Cyborg 02 - Operation Nuke

by Martin Caidin

  Within the jet there was little sound. The pilot eased control from his hands to the automatic pilot, coupled to the inertial computer. Everything had been preset, fed carefully into the electronic innards of the compact robot brain. As the machine surged steadily into the morning skies the computer compared its predicted passage over the earth with actual flight. Minutes later the effects of wind at different heights flashed on a digital readout panel. Compensation was automatic, and it was the human pilot who scribbled notes on a kneepad, leaving the robot to tend to its ministrations.

  They seemed a sealed spore drifting higher and higher with no apparent effort. No real sense of motion beyond the slow slide of distant horizon. Cape Sainte-Marie to their left was visible only briefly. Their steep angle of climb and breathless rush into thinning air swept it quickly from view. The jet angled smoothly to the northwest, climbing constantly as it crossed the Mozambique Channel. Just north of Nampula it edged over the continent proper. Several moments later the altimeter circled around to a reading of 25,000 feet. Now, for the first time since he activated the autopilot, the man in the left seat returned to direct control of the machine.

  This was no ordinary DH-125, although it would have taken an expert observer to detect the wings were nine feet wider than the standard airplane’s; at high altitudes they performed with the lifting characteristics of a highspeed glider. Close study would show an inlet for each engine at least fourteen inches wider than the power plants normally fitted to the de Havilland. They could not be advanced to full power until they reached five miles above the earth for fear of structural failure. Now, with a steady and careful movement, the pilot rested his right hand on the throttles, edged them forward, watching his fuel flow and pressure gauges. Then they were full forward. The DH-125 climbed with a fighter’s speed and rate of ascent.

  Tabora in Tanganyika, due south of Lake Victoria, lay directly beneath the airplane as they eased into level flight at 68,000 feet. The great height banished all sense of motion. The distant horizon of the planet itself curved visibly before them. It was an extraordinary moment, the air above a dark, almost-purple blue, the rounded edge of earth mantled with a sun-slashed silver haze.

  Sam Franks paid it no attention. He had left the cockpit to another man. Now he sat hunched before a large instrument panel. On a grid map illuminated beneath a plexiglass sheet, the terrain far below moved slowly on rollers, and a bright dot represented their exact position. Kigoma would be just north of their position as they flew due west. Franks felt the slight turn. The winds were stronger than expected and the robot brain was compensating. Within minutes they would cross the Congo River, and shortly after they would be 110 miles due north of Butukama, where several hundred men argued the future of an all-black continent.

  In the high-columned meeting hall at the center of Butukama the meeting had come to a violent halt. Delegates of every black government and secret conclave were on their feet, their faces distorted with shouted anger. Fists were shaken in the air as the conference hall rocked with curses and cries for blood. Not of whites. Not at this moment, anyway.

  All eyes followed several black men in chains dragged onto the main floor. The delegates, seated in ascending, staggered rows as within an indoor arena, looked down on the captives kept to the floor beneath rifle butts and booted feet. Then a momentary interruption as another group was dragged, already dead, and placed against one wall.

  Colonel Jomo Mwanza, chief of the special security force to protect the gathering, stood in the center of the hall, arms upraised in a sudden gesture for silence. It came quickly. Mwanza turned slowly, his face gleaming from the rain, and looked up at the faces of the assembly. Finally, achieving his intended effect, he turned to point to the figures on the floor.

  “Look at them,” he said. “They are traitors, hired by the Portuguese to sabotage us. They are responsible for the deaths of our own brothers last night. Some, as you can see, we managed to capture alive. It will be a pleasure to see them regret it.”

  The president of the assembly leaned forward. “It is only a few hours since the treacherous attack last night, and we already have the evidence that the Portuguese have never given up their old colonial ways. And, worse, some of our own people have yet to learn that we mean to take back this continent. Their skins may be black. But they have hearts that are white. They are worse than the whites.” He rose slowly, and ordered Colonel Mwanza to execute them, with the Assembly as silent witness.

  Thirteen miles above the earth the jet with its rakishly swept-back wings drifted across the continent. Sam Franks sat with eyes fixed on the instruments in front of him. Finally he reached forward with his right hand, snapped back a protective cover to reveal a wide, red button.

  They crossed an invisible line from Stanleyville in the north running due south until it reached Butukama. This was the line of decision. Of commitment. Sam Franks waited. The fourth man aboard the airplane nodded. “Sixty seconds.”

  “Open the safety locks.”

  “Safety locks open. Thirty seconds.”

  “Call them off,” Franks said.

  The sound of machine guns violated the meeting hall. It was over quickly. The roar echoed through the high chamber, and the stench of gunpowder drifted up to the delegates.

  Colonel Mwanza then walked forward slowly, unholstering the .38 at his right side. He stood before the first body, bringing the gun slowly forward. His thumb brought back the hammer with a click heard by each of the hundreds of men in the room. He pointed the gun at the head of the first man. His finger tightened, squeezing slowly. The hammer released, only an instant away from detonating the round in the chamber.

  Only an instant.

  It never came.

  “Ten seconds, Sam.”

  “Confirm safety locks open.’

  “Confirmed.”

  “Count.”

  “Five seconds.

  “Four.

  “Three.

  “Two.

  “One.”

  Sam Franks pressed the red button.

  In less time than it took for the hammer in the gun held by Colonel Jomo Mwanza to travel from its cocked position to strike the bullet, the radio signal flashed out from the jet thirteen miles above the earth, more than a hundred miles north of Butukama, where it fed into a high television tower and sped through the coaxial cable in the service tunnel beneath the conference building to the wire spliced into the cable hours before by Sam Franks.

  The heavy container left in the tunnel enclosed a series of concentric spheres, of which the outermost was plastic. This surrounded a sphere of plutonium, which in turn encircled a sphere of beryllium. Gold-plated cones lay in the center of the beryllium. Surrounding the set of multiple spheres was a system of thirty-eight lenses, each made up of a plastic explosive, and each wired to two detonators. Each detonator was wired to a condenser, so that the radio signal flashed from the DH-125 jet and translated to an electrical signal would bring each of the explosive lenses to detonate at the same instant.

  The signal flashed to the condensers, to the detonators, to the lenses, which vanished. They did not explode. They imploded, the terrible explosive pressure rammed inward against the porous plutonium sphere. The vanishing explosive lenses became a single concave shock wave front all about the surface of the plutonium sphere. Instantly the plutonium was compressed into a hypercritical mass. The beryllium core also collapsed. The gold-plated cones no longer restricted a flow of neutrons. The plutonium mass was critical—the K-factor. And because of the neutron activity the mass destroyed itself.

  The mechanical process of electrical activity through the system of condensers, detonators, and imploding lenses took barely a thousandth of a second. It was at this moment that Colonel Jomo Mwanza’s squeezing finger released the cocked hammer of his revolver. At the moment the hammer cracked against the bullet the mechanical process in the service tunnel beneath the building ended. At that millionth of a second when the spherical object in t
he service tunnel ceased to exist, a small star was born.

  Directly beneath the building where the leaders of the new Africa were meeting, where bodies lay collapsed against the marble floor, where hundreds of men watched in silence as Colonel Mwanza squeezed a trigger, a thing with a temperature of sixty million degrees came into being.

  In that moment the service tunnel, the ground beneath, the soil in all directions for a thousand feet across and twice that distance upward totally encompassing the meeting hall and everything in it became as hot as is the interior of the sun, and was subjected to a pressure force of thirty million pounds per square inch.

  The pressure tore outward, converting what it touched to superheated gas. The tiny heart of that momentary star erupted into savaging atomic energy, at the same instant the powder in the bullet of the gun held by Jomo Mwanza exploded.

  The bullet never fired. In that instant it ceased to exist. Exposed to the heart of a star, the bullet, the gun, every man, the entire building, the ground on which it stood, the earth and air about it became energy. Molecular structure vanished in the flicker of time that the atom raged—the visible fireball still to follow. It was a moment, had one been able to measure the passage of events, that could have had as its yardstick the bullet in Jomo Mwanza’s gun: before it reached the muzzle of the gun it no longer existed.

  Butukama was suddenly in a naked glare that spread instantly through the city, and began the slow process of chemical combustion on nearly every surface it touched. Behind that savage light came the exploding fireball and the shock wave that moved sideward and downward, slammed into the earth, gouging a hemispherical depression, sledgehammering beyond, rolling the crust of the earth within its reach as if it were so much jelly.

  Above ground the blazing fireball expanded in a fraction of a second to form a dome of energy, glowing too brightly at first to be seen and then, as it cooled within seconds, showing a mottled form of berserk power expanding, pulsating, contracting. From the edge of the fireball erupted the shock wave, still with a pressure of many tons to the square inch.

  Butukama vanished.

  They saw it from the jet thirteen miles high and more than a hundred miles to the north.

  The pilot flying the DH-125 had put on thick, almost opaque smoked glasses. Through this glass the naked sun, even stared at directly, was only the faintest, barely discernible glow. Yet what took place shook the pilot so that he would never forget it.

  A commercial jetliner en route to South Africa flew over the area two hours after the blast. Most of the cloud was by then dissipated, a harmless-looking spray of white in the very high air. The crew and passengers saw fires burning, drifting smoke.

  A gaping crater looked up at them.

  CHAPTER 5

  Three seconds after the atomic bomb annihilated what had been the city of Butukama, sensors contained within two Vela Hotel satellites orbiting seventy-four thousand miles above the earth registered the stellar light flash of the exploding atomic bomb. Because the heavy cloud cover and rain as well as the bomb being exploded slightly beneath the surface held down the sudden burst of light, the Vela Hotel satellites delayed flashing the alert signal to ground receiving stations. The computerized systems judged what they detected in the visible spectrum and then compared other radiation signatures of the nuclear energy release.

  The first detection of the blast by the Vela Hotels did not require three seconds. Such detection was instantaneous. But the satellites had been prepared with redundant systems so that any immediate activation of the sensors as a result of faulty equipment would not trigger combat alarms in the main space data control center in the Rocky Mountains.

  The first satellite ran through a review of its detection of the visible and other radiation signature and then flashed word of what had been received. With that alert signal went a complete review of the time continuity of the events, and, also, a complete report on the equipment used by the satellite in detecting, registering, checking and then signalling what had happened. The message flashed from the Vela Hotel not to the earth antenna which, at that moment, was not in direct range between satellite and earth station, but to seven military communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit at average distances from the earth of some 23,000 miles. The use of seven satellites was also a matter of redundancy, since signal transmission and retransmission was automatic.

  At the same moment the alert message was moving through the computer processing system of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) deep in the bowels of a Colorado mountain, the second Vela Hotel completed processing its own detection, checkout and transmission signal, and was relaying its report through the military comsats to Colorado.

  These first two messages that there had just occurred the uncontrolled release of nuclear energy above the earth, and that this energy was from a complete fission process rather than an exploding nuclear pile or some other such nonmilitary system, required another thirty-one seconds to be flashed on the readout panel of the combat center of the North American Air Defense Command. The readout came in several forms. One took place on a large wall screen where the printout message was “frozen.” TV transmission of that screen took place automatically to all appropriate control center desks within NORAD. At the same time, other readouts were taking place through telex, printed circuit and related systems.

  Through automatic alerting communications nets, the news from the Vela Hotels was also flashed simultaneously to the White House, the combined services combat intelligence center in the Pentagon and headquarters of the Strategic Air Command in Nebraska. Dissemination of the message was made with the warning:

  THIS NUCLEAR DETONATION ALERT REQUIRES FURTHER CONFIRMATION. DO NOT REPEAT DO NOT ACTIVATE ANY COMBAT EMERGENCY PROCEDURES BEYOND PREPLANNED NOTIFICATION UNTIL CONFIRMING MESSAGE IS TRANSMITTED THROUGH NORAD. DO NOT REQUEST INFORMATION AT THIS POINT. STAND BY FOR MESSAGE CONFIRMATION.

  It required another two minutes, nineteen seconds for the NORAD combat control center duty officer to interrogate the Vela Hotel satellites for computer reconfirmation of the original messages. A repeat signal, taped within the satellites, also flashed on command, and the two messages were compared within the NORAD computers. Moments later reconfirmation flashed from the computers, and a sergeant began tapping out the second message dictated to him by the colonel on duty.

  GREENAPPLE TWO CONFIRMATION NUCLEAR DETONATION ALERT. DETECTION BY TWO REPEAT TWO VELA HOTEL SATELLITES ALPHA NINER AND DELTA SIX, COMPLETE COMPUTER VERIFICATION SIGNALS. FURTHER DATA FOLLOWS. CLOSEST POPULATION CENTER IMMEDIATE GROSS ESTIMATES VELA HOTEL COORDINATES IS BUTUKAMA IN CONGO, CONTINENT AFRICA. MESSAGE LIST BRAVO FOXTROT IS NOW ACTIVATED, INTERROGATION DETAILS THIS CENTER CONTACT CODE FLYBY PROTON SEVEN SEVEN TANGO. MESSAGE ENDS.

  Another office in NORAD headquarters immediately began its own message transmissions along a standing notification list. The exact contents of both messages from NORAD was now disseminated through hotline and other systems to the Tactical Air Command, Army Combat Headquarters, Navy Combat Headquarters, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Office of Civil Defense, and sixty-seven other separate notification points. This list was a primary notification requirement aside from what any government agency or division might do on its own.

  “That’s everything so far.”

  Colonel Milton Hawkins studied the papers in front of him. At his right side was a nuclear weapons expert from the Department of Defense. To his left, a weapons scientist from the Atomic Energy Commission and an expert on Russian affairs sat around the long conference table in the basement of the White House. Colonel Hawkins was the military aide to the President. He had already alerted the chief executive but would not contact him again until he had every available bit of information. More than information he needed expert opinion to evaluate the facts to date.

  “Dr. Jameson, what do you make of this so far?” Colonel Hawkins asked.

  The AEC scientist hesitated, then: “It appears to be a single de
tonation of an intermediate to high-yield fission weapon. It also seems to be a high-technology product. Initial indications point to a surface or a low sub-surface burst, which means high downwind fallout. I’d say the yield was on the order of two to five hundred kilotons.”

  “You say a high-technology product, Doctor. Why?”

  “When you get that kind of yield from a fission bomb you’ve got something that was put together by a weapons laboratory.”

  Colonel Hawkins glanced at his air force counterpart. “Bob, you agree?”

  “Down the line. When we get a look through some other systems we can sift more facts from extrapolation. We’re trying to get air samples of the cloud. When we do, even the preliminary reports will tell us much more . . . damn near right down to the serial number.”

  “Is it possible it’s one of our own missing bombs?”

  “Possible. Can’t tell yet. We’ve got to break down the fission products we’ll pick up in cloud sampling.”

  Hawkins turned to his communications officer. “Do we have confirmation of message receipt from Moscow?”

  Yes, sir. It’s gone to the President.”

  Colonel Hawkins thought of the old days and what might have happened when an atomic bomb went off in the world, away from a testing ground, and he felt a chill pass through him.

  He rose to his feet. “Gentlemen, thank you for your patience. I’d appreciate it if you would stand by just a bit longer.”

  He walked quickly down the hall to see the President.

  That night the CIA activated its world-wide reporting system throughout the world, following every lead that might possibly tie the blast in Butukama with any move made by the Soviet Union, directly or indirectly. This was not carried out under the suspicion that the Soviets might be responsible for the mysterious explosion, but was, rather, following through with standard procedure. If the thorough, world-wide checkout failed to indicate a link to the Russians, so much the better.