And when the president went before the House Armed Services Committee in secret session to present certain legal opinions and request their imprimatur upon his war plans – the full House having already voted to declare war on whoever had attacked the capital city – nobody dared argue that they were excessive.
*
Midmorning in Gloucestershire, England. It was a bright day at Fairford, and behind the high barbed-wire-topped fence the air base was a seething hive of activity. Officially a British Royal Air Force base, Fairford had for decades now provided a secure forward operating base for USAF aircraft staging out to the Arabian Gulf. Newly upgraded to provide a jumping-off point for operations in Iraq, boasting recently improved fuel bunkers and a runway so long that it was designated as a Space Shuttle transatlantic abort landing strip, for three weeks Fairford had been playing host to the B-52s of the Fifth Bomb Wing, USAF.
The Clan couldn’t reach them in England, ran the official thinking. Not without international travel on forged documents.
Now they were queueing up on the taxiways: The aircraft of the Fifth Bomb Wing had been ordered to fly home. But first they were going to make a little detour.
For the past week, C-17s had been flying in nightly from Stateside, carrying anonymous-looking low-loaders, which were driven to the bomb storage cells and unloaded under the guns of twitchy guards. And for the past two days technicians had been double- and triple-checking the weapons, nervously working through the ringbound manuals. Yesterday there’d been a hiatus; but in the evening the ordnance crews had turned out again, and this time they were moving the bombs out to the dispersal bays, under guard. Finally, around midnight, a last C-17 arrived, carrying a group of specialists and a trailer that, over the following hours, made the rounds of the readying air wing.
Nobody outside the base saw a thing. The British authorities could take a hint; the small and dispirited huddle of protesters, camped by the front gate to denounce the carpet-bombers of Baghdad, had been rounded up in a midnight raid and hauled off to police cells under the Terrorism Act, to be held for weeks without counsel or charge. The village nearby was cowed by a military police presence that hadn’t been seen since the height of the Troubles: Newspaper editors received discreet visits from senior police officers that left them tight-lipped and shaken. Fairford, to all intents and purposes, had vanished from the map.
At 11:00 A.M. Zulu time, the first of thirty-six B-52H Stratofortresses ran its engines up to full throttle and began its takeoff roll. It was a hot day, and the huge plane’s wing tanks were gravid with jet fuel; it climbed slowly away, shaking the ground with a bellowing thunder like the onrushing end of the world.
*
The Atlantic Ocean was wide, and the jet streams blowing west-to-east over Ireland slowed the bombers as they climbed towards their cruising altitude of forty-eight thousand feet, miles above the air corridors used by the regular midmorning stream of airliners heading west from the major European and Asian hubs. The operations planners had seen no reason to warn or divert those airliners; when CARTHAGE was complete they would, if anything, be safer.
Over the next seven hours the BUFFs shadowed the daily commuter herd, tracking along the great circle route that took them just south of Greenland’s icy hinterlands before turning south towards Newfoundland and then on towards Maine. As they neared the coast, the bombers diverged briefly from the civil aviation corridor, skirting around Canadian airspace and then flying parallel to the regular traffic, but farther east, staying over deep water for as long as possible. It was more than just the diplomatic nicety of keeping aircraft engaged on this mission out of foreign airspace: If anything should go catastrophically wrong, better that the cargo should ditch in the Atlantic waters than come down over land.
As they passed the southernmost end of Nova Scotia, the bombers finally turned west. The final encrypted transmission came in: Meteorological conditions over the target were perfect. Downstairs from the pilot and copilot, the defensive-systems operators were busy at last, running the activation checklist on their ARMBAND units – gray boxes, bolted hastily to the equipment racks lining the dark cave of the bomber’s lower deck – and the differential GPS receivers to which they were connected by raw, hand-soldered wiring looms. Meanwhile, their offensive systems operators were running checklists of their own; checklists that required the pilot and copilot’s cooperation, reading out numbers from sealed envelopes held in a safe on the flight deck.
*
A hundred miles due east of Portland, the bomber crews completed their checklists. It was nearing three o’clock in the afternoon on the eastern seaboard when they lined up. At a range of fifty miles, the largest city in Maine was spread out before them, glittering beneath the cloudless summer sky. An observer on the ground who knew what they were looking at – one with very sharp eyes, or a pair of binoculars – would have seen a loosely spaced queue of aircraft, cruising in echelon far higher than normal airliners. But there were no such observers. Nor did the civilian air traffic control have anything to say in the presence of the FBI agents who had dropped in on them an hour ago.
Overhead, without any fuss, the bombers were going out.
*
Another day, another world.
In the marcher kingdoms of the North American eastern seaboard, life went on. A frontal system moving in from the north was bringing cooler, denser air southeast from Lake Ontario, and a scattering of high cloud cover warned of rainfall by evening. The daily U-2 reconnaissance overflight had reported a strong offshore breeze blowing, carrying dust and smoke out to sea; it was expected to continue for at least twenty-four hours.
The wheat harvest was all but over, and rye, too; the peasants were still laboring with sickle and adze in their strip fields, and the granaries were filling, but an end to toil was in sight. Their lords and masters busied themselves with the summer hunt, wild boar and deer fat and heavy; the season of late-summer parties was in swing, as eligible daughters were paraded around before their fathers’ friends’ sons, and barons and dukes sought surcease from the stink of the cities by touring their estates and the houses of their vassals.
There was quiet unrest too. Among the hedge-lords, whispered rumor spoke of the upstart tinker families becoming absent neighbors. Houses were mysteriously empty, houses that had weathered the campaign by the late pretender and survived the subsequent wave of murders that had engulfed the Clan. Some spoke of strangeness; families with children sent away, the parents’ bright-eyed cheer covering some grim foreboding. Rumors of tinker Clansmen in their cups maundering about the end of the world, grumbling about absent cousins trying to run before the storm surge while they, the heroic drunk, chose to stand firm against the boiling wave crests –
And the queen, Prince Creon’s widowed pregnant wife, had not been seen in public for nearly two months.
The queen’s absence was not in and of itself remarkable – she was pregnant, and a retreat from court engagements was not unexpected – but the totality of it attracted notice. She hadn’t been seen by anyone except, it appeared, her mother. The dowager duchess (herself mysteriously absent for a period of decades) was in residence in Niejwein in one of the Clan’s less badly damaged great houses, busying herself with the restoration of the Summer Palace (or rather, with commencing its reconstruction from the ground up, for its charred beams and shattered stones would not be fit for habitation anytime soon). And she had seen her daughter the queen-widow, and loudly testified to that effect – to her bouts of morning sickness and desire for seclusion. But. The queen hadn’t been seen in public for weeks now, and people were asking questions. Where was she?
Now, high above the thin mares’ tails, a curious thing can be seen in the heavens.
A row of strange straight clouds are rushing across the vault of the sky, quite unlike anything anyone remembers seeing in times gone by. True, for the past month or so the witch-clouds have been glimpsed from time to time, racing crisscross from east to west – but o
nly one at a time.
Today, two rows of knife-straight clouds are ploughing southwest, as if an invisible god has drawn two eighteen-toothed combs across the horizon, one comb flying two thousand feet above the other. They cover the dome of the sky from side to side, for they are not close together; a knowledgeable observer would count twelve miles between teeth.
Flying just ahead of each tine is a B-52H Stratofortress of Fifth Bomb Wing, Eighth Air Force, Air Combat Command. Thirty-five out of thirty-six aircraft carry in each of their two bomb bays a rotary dispenser containing six B83 free-fall hydrogen bombs. The remaining bomber is gravid with a single device, a monstrous B53-Y1, a bloated cylinder that weighs over four tons and fills the BUFF’s central bomb bay completely. This aircraft flies near the eastern edge of the upper group. It is intended to deliver the president’s signature message to the enemy capital: shock and awe.
*
The track from Kirschford down to the Linden Valley was clear of tinker-lord traffic this afternoon. The flow of refugees had slackened to a trickle, for those who wanted to evacuate had for the most part already left. Helena voh Wu and her infants and sister-in-law had come this way a week before; while Gyorg was still occupied with the corvée, shuttling supplies between anonymous storage lockups in Boston and wine cellars in the Gruinmarkt, his dependents had achieved the tenuous sanctuary of a refugee camp in New Britain.
So none of them paused to look up, slack-jawed, as the first wave of bombers commenced their laydown.
A B83 hydrogen bomb isn’t very large; it weighs about a ton, and looks exactly like most other air-dropped bombs. The weapons the Fifth Bomb Wing were delivering were equipped with parachutes which retarded their descent from altitude, so that it would take each bomb more than three minutes to descend to its detonation altitude of twenty thousand feet. Flying parallel courses twelve miles apart, the aircraft began to drop their payload at one-minute intervals, seeding a furrow of hells at twelve mile intervals. The distance between bombs was important; any closer, and the heat flash might ignite the Kevlar ribbon ’chutes of the other weapons.
Three minutes and twenty seconds. The trails arrowed south across the sky of the Gruinmarkt, a faint rumble of distant thunder disturbing the afternoon quiet; and then the sky lit up as the first row of eighteen hydrogen bombs, spanning the kingdom from sea to inland frontier, detonated at an altitude of just under four miles.
The flash of a single one-megaton hydrogen bomb is followed by a fireball which dims over a period of nearly a minute. It is visible in good weather at a range of hundreds of miles – light from the flash is scattered by particles in the upper atmosphere, reflected around the curve of the earth. To an observer in Niejwein, the capital city located nearly two hundred miles south of the first row, the northern horizon would have begun to flicker and brighten as if a gigantic match had been held to the edge of the map. There was no sound; there would be no sound for many minutes, for even though the shock waves from the detonations overtook the bombers, it would take a long time for the attenuated noise to reach the capital.
To an observer located closer to the bombing line, it would have been the end of the world.
The heat flash from a B83 detonating at twenty thousand feet is sufficient, in good weather, to ignite cardboard or cotton sheeting, heat damp pine needles to smoldering tinder, and char wood and flesh six miles from ground zero. The leading row of eighteen bombers were spaced close enough that over open ground no spot could remain unseared; only in the lee slope of a steep valley, or the depths of a cellar or cave, was there any hope of survival.
Peasants working in the fields might have glanced up as the sky flashed white above them; it would have been the last thing they saw through rapidly clouding eyes. Their skin reddened and crisped as the grain stubble and trees around them began to smoke; screaming and stumbling for cover, they blundered towards their houses or the tree line, limned in the flaring red burn of a billion leaves igniting simultaneously. There were some survivors of the initial flash: women spinning thread or weaving cloth indoors, millers tending their wheels, even a lucky few sitting behind dry-stone walls or swimming in cool water pools. But as they looked up in confusion they saw the same thing in every direction around them: trees, plants, buildings, even cattle and people smoking and flaming.
And then the hammer-blast of red-hot wind arrived from above, slamming into hedges and walls alike and splintering all before them.
The aircrew saw nothing of this. They flew on instruments, insulated blackout screens drawn across the cockpit windows to prevent reflected light from blinding them. Perhaps they glanced at one another as shock waves buffeted the tail surfaces of the bombers, bumping and dropping them before the pilots regained full control authority; but if they did so, it was with no sympathy for the unseen carnage below. A president had been killed, tens of thousands murdered by emissaries from this world; their word for the task they were engaged in was payback.
Seventy seconds later, the second row of H-bombs reached their preset altitude and began to detonate, flashbulbs popping erratically on a wire two hundred and fifty miles wide. And seventy seconds after that, the process continued, weeping tears of incandescence across the burning coastline.
There were a lot of flashes.
*
It took the aircraft nearly twelve minutes to reach Niejwein, two-thirds of the way through their carpet-bombing run. And here, there were witnesses. Niejwein, with a population of nearly sixty thousand souls, was the biggest city within four hundred miles; proud palaces and high-roofed temples rose above a sprawling urban metropolis, home to dozens of trades and no fewer than four markets. And the people of Niejwein had due notice. The flickering brightness on the horizon had been growing for almost a quarter hour; and lately there had been a rumbling in the ground, an uneasy shuddering as if Lightning Child himself was shifting, uneasy in his bed of clay. A strange hot wind had set the bells of the temple of Sky Father clanging, bringing the priests stumbling from their sanctuary to squint at the northern lights in disbelief and shock.
In the Thorold Palace, some of the residents realized what was happening.
At midafternoon, the Dowager Duchess Patricia was holding court, sitting in formal session in the east wing of the palace to hear petitions on behalf of her daughter. A merchant, Freeman Riss of Somewhere-Bridge, was bringing a complaint about the lord of his nearest market town, who, either in a fit of pique or for some reason Freeman Riss was reticent about disclosing, had banned said merchant from selling his wares in the weekly market.
At another time, this complaint might well have interested Dame Patricia as much for its value as leverage against the earl in question as for its merit as a case. But it was a hot afternoon, and sitting in the stiff robes of state beneath a row of stained-glass windows which dammed the air and cast flickering multicolored shadows across the bench before her, she was prone to distraction.
Riss was reciting, in a scratchy voice as if from memory, ‘And I deponeth thus, that on the third feastday of Sister Corn, the laird did send his armsmen to stand before my drover and his oxen and say – ’
Patricia raised a shaky hand. ‘Stop,’ she said. Freeman Riss paused, his mouth open. ‘Surcease, we pray you.’ She squinted up at the windows. They were flickering. ‘We declare a recess. Your indulgence is requested, for we are feeling unwell.’ She closed her eyes briefly. I hope it isn’t another attack, she worried; the MS hadn’t affected her vision so far, but her legs had been largely numb all week, and the prickling in her hands was worsening. ‘Sergeant-at-arms – ’
There was a banging and clattering from outside the room. The courtiers and plaintiffs began to talk, just as the door burst open. It was Helmut ven Rindt, lord-lieutenant and commander of the second troop of the Clan’s security force, accompanied by six soldiers. Their camouflage surcoats sat uneasy above machine-woven titanium mail. ‘Your grace? I regret the need to interrupt you, but you are urgently required elsewhere.’
&nb
sp; ‘Really?’ Iris stared at Helmut. Not you, too? The clenching in her gut was bad.
‘Yes, your grace. If I may approach’ – she nodded; Helmut stepped towards her raised seat, then continued to speak, quietly, in English – ‘we lost all radio access nine minutes ago. There’s nothing but static, and there are very bright lights on the northern horizon. Counting them and checking the decay curves, it’s megaton-range and getting closer. With your permission, we’re going to evacuate right now.’
‘Yes, you go on.’ She nodded approvingly, then did a slow double take as one of Helmut’s troops marched forward. ‘Hey – ’
The soldier bent to lift her from her throne in a fireman’s carry.
Instant uproar among the assembled courtiers, nobles, and tradesmasters assembled in the room. ‘Stop him!’ cried one unfortunate, a young earl from somewhere out to the northwest. ‘He laid hands on her grace!’
That did it. As the soldier lifted Patricia, she saw a flurry of bodies moving towards the throne, past the open floor of the chamber, which by custom was not entered without the chair’s consent. ‘Hey!’ she repeated.
The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3) Page 62
