by Tom Clancy
“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 we
ll 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 m
inutes, 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.
