The Seventh Angel (54 page)

Gamma rays, neutrons, and x-rays shot out from the center of the chain reaction, bombarding everything in the area with lethal ionizing radiation.

Less than a second behind the thermal front came the shock wave, lashing out with the explosive force of 440 million pounds of TNT. Anything not already incinerated by the firestorm was ripped apart, or pulverized by the monstrous overpressure of the mechanical wave front.

Again the Naval Station and the surrounding cities were hammered by a destructive force that nothing and no one could withstand. Miles upon miles of buildings were crushed into powder or torn into minute fragments. Vehicles fluttered through the air like leaves in a hurricane. Roofs were peeled away; walls imploded; steel melted; stone shattered; and concrete crumbled. Airplanes and helicopters were swatted out of the air. Telephone poles, mailboxes, guardrails, fence posts, bodies, dirt, and broken window glass all became part of the roaring maelstrom of debris.

At two-thirty in the morning, the manning level of the naval base was at its low point. Slightly less than a thousand civilians and military personnel were on the base when the bomb exploded. Not one of them survived.

Eighty-percent of the residents of Pearl City, nearly 30,000 people, were dead or dying within five seconds of the blast. The adjoining towns of Waipahu and ‘Aiea were burned to cinders and smashed flat, killing another 40,000 people within seconds.

The hypocenter of the explosion occurred over the harbor itself. Thousands of tons of water were flash-vaporized, forming steam and radioactive water droplets that recondensed and drizzled from the sky like poison rain.

The rapid formation of super-heated low-density gases at low altitude created a Rayleigh-Taylor instability. An enormous volume of hot gas rose rapidly, causing turbulent vortices to curl downward along the outer perimeter of the rising column. Fire, smoke, dirt, debris, and water vapor were drawn upward by the same principle of physics that causes hot air to rise up a chimney.

The column of gas and debris became the stem of the infamous cloud formation. It continued to rise until it reached an altitude where the surrounding atmospheric pressure became lower than the pressure inside the column. The gases ballooned outward, forming a bulbous cap at the top of the column.

For the third time in the history of the species, the mushroom cloud rose above the cities of man.

WHITE HOUSE

PRESIDENTIAL EMERGENCY OPERATIONS CENTER

WASHINGTON, DC

THURSDAY; 07 MARCH

9:38 AM EST

“
The casualty figures are coming in now, sir,” the Secretary of Homeland Security said. Becka Solomon looked much older than her thirty-nine years. She was immaculately dressed, as always, but her face was haggard and the circles under her eyes were deep. Hers was a tough job during the most peaceful of times. It was a nightmare now.

Her political career wouldn’t survive this, President Chandler knew. And there was no justice in that. She was doing a good job of coping with the emergencies that had been tossed into her lap, and her advanced planning had been excellent. She was intelligent, forward-thinking, and genuinely dedicated. She was also not afraid to admit her mistakes, which was a rarity in political figures of any stripe.

Of course, the critics would ignore all of that. When the witch hunt started, if it hadn’t started already, the political opposition would scream that she hadn’t been prepared for Pearl Harbor, or the panic on the West Coast. As though
anyone
could have foreseen events that far outside the scope of human experience.

The president’s eyes were drawn to the wall-sized geographic display screen. It was blank now. No curving red trajectory lines. No incoming nuclear missiles. No escalation to doomsday. And yet, the damage had been quite awful enough.

He nodded. “How bad is it?”

“
It’s pretty bad, Mr. President,” Secretary Solomon said. “The initial estimate is about 70,000 dead, about 20,000 injured, and an unknown number of cases of radiation exposure. We’re working with FEMA and the National Weather Service to calculate fallout footprints. We’ll be issuing radiation warnings in the affected areas, and we’ll need to initiate quarantine protocols. That will help us save some lives, but it’s still going to be ugly. If we handle everything properly, we’ll see something like 140,000 more deaths over the next five years from leukemia, cancer, and various long term side effects of radiation. If we mismanage the casualty response and cleanup, it’ll be a lot worse than that.”

Becka Solomon sighed. “The hospitals are overwhelmed, of course. The Secretary of the Navy is calling in the hospital ships USNS
Mercy
and USNS
Comfort
. The
Mercy
is fairly close; she’ll be on station in a couple of days. The
Comfort
is in the Caribbean so she’ll take several more days. In the meantime, the Coast Guard is …”

Her voice trailed away as she apparently realized that she didn’t have the president’s attention.

He was staring at the blank screen again.

“
You’ve got a full Homeland Security briefing scheduled at one o’clock, Mr. President. We can go over the rest of this then. I just wanted to get you the early casualty figures.”

The president nodded. “Thank you, Becka.”

He was still looking at the screen when she left the room, but that wasn’t what was on his mind. He was thinking about the Single Integrated Operational Plan again.

Like it or not, he was going to have to order a retaliatory nuclear strike against Kamchatka. There really wasn’t any other option. America’s allies and enemies were both watching carefully, waiting for the U.S. response. If he allowed a foreign leader to nuke an American city and didn’t retaliate, the credibility of the nation’s nuclear deterrence would evaporate. He might as well declare open season. Every nutcase on the planet would decide that America was too weak or too frightened to defend herself.

That could not be allowed to happen. He had to stop the next punch
before
it was thrown. And that meant sending an unambiguous message to the enemies of the United States that America could not be attacked with impunity.

He
had
to answer Zhukov’s attacks with a nuclear response. But he had absolutely no desire to actually do it. Owning the keys to the nuclear arsenal was not the same as wanting to use them.

And he wasn’t entirely sure that
could
he use them, without triggering another nuclear conflict. Kamchatka was a Russian province, after all. Now that Zhukov’s missile submarine had been eliminated, would the Russian government tolerate a retaliatory strike from the United States? Could he expect them to sit on their hands, while America launched nuclear missiles at targets on Russian soil?

The answer to those very questions walked in the door, in the guise of Gregory Brenthoven. The national security advisor nodded as he pulled out a chair and sat down. “Good morning, Mr. President.”

The president stared at him without speaking.

“
Okay, poor choice of words,” Brenthoven said. “It is most definitely
not
a good morning. But I have a piece of news that you might find useful, in light of your current dilemma.”

The president turned his gaze back toward the blank display screen. “What have you got, Greg?”

Brenthoven laid a black diplomatic pouch on the table. “I’ve just finished up a meeting with Ambassador Kolesnik. He hand-delivered a very interesting proposal from President Turgenev. It’s counter-signed by Prime Minister Primakov, and a solid majority of the Russian Federal Assembly.”

“
What are our Russian friends proposing?” the president asked.

Brenthoven leaned back and made a steeple of his fingers. “They suggest that the United States and the Russian Federation carry out joint retaliatory strikes against Kamchatka. They recommend that we act in concert, and that we hit Kamchatka
hard
.”

President Chandler looked around. “What? I think you must have misunderstood…”

Brenthoven shook his head. “No, sir. There’s no misunderstanding. Ambassador Kolesnik was extremely direct. The Russians want to divide the target list. They nuke Petropavlosk and the surrounding volcanoes. We hit Yelizovo and as many of the local geographic features as we want.”

The national security advisor raised an eyebrow. “That last part is only to give us an even bite of the candy bar. The Russians want to go after the volcanic peaks surrounding Petro, because that’s where they think Zhukov is hiding. They’re offering us a chance to nuke a few volcanoes too, so we won’t feel like we’re getting left out of the party.”

“
That’s crazy,” the president said. “Why on earth would they agree to such a plan?”

“
It’s not all that crazy, sir,” Brenthoven said. “From the Russian perspective, it solves three different problems at one stroke.”

“
How is that?”

“
Well, sir …
First
, it allows them to demonstrate to us, to the world, and to their own people that they absolutely are
not
afraid to play hardball with any would-be republics who try to break away and take part of the Russian arsenal with them. A demonstration this powerful will go a long way towards keeping some of their more troublesome territories in line. Especially places like Chechnya, and Ingushetia.
Second
, this plan allows the Russians to save face. They
know
we’re going to retaliate against Kamchatka. If they just sit back and take a punch in the face from another nuclear superpower, they look weak and foolish. On the other hand, if they line up shoulder-to-shoulder with the U.S. and we
both
retaliate, they get to play the part of the avenging hero.”

The president nodded. “I can see some logic in that. What’s their third reason?”

Brenthoven half-smiled. “We knocked a lot of their warheads out of the sky, Mr. President. We didn’t intercept them all, but we got
most
of them. From the Russian point of view, that casts serious doubt on the credibility of their nuclear arsenal. This plan gives them the chance to demonstrate the power of the Russian nuclear forces in a way that leaves no room for doubt. It’s sort of a public renewal of their ticket to the Nuclear Superpower Club.”

The president frowned. His advisor’s words were flippant, but the underlying idea seemed to have some merit. The Russian attack plan wasn’t pleasant or humanitarian, by any stretch of the imagination. But it might actually do the nasty job that needed doing.

“
I think Russians division of targets is pretty shrewd,” Brenthoven said.

“
How so?”

“
They know we have a national aversion to killing civilian populace, so they’re offering us Yelizovo as a primary target. It has a population of about 42,000 people.
Their
primary target, Petropavlovsk, is closer to 200,000 people. This plan gives us a significant enough target to demonstrate that we’re not afraid to retaliate, while allowing us to reduce civilian casualties by about seventy-five percent.”

“
That’s a good point,” the president said. “But 42,000 is still a
lot
of people.”

“
You’re right, sir,” Brenthoven said. “It
is
a lot of people. But Zhukov nuked about twice as many of our people at Pearl Harbor.”

He spoke more softly. “No matter how we do this, it’s going to be hideous, Mr. President. But compared to what’s been done to our citizens, this response is almost merciful. And I suspect that it’s just about the minimum retaliation we can get away with, and still salvage the credibility of our nuclear deterrence.”

“
What about radiation?” the president asked. “The prevailing winds are from West-to-East. Are we going to have a fallout cloud over Alaska, Washington, and Oregon?”

“
The western states will get some residual radiation, sir. But not as much as you might think. The Pentagon has run fallout projections for just about every conceivable strike scenario. The results are in Appendix G of the SIOP. If we hit Yelizovo, the major fallout footprint will extend about seventy miles downwind from the blast. After that, radiation levels will taper off dramatically.”

“
How
dramatically?”

“
Five hundred miles east of the blast, the contamination level won’t be much higher than the normal background radiation we experience every day. Most of it will blow out to sea, where it will be absorbed and diluted by the ocean.”

“
Which isn’t going to do the environment any good,” the president said.

“
No, sir, it won’t,” Brenthoven said. “But it’s been done before. Back before the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Russians tested a lot of nuclear weapons in the Pacific ocean, and so did we. If we attack Yelizovo, the environmental impact shouldn’t be any worse than the old tests at Bikini Atoll, or Johnson Island, or Enewetak.”

“
That’s not particularly comforting,” the president said. “We still don’t know the long-term environmental impact of Bikini, or any of those other tests. We haven’t even figured out how to accurately measure the damage they’ve caused to the ocean eco-systems.”

“
That’s true, Mr. President,” the national security advisor said.