The Hammer of God

by Tom Avitabile

  Overnight, the most popular site on the Internet became www. WhatsMyCEP.com, which allowed visitors to enter their street address and then virtually plant the suitcase bomb anywhere within 100 miles of that location. It told you how much damage you could expect, how much radiation, if you would survive, and if your pets would live to lick your glowing remains. The irony was that the engine for these calculations was hacked from the Department of Defense study done at Purdue University to determine the effects of nuclear detonations on cities and small towns. It calculated the Circular Error Probable of a detonation at various kilo- and mega-tonnage and then, using GPS mapping software and weather models for wind direction, the site determined likely death counts and fallout patterns. Real homey, comfy stuff.

  In short, America was scaring itself to death, and doing almost as much damage to the national psyche and commerce as if the other 23 bombs were on the loose.

  Then the extreme lunacy hit. Hiccock was reluctantly appearing on a talk show under the agreement that he was to be the only guest on for an entire half-hour segment. With the administration’s approval, he went on to separate scientific fact from science fiction. The show was going well until the last commercial break for Bill’s segment. That’s when a senator who was on the next segment “bullied” his way onto the set just before they were going back on the air.

  “Mister Hiccock,” Senator Barnes said, “when is the administration going to make public its retaliation policy for when the bomb goes off?”

  Hiccock should have gotten up and left right there and then, but the stage manager called out, “Back in 5, 4, 3, 2….” Then threw his finger cue.

  “We’re back and are joined now by Senator Barnes,” host Wolf Blitzer said. “Welcome Senator Barnes. Senator, during the break you were asking the President’s science advisor a rather poignant question. Would you mind repeating that for the benefit of our viewers?”

  Barnes repeated it exactly as before and Hiccock’s brain went into overdrive. To answer this question was to fall into a huge trap. “When the bomb goes off,” meant that any positive answer would signal that the administration believed the detonation inevitable. Any negative response meant the President wasn’t “going to make public our retaliation policy” and was therefore not being forthright with the public. Bill hated this political crap; it was another good reason why he believed he should never appear in public in any official capacity. As Bill’s inner play clock ticked down, he looked the senator in the eye, trying to figure out where he was coming from, but felt politically inept for not even knowing whether this guy was a friend or foe of his boss. A friend wouldn’t ambush us like this was the last thought he had before he found himself speaking.

  “Would the Senator care to further elaborate on his question?”

  “Sounds plain enough to me, Mister Hiccock. When is the administration going to make public its retaliation policy for when the bomb goes off?”

  “Oh, okay. First off, it’s Professor Hiccock. And second, I thought I didn’t hear you right the first time because that is the most ill-informed, ill-composed, and ill-conceived question ever asked. It presupposes a whole series of non-factual and fantastical assumptions. It is, to put it simply, a trick question. And I don’t do tricks, Senator.”

  Wolf Blitzer’s jaw seemed frozen open. Bill could hear the scratchy sound of the producer hollering at Blitzer from the control room through the little earpiece stuffed into the ear away from camera. The senator looked to Wolf for some cover, but Wolf was distracted by the screaming in his ear.

  “Wolf, you need a minute here, buddy?” Hiccock said with the smallest of smirks.

  “Senator, would you like to rephrase your question?”

  “No, Wolf, let’s move on. I and many on my side of the aisle are calling for a simple, clear, declarative statement from the President on a retaliatory policy that would force the nations who sponsor and support terrorism to clean up their own act and stop this heinous crime before it is carried out.”

  “What are you looking for the President to say, Senator?” Wolf asked.

  “That five Arab capitals will be targeted by our ICBMs. That if the suitcase nuke goes off on American soil, the capitals of Syria, Jordon, Iran, Libya, and the Sudan will be wiped from the face of the earth.”

  “A sweeping proposal. Mister…Professor Hiccock, as a member of the administration, would you care to respond to that?”

  “No. But I’d like to respond as a private citizen if I may.”

  Blitzer was visibly uneasy with the request but acceded without thinking.

  Hiccock leaned over towards the windbag senator. “You are out of your ever-loving mind, my friend. Thank God you, nor any of your cohorts on the hill, are the President right now, because that is the dumbest, most counterproductive idea since somebody elected you into office, pal. Do yourself and the government of the people you are sworn to protect and serve a big favor and shut the hell up!”

  Hiccock sat back in his chair again. “There; that was me, the private citizen, voicing my personal views. Speaking for the administration again, I have no comment.”

  The senator recovered quickly from the attack. “You bastard! The American people will not stand idly by while Islamic terrorists detonate a nuclear device on our soil. You and your President may be too weak-kneed to get tough with these Arab thugs, but the American people are sick and tired of these terrorists threatening us and terrorizing us. The American people are demanding and deserve a get-tough policy, not some touchy-feely approach that the Hate America First crowd and academics like you, Pro-fes-sor, embrace.”

  “Now gentlemen, let’s try and keep the tone of this debate…”

  Bill leaned forward again. “Senator, first of all, he’s not just my President. He’s yours too, unless you and your Capitol Hill cronies are also rescinding the constitution in your new order. And secondly, threatening to kill millions of innocent people over the acts of madmen makes us nothing more than madder madmen with bigger bombs. Wolf, this fear mongering serves only cheap politicians who are posturing for votes by perpetuating exactly the kind of fear, rumor, and innuendo I came on your program to address. If there was ever a time in American history to let diplomacy and our State Department make policy, this is it.”

  “Gentlemen, I am afraid we are out of time. Thank you for this… lively…and… spirited discussion, we’ll be back after this…”

  “And we are out,” the stage manager announced. “Four-minute break.”

  “You fellas really went at each other….” Blitzer stopped talking when Hiccock tore off his lapel mic, got up, and moved right into the senator’s face. The man backed up in his chair, hands gripping the arms, searching the studio for his security people.

  Hiccock clamped his finger over the lapel mic clipped to Barnes’ blue suit and unloaded. “As for that academic crack, you go to intelligence oversight committee, you get cleared for top secret/need to know, and then you find out what kind of action this ‘academic’ has been involved in, Senator! Until then, don’t ever demean my patriotism again.”

  Hiccock punctuated those last words with two finger jabs to the shoulder, which were strong enough to make the senator wince and rub the area as Hiccock walked off set.

  Blasting through the studio doors, the makeup lady ran to catch up to Bill to give him two paper towels so he could wipe the pancake from his face. At that minute, the show’s producer came out of the control room.

  “That was great TV! What did you say to him just then? We couldn’t hear…”

  “Don’t worry about what I told him. Worry about what I’m telling you, hard-on. You ever lie to me again or blindside me on the air with another asshole like that, and I will kick the living shit out of you. Do you hear me?” Hiccock took the two makeup smudged towels and stuffed them in the producer’s breast pocket, then brushed him aside. “Half-hour exclusive my ass!”

  When Hiccock got into his interagency motor pool car, his cell phone rang. It was Marg
aret Lloyds, White House Press Secretary.

  “I think that went well, don’t you, Peg?”

  Janice was laughing. “So he got the full Bronx treatment? Oh, to have been a fly on the wall.”

  “Yeah, I guess I kinda got all Gunhill Road on him and the producer. I swear that little producer nerd didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.”

  Bill placed the dish with the half-eaten peanut butter chocolate pie on the cocktail table. “You know, your cravings better include a fat husband.”

  “Not a problem, but count your blessings. In some species, the male dies after fertilization.” As she placed her practically-licked-clean plate next to Bill’s, Janice was about to take his uneaten half, but a look from Bill dissuaded her.

  “So you’re just fattening me up for the kill?”

  “More of you to love, Billy.” Janice stood. “Well, I’ll clean up.”

  “I’ll do it. You sit and contemplate life after fatty dies.” Bill took the plates, cups, and forks into the kitchen.

  Janice felt around the couch for the TV remote. She turned on the set and found CNN. Bill was on the screen. They were replaying his exchange with the senator. It was the most played clip of the day and, unless some disaster, political assassination, or sports star scandal occurred, it would probably be the stuff of Sunday morning news shows. In the few short hours that he was home, Bill had already gotten calls from every major paper and news magazine. Now, as she watched the clip of Bill’s confrontation with the senator for the third time, something in Janice’s mind confronted her. Her body started to morph into something like the fetal position around a throw pillow. She was riveted to the screen as the two men, one of them who she loved and trusted, were engaged in a discussion that was the stuff of nightmares. As a little kid who had grown up during the Cold War, expecting to be atomically bombed into ash shadows at any moment, she had studied, and was familiar with, the feeling of certain doom that was encircling her. Living under the threat of nuclear annihilation made many of her older patients and predecessors create the anti-culture and alternate-culture movements. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll were largely the self-medication that the generation before hers had prescribed for a bad case of the nuclear heebie-jeebies.

  Although she didn’t know the senator, his party affiliation made it a good bet they shared very few common views. But as she listened to his proposal, which her man Bill rightly framed as insane, she felt something deep within her resonate to the radical ultimatum. It was an anger brewing, being stirred up by the senator’s declaration that the “Arab Street should no longer be a one-way street,” that they can’t be constantly whipping up the winds of hatred against America, yet remain immune to the consequences. Her hand was resting on her already protruding belly as she felt a warmness, a comfort, wash over her from the senator’s words. This was a disconnect that she had never experienced. Intellectually, there was no question the idea of nuclear retaliation was an unfair, inappropriate response. Yet, emotionally, she wished the senator had won the argument, even over her own man. She turned her own profession inwards and diagnosed herself. Her self-image and long-held beliefs accounted for her instant and magnetic attraction to her husband’s level headed, “fair” position. However, a whole other part of her, a new part, wanted to gnarl and roar causing any who would threaten the budding life within her to cower and scamper away.

  The result of this self-inspection was Bill returning from the kitchen to a different woman from the one he left a minute ago — something that would not be a singular event in the next five months. He sensed something in the catatonic way Janice locked onto the TV.

  “I hope you still think the guy on the left is hunky?”

  “I am suddenly sad.”

  “No hunkiness?”

  “Do you realize what happened here?”

  “You mean on the show? Yeah, I held my ground against a reactionary, blowhard hawk.”

  “That’s not it. You proved that we are all going to die in a nuclear barbeque.”

  “I must have missed that part.”

  “This isn’t funny. There couldn’t even be a televised discussion of this without you threatening this guy with violence. And I am sure if he had his Second-Amendment-protected-right-to-carry an assault weapon on him, he would have shot you where you sat.”

  “Okay, so it got a little heated.”

  “Bill, what chance do we have to survive this thing when even just talking about it went nuclear?”

  Janice started sobbing. Bill didn’t have any reference for this. Janice was not from the waterworks crowd. He sat down next to her and put his arm around her.

  She recoiled slightly. “You’ve got to stop this thing!”

  “Me? Stop what?”

  “You gotta make sure this doesn’t happen. I waited a long time to have a baby and now there’s a chance the world will end!”

  “Whoa, whoa, the world isn’t going to end.”

  “Bill, I’m scared. I’ve never been this scared before.”

  “Jim Mitchell is a good man, Janice. I’ll be there and if anything is going to happen, I’ll know. We’ll be okay… the three of us.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Haystack In The Needles

  The head of Homeland Security reported to the 15 men and 32 assistants crammed into the war room of the White House. “All ports are in lockdown, all border crossings are under manned aircraft and unmanned aerial drone surveillance. The Coast Guard is in full inspect and detect mode. Radiation detectors are at 17 major airports, but that still leaves a gaping hole in our baggage screening. There are airborne radiation detectors on 1400 state and municipal helicopters and all N.E.S.T. units are fully deployed and operational. In addition to the Nuclear Emergency Support Teams, the big cities have just shy of 2,300 handheld and truck-mounted rad detectors between them.”

  “Okay, we’ll work on emergency legislation to beef up airport detectors and increase public information messages. What about if it’s already here?” Reynolds said.

  Joey Palumbo, the Special Assistant to the President attached to the science office filled in. “The timelines on possible entry of the suitcase device prior to our alert are marginal, meaning we doubt they would have sat on these devices for very long. They have been covertly obtaining them since the break up of the U.S.S.R. It is possible that we, or more correctly the boys of Delta Foxtrot, stumbled upon the Nursery very early in their planning. And at that time, they had only managed to get one unit out of the facility.”

  Bill was seated to the right of Joey, looking at the faces of the men and women around the room. He was thinking about Janice and the promise he made to her and his child yet to be. Back when he was growing up they called this the unthinkable: the actual use of nuclear weapons between warring factions. The people seated around the table here today were starting to learn how to get their brains around the unthinkable in a directionless effort to stop the unthinkable from becoming the inevitable. The sobering enormity of the task of trying to find the device was demonstrated when somebody, maybe American Tourister for all Bill knew, calculated that there were 700,000,000 suitcases in, and going through, the U.S. at any given moment. Of course, there was no rule in the terrorists’ handbook that said a suitcase nuke needed to remain in a suitcase. So very quickly one out of 700 million started to look like good odds against one in “everything bigger than a breadbox.”

  The Surgeon General was reporting on the strain on the nation’s hospitals if there were a detonation in a medium-sized city. Hiccock knew calculations for cities like New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles were useless since four square blocks of those cities could mean 100,000 people killed or wounded and these Russian devices were capable of 100 square blocks of destruction, with partial destruction reaching out to almost two miles. What’sMYCEP.com had gotten those numbers right. Real estate values in most cities were dropping as firms pushed up moving dates or broke leases to flee the possible blast epicenters of 200 cities. All this econ
omic and civil chaos was in full gear and yet there was no credible or actionable intelligence to suggest that terrorists planned to attack a specific city at all. Boulder Dam or any dam would also make a devastating statement. Fort Knox, Kentucky would be a major blow. (On second thought, Bill doubted the terrorists had ever seen the movie “Goldfinger” with its plot to irradiate the American gold supply thus rendering it untouchable for thousands of years.) You could even try to wedge the thing at some geo-critical point in the California mountains and use the energy of the blast to possibly initiate a tremor that could tear open a rift in the San Andreas fault and cleaver all of California into the sea. Oh wait, that was the plot of Superman: The Movie. Bill’s mood sank as he realized that Hollywood had already written the only how-to book any terrorist ever needed.

  “Anything else?” the Head of Homeland Security asked the room.

  Bill was tempted to add something but held back. Instead, he leaned over to Joey. “Joe, we need a special team here. You and whoever you think we’ll need, have them remain in the room after the others leave.”