“Any estimate of yield?” asked Roger.
The Colonel’s voice lowered. “The White House reports from his Russian counterpart that those old birds carried a full megaton.”
“God help us.”
Roger’s comment wasn’t blasphemous. Justin knew that. His quiet “Amen” wasn’t a blasphemy either. Nor, for once in his life, was Colonel Draper’s.
“Roger!”
“I see it, Justin. Colonel, we have a positive lock. Back-feeding data to NORAD now.”
All the way back in the ’80s, Navy F-14 Tomcats received and sent radar information via an older Data Link 16. Guardian’s LIDAR data link to NORAD now was incredible. Every two seconds, the massive display zooming in on the northeastern U.S. showed a progressively smaller oval for the CEP.
“Looks like you nailed it.” After ten seconds of data from the aircraft, Roger and NORAD watched the oval decrease to an area sixty miles north and south of Norfolk, and just forty miles wide. Norfolk was at the center. Roger added, “Justin, can you see that?”
His resolution was lower due to the limitations of his 6G Multiphone’s bandwidth, but it was enough.
“Got it. Colonel, Guardian’s steady-state is Mach Ten Point One. Do you have vectors for his intercepts?”
Colonel Drake looked at Technical Sergeant Owens. “Ready to overlay, Sir.” The Colonel nodded.
“This just might work.” Roger’s course tracked between Atlanta, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina. Guardian automatically corrected a few degrees further south to optimize the intercept as far out over the Atlantic Ocean as possible.
“Charging capacitor bank.” Roger initiated the third mandatory manual action, applying power to charge the super capacitor network that would fire the electromagnetic rail gun. Once operational, the aircraft would carry twelve ten-pound projectiles, or “slugs,” to be fired in sets of two or three, for at least four intercepts. As targeting accuracy improved, an intercept might only take one or two shots. Each intercept would be as Roger described, giving adequate time for cooling, recalculating, and recharging the rail gun. For testing, Guardian only had three slugs. And he had one intercept. A two-inch diameter titanium-clad iron bullet, at over 9,000 miles per hour, had to intercept a warhead four to eight feet tall, with a base around three feet. The warhead would also be traveling thousands of miles per hour as it began its re-entry.
The system was only bore sighted to nine decimal places, not the ultimate ten. Guardian had two test shots to complete what should be at least eight shots over two test flights. With each shot, the TCS DPI-01 computer and Fire Control System would scream through teraflops of calculations, literally “on the fly,” to recalibrate and increase accuracy. The final shot had to be dead on. Or…
“Justin, is my backup plan ready?” Roger asked.
After an uncharacteristic pause, Justin quietly replied, “Overrides ready.” And to himself, How I wish we could have used a laser instead of the rail gun.
19. INTERCEPT
“Colonel, everything’s ‘go’ for intercept. We expect the first two shots will miss. With each miss, the Fire Control System will recalibrate and increase accuracy by several orders of magnitude. The goal is for the final slug to pulverize the warhead. If it misses, the FCS won’t let me ram it even if I could at this speed. So, here’s Plan B. Justin, make it short. We’ve got less than a minute.”
“Understood,” Justin replied. “Colonel, Guardian’s blowing conductive plasma out its tail at several thousand degrees. Inside, it’s got a superconductive magnet and generator with enough juice to light up a small town. Roger and I speculate that if we over-ride safety interlocks and collapse that magnetic field, it should create a directional EMP back along that ionized gas tail, then on out into space. We expect an electronic kill radius of several miles.”
“So, it wouldn’t be area-wide like a NUDET?” asked the Colonel.
“That’s the bad news. Guardian flies beneath the warhead, we collapse the field and produce an EMP, and a possible outcome of that much instantaneous power is that we set off the warhead ourselves. You’ll have a high-altitude nuclear detonation—a NUDET—that could affect much of the central East Coast.”
“But no casualties?”
“None, unless some airline flights are affected, or we get pile-ups on the interstate from fried ignition systems. Fortunately, this will be way off the coast. And you’ve got that bad storm going on.”
Colonel Draper thought for a moment. “I need to contact Washington. This is above my pay grade.”
Roger responded. “Negative, Colonel. No time. And not your decision. I just want someone there to notify authorities to be ready if stuff stops working. We have three shots. If they miss, Justin bypasses safety interlocks, and we hit the warhead with lightning. Literally. Total probability of success is sixty to eighty percent. But the consequences of failure are off the charts.”
“If you have to do the Battle Short thing, what’s the chance of your own survival?”
Justin quietly interjected. “Colonel, this was a one-way trip for Roger from the second Guardian launched over Texas.”
Lord, help me to concentrate just a few more minutes. Roger’s AFib was worsening. “NORAD, we’re down to the critical final moments. I need exclusive communication with Justin.” Without waiting for a response, he added, “All systems are green here. How’s telemetry?”
Guardian required a two-person crew, and Justin was doing his best to remotely perform the back-seat role.
“Leading edge temperature’s rising—you’re really pushing it—but should stay within tolerance for the intercept.”
“I don’t have the TM steps memorized. Am I missing anything?”
Justin had the Technical Manual pulled up on another screen panel.
“Negative. Everything’s nominal. FCS on Auto?”
“FCS on Auto.”
Three shots. All automatic. Then only seconds to implode the drive if they miss.
Roger rubbed his elbows and flexed his fingers. His joints throbbed mercilessly. He’d never experienced the bends from SCUBA dives but knew exactly what was happening. Dissolved nitrogen slowly bubbled out into his bloodstream, starting in his joints. Pilots would never go to such an altitude without a pressure suit. Of course, they also wouldn’t fly a high-performance aircraft without a G-suit to help with the high G-forces that almost ended Roger’s mission before it began. The cabin was partially pressurized, or he’d already be dead. But eight psi was significantly less than fourteen-point-seven. At least he had an oxygen mask. The pure oxygen helped keep his thinking clear and slowly helped purge the nitrogen out of his bloodstream. But a pressure suit would have prevented the problem.
Doesn’t matter. It’s all over in minutes.
Justin’s countdown to slug number one interrupted Roger’s thoughts about joining his wife, their kids, and their Lord.
“…Three, two, one…”
No one knew how it would sound. A railgun launching a ten-pound projectile from an aircraft flying hypersonic at 90,000 feet? He heard a loud “whump” as the slug streaked out of the aircraft’s nose. Within a second, it began glowing and leaving a tail. Muzzle velocity, as it exited the rail gun, was Mach Fifteen, and without the help of Guardian’s ion shield the titanium outer shell began to ablate. On a clear night, a child might have thought it was a meteor and made a wish.
As expected, the first shot missed by several hundred meters. Now the Trisistors in the TCS DPI-01 earned their pay, entering their teraflops burst mode as the seconds ticked away for launching the second slug.
“… Two, one…”
With another shudder and “whump,” a second slug was on its way, within seconds lighting up the night sky.
“Three meters ahead of target,” Justin reported.
“As soon as number three launches, I want you to bypass the interlocks. If we miss, the only thing I want on your mind is when to implode the drive.” As an afterthought, Roger added:
“Colonel, my legs are paralyzed and I won’t be able to land this thing. But if General Alvarez wants I could try to ditch it, or put it down on a foamed runway. Justin, how’s our count?”
“Stand by. If we miss, keep your heading and enter two degrees down elevation into the autopilot. Five seconds. Three… two… one.”
“Number three is on the way. Initiate Battle Short!”
“Overrides initiated.”
The warhead began re-entry and the burning ablative shield was now making it visible. Two bright streaks on a collision course…
“And we have a…Missed! Altering two degrees down. Justin, tell me when. Colonel, I guess the General doesn’t get any of his plane back.”
At that instant, he screamed below the streaking meteor that was the incoming warhead.
Roger had already seen the icon Justin added to his main touch screen. He held a shaking finger over the screen to force the implosion. His entire upper body ached from the bends. Mercifully, he couldn’t feel anything below his waist.
There was nothing more to say. Only one more thing to do. Then he’d be with his family, his Lord, and His God. He was going home. “Absent from the body…at home with the Lord…”
“Now!” Justin shouted. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. “Goodbye, old friend.”
And the comms went dead.
20. FALLOUT
The Secret Service agent received the terse, urgent text with mixed emotions. On the one hand, his country was safe—at least for now—from an extreme makeover akin to Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. Many lives were saved, including several key leaders who he had to admit, he had begun to like and even respect.
On the other hand, so many plans, such detail. All wasted. But Nathan Franks complied. That’s what you do when you work for them. You obey, you’re paid well; you disobey and the consequences…Nathan shuddered at the thought.
“Stand down.”
A simple, short text. Nathan and everyone else who were also prepared to strike did exactly that. They stood down. And this night that was meant to end the United States of America as it had been for over two and a half centuries, became just another Saturday evening.
+ + +
Silence. No telemetry, and with the audio link through Guardian broken, Justin had also lost contact with NORAD.
He folded up his Multiphone and ran back to his living room.
He hardly noticed that Tamika had finished her glass of wine, the hors d'oeuvres on her plate, and left.
With a series of hand movements, he swiped the entertainment system screen away from the football wrap-up program—scores didn’t matter now—and scanned through news channels. Major network channels. Weather channels. Stories of even more tensions with China. The latest sexting scandal from Washington. Continued rising poll numbers for President Garcia, despite, or perhaps because of, his strong conservative leadership, according to the commentator.
The Weather Channel had a comment about the Nor’easter pounding the East Coast from Virginia to the Carolinas. They mentioned an unusually bright flash accompanied much later with what sounded like a prolonged sonic boom. Weather personnel speculated that it might have been an extremely rare occurrence of what they described as exploding ball lightning.
Justin sat in stunned silence.
Roger, you did it. You really did it.
+ + +
“Yes, Mr. President.”
Twenty-four hours. He has an argument with his wife and realizes that short of a miracle, his marriage was history. He walks into the NORAD Command Center and finds that America is under nuclear attack. And now he’s presenting his preliminary assessment to President Juan Garcia—America’s first president of Hispanic descent—and his key staff.
Colonel Draper continued. “To summarize up front, there are thousands of ways this could have been worse, and few ways it could have been any better. What we know so far,” Draper went into his briefing mode as he spoke to the video conference camera:
“First, the maximum yield of a nuclear device depends on a specific ignition sequence. In one design, for example, the precise ignition of a spherical high explosive shell creates a shock wave that implodes a plutonium core and triggers a fusion reaction. Guardian’s EMP triggered an explosion, but it was not optimized. The yield may have been under a hundred kilotons, less than a tenth of what we feared.
“Second, the high-altitude detonation—roughly 90,000 feet—means no ground entered into a fireball to become radioactive fallout. Any radioactive material left from the warhead was vaporized. It was probably negligible and safely dispersed over a wide area by the storm.
“Third, the detonation occurred about 160 nautical miles east-southeast of Charleston, South Carolina. At that distance, altitude, and yield, there was only enough overpressure to rattle some windows.
“Fourth, the heavy Nor’easter covering the region blanketed northern Georgia and the Carolinas with clouds topping out at over 35,000 feet. Otherwise, a high-altitude detonation on a clear night would have blinded thousands, including pilots, drivers…there would have been significant collateral damage. As it was, reports are that it was no worse than a massive lightning flash and no thermal effects at all.”
President Garcia interrupted. “What about EMP from the blast?”
“Sir, I can’t explain this. It’ll probably take a team of physicists with adequate security clearances to figure it out. Best we can tell, the EMP of the explosion somehow followed the ionized trail of Guardian. Rather than the expected omnidirectional spread, it apparently went along a straight line, above the earth and out into space to the east and west. We’ve had no reports of ground level EMP effects. We had one commercial satellite along that line to the east go dark, and one of our hardened GPS satellites to the west rebooted.
“Mr. President, it’s like the first ever nuclear attack on the United States was a non-event.”
+ + +
“It is appointed unto man once to die, and after that the judgment.”
The Bible verse repeated as if on looped playback. Suddenly his entire body convulsed. His eyes flew open.
Impossible!
Roger knew from Scripture that there was no Purgatory. The Apostle Paul wrote that for believers, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.
So… where was he?
Guardian!?
Again: Impossible!
Flat-screen displays blazed aircraft status in full high definition color. The aircraft was flying smooth, level, and subsonic. Outside, the sky appeared to be a strange semi-transparent light gray. He was in clouds but somehow saw through them, even at night. It reminded him of computer images, with “transparency” at eighty percent…
Night? He shook his head—actually, his whole body trembled—and looked back at the displays.
Time? The chronometer readings were gibberish, just random flashing numbers.
We should be vaporized.
Altitude? His radar altimeter flashed numbers between twenty and forty thousand feet, averaging around Flight Level Three Zero.
If the fireball didn’t get us, the blast front should have ripped us apart.
Airspeed? Three hundred.
Even if Guardian survived, the gamma radiation from the NUDET should have already killed me. But…
He took a slow, deep breath.
He held out a hand. The trembling had stopped. His heart beat strong and steady; no AFib.
Course? The autopilot display indicated a faint orange ellipse, a track extending from 100 out to 150 nautical miles from the East Coast. Guardian was flying an elliptical track between Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina. His current heading was down toward Savannah.
She’s in a safe holding pattern, awaiting instructions…just like we programmed her.
Not only did Roger feel better than he had in years, but his joints weren’t hurting. At the lower altitude, the cockpit air pressure was back up near fourteen point seven, he was still b
reathing pure oxygen, and he felt…he slowly shook his head.
I feel great!
Another quick survey assured Roger of adequate fuel for at least another hour for the turbojet engine, and that the ion drive and related systems had shut down. He could only imagine the severity of the buffeting when the ion shield collapsed, and the heat damage to leading edges before the aircraft slowed to subsonic.
What knocked me out? How long?
Something else caught Roger’s attention. His legs were jerking. And…was it his imagination, or were they tingling?
Hmmm?
Roger checked his radio status and frequency. Still set to NORAD.
“NORAD, Guardian. NORAD, this is Guardian. Do you copy? Over.”
Nothing.
After several more attempts, Roger scanned through other common aviation frequencies.
Silence.
Puzzled, he tried to datalink into the DPI network, trying to reverse the link Justin used. Nothing.
He checked his navigation again. Ten Miles? This should be accurate to a few feet! Checking his GPS screen, he saw he had no lock on any GPS satellite. Not a single one. Navigation was old fashioned, based on gyroscopes that hadn’t been calibrated to fine precision due to the hurried airborne launch.
He had longed, ached to be reunited with his family. But the analytic engineer in him was overwhelmed with curiosity. This was a huge mystery, and he was in the data collection mode. What disabled communications while every other onboard system operated at one hundred percent? Except the clock.
With no outside help, he had to carefully consider his options while he still had a few.
Fact: Guardian was ultra-classified and must not simply be crashed at the nearest airport.
The Guardian Collection (End of the Sixth Age Book 2) Page 9
