FLASHDANCE. Code for an impending nuclear attack.
The limousine moved fifty feet down the road, then came to a sudden stop, its wheels screeching on the asphalt, nearly causing half a dozen collisions behind it. Bull opened a side door. “GET OUT!” he screamed to the two members of the press. The frazzled men were pushed out the door and onto the street. Three additional Secret Service agents then jumped into the automobile, their handguns drawn, their eyes wild and darting. They pushed the president into the center of the limo and held his head near the floor. Four other agents wielding Uzi machine guns with collapsible stocks jumped onto metal running boards that had been extended from the lower carriage of the black limousine. They gripped the handholds with one hand and held their machine guns with the other. The limousine moved forward onto 23rd Street, screeching through the intersection, surrounded now by more than a dozen police cars. Ahead of them, there was a sudden squeal of automobile tires, then a solid crunch as a D.C. police car intentionally rammed into the side of a Metro taxi that had proceeded into the intersection in front of the presidential limousine. Jamming his gas pedal, the policeman pushed the taxi out of the way, crunching it into the side of another car. Two Marine emergency choppers sounded from overhead, sweeping over the motorcade from their security perch. Higher up, an F-16 pilot hit his afterburner until he fell into position over the presidential caravan, his air-to-air missiles armed and ready to go.
Two and a half miles to the south, all airline traffic at Reagan National Airport was commanded to hold. Seconds before, a single Delta airliner had taken to the air, too far down the runway to abort without ending up in the Potomac River. The F-16 pilot saw the Delta climb as it tucked in its landing gear. He slammed his throttle forward and was pushed back in his seat. He lowered the fighter’s nose and moved a small piper on his Head Up Display, targeting the Delta with two of his air-to-air missiles. The earpiece in his helmet growled. The airliner was locked up. The Delta continued flying north, taking a path that would place it less than two miles from the presidential motorcade. A small course correction and ten seconds were all it would take to turn the airliner into a missile targeting the president. The F-16 pilot tensed up, his gut in a knot. But he had his orders, and he would not hesitate. He switched his radio to guard frequency and cried, “Delta aircraft taking off from Reagan, break left RIGHT NOW! Turn left NOW, Delta, or I will fire!”
The airliner wobbled, then turned hard to the left, rocking up on one wing. The fighter pilot drew a deep breath and pulled his finger away from the fire button.
Below him, the presidential limousine screamed south on 23rd . Bull had a decision to make and only seconds to make it. Keep the president on the ground and try to get back to the White House, or get him in the air?
“Ground or Air Evacuate?” the Secret Service controller demanded over his radio.
Bull turned to his watch. A little more than five minutes to go. Not enough time to get back to the underground command center at the White House. “Evacuate the Cowboy!” he cried in reply.
The senior agent looked at his men sitting on both sides of the president. “You copy that?” he asked. They all nodded their heads. “Twenty-third and Constitution!” Bull commanded into his microphone, telling the choppers where to land.
“Roger, 23 and C,” the controller replied quickly.
The president remained quiet. He was nothing but baggage now. If he were to say anything, he would be told to shut up.
He sat back and placed a trembling hand over his face, then groaned once in anguish as his limousine screamed down the road. By now there were more than forty police and security vehicles in the caravan. More were joining by the second. The entire district seemed to wail, from the north and the south; flashing lights and police sirens could be heard everywhere. Fifteen miles to the southeast, a flight of two alert
F-16s took off from Andrews Air Force Base and flew in afterburner to set up a combat patrol overhead. Below them, a single Air Force chopper took to the air, followed by four other emergency evacuation choppers, all of them heading toward the Mall. They would set down in the grass outside the Capitol Building to begin the evacuation of the senior congressional leadership.
The Marine presidential helicopters had moved into position. “Birdeyes are ready,” the lead pilot said.
The limousine and its security escorts accelerated down the crowded city street to seventy miles an hour. At the corner of 23rd and Constitution, their brakes squealed and burned, hot smoke belching from their tires. The road had already been cleared by Secret Service SUVs, and the two choppers were sitting down in the middle of the street.
“GO!” Bull screamed before the limousine had even come to a stop.
The doors to the president’s black sedan burst open. The agents pushed the president out, nearly knocking him down. A half-dozen men were waiting to surround him and they grouped together, forming a protective ring, before shoving him into the second helicopter. The president felt like a child, helpless and weak. A group of other agents propelled a presidential look-alike into a second limousine, and it squealed away. In seconds, it was over. Doors slammed, tires squealed, the choppers lifted into the air. The decoy presidential limousines drove away, heading east on Constitution Avenue for two blocks, then split up, each limousine heading in different directions toward the White House.
Inside the Marine helicopter, the president was surrounded by his men.
“Which way?” the pilot shouted.
Bull did not know. Where was the attack coming from? What was the safest direction to go?
“Give me a vector!” the pilot demanded again as the chopper lifted into the air.
Bull spoke into his radio. “We don’t know, we don’t know!” was all he heard in reply.
Bull looked north and then south. The chopper was at five hundred feet. Glancing out his window, he saw the line of airliners flying away from Reagan International. They had all been turned away when the FLASHDANCE had been called.
Could it be the weapon was loaded on one of the airliners? he wondered. It was only a guess, but it was all he had.
“Turn north!” he screamed to the pilot. “Get away from all the airports as quickly as you can!”
The chopper’s nose dropped as it accelerated. The pilot let it fall, leveling to just above the trees. He steered toward the small canyon that wound its way on the west side of D.C., following the contours of the Potomac River, seeking cover from the cut-out terrain.
The Secret Service agent looked down at his watch.
Less than one minute.
He took a long gulp of air.
The control tower at Reagan International Airport was set in a panic. The senior air traffic controller’s voice suddenly crackled over the radio. “All aircraft approaching Reagan International Airport, TURN AWAY FROM THE AIRPORT NOW! This is an emergency message. ALL AIRCRAFT MUST COMPLY! All inbound aircraft turn away. Proceed under VFR flight rules to your nearest holding point. All aircraft on the ground at Reagan, HOLD YOUR POSITION NOW! Delta aircraft on takeoff roll, abort if you can. This is a national emergency and this is not a drill. I say again, all aircraft approaching Reagan, CLEAR THIS AIRSPACE NOW!”
The PacEx pilots didn’t hesitate. The aircraft banked up and started turning away. They were very low, only three hundred feet in the air. Their gear had been extended. They had been ready to land.
Inside their cargo compartment, the timer continued counting.
Thirty seconds to go.
The aircraft’s wing dipped and the nose climbed as the jet turned away. The pilot shoved up the power and accelerated, then set a course for their hold point on the east side of the city. The aircraft’s landing gear receded into its belly.
They were on the southeast side of the White House by now.
The Potomac River drifted under the aircraft’s nose. To the west, the Pentagon was only half a mile away.
The aircraft continued turning, banking up on its wing.
> Twenty seconds to go.
The White House fell in the distance behind it, little more than three miles away.
The aircraft leveled out and kept climbing.
Five seconds to go.
“All aircraft . . . ” the controller started crying through the radio once again.
Then there was a bright light. An explosion.
And his world disappeared.
The presidential helicopter was four miles from the epicenter of the nuclear fire ball. It was low, seeking shelter among the wide canyons that had been carved by the Potomac Falls. The light flashed from behind it, causing the nuclear-hardened windows to turn instantly opaque. Then the wall of superheated air approached the helicopter at three times the speed of sound. The compressed air smashed the helicopter, sending it up on its side.
The Secret Service agent threw his body across the president to protect him, all the time crying in fear.
The energy released in a nuclear reaction is ten million times greater than in an equivalent chemical reaction. While a conventional bomb derives its power from the rapid decomposition of a burning compound, this reaction only releases the energy from the outermost electrons in the atom. An atomic bomb, on the other hand, reaches deep into the nuclei, destroying the very nucleus that holds it together.
The Pakistani nuclear physicists who designed and built their nuclear warheads didn’t understand everything Einstein taught in his Special Theory of Relativity, but they understood the basics. The combined energy of mass and speed equaled a very big bang.
The Pakistani warhead hidden inside the PacEx aircraft was a medium-sized weapon, one of the newest the Pakistani government had produced. A simple device, similar to the Little Boy that was dropped over Hiroshima, Japan, it was small and yet extremely powerful.
The simple fact was, the shelter under the White House was not large enough to protect all of the staff. More than a thousand people worked in the White House, and the underground shelter could take no more than half of them.
General Brighton was on the access list to the shelter, but he remained at his desk for as long as he could. The other staff evacuated around him, but he remained on the phone. Once he knew that the president was onboard the evacuation chopper, he made one more frantic call to the Pentagon to tell them what was going on.
He looked down at his watch—4:50. Less than two minutes to go.
Standing, he turned and ran for the stairwell. He had drilled it many times, and he knew exactly where to go.
He ran down the hallway, turned right down another hallway and across the Portola porch. Down a flight of stairs, a short hallway. He came to the double doors. He glanced again at his watch as he ran. Fifty seconds to go.
He pushed on the door. But it didn’t move. He pushed again, and started calling.
The door was locked.
Someone had panicked. They hadn’t waited. The door was shut tight.
He banged the door with his fist, then turned and started running. Up the stairs, on the other side of the hallway, was another set of stairs, another access door.
He started up the stairs, reached the top, then saw the bright flash of light.
The stairwell collapsed in a fury of white heat and smoke.
But General Brighton felt nothing, for he was already dead.
Over the landscape of downtown Washington, D.C., the bright light flashed across the sky as the second sun appeared.
The initial destruction of heat was almost instantaneous. The fireball over Washington was a horrifying sight, a boiling mushroom cloud capped with a crescent of white from condensation and heat. The fireball was white in the center, with orange and red tints at the rim. Below the fireball was a thick column of fiery dust and smoke that reached down to the ground, a solid pillar of fire that seemed to support the fireball like a golf ball on a tee.
There was no time to react, no time even to look up.
The instant the weapon went off, a burst of supersonic pressure moved across the ground, demolishing everything below into cinder and smoke. A donut ring of debris rolled outward from the center of the explosion. The fireball illuminated the day from overhead, much brighter than the sun, creating black and devilish shadows that danced in front of the expanding ring of debris.
The first indication on the ground was a two-second blast of white light and heat. Then the fireball rolled upward through the sky, more than a thousand feet wide. Ten thousand degrees at the center, the thermal radiation burst outward at the speed of light, burning everything it touched almost instantly. Clothes, flesh, hair, wood, asphalt, paper, shingles, plastic, steel—everything turned to ash underneath the rolling cloud. Then, like thunder after lightning, a high-pressure blast wave followed the burst of radiation by a second or two. It moved across the ground, creating a ring of enormous overpressure at the front of the blast while tornado-force winds rushed in to fill the vacuum behind. Steel buildings blew apart as if they were made of paper and sticks; houses fell over and burst into flames; high-rise hotels blew to pieces as if they were nothing but mist. Oak trees snapped at ground level and vanished into ash, smoke, and heat. The sand on the beach along the river was instantly baked into glass, leaving human shadows etched in the glossy formations where innocent children had played. Water in the Chesapeake Bay boiled and rose in clouds of radiated steam, then fell almost instantly back to earth as contaminated rain. Ash, dust, and dirt were pulled thirty thousand feet into the air and sucked into the rolling fireball in the upper atmosphere. The fallout blew northeast, toward the city of Baltimore and the suburbs on the outskirts of D.C.
As the fireball rose, it grew dark, a horrible red and purplish hue. Below it, there was nothing but black ash and baked earth.
* * *
The fireball began to dissipate.
Below it, the devastation spread for miles in a near-perfect ring. Two miles under the detonation, there was nothing but blackness and smoke, a circle of smooth ash and nearly perfect level ground. Here and there, a steel rod or square of cement protruded from the smoothed-over debris. Four miles from the center, a few steel structures remained, the framework of once-mighty office buildings and grand hotels. Here, the sidewalks were baked into ash and the hulks of burned-out cars were tossed on their sides. Four miles from the epicenter, at Bolling Air Force Base, the presidential fleet of helicopters were burned in their hangars, melted as if they were wax. Cars and buses had been lifted, blown into pieces, and scattered through the air. The devastation grew less intense with each passing mile, but it was seven miles out before there could be found a green blade of grass.
A few minutes after the explosion, the fireball rose into the atmosphere and normal daylight returned.
Then the sounds and smells of human suffering began to drift through the air.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Blade 45
Twenty-six miles southwest of Basra, Iraq
Sergeant Samuel Brighton sat in the gunner’s seat, looking out on the nighttime desert as it passed below. Lieutenant Joseph Calton sat opposite him. They were the only two men in the chopper, except for the pilots, who were sitting in the cockpit in front. The cabin doors of the HH-60 helicopter were pinned back, and the cool night wind gusted though the open cabin. The pilots were talking to each other, using the aircraft interphone. Sam and Bono rode in silence. They wore their combat fatigues, and underneath their seats were four tan-and-brown canvas bags. All of their gear had been stuffed inside them. They held their Kevlar helmets in their hands.
“Where we going?” Sam asked Bono. He had to yell above the roar of the engines and blades to be heard.
The lieutenant shrugged, then leaned to Sam’s ear. “We’re picking up a charter flight down in Basra. Someone’s going to meet us. That’s really all I know.”
“Come on, come on, I think you know more than that.”
Bono shook his head. “Really, that’s all the colonel would tell me for now.”
Sam sat back, satisfied. �
��We’re going to be Cherokees, baby!” He slapped the lieutenant on the knee. “The best of the best. The razor tip of the spear!”
Bono leaned closer to him so he didn’t have to yell quite so loud. “I thought that Deltas were the best?”
“Yeah, well, that’s before we were invited to join the Cherokees.”
“You realize, of course, that we’re so good we won’t even be able to tell anyone what we do. There’ll be no pride or ego. We won’t be able to say anything. The Cherokees are so highly classified, we can’t even confirm our code word. We can’t brag. We can’t talk. And when we hear the cover story they provide us, I bet we’ll see that the girls will not be impressed.”
Sam deflated a little, then brightened up again. “When it’s over, we can tell them.”
Bono smiled and nodded.
Sam stared at the moonlight night passing by. Reflecting the stars, the desert looked like a huge, silver ocean, the dunes enormous waves that were frozen at their crest. “Why do you think they chose us?” Sam asked after a while.
Bono was sucking on a lollipop, and he pulled it from his mouth. “They chose me,” he yelled, “because I’m fluent in Arabic. That, and I could pass for any of the locals, thanks to my mother, you know. They chose you because I said I wouldn’t go without you.”
Sam hesitated. “Really,” he said.
“Yep,” Bono answered. “You’re the best sergeant in the unit. Since the day that I got here, that’s how I’ve felt. After what you did for that girl . . . ”
There was a sudden motion from the front of the cockpit, and both men looked forward. One of the pilots was shaking. The other one had lifted both arms to the sky. He seemed to cry out in anguish, and the chopper wobbled up on its side. The two soldiers stared at the pilots, then looked at each other. “What’s going on?” Sam asked.
Bono shook his head.
The helicopter suddenly dropped toward the desert, flared aggressively, then set down hard on the rocks and bounced until it came to a stop. The engines kept going, but both pilots stared ahead. One of them wiped his Nomex glove across his face. The other one bowed his head. They seemed to have completely forgotten about the two troops in the back.
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