to be people in there.

“Okay, I’ve seen enough,” Callaghan told Griggs. The officer handed him a headset so that they could speak coherently.

“What is this?”

“Just what it looks like, far as I can tell,” Griggs replied. “What do you need?”

“Heavy-lift and rigging equipment. There are probably people in what’s left of the stadium. We gotta get in to them. But what about the—what about radiation?”

The Major shrugged. “I don’t know. When I leave here, I’m picking up a team from Rocky Flats. I work at the Arsenal, and I know a little about this, but the specialists are at Rocky Flats. There’s a NEST team there. I need to get them down here ASAP. Okay, I’ll call the guard people at the Arsenal, we can get the heavy equipment down here fast. Keep your people to windward. Keep your people at this end. Do not attempt to approach from any other direction, okay?”

“Right.”

“Set up a decontamination station right there where your engines are. When people come out, hose them down—strip them and hose them down. Understand?” the Major asked as the chopper touched down. “Then get them to the nearest hospital. Upwind—remember that everything has to go northeast into the wind, so you know you’re safe.”

“What about fallout?”

“I’m no expert, but I’ll give you the best I got. Looks like it was a small one. Not much fallout. The suction from the fireball and the surface wind should have driven most of the radioactive shit away from here. Not all, but most. It should be okay for an hour or so—exposure, I mean. By that time I’ll have the NEST guys here and they can tell you for sure. Best I can do for now, Chief. Good luck.”

Callaghan jumped out and ran clear. The chopper lifted right off, heading northwest for Rocky Flats.

 

“Well?” Kuropatkin asked.

“General, we measure yield by the initial and residual heat emissions. There is something odd about this, but my best figure is between one hundred fifty and two hundred kilotons.” The Major showed his commander the calculations.

“What’s odd about it?”

“The energy from the initial flash was low. That might mean some clouds were in the way. The residual heat is quite high. This was a major detonation, comparable to a very large tactical warhead or a small strategic one.”

“Here’s the target book,” a lieutenant said. It was just that, a clothbound quarto-sized volume whose thick pages were actually foldout maps. It was intended for use in strike-damage evaluation. The map of the Denver area had a plastic overlay that showed the targeting of Soviet strategic missiles. A total of eight birds were detailed on the city, five SS-18s and three SS-19s, totaling no fewer than sixty-four warheads and twenty megatons of yield. Someone, Kuropatkin reflected, thought Denver a worthy target.

“We’re assuming a ground-burst?” Kuropatkin asked. “Correct,” the Major replied. He used a compass to draw a circle centered on the stadium complex. “A two-hundred-kiloton device would have a lethal blast radius this wide....”

The map was color-coded. Hard-to-kill structures were colored brown. Dwellings were yellow. Green denoted commercial and other buildings deemed easy targets to destroy. The stadium, he saw, was green, as was nearly everything immediately around it. Well inside the lethal radius were hundreds of houses and low-rise apartment buildings.

“How many in the stadium?”

“I called KGB for an estimate,” the Lieutenant said. “It’s an enclosed structure—with a roof. The Americans like their comforts. Total capacity is over sixty thousand.”

“My God,” General Kuropatkin breathed. “Sixty thousand there ... at least another hundred thousand inside this radius. The Americans must be insane by now.” And if they think we did it....

 

“Well?” Borstein asked.

“I ran the numbers three times. Best guess, one-fifty-KT, sir,” the Captain said.

Borstein rubbed his face. “Christ. Casualty count?”

“Two hundred-K, based on computer modeling and a quick look at the maps we have on file,” she answered. “Sir, if somebody’s thinking terrorist device, they’re wrong. It’s too big for that.”

Borstein activated the conference line to the President and CINC-SAC.

“We have some early numbers here.”

“Okay, I’m waiting,” the President said. He stared at the speaker as though it were a person.

“Initial yield estimates look like one hundred fifty kilotons.”

“That big?” General Fremont’s voice asked.

“We checked the numbers three times.”

“Casualties?” CINC-SAC asked next.

“On the order of two hundred thousand initial dead. Add fifty more to that from delayed effects.”

President Fowler recoiled backwards as though slapped across the face. For the past five minutes he had denied as much as he could. This most important of denials had just vanished. Two hundred thousand people dead. His citizens, the people he’d sworn to preserve, protect, and defend.

“What else?” his voice asked.

“I didn’t catch that,” Borstein said.

Fowler took a deep breath and spoke again. “What else do you have?”

“Sir, our impression here is that the yield is awfully high for a terrorist device.”

“I’d have to concur in that,” CINC-SAC said. “An IND—an improvised nuclear device, that is, what we’d expect from unsophisticated terrorists—should not be much more than twenty-KT. This sounds like a multistage weapon.”

“Multistage?” Elliot said toward the speaker.

“A thermonuclear device,” General Borstein replied. “An H-Bomb.”

 

“Ryan here, who’s this?”

“Major Fox, sir, at NORAD. We have an initial feel for yield and casualties.” The Major read off the bomb numbers.

“Too big for a terrorist weapon,” said an officer from the Directorate of Science and Technology.

“That’s what we think, sir.”

“Casualties?” Ryan asked.

“Probable prompt-kill number is two hundred thousand or so. That includes the people at the stadium.”

I have to wake up, Ryan told himself, his eyes screwed tightly shut. This has to be a fucking nightmare, and I’m going to wake up from it. But he opened his eyes, and nothing had changed at all.

Robby Jackson was sitting in the cabin of the carrier’s skipper, Captain Ernie Richards. They had been half-listening to the game, but mainly discussing tactics for an upcoming war game. The Theodore Roosevelt battle group would approach Israel from the west, simulating an attacking enemy. The enemy in this case was the Russians. It seemed highly unlikely, of course, but you had to set some rules for the game. The Russians, in this case, were going to be clever. The battle group would be broken up to resemble a loose assembly of merchant ships instead of a tactical formation. The first attack wave would be fighters and attack-bombers squawking “international” on their IFF boxes, and would try to approach Ben-Gurion International Airport in the guise of peaceful airliners, the better to get inside Israeli airspace unannounced. Jackson’s operations people had already purloined airliner schedules and were examining the time factors, the better to make their first attack seem as plausible as possible. The odds against them were long. It was not expected that TR could do much more than annoy the IAF and the new USAF contingent. But Jackson liked long odds.

“Turn up the radio, Rob. I forgot what the score is.”

Jackson leaned across the table and turned the dial, but got music. The carrier had her own on-board TV system, and was also radio-tuned to the U.S. Armed Forces network. “Maybe the antenna broke,” the Air Wing Commander observed.

Richards laughed. “At a time like this? I could have a mutiny aboard.”

“That would look good on the old fit-rep, wouldn’t it?” Someone knocked at the door. “Come!” Richards said. It was a yeoman.

“Flash-traffic, sir.” The petty officer handed the clipboard over.

“Anything important?” Robby asked.

Richards just handed the message over. Then he lifted the growler phone and punched up the bridge. “General quarters.”

“What the hell?” Jackson murmured. “DEFCON-THREE—WHY, for Christ’s sake?”

Ernie Richards, a former attack pilot, had a reputation as something of a character. He’d reinstituted the traditional Navy practice of bugle calls to announce drills. In this case, the 1-MC speaker system blared forth the opening bars of John Williams’ frantic call to arms in Star Wars, followed by the usual electronic gouging.

“Let’s go, Rob.” Both men started running down to the Combat Information Center.

 

“What can you tell me?” Andrey Il’ych Narmonov asked.

“The bomb had a force of nearly two hundred kilotons. That means a large device, a hydrogen bomb,” General Kuropatkin said. “The death count will be well over one hundred thousand dead. We also have indications of a strong electromagnetic pulse that struck one of our early-warning satellites.”

“What could account for that?” The questioner here was one of Narmonov’s military advisers.

“We do not know.”

“Do we have any nuclear weapons unaccounted for?” Kuropatkin heard his President ask.

“Absolutely not,” a third voice replied.

“Anything else?”

“With your permission, I would like to order Voyska PVO to a higher alert level. We already have a training exercise under way in Eastern Siberia.”

“Is that provocative?” Narmonov asked.

“No, it is totally defensive. Our interceptors cannot harm anyone more than a few hundred kilometers from our own borders. For the moment I will keep all my aircraft within Soviet airspace.”

“Very well, you may proceed.”

In his underground control center, Kuropatkin merely pointed to another officer, who lifted a phone. The Soviet air-defense system had already been prepped, of course; inside a minute radio messages were being broadcast, and long-range search radars came on all over the country’s periphery. Both the messages and the radar signals were immediately detected by National Security Agency assets, both on the ground and in orbit.

“Anything else I should do?” Narmonov asked his advisers.

A Foreign Ministry official spoke for all of them. “I think doing nothing is probably best. When Fowler wishes to speak with us, he will do so. He has trouble enough without our interfering.”

The American Airlines MD-80 landed at Miami International Airport and taxied over to the terminal. Qati and Ghosn rose from their first-class seats and left the aircraft. Their bags would be transferred automatically to the connecting flight, not that either one particularly cared about that, of course. Both men were nervous, but less so than one might have expected. Death was something both had accepted as an overt possibility for this mission. If they survived, so much the better. Ghosn didn’t panic until he realized that there was no unusual activity at all. There should have been some, he thought. He found a bar and looked for the usual elevated television set. It was tuned to a local station. There was no game coverage. He debated asking a question, but decided not to. It was a good decision. He had only to wait a minute before he overheard another voice asking what the score was.

“It was fourteen-seven Vikings,” another voice answered. “Then the goddamned signal was lost.”

“When?”

“About ten minutes ago. Funny they don’t have it back yet.”

“Earthquake, like the Series game in San Francisco?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, man,” the bartender replied.

Ghosn stood and left for the walk back to the departure lounge.

“What does CIA have?” Fowler asked.

“Nothing at the moment, sir. We’re collecting data, but you know everything that we—wait a minute.” Ryan took the message form that the Senior Duty Officer handed him. “Sir, I have a flash here from NSA. The Russian air-defense system just went to a higher alert level. Radars are all coming on, and there’s a lot of radio chatter.”

“What does that mean?” Liz Elliot asked.

“It means that they want to increase their ability to protect themselves. PVO isn’t a threat to anybody unless they’re approaching or inside Soviet airspace.”

“But why would they do it?” Elliot asked again.

“Maybe they’re afraid somebody will attack them.”

“Goddamn it, Ryan!” the President shouted.

“Mr. President, excuse me. That was not a flippant remark. It is literally true. Voyska PVO is a defense system like our NORAD. Our air-defense and warning systems are now at a higher alert status. So are theirs. It’s a defensive move only. They have to know that we’ve had this event. When there’s trouble of this sort, it’s natural to activate your own defenses, just as we have done.”

“It’s potentially disturbing,” General Borstein said at NORAD HQ. “Ryan, you forget we have been attacked. They have not. Now, before they’ve even bothered to call us, they’re jacking up their alert levels. I find that a little worrisome.”

“Ryan, what about those reports that we got about missing Soviet nuclear weapons?” Fowler asked. “Could that fit into this situation?”

“What missing nukes?” CINC-SAC demanded. “Why the hell didn’t I hear about that?”

“What kind of nukes?” Borstein asked a second later.

“That was an unconfirmed report from a penetration agent. There are no details,” Ryan answered, then realized he had to press on. “The sum of the information received is this: We’ve been told that Narmonov has political problems with his military; that they are unhappy with the way he’s doing things; that in the ongoing pullback from Germany, an unspecified number of nuclear weapons—probably tactical ones—have turned up missing; that KGB is conducting an operation to determine what, if anything, is missing. Supposedly Narmonov is personally concerned that he might be the target of political blackmail, and that the blackmail could have a nuclear dimension. But, and I must emphasize the but, we have been totally unable to confirm these reports despite repeated attempts, and we are examining the possibility that our agent is lying to us.”

“Why didn’t you tell us that?” Fowler asked.

“Mr. President, we’re in the process of formulating our assessment now. The work is still ongoing, sir, I mean, we’ve been doing it over the weekend.”

“Well, it sure as hell wasn’t one of ours,” General Fremont said heatedly. “And it’s no goddamned terrorist bomb, it’s too goddamned big for that. Now you tell us that the Russians may have a short inventory. That’s more than disturbing, Ryan.”

“And it could explain the increased alert level at PVO,” Borstein added ominously.

“Are you two telling me,” the President asked, “that this could have been a Soviet device?”

“There aren’t all that many nuclear powers around,” Borstein replied first. “And the yield of this device is just too damned big for amateurs.”

“Wait a minute.” Jack jumped in again. “You have to remember that the facts we have here are very thin. There is a difference between information and speculation. You have to remember that.”

“How big are Soviet tactical nuclear weapons?” Liz Elliot wanted to know.

CINC-SAC handled that one: “A lot like ours. They have little one-kiloton ones for artillery rounds, and they have warheads up to five hundred-KT left over from the SS-20s they did away with.”

“In other words the yield of this explosion falls into the range of the Soviet warhead types that we have heard are missing?”

“Correct, Dr. Elliot,” General Fremont replied.

 

At Camp David, Elizabeth Elliot leaned back in her chair and turned to the President. She spoke too softly for the speakerphone to catch her words.

“Robert, you were supposed to be at that game, along with Brent and Dennis.”

It was strange that he hadn’t had that thought enter his mind yet, Fowler told himself. He, too, leaned back. “No,” he replied. “I cannot believe that the Russians would attempt such a thing.”

“What was that?” a voice on the speaker asked.

“Wait a minute,” the President said too quietly.

“Mr. President, I didn’t catch what you said.”

“I said, wait a minute!” Fowler shouted. He put his hand over the speaker for a moment. “Elizabeth, it’s our job to get control of this situation and we will. Let’s try to put this personal stuff aside for the moment.”

“Mr. President, I want you on Kneecap just as fast as you can get there,” CINC-SAC said. “This situation could be very serious indeed.”

“If we’re going to get control, Robert, we must do it quickly.”

Fowler turned to the naval officer standing behind him. “When’s the chopper due in?”

“Twenty-five minutes, sir, then thirty more to get you to Andrews for Kneecap.”

“Almost an hour...” Fowler looked at the wall clock, as people do when they know what time it is, know what time it will take to do something, and look at the clock anyway. “The radio links on the chopper aren’t enough for this. Tell the chopper to take Vice President Durling to Kneecap. General Fremont?”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“You have extra Kneecaps there, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do, sir.”

“I’m sending the Vice President up on the primary. You send a spare down here. You can land it at Hagerstown, can’t you?”

“Yes, sir, we can use the Fairchild-Republic airfield, where they used to build the A-10s.”

“Okay, do that. It’ll take me an hour to get to Andrews, and I cannot afford to waste an hour. It’s my job to settle this thing down, and I need that hour.”

“That, sir, is a mistake,” Fremont said in the coldest voice he had. It would take two hours to get the aircraft to central Maryland.

“That may be, but it’s what I’m going to do. This is not a time for me to run away.”

Behind the President, Pete Connor and Helen D’Agustino traded a baleful look. They had no illusions on what would happen if there were a nuclear attack on the United States. Mobility was the President’s best defense, and he had just thrown that away.

 

The radio message from Camp David went out at once. The presidential helicopter was just crossing the Washington Beltway when it turned and went back southeast. It landed on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory. Vice President Roger Durling and his entire family jumped aboard. They didn’t even bother strapping in. Secret Service agents, with their Uzi sub-machine guns out, knelt inside the aircraft. All Durling knew was what the Secret Service detail had told him. Durling told himself that he had to relax, that he had to keep his head. He looked at his youngest child, a boy only four years old. To be that age again, he’d thought only the day before, to be that age again and be able to grow up in a world where the chance of a major war no longer existed. All the horrors of his youth, the Cuban Missile Crisis that had marked his freshman year in college, his service as a platoon leader in the 82nd Airborne, a year of which had been in Vietnam. War experience made Durling a most unusual liberal politician. He hadn’t run from it. He’d taken his chances and remembered having two men die in his arms. Just yesterday he’d looked at his son and thanked God that he wouldn’t have to know any of that.

And now, this. His son still didn’t know anything more than that they were getting a surprise helicopter ride, and he loved to fly. His wife knew more, and there were tears streaming from her eyes as she stared back at him.

The Marine VH-3 touched down within fifty yards of the aircraft. The first Secret Service agent leaped off and saw a platoon of Air Force security police marking the way to the stairs. The Vice President was practically dragged toward them, while a burly agent picked up his young son and ran the distance. Two minutes later, before people had even strapped in, the pilot of the National Emergency Airborne Command Post—Kneecap—firewalled his engines and roared down runway Zero-One Left. He headed east for the Atlantic Ocean, where a KC-10 tanker was already orbiting to top off the Boeing’s tanks.

 

“We have a major problem here,” Ricks said in the maneuvering room. Maine had just tried to move. At any speed over three knots, the propeller screeched like a banshee. The shaft was slightly bent, but they’d live with that for a while. “All seven blades must be damaged. If we try for anything over three we make noise. Over five and we’ll lose the shaft bearings in a matter of minutes. The outboard motor can give us two or three knots, but that’s noisy too. Comments?” There were none. No one aboard doubted Ricks’ engineering expertise. “Options?”

“Kinda thin, aren’t they?” Dutch Claggett observed.

Maine had to stay near the surface. At this alert level, she had to be ready to launch in minutes. Ordinarily they could have gone to a deeper depth, if for no other reason than to reduce the horrible motion the ship was taking right now from surface turbulence, but her reduced speed made coming up too time-consuming.

“How close is Omaha?” the chief engineer asked.

“Probably within a hundred miles, and there’s P-3s at Kodiak—but we still have that Akula out there to worry about,”

Claggett said. “Sir, we can hang tough right here and wait it out.”

“No, we have a hurt boomer. We need some kind of support.”

“That means radiating,” the XO pointed out.

“We’ll use a SLOT buoy.”

“At two knots through the water, that doesn’t buy us much, sir. Captain, radiating is a mistake.”

Ricks looked at his chief engineer, who said, “I like the idea of having a friend around.”

“So do I,” the Captain said. It didn’t take long. The buoy was on the surface in seconds and immediately began broadcasting a short message in UHF. It was programmed to continue broadcasting for hours.

 

“We’re going to have a nationwide panic on our hands,” Fowler said. That was not his most penetrating observation. He had a growing panic in his own command center, and knew it. “Is there anything coming out of Denver?”

“Nothing on any commercial TV or radio channel that I know of,” a voice at NORAD replied.

“Okay, you people stand by.” Fowler searched his panel for another button.

“FBI Command Center. Inspector O’Day speaking.”

“This is the President,” Fowler said unnecessarily. It was a direct line and the light on the FBI panel was neatly labeled. “Who’s in charge down there?”

“I am Deputy Assistant Director Murray, Mr. President. I’m the senior man at the moment.”

“How are your communications?”

“They’re okay, sir. We have access to the military commsats.”

“One thing we have to worry about is a nationwide panic. To prevent that, I want you to send people to all the TV network headquarters. I want your people to explain to them that they may not broadcast anything about this. If necessary, you are directed to use force to prevent it.”

Murray didn’t like that. “Mr. President, that is against—”

“I know the law, okay? I used to be a prosecutor. This is necessary to preserve life and order, and it will be done, Mr. Murray. That is a Presidential Order. Get to it.”

“Yes, sir.”