by Tom Clancy
“Who's the duty officer of this whorehouse?” Keitel bellowed. A corporal just pointed. Corporals do not dispute the orders of staff-grade officers. The duty officer, they found, was a major, perhaps thirty years of age.
“What is this?” the young officer asked.
“I am Colonel Ivanenko of the Inspectorate. This is an unannounced operational-readiness inspection. Hit your alarm!” The major walked two steps and punched a button that set off sirens all over the camp area.
“Next, call your regimental commander, and get his drunken ass over here! What is your readiness state, Major?” Keitel demanded, without giving the man a chance to take a breath. The junior officer stopped in mid-reach for the phone, not knowing which order he was supposed to follow first. “Well!”
“Our readiness is in accordance with unit norms, Colonel Ivanenko.”
“You have a chance to prove that.” Keitel turned to one of the others. “Take this child's name!”
Less than two thousand meters away, they could see lights going on at the American base in what had so recently been West Berlin.
“They're having a drill also,” Keitel/Ivanenko observed. “Splendid. We'd better be faster than they are,” he added.
“What is this?” The regimental commander, also a colonel, arrived without his buttons done.
“This looks like a sorry spectacle!” Keitel boomed. “This is an unannounced readiness inspection. You have a regiment to lead, Colonel. I suggest you get to it without asking any further questions.”
“But—”
“But what?” Keitel demanded. “Don't you know what a readiness inspection is?”
There was one thing about dealing with Russians, Keitel thought. They were arrogant, overbearing, and they hated Germans, however much they protested otherwise. On the other hand, when browbeaten, they were predictable. Even though his rank insignia was no higher than this man's, he had a louder voice, and that was all he needed.
“I'll show you what my boys can do.”
“We'll be outside to watch,” Keitel assured him.
* * *
“Dr. Ryan, you'd better get down here.” The line clicked off.
“Okay,” Jack said. He grabbed his cigarettes and walked down to room 7-F-27, the CIA's Operations Center. Located on the north side of the building, it was the counterpart to operations rooms in many other government agencies. In the center of the twenty-by-thirty-foot room, once you got past the cipher lock on the door, was a large circular table with a lazy-Susan bookcase in the center, and six seats around it. The seats had overhead plaques to designate their functions: Senior Duty Officer, Press, Africa — Latin America, Europe — USSR, Near-East — Terrorism, and South Asia — East Asia — Pacific. The wall clocks showed the time in Moscow, Beijing, Beirut, Tripoli, and, of course, Greenwich Mean. There was an adjacent conference room that looked down on the CIA's internal courtyard.
“What gives?” Jack asked, arriving with Goodley in his wake.
“According to NORAD, a nuclear device just went off in Denver.”
“I hope that's a fucking joke!” Jack replied. That, too, was a reflex. Before the man had a chance to respond, Ryan's stomach turned over. Nobody made jokes like that one.
“I wish it were,” the Senior Duty Officer replied.
“What do we know?”
“Not much.”
“Anything? Threat board?” Jack asked. Again it was reflexive. If there had been anything, he would have heard it by now. “Okay — where's Marcus?”
“Coming home in the C-141, somewhere between Japan and the Aleutians. You're it, sir,” the SDO pointed out, quietly thanking a beneficent God that it wasn't himself. “President's at Camp David. SecDef and SecState—”
“Dead?” Ryan asked.
“It would appear so, sir.”
Ryan closed his eyes. “Holy Jesus. The Vice President?”
“At his official residence. We've only been going about three minutes. The NMCC watch officer is a Captain James Rosselli. General Wilkes is on the way in. DIA's on line. They — I mean the President just ordered DEFCON-TWO on our strategic forces.”
“Anything from the Russians?”
“Nothing unusual at all. There's a regional air-defense exercise underway in Eastern Siberia. That's all.”
“Okay, alert all the stations. Put the word out that I want to hear anything they might have — anything. They are to hit every source they can just as fast as they can.” Jack paused one more time. “How sure are we that this really happened?”
“Sir, two DSPS satellites copied the flash. We have a KH-11 that's going to be overhead in about twenty minutes, and I've directed NPIC to put every camera they have on Denver. NORAD says it's a definite nuclear detonation, but there's no word on yield or damage. The explosion seems to be in the immediate area of the stadium — like Black Sunday, sir, but real. This is definitely not a drill, not if we're jacking the strategic forces to DEFCON-TWO, sir.”
“Inbound ballistic track? Aircraft delivery?”
“Negative on the first, there was no launch warning, and no ballistic radar track.”
“What about a FOBS?” Goodley asked. A weapon could be delivered by satellite. That was the purpose of a Fractional-Orbital Bombardment System.
“They would have caught that,” the SDO replied. “I already asked. On the aircraft side, they don't know yet. They're trying to check air-traffic-control tapes.”
“So we don't know jack shit.”
“Correct.”
“President check in with us yet?” Ryan asked.
“No, but we have an open line there. He has the National Security Advisor there also.”
“Most likely scenario?”
“I'd say terrorism.”
Ryan nodded. “So would I. I'm taking over the conference room. Okay, I want DO, DI, DS&T in here immediately. If you need choppers to fetch them in, order 'em.” Ryan walked into the room, leaving the door open.
“Christ,” Goodley said. “You sure you want me here?”
“Yes, and when you have an idea, you say it out loud. I forgot about FOBS.” Jack lifted the phone and punched the FBI button.
“ Command Center.”
“This is CIA, Deputy Director Ryan speaking. Who is this?”
“Inspector Pat O'Day. I have Deputy-Assistant Director Murray here also. You're on speaker, sir.”
“Talk to me, Dan.” Jack put his phone on speaker, also. A watch officer handed him a cup of coffee.
“We don't know anything. No heads-up at all, Jack. Thinking terrorists?”
“At the moment, it seems the most plausible alternative.”
“How sure are you of that?”
“Sure?” Ryan shook his head at the phone, Goodley saw. “What's 'sure' mean, Dan?”
“I hear you. We're still trying to figure out what happened here, too. I can't even get CNN on the TV to work.”
“What?”
“One of my communications people says the satellites are all out,” Murray explained. “Didn't you know that?”
“No.” Jack pointed for Goodley to get back into the Ops Center and find out. “If that's true, it could scratch the terrorism idea. Jesus, that's scary!”
“It's true, Jack. We've checked.”
“They think ten commercial commosats are nonfunctional,” Goodley said. “All the defense birds are on line, though. Our commlinks are okay.”
“Find the most senior S&T guy you can find — or one of our commo people — and ask him what could snuff out satellites. Move!” Jack ordered. “Where's Shaw?”
“On his way in. Going to be a while the way the roads are.”
“Dan, I'll give you everything I get here.”
“It'll be a two-way street.” The line went dead.
The most horrible thing was that Ryan didn't know what to do next. It was his job to gather data and forward it to the President, but he had no data. What information there was would come in through military circuits.
CIA had failed again, Ryan told himself. Someone had done something to his country, and he hadn't warned anyone. People were dead because his agency had failed in its mission. Ryan was Deputy Director, the man who really ran the shop for the political drone placed over his head. The failure was personal. A million people dead, maybe, and there he was, all alone in an elegant little conference room staring at a wall with nothing on it. He hunted a line to NORAD and punched it.
“NORAD,” a disembodied voice answered.
“This is the CIA Operations Center, Deputy Director Ryan speaking. I need information.”
“We do not have much, sir. We think the bomb exploded in the immediate vicinity of the Skydome. We are trying to estimate yield, but nothing yet. A helicopter has been dispatched from Lowery Air Force Base.”
“Will you keep us posted?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you.” That was a big help, Ryan thought. Now he knew that someone else didn't know anything.
* * *
There was nothing magical about a mushroom cloud, Battalion Chief Mike Callaghan of the Denver City Fire Department knew. He'd seen one before, as a rookie fireflghter. It had been a fire in the Burlington yards just outside the city, in 1968. A propane tank-car had let go, right next to another trainload of bombs en route to the Navy's munitions terminal at Oakland, California. The chief back then had had the good sense to pull his men back when the tank ruptured, and from a quarter mile away they'd watched a hundred tons of bombs go off in a hellish firecracker series. There had been a mushroom then also. A large mass of hot air rose, roiling as it went into an annular shape. It created an updraft, drawing air upward into its donut-shaped center, making the stem of the mushroom…
But this one was much larger.
He was behind the wheel of his red-painted command car, following the first alarm, three Seagrave pumper units, an aerial ladder truck, and two ambulances. It was a pitiful first response. Callaghan lifted his radio and ordered a general alarm. Next he ordered his men to approach from up-wind.
Christ, what had happened here?
It couldn't be that…. most of the city was still intact.
Chief Callaghan didn't know much, but he knew there was a fire to fight and people to rescue. As the car turned off the last side-street onto the boulevard leading to the stadium he saw the main smoke mass. The parking lot, of course. It had to be. The mushroom cloud was blowing rapidly southwest towards the mountains. The parking lot was a mass of fire and flame from burning gasoline and oil and auto parts. A powerful gust of wind cleared the smoke briefly, just enough that he could see that there had been a stadium here… a few sections were still… not intact, but you could tell what they were — had been only a few minutes before. Callaghan shut that out. He had a fire to fight. He had people to rescue. The first pump unit pulled up at a hydrant. They had good water here. The stadium was fully sprinklered, and that system fed off two 36-inch high-pressure mains that gridded around the complex.
He left his car next to the first big Seagrave and climbed on top of the fire engine. Some heavy structural material — the stadium roof, he supposed — was in the parking lot to his right. More had landed a quarter mile away in the mercifully empty parking lot of a shopping center. Callaghan used his portable radio to order the next wave of rescue units to check both the shopping center and the residential area that lay beyond it. The smaller fires would have to wait. There were people in the stadium who needed help, but his firefighters would have to fight through two hundred yards of burning cars to get to them…
Just then he looked up to see a blue Air Force rescue helicopter. The UH-1N landed thirty yards away. Callaghan ran over towards it. The officer inside the back, he saw, was an Army major.
“Callaghan,” he said. “Battalion chief.”
“Griggs,” the Major replied. “You need a look-around?”
“Right.”
“'Kay.” The Major spoke into his headset, and the helicopter lifted off. Callaghan grabbed a seatbelt, but didn't strap in.
It didn't take long. What appeared to be a wall of smoke from street level became discrete pillars of black and gray smoke from overhead. Perhaps half of the cars had ignited. He could use one of the driving lanes to get closer in, but some of the way was blocked by wrecked and burning cars. The chopper made a single circuit, bouncing through the roiled, hot air. Looking down, Callaghan could see a mass of melted asphalt, some of it still glowing red. The only spot not giving off smoke was the south end of the stadium itself, which seemed to glisten, though he didn't know why. What they could see appeared to be a crater whose dimensions were hard to judge, since they could only catch bits and pieces of it at a time. It took a long look to determine that parts of the stadium structure remained standing, perhaps four or five sections, Callaghan thought. There had to be people in there.
“Okay, I've seen enough,” Callaghan told Griggs. The officer handed him a headset so that they could speak coherently.
“What is this?”
“Just what it looks like, far as I can tell,” Griggs replied. “What do you need?”
“Heavy-lift and rigging equipment. There are probably people in what's left of the stadium. We gotta get in to them. But what about the — what about radiation?”
The Major shrugged. “I don't know. When I leave here, I'm picking up a team from Rocky Flats. I work at the Arsenal, and I know a little about this, but the specialists are at Rocky Flats. There's a NEST team there. I need to get them down here ASAP. Okay, I'll call the guard people at the Arsenal, we can get the heavy equipment down here fast. Keep your people to windward. Keep your people at this end. Do not attempt to approach from any other direction, okay?”
“Right.”
“Set up a decontamination station right there where your engines are. When people come out, hose them down — strip them and hose them down. Understand?” the Major asked as the chopper touched down. “Then get them to the nearest hospital. Upwind — remember that everything has to go northeast into the wind so you know you're safe.”
“What about fallout?”
“I'm no expert, but I'll give you the best I got. Looks like it was a small one. Not much fallout. The suction from the fireball and the surface wind should have driven most of the radioactive shit away from here. Not all, but most. It should be okay for an hour or so — exposure, I mean. By that time, I'll have the NEST guys here and they can tell you for sure. Best I can do for now, Chief. Good luck.”
Callaghan jumped out and ran clear. The chopper lifted right off, heading northwest for Rocky Flats.
* * *
“Well?” Kuropatkin asked.
“General, we measure yield by the initial and residual heat emissions. There is something odd about this, but my best figure is between one hundred fifty and two hundred kilotons.” The major showed his commander the calculations.
“What's odd about it?”
“The energy from the initial flash was low. That might mean some clouds were in the way. The residual heat is quite high. This was a major detonation, comparable to a very large tactical warhead, or a small strategic one.”
“Here's the target book,” a lieutenant said. It was just that, a clothbound quarto-sized volume whose thick page's were actually fold-out maps. It was intended for use in strike-damage evaluation. The map of the Denver area had a plastic overlay that showed the targeting of Soviet strategic missiles. A total of eight birds were detailed on the city, five SS-18s and three SS-19s, totalling no fewer than sixty-four warheads and twenty megatons of yield. Someone, Kuropatkin reflected, thought Denver a worthy target.
“We're assuming a ground-burst?” Kuropatkin asked.
“Correct,” the Major replied. He used a compass to draw a circle centered on the stadium complex. “A two-hundred-kiloton device would have a lethal blast radius this wide…”
The map was color-coded. Hard-to-kill structures were colored brown. Dwellings were yellow. Green denoted commercial and other build
ings deemed easy targets to destroy. The stadium, he saw, was green, as was nearly everything immediately around it. Well inside the lethal radius were hundreds of houses and low-rise apartment buildings.
“How many in the stadium?”
“I called KGB for an estimate,” the lieutenant said. “It's an enclosed structure — with a roof. The Americans like their comforts. Total capacity is over sixty thousand.”
“My God,” General Kuropatkin breathed. “Sixty thousand there… at least another hundred thousand inside this radius. The Americans must be insane by now.” And if they think we did it…
* * *
“Well?”Borstein asked.
“I ran the numbers three times. Best guess, one-fifty-KT, sir,” the Captain said.
Borstein rubbed his face. “Christ. Casualty count?”
“Two hundred-K, based on computer modeling and a quick look at the maps we have on file,” she answered.
“Sir, if somebody's thinking terrorist device, they're wrong. It's too big for that.”
Borstein activated the conference line to the President and CINC-SAC. “We have some early numbers here.”
* * *
“Okay, I'm waiting,” the President said. He stared at the speaker as though it were a person.
“Initial yield estimates look like one hundred fifty kilotons.”
“That big?” General Fremont's voice asked.
“We checked the numbers three times.”
“Casualties?” CINC-SAC asked next.
“On the order of two hundred thousand initial dead. Add fifty more to that from delayed effects.”
President Fowler recoiled backwards as though slapped across the face. For the past five minutes, he had denied as much as he could. This most important of denials had just vanished. Two hundred thousand people dead. His citizens, the people he'd sworn to preserve, protect, and defend.
