The War Cloud Page 3

  Chairman Sherman and the rest of the Joint Chiefs stood on a platform perched above the battle staff. On speaker was the President.

  “MrPresident,” the Chairman said, “we can confirm that the uranium traces found near Union Station came from an old Soviet-era SS-20 nuclear missile, the last of which was allegedly eliminated under the INF Treaty at the Kapustin Yar Missile Test Complex on May 12, l991. The Russian president claims the warheads must have been stolen around the same time as those 100 suitcase nukes we’ve been tracking the past 20 years. The difference is this warhead is more powerful, with a yield of 150 KIT.”

  “Meaning what?” the president demanded on speaker. “Give me a damage projection so we can prep out-of-area first-responders to mobilize now in case this thing really goes off.”

  Sherman hated thinking about the unthinkable, especially since he probably wasn’t going to be around to assess the accuracy of his estimate. But the president was right about mobilizing out-of-area FEMA help, even if this only shaved a minute off their response time.

  “Within the first second of detonation, Mr. President, the shock wave will destroy even our most heavily reinforced steel and concrete buildings within a half-mile radius,” Sherman reported from the graphics on screen. “These buildings will include the Pentagon. Nothing inside this ring will be recognizable.”

  There was a pause on the president’s end of the line, and then, “Casualites?”

  Sherman said, “The thermal pulse will instantly kill those in the direct line of sight of the blast. Those indoors will be shielded from the thermal effect but die as buildings collapse. The real issue will be the fireball that erupts and wind shifts so far as casualties are concerned. Too early to talk hard numbers. But we caught a break with the snow keeping thousands of federal employees at home today. Our best guess is less than 4,000. Not nearly as bad as it might be, but more than 9/11. It’s the symbolism that we’ll ultimately have to deal with. We’re preparing a military response.”

  “Response to whom?” Rhinehart demanded. “The Russians? The Chinese? We don’t even know whom we’re fighting. If we’re fighting.”

  Sherman said, “Whoever it is gave us no time to negotiate.”

  “Agreed,” said Rhinehart. “So why warn us at all?”

  “Good question, sir.” Sherman looked up at a clock — one of three — on a nearby wall. “A five-minute warning means the nuke would go off at 11:49 a.m.,” he said, thinking out loud for his staffers. “Why not noon exactly?”

  “The blue line, General!” An aide ran up waving a Metro schedule. “The Metro stops at the Pentagon subway platform at 11:49. The nuke is coming in on the train.”

  Sherman grabbed the card and stared at it. There it was. 11:49 a.m. The Pentagon. Sherman checked the clock on the wall. 11:48. His stomach sank. Christ Almighty, it just felt right.

  “The bastards are using D.C.’s own transportation system to deliver their destruction — just like the jets on 9/11 and the anthrax mail on Capitol Hill,” Sherman said, and started barking new orders. “Tell Metro to stop all trains, and get a strike team down there now!”

  Sherman turned back to the secure speaker phone to the White House bunker. “Mr. President, we may have made a grave error. The nuke may not have been off-loaded from a Metro train; it may have been on-loaded. We believe that the Pentagon is the primary target, and it will be an underground detonation. That will se us wind shift factoring, but the Metro tunnels will direct the fallout to all nearby stops, including the U.S. Capitol.”

  He hung up as a quiet sort of pandemonium filled the emergency briefing chamber during the next minute. No shouting. No shoving. Just an urgent, desperate scramble at the consoles. Nobody was heading for the exits.

  “General!” His aide tried to pull him away. “You should get to the bunker!”

  “If there’s a nuke on that train,” said Sherman, “those bunker walls might as well be wax paper.”

  “What else can we do, sir?”

  Sherman held up one finger and picked up the phone. “Get me the National Archives.”

  9

  1148 Hours

  National Archives

  More than 200 students from the Presidential Classroom for Young Americans crowded beneath the rotunda around the gold display showcasing the U.S. Constitution. Their teacher read from the archives literature.

  “Every night at closing time the documents are lowered into a fifty-ton vault designed to protect them from fire, shock, heat, water and nuclear explosion,” Mrs. Chan recited. “The vault was dedicated in 1952 by President Harry Truman, who called it ‘as safe from destruction as anything that the wit of modern man can devise.’”

  Suddenly, from down the corridor came a shout.

  “Away from the glass!”

  Sergeant Wanda Randolph, head of the Capitol Police’s special reconn and tactics or RATS squad that patrolled the underground tunnels the U.S. Capitol Complex, sprinted across the rotunda’s marble floor, waving her 50 caliber sniper rifle at the screaming, fleeing kids.

  She tried to radio her man at the Pentagon as she ran, “Omar!”

  “We’re on it, boss,” Omar’s voice crackled in her earpiece. “Get yourself some cover!”

  “I got a hole to crawl into,” she said. “Just one more thing.”

  Using whatever speed was left from her days as a track star at Howard University, Randolph ran the race of her life toward the display, knocking over two kids.

  “Hey!” Mrs. Chan yelled.

  Randolph hurdled three kids crouched in front of the display in one jump. She unlocked a switch and breathlessly watched the display case sink into the floor and drop hundreds of feet down its shaft.

  10

  1148 Hours

  Andrews AFB, Maryland

  Colonel Kozlowski and Captain Linda Li jogged across the tarmac to the awaiting Advanced Airborne Command Post. Unlike the tamer, civilian Air Force One, the militarized E-4B jumbo jet, code-named Nightwatch, was built to soar over mushroom clouds.

  “I was worried we were going to have to take off without you, sir,” Li said.

  “You saved my lifeKozlowski told his diminutive communications officer. “Again.”

  Li smiled. “Any time, sir.”

  Kozlowski had been staring into the barrel of his gun back at the hotel when the call from Li came in. Out of habit he picked up and heard her clear, chipper voice letting him know there had been a roster change. It seemed that General Marshall was logging a shift aboard Looking Glass that morning, and would the colonel mind reporting to base as a Suburban was waiting for him at the hotel entrance. “Unless you have something better to do, sir,” she added.

  Kozlowski had looked down at his gun again. He suspected that Brad Marshall was not why she really called. She was always looking out for him, even though he knew she didn’t approve of his off-duty life. Hell, how did she even know he was at the Hay-Adams? He swore she was psychic. She called it the spiritual gift of discernment. But she had aroused his curiosity. Brad Marshall was never one to languish in obscurity, even for eight hours. So Kozlowski had switched on his gun’s safety and told her he’d be right down.

  Now he found that he had arrived in the middle of a full-blown Alert One nuclear situation.

  “Where’s the President?”

  “No time, sir,” Li said.

  Of course not, thought Kozlowski. He himself would never have made it. God bless Captain Li.

  The whine of the engines was deafening now as they approached the towering, 231-foot-long plane.

  Li shouted, “We have orders to pick up the Secretary of Defense at Edwards AFB.”

  Kozlowski nodded as they ran up the hydraulic steps into the belly of the fuselage. They made their way through a long communications section manned by six Air Force officers and then entered the battle staff compartment. Fifteen more officers, conducting their pre-flight checks, saluted.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here!” Kozlowski shouted and strap
ped himself into a jump seat.

  Li plunked down next to him, breathless. The GE 80-series engines wound up into a deep-throated roar and the jumbo jet started moving down the runway.

  Kozlowski leaned back against his seat as the plane left the ground. He never felt more alive in his life.

  11

  1148 Hours

  The White House

  President Rhinehart paced the floor in the bunker while his national security adviser gave him the latest.

  “Marshall is on Looking Glass, Mr. President.”

  Rhinehart nodded. Whatever political challenges the general had presented him, he was a genuine military asset. “And my doomsday plane?”

  “Nightwatch just took off from Andrews,” Jack Natori said.

  “Send Nightwatch to California to pick up Bald Eagle at Edwards,” said Rhinehart.

  At that moment the tumblers in the vault door began to click-clack. Rhinehart and company looked at each other in surprise.

  Rhinehart said, “I thought everybeen accounted for.”

  “Everybody has been accounted for, Mr. President,” said chief of staff Stan Black.

  “Then who’s that?” Rhinehart demanded.

  All eyes turned toward the vault door as it slowly opened to reveal the bald, bullet-headed Secretary of Defense, Ryan O’Donnell.

  “What have I missed?” O’Donnell asked in response to the incredulous stares.

  Rhinehart gasped, “You’re supposed to be in California!”

  “My kid’s in the hospital with the flu,” the Secretary of Defense explained. “I was going to catch a later flight. Central Locator said we’re covered.”

  There was no response, only horrified expressions around the bunker.

  O’Donnell stared back blankly. “What?!”

  12

  1149 Hours

  Metro Station

  The Pentagon

  The Blue Line Metro shot down the tunnel, packed with suits and uniforms, all oblivious to the flashing red light behind the front axle of the chassis as the train screeched along the rails.

  Inside the cars, faces were buried behind the pages of the Washington Post when the intercom crackled and the conductor’s voice announced:

  “Next stop, the Pentagon.”

  The caution lights lining the edge of the platform ahead began to blink. As the commuters began to queue up, a beam of light from the Metro stabbed out of the tunnel.

  Six Special Forces troops burst onto the platform and fanned out, parting the sea of commuters into waves of panic and confusion. Their commanding officer, Lt. Matt Omar, was once an Azerbaijani national in Baku, trained by the CIA and Oklahoma National Guard to fight terrorists, before Wanda Randolph of the U.S. Capitol Police brought him stateside and helped him become an American citizen. She had argued that anyone already putting his life on the line for America deserved it.

  “Down there!” shouted Omar.

  On the track, attached to the rail’s tie-plate, was a small black box on which an even smaller red light was blinking. The security cameras had missed it.

  Omar dove for the device even as the Metro shot out of the tunnel and into the station. He desperately tried to disengage the signal box. He looked up helplessly at his partners a second before the Metro, brakes squealing, mowed him down, tripping the signal box and detonating the nuclear warhead bolted to the train.

  Suddenly there was a blinding white flash.

  13

  1149 Hours

  Northern Command

  Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado

  The deer raised her head from the fresh powder of snow and stood deathly still while the pine trees, dripping white, trembled ever so slightly. Then she scrambled away over a slope past the “Danger! Restricted Area” sign and out of view of the security c

  Hundreds of feet beneath the earth, behind a giant vault-like door of titanium cut out of the mountain, it was snowing inside too, on the monitors of the command center of the U.S. Northern Command.

  USAF Maj. Gen. Norman Block, squat and brash, stared at two giant screens where his bosses used to be. “What the hell happened?”

  “IONDS sensors detect a nuclear detonation within the U.S., sir,” his senior controller reported. “It’s Washington.”

  Block looked at the reconfiguring screens. The left screen displayed TOT MISL 1 — total number of missiles launched. The right screen displayed TTG +00.00.35 — time to go before detonation. It was the plus sign that made Block’s blood jump.

  “God Almighty,” he said.

  What happened next went strictly according to plan as America’s so-called Post Attack Command Control System swung into action.

  Block picked up the gold phone of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Alerting Network (JSCAN) from the console in front of him.

  “Put me through to General Carver at SAC.”

  14

  1149 Hours

  Strategic Command

  Omaha, Nebraska

  Inside the underground command center of the Strategic Command, the gold JSCAN telephone started beeping in SC Commander Duane Carver’s office. Carver, a lean, low-key man, picked up and heard the news from Block.

  “Yes, sir,” he replied and stepped out onto his balcony overlooking a floor half the size of a football field where SAC officers manned their consoles deep beneath Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha. Display screens told them which bombers were in the air, which were sitting on runways and how long their engines had been running. “I’m on it.”

  Carver hung up and picked up the red telephone to the Primary Alerting System. As soon as he did, an alarm warbled and a rotating red beacon flashed.

  On the surface, sirens blared as blue trucks rushed pilots to their awaiting bombers and tankers already lined up for a quick escape.

  “Alert crews to your stations,” blared the senior controller’s voice over the base speakers. “This is not a drill. Repeat. This is not a drill.”

  On the runways, B-2, B-52 and FB-11 bombers and their supporting KC-135 tankers began to blast off in Minimum Interval Take Offs (MITOs), one after another with less than twelve seconds between them, collectively armed with enough nuclear warheads to destroy the world’s 25 largest cities.

  15

  1149 Hours

  Looking Glass

  The Looking Glass plane had reached its 30,000-foot cruising altitude among the thunderclouds when Marshall heard the ominous click-clack of an Emergency Action Message or “go code” print out in the battle staff compartment. Wilson ripped it out and walked it over to him.

  “Northern Command confirms a first strike on U.S. soililson said in a trained monotone stripped of all emotion. “The ANMCC says we’ve lost the Pentagon, White House and most of the nation’s elected leadership.”

  Marshall read the EAM, his mind racing. Without a star in charge and only a junior grade skeleton staff, the Alternate National Military Command Center at Raven Rock was about as valuable now as a call center in Bangalore, India. That left General Duane Carver at Strategic Command, General Norm Block at Northern Command, and himself aboard Looking Glass as the essential National Command Authority to run the country.

  They would be contacting him any second now, Marshall thought, when

  Major Tom’s voice came on the speaker from the communications compartment.

  “Sir, I’ve got Generals Carver and Block for you in the conference center.”

  “I want a launch poll, Major Tom,” he told her as he rose to his feet. “I want to know what assets got off the ground, what assets are on the ground and which ones are in the ground. And I want it waiting for me when I get there in thirty seconds.”

  Marshall found the two faces of his last remaining superiors staring from the big screen when he sat down in the conference center: Block, the squat cigar-chomping warrior from the old schools, and Carver, the tall, wiry egghead from the new. Laurel and Hardy in uniform, except Block was white and Carver was black.

  “Damage reports, Mar
shall?”

  “Early reports indicate a ground burst,” Marshall said, glancing down at the screen beneath the surface of the table. “One hundred fifty KT. Blast radius three miles. Casualties estimated at about four thousand. Looks like snow kept most nonessential federal workers at home.”

  “So we caught a break,” Block said. “That puppy’s bark was worse than its bite.”

  “I suppose that’s one way to look at it,” General Carver said dully. “Marshall, the launch poll.”

  Marshall glanced down again. The poll had just popped up. It was everything they already knew, but protocol demanded acknowledgment.

  “We’ve lost the Commander-in-Chief at the White House and the Joint Chiefs at the National Military Center at the Pentagon. But we still have command posts at Northern Command, Strategic Command and the ANMCC at Raven Rock,” Marshall reported. “We are the National Command Authority now.”

  Block looked relieved on screen. “So the actual damage to our ability to fight this war is minimal.”

  “I suppose so, sir,” Marshall said. “General Block, you now have operational launch control of U.S. ICBMs in the ground. I’m your back-up here in the Looking Glass air command. General Carver?”

  “All my birds are in the air and my sharks are in the water,” he said, referring to U.S. bombers and submarines armed with nuclear warheads. “All awaiting orders, soon as we know whom to strike.”

  “I put my chips on yellow,” said Block. “I bet it’s General Zhang and the chinks.”

  Marshall could see the slight grimace on Carver’s face at Block’s derogatory remark. But Carver was too smart to be politically correct in a state of war, and Marshall had never seen Carver lose his cool. “From this moment on, everything goes strictly accordour plan per our Post Attack Command Control System,” Carver ordered. “Hell, Marshall, you wrote it. What’s next?”