Like all members of the People’s Liberation Army, he was a highly disciplined man, and always mindful of the fact that he had his country’s most valuable military assets under his personal control. The alarm had been raised by one of the silo-guard posts, and his staff switched on the television cameras used for site inspection and surveillance. They were old cameras, and needed lights, which were switched on as well.
What the fuck!” Chavez shouted. ”Turn the lights off!” he ordered over his radio.
It wasn’t demanding. The light standards weren’t very tall, nor were they very far away. Chavez hosed one with his MP-10, and the lights went out, thank you. No other lasted for more than five seconds at any of the silos.
We are under attack,” General Xun said in a quiet and disbelieving voice. ”We are under attack,” he repeated. But he had a drill for this. ”Alert the guard force,” he told one NCO. ”Get me Beijing,” he ordered another.
At Silo #1, Paddy Connolly ran to the pipes that led to the top of the concrete box that marked the top of the silo. To each he stuck a block of Composition B, his explosive of choice. Into each block he inserted a blasting cap. Two men, Eddie Price and Hank Patterson, knelt close by with their weapons ready for a response force that was nowhere to be seen.
“Fire in the hole!” Patterson shouted, running back to the other two. There he skidded down to the ground, sheltered behind the concrete, and twisted the handle on his detonator. The two pipes were blown apart a millisecond later.
“Masks!” he told everyone on the radio... but there was no vapor coming off the fueling pipes. That was good news, wasn’t it?
“Come on!” Eddie Price yelled at him. The three men, guarded now by two others, looked for the metal door into the maintenance entrance for the silo.
“Ed, we’re on the ground, we’re on the ground,” Clark was saying into his satellite phone, fifty yards away. “The barracks are gone, and there’s no opposition on the ground here. Doing our blasting now. Back to you soon. Out.”
Well, shit,” Ed Foley said in his office, but the line was now dead.
What?” It was an hour later in Beijing, and the sun was up. Marshal Luo, having just woken up after not enough sleep following the worst day he’d known since the Cultural Revolution, had a telephone thrust into his hands. ”What is this?” he demanded of the phone.
“This is Major General Xun Qing-Nian at Xuanhua missile base. We are under attack here. There is a force of men on the ground over our heads trying to destroy our missiles. I require instructions!”
“Fight them off!” was the first idea Luo had.
“The defense battalion is dead, they do not respond. Comrade Minister, what do I do?”
“Are your missiles fueled and ready for launch?”
“Yes!”
Luo looked around his bedroom, but there was no one to advise him. His country’s most priceless assets were now about to be ripped from his control. His command wasn’t automatic. He actually thought first, but in the end, it wouldn’t matter how considered his decision was.
“Launch your missiles,” he told the distant general officer.
“Repeat your command,” Luo heard.
“Launch your missiles!” his voice boomed. “Launch your missiles NOW!”
“By your command,” the voice replied.
Fuck,” Sergeant Connolly said. ”This is some bloody door!” The first explosive block had done nothing more than scorch the paint. This time he attached a hollow-charge to the upper and lower hinges and backed off again. ”This one will do it,” he promised as he trailed the wires back.
The crash that followed gave proof to his words. When next they looked in, the door was gone. It had been hurled inward, must have flown into the silo like a bat out of—
—“Bloody hell!” Connolly turned. “Run! RUN!”
Price and Patterson needed no encouragement. They ran for their lives. Connolly caught them reaching for his protective hood as he did so, not stopping until he was over a hundred yards away.
“The bloody missile’s fueled. The door ruptured the upper tank. It’s going to blow!”
“Shit! Team, this is Price, the missiles are fueled, I repeat the missiles are fueled. Get the fucking hell away from the silo!”
The proof of that came from Silo #8, off to Price’s south. The concrete structure that sat atop it surged into the air, and under it was a volcanic blast of fire and smoke. Silo #1, theirs, did the same, a gout of flame going sideways out of the open service door.
The infrared signature was impossible to miss. Over the equator, a DSP satellite focused in on the thermal bloom and cross-loaded the signal to Sunnyvale, California. From there it went to NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, dug into the sub-basement level of Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado.
“Launch! Possible launch at Xuanhua!”
“What’s that?” asked CINC-NORAD.
“We got a bloom, a huge—two huge ones at Xuanhua,” the female captain announced. “Fuck, there’s another one.”
“Okay, Captain, settle down,” the four-star told her. “There’s a special op taking that base down right now. Settle down, girl.”
In the control bunker, men were turning keys. The general in command had never really expected to do this. Sure, it was a possibility, the thing he’d trained his entire career for, but, no, not this. No. Not a chance.
But someone was trying to destroy his command—and he did have his orders, and like the automaton he’d been trained to be, he gave the orders and turned his command key.
The Spetsnaz people were doing well. Four silos were now disabled. One of the Russian teams managed to crack the maintenance door on their first try. This team, General Kirillin’s own, sent its technical genius inside, and he found the missile’s guidance module and blew it apart with gunfire. It would take a week at least to fix this missile, and just to make sure that didn’t happen, he affixed an explosive charge to the stainless steel body and set the timer for fifteen minutes. “Done!” he called.
“Out!” Kirillin ordered. The lieutenant general, now feeling like a new cadet in parachute school, gathered his team and ran to the pickup point. As guilty as any man would be of mission focus, he looked around, surprised by the fire and flame to his north—
—but more surprised to see three silo covers moving. The nearest was only three hundred meters away, and there he saw one of his Spetsnaz troopers walk right to the suddenly open silo and toss something in—then he ran like a rabbit—
—because three seconds later, the hand grenade he’d tossed in exploded, and took the entire missile up with it. The Spetsnaz soldier disappeared in the fireball he’d caused, and would not be seen again—
—but then something worse happened. From exhaust vents set left and right of Silos #5 and #7 came two vertical fountains of solid white-yellow flame, and less than two seconds later appeared the blunt, black shape of a missile’s nosecone.
Fuck,” breathed the Apache pilot coded CROOK Two. He was circling a kilometer away, and without any conscious thought at all, lowered his nose, twisted throttle, and pulled collective to jerk his attack helicopter at the rising missile.
“Got it,” the gunner called. He selected his 20-mm cannon and held down the trigger. The tracers blazed out like laser beams. The first set missed, but the gunner adjusted his lead and walked them into the missile’s upper half—
—the resulting explosion threw CROOK Two out of control, rolling it over on its back. The pilot threw his cyclic to the left, continuing the roll before he stopped it, barely, a quarter of the way through the second one, and then he saw the fireball rising, and the burning missile fuel falling back to the ground, atop Silo #9, and on all the men there who’d disabled that bird.
The last missile cleared its silo before the soldiers there could do much about it. Two tried to shoot at it with their personal weapons, but the flaming exhaust incinerated them in less time than it takes to pull a trigger. Another Apach
e swept in, having seen what CROOK Two had accomplished, but its rounds fell short, so rapidly the CSS-4 climbed into the air.
Oh, fuck,” Clark heard in his radio earpiece. It was Ding’s voice. ”Oh, fuck.”
John got back on his satellite phone.
“Yeah, how’s it going?” Ed Foley asked.
“One got off, one got away, man.”
“What?”
“You heard me. We killed all but one, but that one got off... going north, but leaning east some. Sorry, Ed. We tried.”
It took Foley a few seconds to gather his thoughts and reply. “Thanks, John. I guess I have some things to do here.”
There’s another one,” the captain said.
CINC-NORAD was trying to play this one as cool as he could. Yes, there was a spec-op laid on to take this Chinese missile farm down, and so he expected to see some hot flashes on the screen, and okay, all of them so far had been on the ground.
“That should be all of them,” the general announced.
“Sir, this one’s moving. This one’s a launch.”
“Are you sure?”
“Look, sir, the bloom is moving off the site,” she said urgently. “Valid launch, valid launch—valid threat!” she concluded. “Oh, my God...”
“Oh, shit,” CINC-NORAD said. He took one breath and lifted the Gold Phone. No, first he’d call the NMCC.
The senior watch officer in the National Military Command Center was a Marine one-star named Sullivan. The NORAD phone didn’t ring very often.
“NMCC, Brigadier General Sullivan speaking.”
“This is CINC-NORAD. We have a valid launch, valid threat from Xuanhua missile base in China. I say again, we have a valid launch, valid threat from China. It’s angling east, coming to North America.”
“Fuck,” the Marine observed.
“Tell me about it.”
The procedures were all written down. His first call went to the White House military office.
Ryan was sitting down to dinner with the family. An unusual night, he had nothing scheduled, no speeches to give, and that was good, because reporters always showed up and asked questions, and lately—
“Say that again?” Andrea Price-O’Day said into her sleeve microphone. “What?”
Then another Secret Service agent bashed into the room. “Marching Order!” he proclaimed. It was a code phrase often practiced but never spoken in reality.
“What?” Jack said, half a second before his wife could make the same sound.
“Mr. President, we have to get you and your family out of here,” Andrea said. “The Marines have the helicopters on the way.”
“What’s happening?”
“Sir, NORAD reports an inbound ballistic threat”
“What? China?”
“That’s all I know. Let’s go, right now,” Andrea said forcefully.
“Jack,” Cathy said in alarm.
“Okay, Andrea.” The President turned. “Time to go, honey. Right now.”
“But—what’s happening?”
He got her to her feet first, and walked to the door. The corridor was full of agents. Trenton Kelly was holding Kyle Daniel—the lionesses were nowhere in sight—and the principal agents for all the other kids were there. In a moment, they saw that there was not enough room in the elevator. The Ryan family rode. The agents mainly ran down the wide, white marble steps to the ground level.
“Wait!” another agent called, holding his left hand up. His pistol was in his right hand, and none of them had seen that very often. They halted as commanded—even the President doesn’t often argue with a person holding a gun.
Ryan was thinking as fast as he knew how: “Andrea, where do I go?”
“You go to KNEECAP. Vice President Jackson will join you there. The family goes to Air Force One.”
At Andrews Air Force base, just outside Washington, the pilots of First Heli, the USAF 1st Helicopter Squadron, were sprinting to their Bell Hueys. Each had an assignment, and each knew where his Principal was, because the security detail of each was reporting in constantly. Their job was to collect the cabinet members and spirit them away from Washington to preselected places of supposed safety. Their choppers were off the ground in less than three minutes, scattering off to different preselected pickup points.
Jack, what is this?” It took a lot to make his wife afraid, but this one had done it.
“Honey, we have a report that a ballistic missile is flying toward America, and the safest place for us to be is in the air. So, they’re getting you and the kids to Air Force One. Robby and I will be on KNEECAP. Okay?”
“Okay? Okay? What is this?” “It’s bad, but that’s all I know.”
On the Aleutian island of Shemya, the huge Cobra Dane radar scanned the sky to the north and west. It frequently detected satellites, which mainly fly lower than ICBM warheads, but the computer that analyzed the tracks of everything that came into the system’s view categorized this contact as exactly what it was, too high to be a low-orbit satellite, and too slow to be a launch vehicle.
“What’s the track?” a major asked a sergeant.
“Computer says East Coast of the United States. In a few minutes we’ll know more... for now, somewhere between Buffalo and Atlanta.” That information was relayed automatically to NORAD and the Pentagon.
The entire structure of the United States military went into hyperdrive, one segment at a time, as the information reached it. That included USS Gettysburg, alongside the pier in the Washington Navy Yard.
Captain Blandy was in his in-port cabin when the growler phone went off. “Captain speaking... go to general quarters, Mr. Gibson,” he ordered, far more calmly than he felt.
Throughout the ship, the electronic gonging started, followed by a human voice: “General Quarters—General Quarters—all hands man your battle stations.”
Gregory was in CIC, running another simulation. “What’s that mean?”
Senior Chief Leek shook his head. “Sir, that means something ain’t no simulation no more.” Battle stations alongside the fucking pier? “Okay, people, let’s start lighting it all up!” he ordered his sailors.
The regular presidential helicopter muttered down on the South Lawn, and the Secret Service agent at the door turned and yelled: “COME ON!”
Cathy turned. “Jack, you coming with us?”
“No, Cath, I have to go to KNEECAP. Now, get along. I’ll see you later tonight, okay?” He gave her a kiss, and all the kids got a hug, except for Kyle, whom the President took from Kelley’s arms for a quick hold before giving him back. “Take care of him,” he told the agent.
“Yes, sir. Good luck.” Ryan watched his family run up the steps into the chopper, and the Sikorsky lurched off before they could have had a chance to sit and strap down.
Then another Marine helicopter appeared, this one with Colonel Dan Malloy at the controls. This one was a VH-60, whose doors slid open. Ryan walked quickly to it, with Andrea Price-O’Day at his side. They sat and strapped down before it lumbered back into the air.
“What about everybody else?” Ryan asked.
“There’s a shelter under the East Wing for some...” she said. Then her voice trailed off and she shrugged.
“Oh, shit, what about everybody else?” Ryan demanded.
“Sir, I have to look after you.”
“But—what—”
Then Special Agent Price-O’Day started retching. Ryan saw and pulled out a barf bag, one with a very nice Presidential logo printed on it, and handed it to her. They were over the Mall now, just passing the George Washington Monument. Off to the right was southwest Washington, filled with the working- and middle-class homes of regular people who drove cabs or cleaned up offices, tens of thousands of them... there were people visible in the Mall, on the grass, just enjoying a walk in the falling darkness, just being people...
And you just left behind a hundred or so. Maybe twenty will fit in the shelter under the East Wing... what about the rest, the ones
who make your bed and fold your socks and shine your shoes and serve dinner and pick up after the kids—what about them, Jack? a small voice asked. Who flies them off to safety?
He turned his head to see the Washington Monument, and beyond that the reflecting pool and the Lincoln Memorial. He was in the same line as those men, in the city named for one, and saved in time of war by another... and he was running away from danger... the Capitol Building, home of the Congress. The light was on atop the dome. Congress was in session, doing the country’s work, or trying to, as they did... but he was running away... eastern Washington, mainly black, working-class people who did the menial jobs for the most part, and had hopes to send their kids to college so that they could make out a little better than their parents had... eating their dinner, watching TV, maybe going out to a movie tonight or just sitting on their porches and shooting the bull with their neighbors—
—Ryan’s head turned again, and he saw the two gray shapes at the Navy Yard, one familiar, one not, because Tony Bretano had—
Ryan flipped the belt buckle in his lap and lurched forward, knocking into the Marine sergeant in the jump seat. Colonel Malloy was in the right-front seat, doing his job, flying the chopper. Ryan grabbed his left shoulder. The head came around.