by Steve Alten
ALL CLEAR FOR LAUNCH.
Covah looks over at Rocky. “Time to see what your ship can do. This first round is compliments of the Ronald Reagan. Sorceress, launch one ICBM, two Tomahawk Block Ills, and two long-range Block IVs at predesignated coordinates Covah Utopia-One.”
ACKNOWLEDGED.
The hair on Rocky’s neck stands on end. “Covah … what are you doing?”
“What should have been done long ago.”
With a reverberating hiss, the 130,000-pound Trident II (D5) missile is forcibly expelled vertically through one of Goliath’s silos, rising within a massive, protective bubble of nitrogen. Gas and warhead ascend at the same rate, the SLBM never getting wet—until the monstrous white missile bursts from the sea.
The Trident’s first-stage motor ignites in a thunderous roar, sending the mammoth missile leaping into the air above a dense white trailing cloud of smoke. With a slight lean to the east, onboard guidance initiates a gravity turn, minimizing aerodynamic torque on the structure. Within minutes, the missile and its lethal payload are traveling in excess of twenty thousand feet per second.
Before the froth along the turbulent surface can dissipate, four smaller missiles—Tomahawks—are ejected from the two torpedo bays located within each of Goliath’s enormous wings. The birds spring from the sea in pairs, the first following the Trident to the east, the second on a northward trajectory.
Gunnar stares at the overhead map, breathlessly watching … and waiting.
North American Aerospace Defense Command NORAD Colorado
3:02 A.M.
NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, is a four-and-a-half-acre subterranean compound buried within Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. Although the complex serves as a unified command center linking every branch of the Armed Forces, the facility’s primary function is to detect missile launches occurring anywhere in the world. To do this, NORAD relies on an early-warning missile detection system originating from 22,300 miles in space.
The Defense Support Program (DSP) is an array of satellites that circle the Earth in geostationary orbits, providing continuous, overlapping coverage of most of the planet. Outfitted with advanced infrared optics, the constellation of two-and-a-half-ton satellites can quickly detect heat signatures of a missile’s boost phase anywhere above the world’s cloud tops.
Major Kady Walker enters the Combined Command Center (CCC) and takes her place at one of the three command posts within the chamber. Four computer monitors are mounted at each post, with large screens lining the forward wall. To her back is a glass partition, separating the gallery from the technicians.
The CCC is the focal point for all incoming data. All missile, air, and space events are monitored twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. As Command Director, Kady must make sure that the proper responses to each warning or intrusion are initiated.
This is Kady’s world—a nerve-wracking existence in a fortified underground city—a daily, unending game of chess where nuclear weapons are the major pieces on the board. NORAD completes eighty thousand space observations daily, tracking eighty-seven hundred objects each year. Over the last ten years, Kady has witnessed no less than a thousand rocket launches. Communication satellites, space probes, spy satellites—the NORAD veteran has seen them all.
What she witnesses this early hour of November 5 will stay with her the rest of her days.
QUICK ALERT! QUICK ALERT! MULTIPLE MISSILE LAUNCHES DETECTED
LAUNCH SITE: MEDITERRANEAN SEA
34.6 degrees. 24 minutes N. Latitude
33.3 degrees. 06 minutes E. Longitude
FIVE [5] Missiles. Four [4] Trajectories.
TRAJECTORY 1: Trident 11 [05] Nuclear Missile
NUMBER OF MISSILES: ONE
TARGET: IRAQ: Baghdad
TIME TO IMPACT: 04 minutes 12 seconds
TRAJECTORY 2: TOMAHAWK BLOCK III TLAM
NUMBER OF MISSILES: ONE
TARGET: IRAQ: Northern Region
TIME TO IMPACT: 04 minutes 39 seconds
TRAJECTORY 3: TOMAHAWK BLOCK III TLAM
NUMBER OF MISSILES: ONE
TARGET: IRAQ: Southern Desert
TIME TO IMPACT: 05 minutes 14 seconds
TRAJECTORY 4: TOMAHAWK BLOCK IV DEEP STRIKE TLAM
NUMBER OF MISSILES: TWO
TARGET:RUSSIA: South Ural Mountains
TIME TO IMPACT: 122 minutes 03 seconds
Training takes over. Kady and her fellow technicians frantically relay information to the National Command Authorities in the United States and Canada via direct phone lines as a crowd gathers in the gallery. The emotional intensity in the chamber is suffocating.
Kady looks up, focusing on the color-coded track of Trajectory 1, her eyes following the missile as it loops over the southern border of Iraq.
“Two minutes! Two minutes!”
Her heart skips a beat as the clock ticks down, the 475-kiloton rocket and its multiple nuclear warheads soaring on its slanted path over the desert, precisely on target.
In the background, she hears the surreal voice of a CNN news anchor informing the public about reports that “a missile may have just been launched in the Mediterranean …”
Twenty seconds—
The chamber grows deathly quiet.
Baghdad, Iraq
The sudden blast of sirens sends tens of thousands of Iraqis fleeing through the congested streets of the city. Clouds of dust and debris rise above the chaos as human walls of flesh push, shove, and tumble in upon themselves in waves. People are crying, screaming, hiding beneath cars. Some gaze at the sky for the last time, while others duck for cover.
Seventy-five hundred feet above Baghdad’s Presidential Palace, the Trident II reaches its target point … and detonates.
A blinding flare—as quick as a camera flashbulb but a million times brighter—ignites the entire sky. A split second later—the crushing unearthly heat of tortured air, as if a monstrous new sun has magically appeared thirty football fields above Baghdad to blow its lethal kiss upon the desert city. In the few seconds before the shock wave hits, every person, every building, every thing in downtown Baghdad is heated to ignition. A second after the shock, the buoyant rise of all that superheated air inhales like a hurricane wind, sucking everything up into its hellish ascent. The burgeoning firestorm feeds the galeforce winds—so hot, so intense, that the city will burn completely.
For those surviving wretches not far enough outside the city limits, the remaining heartbeats of life become an eternity. Thousands who were foolish enough to look at the sky clutch futilely at their faces, screaming in agony as their hair bursts into flames. The initial blast—ungodly bright—has blinded them, literally melting their eyeballs. The heat is soaring so high that they can actually feel their charred skin peeling away from their bones. Blindly, they hurl themselves into the steaming waters of the Tigris River.
Seconds later, a blast wave—an invisible tidal wave of crushing wind and heat—rolls outward from the center of Baghdad at speeds in excess of two thousand miles an hour. This ring of thunder levels the remains of the ancient city of the Arabian Nights and continues expanding outward across the desert landscape, its dust-filled radioactive forward crest driving the sand like an avalanche.
Farther out, radioactive debris and pulverized dust fall back to earth, poisoning those survivors outside the city limits. For these pitiful souls, the nightmarish existence to follow will bring nothing but misery. Scorched skin will become a torturous blanket of festering blisters. Relief, if one can call it that, will take days to arrive as medical personnel will be hesitant to enter the radiation zone. Aid stations will be underequipped and overwhelmed by the sheer number of victims and the extent of their wounds. Badly burned, their organs laced with radioactive particles, the luckiest of these holocaust victims will drift back and forth into a morphine-induced sleep while they await death, their only salvation.
Mosul Presidential Palace Northern Region, Iraq
In 1
991, following the end of the Gulf War, United Nations weapon inspectors in Iraq succeeded in destroying 38,000 chemical weapons, 480,000 liters of chemical weapons agents, 48 missiles, a half-dozen missile launchers, 30 special missile warheads for biological and chemical weapons, and several manufacturing and weapons research facilities. Despite these successes, UNSCOM officials were forced out of Iraq in 1998 having failed to locate more than 31,000 chemical warfare munitions, as well as an extensive supply of VX nerve gas—theoretically enough to wipe out the world’s entire population, if somehow delivered to everybody.
UNSCOM’s failure came as a result of Saddam Hussein’s outright refusal to allow weapon inspectors to visit his Presidential Palaces, nine sprawling complexes featuring hundreds of buildings, occupying more than one hundred square miles.
Seven of them had been located in central Iraq. The 475-kiloton nuclear explosion has reduced the buildings to rubble and collapsed their subterranean infrastructures and most of the bunkers lying beneath them.
Mosul Presidential Palace in Northern Iraq, is located outside the blast zone. The compound, just short of a square mile in size, contains fifty surface structures—and ten subterranean bunkers concealing 23,000 liters of genetically enhanced anthrax spores and botulinum.
Guided by its Global Positioning System, the first of the two eastbound Tomahawk Block III TLAMs soars low over the desert terrain, the WDU-36 warhead’s PBXN-107 explosive having been replaced with a four-kiloton tactical device.
With irresistible impact, the projectile slams through the roof of the palace’s main building, continuing deeper until it punches a hole in the concrete bunker … and detonates.
The nuclear blast vaporizes the entire complex, leaving only a modest crater as a signature.
Basra Palace Southern Desert, Iraq
It is said that Saddam Hussein never sleeps in the same location two nights in a row, a security measure that was interrupted on February 4, when the Iraqi leader proclaimed from the balcony of his Republican Presidential Palace that he would defy the criminal demands of the United States—the “great Satan” hiding behind the mask of the so-called Declaration of Humanity. Despite the dangers, Saddam would “remain indefinitely within his Baghdad dwelling.”
Six hours later, the Iraqi dictator arrived under cover of darkness at Basra Palace, a small Ottoman-period merchant house located less than fifty miles from the Kuwaiti border—three hundred miles southeast of downtown Baghdad. There he would remain hidden and out of the public’s eye until the nuclear attack took place.
From there he would strike back at the West.
Concealed on the grounds of the Basra compound are four mobile missile launchers. The warheads atop each middle-range ICBM can disperse enough VX nerve gas to wipe out the populations of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Riyadh, and Kuwait City—Saddam’s four targets of retribution.
Safe inside the subterranean bunker directly beneath Basra Palace, Saddam huddles now with several family members and top officials, watching the live CNN report on television. He stares impassively at the image of his people scrambling for cover on the streets of Baghdad. He registers the familiar burning waves of acid in the pit of his ulcer-ridden stomach as the picture goes fuzzy and his capital city is leveled.
Saddam looks over at the two sons he has been grooming to take over for him when he is gone. Odai, the older of the two, has a reputation as a womanizer with a violent temper. Qusai is more low-key and has been in charge of the elite Republican Guard as well as the Special Security Organization that protects his father.
Saddam signals Qusai to his side. “Wait ten minutes for the seismic shock waves to pass. Then launch all missiles.”
Without warning, a sonic explosion rocks the bunker, the second Tomahawk missile smashing through the roof of the merchant house. Saddam’s screams are cut off as the scorching white light of the nuclear fireball vaporizes his body almost as fast as the nerve impulses race fear to his doomed brain.
Saddam, his family, his officials, the palace, the missiles, the canisters of sarin and mustard gas, the drums of VX nerve gas, and the remains of Iraq’s horrific arsenal are reduced to their harmless elements and swept up in a radioactive mushroom cloud of poison and death.
Simon Covah sits at his elevated control station, following the trajectory of the last two Tomahawks as they race toward the Russian shelter at Yamantou Mountain in the Urals. “Sorceress, descend to six hundred feet, then take us to launch site two.”
ACKNOWLEDGED.
David Paniagua watches his colleague, envy in his eyes. Why does he get to command? GOLIATH was my project. Without me, none of this would even be possible …
Gunnar leans against one of the scarlet viewports, staring out at the bluegreen brine, his heart pounding furiously in his chest. Sixty feet above his head, azure waves dance along a tranquil surface as if mocking him. What have I done … what have I allowed to happen? How much killing is justifiable in a war against oppression? Who establishes the rules of morality? And why do I feel such … elation?
ATTENTION. ELECTRONIC SUPPORT MEASURES HAVE DETECTED AN OUTGOING EHF TRANSMISSION.
Gunnar’s heart skips a beat.
“A transmission?” Covah looks up from his main control console. “Where’s the signal originating from?”
TRANSMISSION IS ORIGINATING FROM WITHIN THE GOLIATH.
David interjects. “Sorceress, isolate the exact location of the outgoing signal.”
CONTROL ROOM.
Gunnar closes his eyes, his mind racing. “It’s coming from me.”
Rocky shoots him a strange look as the crew circles them.
Covah climbs down from his elevated perch. “David, escort the two of them to the surgical suite.”
“You escort them, I’ve got work to do.” David heads for the spiral steps, the tension in the room palpable.
Goliath’s remaining two tactical missiles approach Kazakstan barely under Mach 1, as they swoop over the waters of the Caspian Sea. Too low to track and intercept, they continue north, the Tomahawk’s onboard Digital Scene Matching Area Correlators verifying the Ural mountain landscape as they home in on their target.
With an earth-shattering boom, the two warheads slam into the eastern and western bases of “evil mountain,” the dual ground bursts yielding deafening roars of thunder that bellow across the Ural mountain range. Yamantou Mountain erupts like a small version of Mount St. Helens’s ten megatons, its rock and debris, steel and concrete vomited into the sky within an ashen brown mushroom cloud.
A hellish wind whips across the Urals, reaching outward to trample the nearby mining town of Beloretsk, reducing the decrepit Communist-built shacks to kindling.
Long minutes pass. The wind grows silent.
The supersonic blast wave gone, the mushroom cloud dissipates, revealing the mangled, melted innards of the Russian subterranean shelter complex … now nothing but a radioactive crater.
“The most dramatic conflicts are perhaps those that take place not between men, but between a man and himself—where the arena of conflict is a solitary mind.”
—Clark Moustakas
“I hadn’t decided on anything, but suddenly, I had a strange impulse to end it all … for both of us.”
—Betty Hardaker, a California mother who, in 1940, killed her five-year-old daughter during a walk
“Why could not mother die? Dozens of people, thousands of people, are dying everyday. So why not Mother, and Father, too?”
—Pauline Parker, sixteen-year-old New Zealand girl, who plotted her mother’s death so she could be alone with her fifteen-year-old girlfriend
CHAPTER 17
Identity: Stage Five: I have discovered how to manifest my desires from within. My inner world turned out to have power.
—Deepak Chopra
Aboard the Goliath
Thomas Chau is in the starboard weapons bay. He is unconscious, his body held upright, suspended six feet off the deck by a loader-drone—a ten-foot-tall, deck-m
ounted mechanical steel arm designed to grasp, lift, and load a torpedo from its rack. The three-pronged steel claw grips him about the waist, immobilizing his torso and legs.
Smaller, single-limbed robotic arms—targeting drones—dangle from swiveling mounts anchored along the ceiling. The hands of these lighter, more sophisticated graphite-reinforced appendages contain seven fingerlike tools that rotate into place along a grooved steel disk. Like some high-tech version of a Swiss Army knife, these tools endow Goliath’s brain with the flexibility to attach and detach torpedo wires, change warheads, and perform even the most intricate of equipment repairs.
Two of the ceiling-mounted drones reach down along either side of Chau’s limp body, locking their three-pronged grippers around each of his wrists. They extend his arms up and out to the sides so that it appears as if the Asian is a gymnast performing an iron cross on the rings.
Hovering directly above Chau’s bleeding head is the steel hand of a third targeting drone. Extending out from the appendage’s multifaceted palm is a tool—a small, razor-sharp, circular saw.
ATTENTION.
Gasping a breath, the engineer opens his eyes to intense vertigo and pain. Unable to move his limbs, he turns his head to one side and throws up, the vomit splattering on the decking below.
