The Delta airliner wobbled, then turned hard to the left, rocking up on one wing, moving away from the presidential motorcade that was now screaming through the city. The fighter pilot drew a deep breath and pulled his finger away from the fire button.
* * *
Below the pilot, the presidential limousine raced south on 23rd Street. 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 underground bunker at 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. “Air evacuate the Cowboy!” he yelled.
The senior agent looked at his men sitting on both sides of the president. “You copy that?” he asked. They nodded their heads. “Twenty-third and Constitution!” Bull commanded into his microphone, telling the helicopters 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 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 helicopter took to the air, followed by four other emergency evacuation helicopters, all of them heading toward the National 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. “Birdeye is 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 Streets their brakes squealed and burned, hot smoke belching from their tires. The road had already been cleared by Secret Service SUVs, and the two helicopters were sitting down in the middle of the street.
* * *
The cargo aircraft continued flying toward the airport. Inside its main compartment, a series of valves opened up, allowing outside air to begin to cycle through.
The cabin pressure inside the aircraft was equal to the outside pressure now.
At 4:49 P.M. local time, PacEx Express Flight 178 passed through three thousand feet. Inside the crate packed with the nuclear warhead, the barometric sensor detected the appropriate altitude.
The final countdown began. Three minutes to go.
* * *
“GO!” Bull yelled 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. Six 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. Helicopters 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 a different direction 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 helicopter 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 helicopter was at five hundred feet. Glancing out his window, he saw the line of airliners flying away from Reagan International Airport. 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 yelled to the pilot. “Get away from all the airports as quickly as you can!”
The helicopter’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 Washington, 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! 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, and his world disappeared.
* * *
The presidential helicopter was four miles from the epicenter of the nuclear fireball. 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 opaque instantly. 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 times the speed of light squared 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. It was a simple dev
ice similar to the Little Boy that was dropped over Hiroshima, Japan. It was small and yet extremely powerful.
* * *
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 telephone. Once he knew that the president was onboard the evacuation helicopter, he made one more frantic call to the Pentagon to tell them what was going on.
He looked down at his watch. 4:50 P.M. 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.
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 bunker access door.
He started up the stairs, reached the top, and then saw the bright flash of light.
The stairwell collapsed in a fury of white heat and smoke.
But General Brighton felt none of it.
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 fireball over Washington, D.C., 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, a thick column of fiery dust and smoke 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 initial destruction of heat was almost instantaneous.
A burst of supersonic pressure moved across the ground, demolishing everything into cinder and smoke. A doughnut ring of debris rolled outward from the center of the explosion. The fireball illuminated the day much brighter than the sun, creating 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 Fahrenheit 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. 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 glassy formations where children had been playing. 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 Washington, 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.
Across the city, 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, but that was all. Three 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 had been burned in their hangars, melted like 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.
NINETEEN
Blade 45, twenty-six miles southwest of Basra, Iraq
Captain Samuel Brighton sat in the gunner’s seat, looking out on the nighttime desert as it passed below. Bono sat opposite him. They were the only two men in the helicopter, 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 helicopter intercom. Sam and Bono sat 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.
Bono shrugged, and then leaned closer 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 Bono 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, and then brightened up again. “When it’s over, we can tell them.”
Bono smiled and nodded.
Sam peered at the moonlit night passing by. Reflecting the moon, 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 you’re a combat stud. Best leader in the unit. Since the day that I got here, that’s how I 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 helicopter wobbled up on its side. The two soldiers glanced at the pilots, and then looked at each other. “What’s going on?” Sam as
ked.
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 forgotten about the two combat soldiers in the back completely.
Bono watched, shaking his head in confusion. “Might be engine trouble,” he said.
Sam had been on helicopters when they’d had engine trouble before. This wasn’t an engine problem. This was something else.
“Hey, what’s going on?” he shouted to the pilot nearest him.
Both of them ignored him. Either that or they didn’t hear.
“I’ll find out,” Bono said. He undid his harness and crawled forward. “What’s happening?” he asked.
Both of the pilots were crying. Bono’s face showed confusion and fear. Sam watched him carefully, a sickness rising inside him. The copilot rolled the throttles back so he could talk to Bono without yelling. Bono listened, and then seemed to crumple as if someone had punched him in the gut.
He looked up to ask another question, but the pilot shook his head.
Bono hunched his shoulders, looked away, and then pushed himself backward across the cabin floor. Even in the dim light, Sam could see that his face was pale. “What is it?” Sam demanded.
“Oh, geez,” Bono muttered.
Sam felt a rising sense of dread. “Tell me!” he demanded.
Bono took his hand. “There was a nuclear detonation. They said that D.C. is gone. They think a quarter of a million people are dead. The president, all his cabinet, the Congress, the Supreme Court, everyone, all the city, everything is gone.”
Sam sat back. He didn’t believe it. Not at first. Then he thought of his father in the White House. His mother and brothers lived not too far from there. “No,” he muttered weakly. “Bono, you have to be wrong.”
“Everything,” Bono stammered. He didn’t look at Sam anymore. “Everything—everybody—our government gone—” Then he stopped suddenly. How could he be so stupid? How could he have forgotten?
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