The War Cloud (4 page)

“Defender, Mom. The Great American Defender.”

“If that’s what you call lying to Congress about secretly reviving the Star Wars anti-ballistic missile system.”

“At least someone is concerned about my welfare,” Jennifer said.

Sachs said nothing. Marshall’s “America First” views no doubt pressured the White House into firing her. He was a dangerous man politically because he was so personally charming. Sachs wasn’t surprised at her daughter’s blatant hero worship. But she was disappointed. She hoped Jennifer was only trying to get a rise out of her.

Jennifer reached around her neck and removed her school computer flashdrive and handed it to her. “I just finished a class report on him. Check him out. He’s a total stud, and he’s going to be the next president. Ms. Cooper my big lib Constitution teacher can’t handle it, and that’s why she failed me.”

Sachs took the USB drive and sighed. It was shaped like an action figure—”Fembot Fiona”—from Jennifer’s favorite hyper-violent and ultra-realistic videogame, the War Cloud. She knew her daughter played it to be cool with the boys on “group hangouts,” because she didn’t let Jennifer go on dates and because kids don’t go out to the movies anymore. Fembot Fiona’s head came off to reveal the USB plug-in.

Sachs said, “What are you, my eHarmony.com matchmaking service?”

“It doesn’t take a village to raise a daughter. Just a mom and dad.”

“Right,” Sachs said and put it around her neck to show Jennifer she valued anything her daughter had done. “Me and Brad Marshall. I can picture it now. The Second American Civil War.”

They turned the corner, and the noise of the rowdy assembly grew louder. Jennifer halted outside the gymnasium, packed with students. Her peers. Her social life.

“Just don’t embarrass me.”

“I’ll try my best, sweetie.”

Sachs watched Jennifer bravely walk inside first and was about to follow when the government-issued BlackBerry in her purse vibrated with its distinctive “Death March” tone.

Dang, she thought, feeling as if she had been caught by a parole officer. Determined to silence it, she reached into her purse to pull out her phone. It was probably the President, ready to blow a purple vein in his red neck as he screamed at her for standing him up.

Sure enough, the voice on the other end seemed to confirm it. “White House. Please hold.”

Here it comes,
Sachs sighed. All that was missing was a cigarette and blindfold. “Yes?”

The cold, impersonal voice on the other end said, “This is the White House signals operator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. I have an emergency message for Secretary Sachs.”

“Speaking,” said Sachs.

The FEMA operator said, “Please authenticate.”

“Look,” said Sachs, her body temperature heating up, “if the President wants to fire me, he can tell me himself.”

“Authenticate.”

“Oh, please,” she said. “Hold on.”

She rummaged through her purse and fished out an authentication card for the correct response.

“I authenticate,” said Sachs, reading the card. “Code-name: GREEN DOVE. Password: JENNIFER.”

“Where are you?” asked the FEMA operator.

“The Westchester Middle School in Bedford, New York,” Sachs replied. As if they didn’t know from her phone’s GPS signal.

“An alert warning has been declared,” the FEMA operator said. “Repeat. An alert warning has been declared. Please acknowledge.”

“Sure, I acknowledge,” said Sachs, hanging up. She turned off the ringer, plopped the BlackBerry into her purse, and walked into the gymnasium of students.

I
nside the emergency conference room of the National Military Command Center, battle staff officers seated around a huge T-shaped table concentrated on their built-in consoles linking them to American forces worldwide. Six huge color display screens flashed world maps, charts, satellite overheads and troop concentrations.

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.”

M
ore 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.

C
olonel 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 strapped 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.

P
resident 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?!”

T
he 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: