Without warning

by John Birmingham

  The Israeli Air Force flights left in groups of three. One F-15 carried the warhead while the two escorts carried air-to-air load-outs. Those headed for targets in Iran and Iraq did not expect to encounter any significant resistance en route. The top-secret electronic warfare suites installed for this mission were designed to maximise the escorts’ effectiveness against any allied planes they might encounter. It was possible that Coalition aircraft might try to stop them, but Molenz and his peers figured they had enough on their plate as it was. They were no threat.

  The colonel pulled back on the stick and the Strike Eagle clawed its way up into the stars. At twenty thousand feet he performed his usual contortionist feat anyway, straining to catch a glimpse of the capital off on the northern horizon. It was definitely dimmer, but not completely blacked out. What would be the point? Modern sensors meant that pilots no longer had to feel their way through darkened enemy airspace, seeking out targets to bomb. Iraqi Scuds had been landing in Israel for days, despite the best efforts of the Patriot batteries and the promises of General Franks that Coalition special forces would own the western deserts, from where the missile threat originated. The promises meant nothing. The threats issuing from the Iraqi dictator in hiding, however, they had to be taken seriously, and ever since the flooding of Baghdad those threats had become increasingly shrill and apocalyptic. It almost seemed as though Hussein and the Iranian president were racing each other towards a rhetorical abyss. And now, thought Molenz, the abyss races towards them.

  Behind him, Ephron ran through another check of the Elisra SPS-2110/A Modified Electronic Warfare System and the LANTIRN pods while Molenz checked the APG 70 terrain-mapping radar. Even in the foulest weather, in the darkest hours of night, the radar provided him with a picture-perfect return from the ground, making it possible to pick out even small targets like mobile batteries tucked away in a dry wadi. At just under 4000 metres in length, and 114 metres tall, containing 43 million cubic metres of concrete and fill, there wasn’t much chance of him missing the dam.

  Molenz edged their nose around to the south, to skirt Beersheba and trace the length of the border with Jordan, on a course for the headwaters of the Gulf of Aqaba. The three jets flew low and fast, operating up near the edge of full military power, shrieking over the ghostly blue-black desert at Mach 2.5. They maintained radio silence, each man alone with his thoughts, as the demands of the mission allowed.

  A few minutes before they would overfly the resort city of Eilat, he pushed the stick over and sent them rocketing towards the Egyptian border. Beyond lay the Sinai Peninsula and the rocky wastes of the biblical Wilderness where David and the Israelites wandered for so many years. Mountains lay ahead, a jagged-edged void of darkness blotting out the stars, corresponding to the image scrolling down the APG 70 screen, bathing him in the softest of glows.

  During a brief interlude, they traversed a particularly desolate and empty stretch of mountainous wasteland, and the pilot became aware of the beating of his heart. For one perverse second he couldn’t help thinking of the millions of hearts he was about to still forever. Pushing the thought away like a fearful spectre, he concentrated on the return from the radar and the threat boards. Nothing untoward. The Egyptian Air Force was steadfastly refusing to offer even the slightest provocation to its neighbour, for fear of unleashing exactly the sort of hellfire that Molenz now carried with him. They didn’t seem to know he was even in their airspace.

  Whatever moral qualms Molenz had suffered before accepting this mission – and there had been many – he had nonetheless volunteered for it. They all had. He would destroy the dam and doom millions tonight, none of whom had raised a hand against him or his country. But there were millions more who would, who wanted to, and who even now were battling with the Egyptian Government’s security forces on the streets of a dozen cities, attempting to overthrow the Mubarak regime because of its supine response to what they called Zionist aggression. And they were winning. That was the hell of it. They were winning and very soon they would sit in the Presidential Palace in the north-east of Cairo and turn their blood-dimmed eyes on his home and his family – and it was wrong and it was tragic, and he might well burn for the sin he was about to commit. But Rudi Molenz was convinced that if Israel did not reach out now, at this very moment, and hammer its mortal enemies into the dust, then the Jewish state and race would surely perish.

  He shook his head, a quick, constrained movement inside the helmet. They were coming up on the Gulf of Suez, one of the trip points in the fight, where they would be exposed to the radar and weapons of the western naval forces operating in the area. They had no IFF codes for this flight; and as lead planner for the squadron, he knew that an envoy had been dispatched to Hawaii to inform the Americans at the last possible minute of what was about to happen under Operation Megiddo. But they would not know just yet.

  He checked the mission clock. Fifteen minutes. In fifteen minutes they would find out, via the diplomatic envoy.

  But in half that time he would be over the target.

  The Gulf flashed beneath them and Ephron sat quietly waiting for the warning tones and pings that would tell them they had been painted by the sophisticated arrays of the naval vessels below. The warning was not long in coming. Three harsh, discordant tones sounded and Lieutenant Ephron went to work, firing up jamming sets and countermeasures. Molenz focused his attention down to a stiletto point, determined to see them through this passing hazard.

  It was over as quickly as it had begun. The waters dropped away and suddenly the giant wind farm at Zafarana appeared in the crisp aquamarine glow of his terrain-rendering APG screen. Huge, alien-looking structures blurred beneath them, recalling for Molenz an unbidden childhood memory of running alongside a picket fence through which a setting sun had cast its dying rays.

  Behind him, Ephron requested permission to arm the warhead.

  ‘Granted,’ said Molenz. ‘Primary release code: Alpha Two Four Delta Zero Two November Three Two Five One Echo. Confirm.’

  ‘Confirmed.’

  ‘You are released to arm.’

  Ephron, whose voice was shaking, busied himself on a small keyboard, tapping out a long series of commands before announcing, ‘The weapon is armed.’

  Molenz dry-swallowed.

  The port wing dipped thirty degrees and the plane began to track to the south as he levelled off, dropping the flight into the folds of a long valley that ran roughly parallel to the Nile. The faintest silver crescent of light bleeding over the ridgeline to the west would be Luxor, often acclaimed as the world’s greatest open-air museum. The temple at Karnak, the Valley of the Kings, the ruins of Thebes, they were all just a few minutes’ flying time away.

  Molenz pressed on, allowing the Strike Eagle to begin its climb to a safe release height.

  As all three birds emerged, screaming from the folds of the ancient valley, he finally saw what he was about to do. Towns and villages clung to the edge of the Nile, their weak, twinkling lights marking its sinuous path through the night like illuminated buoys. The IAF colonel pressed back into the flight seat as he poured on power for altitude.

  Ephron announced from behind him that the automatic targeting system had a lock and requested that Molenz release control of the aircraft to him. The pilot agreed and felt that brief, awful moment of loss as microprocessors took over. The Eagle rolled and turned to bear down on its target, just like the bird of prey for which it was named.

  There was an audible clunk and the plane jumped, suddenly free of the dreadful burden that had fallen away from beneath them. All three aircraft then pitched over and raced due east, away from the terrible thing they had just done.

  * * * *

  The warhead slipped quietly down through the warm moist air. It did not whistle or shriek to announce its death dive. A passing sibilant hiss and the whirring of guidance fins at the tail were the only sounds it made. In the nose of the bomb, a small electronic device slavishly tracked the laser-designated aim poin
t at the base of the dam, for as long as the warplanes were able to maintain the link. By the time they broke contact to escape the blast, the weapon had already settled into a stable descent. It struck the angled concrete wall of the Aswan High Dam at near supersonic speed with a thunderous boom that shook the entire structure.

  Designed to spear deep into extremely hard, multilayered underground facilities, the penetrator – an elongated narrow-diameter spike of superhardened nickel-cobalt steel alloy – was enhanced with a void-sensing hard target Smart Fuze that measured the progress of the warhead into the body of the dam, delaying detonation until an optimal depth had been reached. Israel had long ago learned the art of reducing the size of its nuclear devices without sacrificing their destructive power. Some of the bombs falling on cities throughout the Middle East at that very moment topped out in the megaton range. The blast and heat and radiation effects they yielded were vastly greater than the primitive bombs that the US had dropped on Japan in 1945.

  The device that lay, for all of a millisecond, sleeping beneath millions of tons of cement, was modest in comparison, although twice as powerful as the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs. It did not need to be a city-killer, however. It merely needed to bring down a wall, and did so by instantly turning a significant portion of it into white-hot plasma. The Smart Fuze, having determined that an optimum penetration had been reached, signalled the bomb to compress a sphere of subcritical explosive material around a plutonium core, setting off a fission reaction.

  Surrounded as it was by the crushing mass of the Aswan High Dam, the initial burst of radiation could not escape and so began to rapidly heat the encasing medium to tens of millions of degrees, vaporising everything within the expanding sphere of gas. Growing towards its maximum size, the fireball cooled rapidly, until it no longer possessed the heat to transform solid mass into gaseous residue. Having disintegrated the wall, though, it did have more than enough thermal power to flash-boil the waters of the dam. With nowhere to easily dissipate, the blast front transferred much of its energy into a shockwave that sped outwards from ground zero, imitating the effect of an earth-shattering quake. It struck the smaller, original dam wall a little further downstream like a hammer of the gods. A few thousand people who lived in the small settlements around the dams died instantly in the explosion, leaving nobody on the ground to witness what happened as the Nile was set free.

  * * * *

  High above, however, Molenz had a perfect view and whispered a prayer, asking forgiveness for what he had done. As the immediate effects of the explosion cleared, a mountainous wall of hot, irradiated water was unleashed on the valley below. A giant, boiling wave, over a hundred metres high, began its journey to the sea; it roared out of the huge lake, punched through the mushroom cloud that rose inexorably over the void where one of the great engineering marvels of the world had stood just a few seconds earlier. He could hear nothing in the cockpit, over the roar of the Eagle’s twin engines, but the pilot imagined that hearing that monstrous wall of angry, super-hot white water rushing towards you would have to sound something like sticking your head inside the F-15’s afterburner.

  He watched the progress of the wave for as long as he could, saw it sweep over Luxor like a giant ocean dumper rolling over a child’s toy at the beach, before something even more terrible caught his eye. The rising of a new sun, hours before dawn, far off to the north.

  Where Cairo had once stood.

  * * * *

  The tremor in Admiral James Ritchie’s hand was obvious as he read from the briefing note. He managed to keep his voice steady, though – wouldn’t do to be caught pissing his pants in a roomful of civilians.

  ‘Casualties from the immediate effects of the first strike are estimated at eighty-five million,’ he said. ‘Further casualties from the breaching of the Aswan dams may double that.’

  The dozen men and women arrayed around the grand oak table in the Governor’s dining room were ashen-faced. And some of them were visibly shaking. Governor Lingle had tears in her eyes. The room was crowded and hot, partly because of the amount of audiovisual equipment that had been brought in to effect the videoconference with Anchorage and Olympia, the Washington state capital.

  The surviving civilian authorities of the United States of America were in shock. Perhaps even more traumatised than they had been by the Disappearance. Ritchie wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it had something to do with the completely inexplicable nature of that event. Perhaps they were all still in a sort of denial. Everyone in this room, however, everyone involved in the conference, had grown up with the spectre of nuclear war lurking at the edge of their consciousness. It was not merely explicable, it was familiar.

  ‘Indirect deaths, in the short term, from radiation poisoning and injuries, are estimated by our modelling to climb as high as another thirty million over the next month.’ He heard somebody curse softly but continued on. ‘Medium-term fatalities, from the collapse of governing and societal systems, may double or triple that again. There may be unquantifiable effects, further afield. Millions of bodies and radioactive debris have been flushed out of the Nile Delta and into the Mediterranean, for instance, where they will contaminate the environment and enter the marine food chain.’

  A woman sitting by Governor Lingle covered her mouth and ran from the room.

  Jed Culver, who had been standing near the door, waiting to speak, yanked it open to let her through. He was sweating profusely and appeared blotchy and unwell.

  ‘General Franks reports that coordinated attacks on US forces in the area have ceased,’ said Ritchie. ‘Iraqi forces are requesting ceasefires or surrendering en masse. Iranian forces are withdrawing. Further, there seems to be no evidence of any national command authority in either country having survived the Israeli strike. In the areas of Iraq still under our nominal control as part of Operation Katie, local Iraqi government leaders have requested humanitarian aid. We have had similar requests from the surviving civilian leadership in both Syria and Egypt. Iran has also requested our assistance.’

  He paused as a Republican state senator from Alaska swore loudly and colourfully.

  ‘Uncoordinated attacks by non state actors continue off the coast of Lebanon and in Afghanistan. General Musharraf survived yet another assassination attempt this morning in the aftermath of the attacks. He informed me personally that Pakistan has now gone to full readiness to retaliate against anyone – Israel, India, anyone – who even remotely threatens his country,’ he went on.

  Ritchie let his hand drop and looked around the room, taking in the cameras beaming his image across the Pacific to Olympia and Anchorage as well.

  ‘I have no national command authority to whom I can turn for orders,’ he said. ‘Our own nuclear deterrent is effectively useless without said authority. I can give orders to fire all day and night long, but the commanders of our ballistic-missile subs will not follow them without Presidential authority. That is why we originally scheduled this meeting. I believe that if we had such an authority, if we had a President and even the semblance of an emergency government, that this… holocaust could have been avoided.’

  He had spoken the word without forethought, but having done so, did not regret it.

  ‘This is not your fault,’ he added, with a mounting and voluble anger that seemed to imply just the opposite. ‘You have all had a hell of a time dealing with the impossible demands of our own emergency. But I promise you, if you cannot come to some sort of working arrangement, if you do not leave this room tonight with a plan to immediately rebuild some basic form of national government, then what happened today will happen again and again and again until the only evidence that civilisation ever arose on this planet will be its radioactive ruins.’

  And with that, he turned and stormed out of the room.

  * * * *

  31

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  Suzie was in the lounge room, watching Toy Story with her friend Emma, when Kip heard the news. Emma’s mom had a t
ransit pass and a voucher for the food bank in Bellevue and the chief engineer had spent the morning on the phone to Fort Lewis – another ‘privilege’ of his newly elevated status – making sure that this time all of the security that should have been in place was in place. He was just running through a checklist of the local aid centres with a Lieutenant Somebody-or-other when he heard Barbara cry out from across the kitchen.