by Jeff Edwards
> TELEMETRY LOST, EKV #6
> TRACK NOT CONTINUED, BALLISTIC TARGET “FOXTROT”
> SUCCESSFUL INTERCEPT PROBABILITY = 97.4%
Air Force Major Lionel Humphrey read the lines of text and let out a shaky breath. It was working … It actually seemed to be working …
“Yeah!,” one of the console operators exclaimed. “Oh yeah! I think it’s gonna …”
“Shut up!,” Lionel snapped. His voice was overloud in the quiet of the control room. “Don’t jinx it,” he said in a softer tone. “Just shut the hell up … and let it happen.”
* * *
Interstate 8 (San Diego, California):
The unofficial and un-recommended evacuation of San Diego began within minutes of the first emergency alert bulletin. The word tore through the city like wildfire. San Diego was a prime military target: the aircraft carriers at North Island … the amphibious warfare base on Coronado … the warships at 32nd Street Naval Station … the submarine base at Point Loma. Any enemy who wanted to cripple the U.S. would nuke San Diego with the very first barrage of missiles.
It seemed like good logic. And in the pressure cooker of a city succumbing to terror, the idea morphed from educated guess to solid fact in the space of mere minutes. Suddenly, the word was everywhere … San Diego was a confirmed target. The only way to survive was to get out of the city NOW! People jumped in their cars and ran for the freeways like lemmings.
The first casualties were from a pileup on Interstate 8, near the Grossmont Boulevard exit—the inevitable product of too many vehicles moving too quickly through too small an area.
Near the middle of the pack and rolling at eighty miles an hour, the driver of a white Ford pickup misjudged his following distance and slammed into the rear of a green Toyota minivan. With a crunch of buckling steel and collapsing plastic, the minivan careened to the left, smashing into the right front fender of a silver BMW Z8 convertible and slewing the sports car sideways into the side of a fourth vehicle.
Startled by the unexpected impact, and by the split-second shock of his driver-side airbag ballooning instantly into his face, the BMW driver snatched his foot away from the accelerator pedal, and stomped on the brakes. It was an utterly natural reaction. Given the same set of circumstances, a lot of drivers would have done precisely what he did. But it was exactly the wrong thing to do.
With that simple act of reflex, a multi-car fender-bender was transformed into a chain-reaction, propagating backward through the speeding lines of traffic as cars, trucks, motorcycles, and buses crashed blindly into the wall of suddenly stationary vehicles to their immediate front. And amidst the rending of metal and the shattering of glass, drivers and passengers were crushed and broken right along with their vehicles.
The Russian warheads had not even penetrated the atmosphere, and already American citizens were beginning to die.
* * *
Alaska Regional Hospital, Anchorage, Alaska:
Charlie Sweigart tapped gently on the door to Gabriella’s room, and then opened it enough to stick his head in. “Hello?”
There was no answer. Gabriella was sleeping.
Charlie shuffled into her room, his hospital slippers making soft shushing noises as they slid across the tiled floor. He wheeled his IV rack in behind himself, taking care that his IV tubes didn’t catch on anything as he quietly closed the door. He probably didn’t need the IV anymore. He was over the hump now, and well on the road to recovery, but the doctors kept reminding him that advanced hypothermia was nothing to play around with.
He felt okay now, or at least well enough to finish his recovery at home. Of course, there might not be any home left to go to. His apartment was in San Diego, and if the news reports were accurate, California was coming unglued. Even if the missiles were shot down, or turned out to be a hoax or something, his two-bedroom loft in Mission Hills might not survive the panic that was ripping through his city.
There was nothing he could do about that now. The missiles would strike, or they wouldn’t. His little home would be preserved, or it would be destroyed. Ten minutes from now, the lid might come off the pot completely, and the superpowers could all start lobbing nukes at each other. Planet Earth might finally get its Third World War, but nothing Charlie could do from this hospital would make the slightest bit of difference. He could do nothing but wait, and Gabriella’s room seemed like a good place to do that.
He turned and looked at her. The sight nearly stole his breath away.
The tall ocean scientist was curled on her side, blue hospital sheets bunched and tangled around her long-limbed body, golden hair fanning across the pillow and spilling over the curve of her cheek. For a half-second, Charlie thought about brushing the hair from her cheek so that he could see her face more clearly. But he didn’t want to wake her, and he wasn’t at all certain that his touch would be welcome.
Gabriella had said things to him in those last few minutes of consciousness aboard the Nereus. Charlie knew that her words might have been nothing more than a delirious symptom of her advancing hypothermia, or even a wishful hallucination from his own cold-addled mind. He didn’t care. He wanted to believe in them anyway. And he didn’t want to break the fragile spell of his hopes by waking her.
He wanted Gabriella’s words to be real, and he wanted her to mean them. But he couldn’t control that, any more than he could control the warheads hurtling toward his country. So he stood and watched the gentle rhythm of her breathing. And his heart was so full that he almost didn’t care if the world came to an end.
* * *
U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska:
With another computer bleep, another trio of messages appeared in the alert window of the STRATCOM tracking screens:
> TELEMETRY LOST, EKV #4
> TRACK NOT CONTINUED, BALLISTIC TARGET “DELTA”
> SUCCESSFUL INTERCEPT PROBABILITY = 97.4%
To his right, Major Lionel could hear a man’s voice whispering, “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus.”
Lionel, who hadn’t felt the slightest desire to pray since he’d outgrown bedtime prayers at the age of nine, suddenly wondered if this might not be a good time to start again.
* * *
Highland Shipping and Commercial Freight (Provo, Utah):
Randall Dixon kicked open the door to the shipping office. The flimsy interior door gave way easily under the sole of his size-11 work boot. Particle board fractured and the simulated wood grain laminate split into several pieces as the broken door swung around on its hinges to bounce off the wall adjoining the doorway.
He hefted the ball-peen hammer he’d grabbed from the cab of his Freightliner. He caught a blur of movement out of the corner of his left eye as a little turd of a man dove for cover behind one of the desks. Dixon grinned. “Knock-knock, asshole.”
Silence, and then a quiet scuffling sound as that weasel Gillespie tried to burrow his worthless ass further out of sight.
Dixon took aim at a desk lamp and swung with the hammer. The lamp disintegrated in a shower of electrical sparks and broken glass.
“Eleven violations,” he growled. The hammer came down again, pulverizing an acrylic paperweight full of tiny starfish. The blow sent several pieces of paper fluttering to the floor.
“Eleven violations,” Dixon said again. “You wrote me up for every piddly-ass rule you could think of, didn’t you, you useless sack of shit?” To punctuate the last word, he brought the hammer down again. A coffee cup was jolted off the edge of the desk. It lay on its side, draining dark liquid into the coarse gray weave of the industrial carpet.
“It ain’t enough for you to get me kicked off the long-hauls where a man can earn a living wage,” Dixon said. “You gotta go after my ticket, don’t you? I break my hump for this company for eight years, and that’s how you’re gonna repay me—by jerking my license to drive a rig.”
The only answer was a series of muffled beeps. Gillespie was trying to use his cellu
lar phone to call for help.
Dixon raised the hammer and held it cocked. The next time he swung, it would be to bash in the little pencil-pusher’s brains. “Calling the cops, ass-wipe?” He laughed. “Won’t do you no good. You ain’t heard? Russian missiles headed right for us. In about five minutes, we all gonna be dead. Our ashes are gonna be glowin’ in the dark like one of them science fiction movies.”
He flexed his grip on the wooden shaft of the hammer and began edging around the end of the desk, moving quietly so Gillespie wouldn’t be expecting him.
“You’re going first, you little shit,” he said. He spoke more softly now, hoping that Gillespie wouldn’t be able to tell that he was moving closer.
“If I’m gonna be dead in five minutes,” he said, “I want the pleasure of killing you myself!”
On the last syllable, he lunged around the end of the desk and leapt toward Gillespie. The little man squealed in terror and threw his hands up to protect his face.
Dixon brought the hammer down with every ounce of anger in his soul. He felt one of Gillespie’s wrists break as the blunt steel head of the heavy tool blurred through its arc without slowing. With a crack like the snap of a bullwhip, the hammer collided with Gillespie’s skull.
The first whack probably killed the bastard, but Dixon hit him six or eight more times just to be sure the job was done properly. Then he dropped the hammer on the floor and went outside to smoke a cigarette and wait for the end of the world.
* * *
U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska:
The computer emitted its now-familiar bleep, and three more lines of text appeared in the alert window:
> TELEMETRY LOST, EKV #7
> TRACK NOT CONTINUED, BALLISTIC TARGET “GOLF”
> SUCCESSFUL INTERCEPT PROBABILITY = 75.1%
Lionel scanned the last line. Seventy-five percent? Not a lot of safety margin there, but a kill was a kill. They’d managed to knock out three of the inbound warhead shapes so far. It was impossible to know how many of the destroyed targets had been decoys and how many had been real warheads.
Maybe they’d gotten all three of the warheads already, and the remaining four were all decoys. Then again, maybe all three successful intercepts had been decoys, and all three of the real warheads were still out there. The only way to be certain was to destroy them all.
The tracking computer bleeped again, and new lines of text appeared on the screen:
> TELEMETRY CONTINUED PAST INTERCEPT POINT, EKV #2
> TRACK CONTINUED PAST INTERCEPT POINT, BALLISTIC TARGET “BRAVO”
> SUCCESSFUL INTERCEPT PROBABILITY = 00.0%
The words hit Lionel like a punch in the stomach. Zero percent? Telemetry continued past Intercept Point? ZERO percent?
“Oh shit!” one of the console operators said. “We missed one of them. One of the warheads got past us.”
“Calm down,” Lionel said. His voice contained a calmness that he did not feel. “Maybe it wasn’t a real warhead. Maybe it was one of the decoys.”
Please, just let it be the one, he thought. Let us get the rest of them. Let us knock the rest of them out of the sky. Please.
But the next alert message announced the failure of EKV #5, followed closely by the failures of EKV #3, and EKV #1.
Of the seven inbound warhead shapes, the ground-based interceptor missiles had managed to kill only three. Four of the targets had gotten past them.
Lionel could see them in his mind’s eye: four darkly conical shapes, streaking through the blackness of space, bending their trajectories downward. Toward his country. Toward the very people who depended upon Lionel to protect them.
How many of those shapes were nuclear bombs? One of them? None? Three? There was no way of knowing, but the warheads would shortly be passing into the reentry phase of their trajectories. Within the next few minutes, the question would answer itself.
Lionel stared at the screen, and the alert messages announcing the failed intercepts. It was up to the Navy, now. He hoped they were up to the challenge.
Like many of his fellow Air Force types, Lionel didn’t think much of the swab jockeys. They had too much mouth, too much money, and not enough of the Right Stuff. But he’d give a year’s pay to see them show up the Air Force right now. If they could knock down all four of the remaining targets, he’d plant a big sloppy kiss on the first Navy type he met. Male or female, eighteen years old or eighty, seaman or admiral. Lionel didn’t care. He just wanted them to finish the job. Nothing else mattered. Nothing.
* * *
Vista Del Rio Assisted Living Community (Long Beach, California):
Harvey Calloway muted the audio on the little bedroom television and hobbled over toward the window. With the sound turned off, he could hear the noise from outside more clearly. Down in the street, car horns were blaring and people were shouting. Harvey heard a pop in the distance that might have been a gunshot, but he couldn’t tell. He was in his nineties and even with his hearing aid turned all the way up, his hearing was pretty bad.
The window was only seven or eight feet away, but it took him a minute or so to cover the distance. The arthritis in his hips and knees made his steps short and difficult, the soles of his slippers scuffing painfully across the carpet in the shuffling walk that his great granddaughter called ‘choo-choo feet.’ He hated having to walk like that, but at least he could still make it around on his own. A lot of guys his age couldn’t get out of bed. Hell, come to think of it, most guys his age were already dead.
He was grateful to still be walking, arthritis and all. But he missed the bouncy swagger of his youth. Harvey had been something else in those days. Nothing but balls, good looks, and a big toothy grin. And man had he cut a figure in his uniform.
Harvey had been a U.S. Navy fighter pilot during the big one. In ’42, he’d flown F4F Wildcats against the Vichy French over North Africa. And later he’d gone eyeball-to-eyeball with the Japanese at places like Tarawa, Leyte Gulf, and Okinawa. He’d even bagged himself a couple of Zeroes at the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. He’d been flying the F6F by then.
The Hellcat … Now there, by Lord, had been an aircraft. Fueled and armed, she had weighed in at more than 15,000 pounds, but she’d danced on the breeze like a ballerina. And she’d given old ‘Snake Eyes’ Harvey Calloway and his squadron mates absolute dominance of the skies over the Pacific.
He craned his neck and looked through the window at the California sky. They’d beaten the Vichy Frogs, the Krauts, and the Nips. Everyone said they’d beaten the commies too, but Harvey had never really bought that. Everybody with a lick of sense knew the Russkis were bent on world domination. And suddenly they just throw down their guns and give up the fight, without firing a shot? Other people might believe that crap, but Harvey knew better. It had all been a trick, to get America to relax and drop her guard. The commies had been lying quiet and waiting for their moment to strike. And now it had come. Now the sneaky bastards were launching their A-bombs at America.
The guy on television was telling everybody to stay in their homes. Don’t panic. Don’t try to run. Harvey shifted his eyes to the traffic jam in the street below his window. It wouldn’t be too hard to follow the television guy’s advice. Even if he could still drive, there wasn’t a prayer of getting out of here before the bombs started to fall.
Of their own accord, Harvey’s eyes pointed themselves toward the drawer of the nightstand beside his bed. There, behind pill bottles, handkerchiefs, and paperback novels, was an old companion: a Navy-issue .45 that had followed him home at the end of the war. He wasn’t supposed to have a gun here; it was against about a dozen of the rules for Vista Del Rio tenants. Harvey had smuggled it in wrapped up in a sweater, because he couldn’t make the staff understand that he needed it for protection.
“We have a security system here,” the Placement Manager had told him. “We have alarms on the doors and windows, and a roving security patrol. You don’t need to worry
about burglars, Mr. Calloway. I promise you—you’ll be safe here.”
But the .45 wasn’t for burglars. It was for a different kind of protection. Harvey had promised himself a long time ago that he’d use it the very first day that he couldn’t get to the toilet by himself. A man shouldn’t have to go through life with hoses shoved into his orifices, and plastic bags of slop hanging from the side of his bed. That was something worth protecting yourself from.
Harvey blinked and looked out the window again. Those commie A-bombs should be falling any minute now …
* * *
USS Shiloh (CG-67):
Two armored hatches snapped open on the cruiser’s forward missile deck, revealing the weatherproof fly-through covers that capped the upper ends of two vertical launch missile cells. At the same instant, another pair of hatches snapped open on the ship’s aft missile deck.
Some fraction of a millisecond later, all four of the fly-through covers were blasted into fragments as two pairs of SM-3 missiles rocketed out of their vertical launch cells and roared into the afternoon sky on bright columns of fire.
In the darkened confines of the ship’s Combat Information Center, the Weapons Control Officer keyed the microphone of his communications headset and spoke into the tactical communications net. “TAO—Weapons Control. Four birds away, no apparent casualties. Targeted one-each on the four ballistic inbounds.” The rumble of the departing missiles was still faintly audible as he spoke.
The Tactical Action Officer’s reply came over the net a second later. “TAO, aye. Is there enough time to prep a second flight of birds in case we miss on some of the intercepts?”
The Weapons Control Officer keyed his mike again. “TAO—Weapons Control. That’s a negative. The inbounds are moving at about 14,000 miles an hour. We get one crack at this, sir. By the time we get off a second flight of birds, the inbounds will be outside of our missile engagement envelope.”
The reply was several seconds in coming. “TAO, aye. Let’s hope we don’t miss the first time.”
