Covah looks over at Rocky. “Time to see what your ship can do. This first round is compliments of the Ronald Reagan. Sorceress, launch one ICBM, two Tomahawk Block Ills, and two long-range Block IVs at predesignated coordinates Covah Utopia-One.”
ACKNOWLEDGED.
The hair on Rocky’s neck stands on end. “Covah … what are you doing?”
“What should have been done long ago.”
With a reverberating hiss, the 130,000-pound Trident II (D5) missile is forcibly expelled vertically through one of Goliath’s silos, rising within a massive, protective bubble of nitrogen. Gas and warhead ascend at the same rate, the SLBM never getting wet—until the monstrous white missile bursts from the sea.
The Trident’s first-stage motor ignites in a thunderous roar, sending the mammoth missile leaping into the air above a dense white trailing cloud of smoke. With a slight lean to the east, onboard guidance initiates a gravity turn, minimizing aerodynamic torque on the structure. Within minutes, the missile and its lethal payload are traveling in excess of twenty thousand feet per second.
Before the froth along the turbulent surface can dissipate, four smaller missiles—Tomahawks—are ejected from the two torpedo bays located within each of Goliath’s enormous wings. The birds spring from the sea in pairs, the first following the Trident to the east, the second on a northward trajectory.
Gunnar stares at the overhead map, breathlessly watching … and waiting.
North American Aerospace Defense Command NORAD Colorado
3:02 A.M.
NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, is a four-and-a-half-acre subterranean compound buried within Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. Although the complex serves as a unified command center linking every branch of the Armed Forces, the facility’s primary function is to detect missile launches occurring anywhere in the world. To do this, NORAD relies on an early-warning missile detection system originating from 22,300 miles in space.
The Defense Support Program (DSP) is an array of satellites that circle the Earth in geostationary orbits, providing continuous, overlapping coverage of most of the planet. Outfitted with advanced infrared optics, the constellation of two-and-a-half-ton satellites can quickly detect heat signatures of a missile’s boost phase anywhere above the world’s cloud tops.
Major Kady Walker enters the Combined Command Center (CCC) and takes her place at one of the three command posts within the chamber. Four computer monitors are mounted at each post, with large screens lining the forward wall. To her back is a glass partition, separating the gallery from the technicians.
The CCC is the focal point for all incoming data. All missile, air, and space events are monitored twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. As Command Director, Kady must make sure that the proper responses to each warning or intrusion are initiated.
This is Kady’s world—a nerve-wracking existence in a fortified underground city—a daily, unending game of chess where nuclear weapons are the major pieces on the board. NORAD completes eighty thousand space observations daily, tracking eighty-seven hundred objects each year. Over the last ten years, Kady has witnessed no less than a thousand rocket launches. Communication satellites, space probes, spy satellites—the NORAD veteran has seen them all.
What she witnesses this early hour of November 5 will stay with her the rest of her days.
QUICK ALERT! QUICK ALERT! MULTIPLE MISSILE LAUNCHES DETECTED
LAUNCH SITE: MEDITERRANEAN SEA
34.6 degrees. 24 minutes N. Latitude
33.3 degrees. 06 minutes E. Longitude
FIVE [5] Missiles. Four [4] Trajectories.
TRAJECTORY 1: Trident 11 [05] Nuclear Missile
NUMBER OF MISSILES: ONE
TARGET: IRAQ: Baghdad
TIME TO IMPACT: 04 minutes 12 seconds
TRAJECTORY 2: TOMAHAWK BLOCK III TLAM
NUMBER OF MISSILES: ONE
TARGET: IRAQ: Northern Region
TIME TO IMPACT: 04 minutes 39 seconds
TRAJECTORY 3: TOMAHAWK BLOCK III TLAM
NUMBER OF MISSILES: ONE
TARGET: IRAQ: Southern Desert
TIME TO IMPACT: 05 minutes 14 seconds
TRAJECTORY 4: TOMAHAWK BLOCK IV DEEP STRIKE TLAM
NUMBER OF MISSILES: TWO
TARGET:RUSSIA: South Ural Mountains
TIME TO IMPACT: 122 minutes 03 seconds
Training takes over. Kady and her fellow technicians frantically relay information to the National Command Authorities in the United States and Canada via direct phone lines as a crowd gathers in the gallery. The emotional intensity in the chamber is suffocating.
Kady looks up, focusing on the color-coded track of Trajectory 1, her eyes following the missile as it loops over the southern border of Iraq.
“Two minutes! Two minutes!”
Her heart skips a beat as the clock ticks down, the 475-kiloton rocket and its multiple nuclear warheads soaring on its slanted path over the desert, precisely on target.
In the background, she hears the surreal voice of a CNN news anchor informing the public about reports that “a missile may have just been launched in the Mediterranean …”
Twenty seconds—
The chamber grows deathly quiet.
Baghdad, Iraq
The sudden blast of sirens sends tens of thousands of Iraqis fleeing through the congested streets of the city. Clouds of dust and debris rise above the chaos as human walls of flesh push, shove, and tumble in upon themselves in waves. People are crying, screaming, hiding beneath cars. Some gaze at the sky for the last time, while others duck for cover.
Seventy-five hundred feet above Baghdad’s Presidential Palace, the Trident II reaches its target point … and detonates.
A blinding flare—as quick as a camera flashbulb but a million times brighter—ignites the entire sky. A split second later—the crushing unearthly heat of tortured air, as if a monstrous new sun has magically appeared thirty football fields above Baghdad to blow its lethal kiss upon the desert city. In the few seconds before the shock wave hits, every person, every building, every thing in downtown Baghdad is heated to ignition. A second after the shock, the buoyant rise of all that superheated air inhales like a hurricane wind, sucking everything up into its hellish ascent. The burgeoning firestorm feeds the galeforce winds—so hot, so intense, that the city will burn completely.
For those surviving wretches not far enough outside the city limits, the remaining heartbeats of life become an eternity. Thousands who were foolish enough to look at the sky clutch futilely at their faces, screaming in agony as their hair bursts into flames. The initial blast—ungodly bright—has blinded them, literally melting their eyeballs. The heat is soaring so high that they can actually feel their charred skin peeling away from their bones. Blindly, they hurl themselves into the steaming waters of the Tigris River.
Seconds later, a blast wave—an invisible tidal wave of crushing wind and heat—rolls outward from the center of Baghdad at speeds in excess of two thousand miles an hour. This ring of thunder levels the remains of the ancient city of the Arabian Nights and continues expanding outward across the desert landscape, its dust-filled radioactive forward crest driving the sand like an avalanche.
Farther out, radioactive debris and pulverized dust fall back to earth, poisoning those survivors outside the city limits. For these pitiful souls, the nightmarish existence to follow will bring nothing but misery. Scorched skin will become a torturous blanket of festering blisters. Relief, if one can call it that, will take days to arrive as medical personnel will be hesitant to enter the radiation zone. Aid stations will be underequipped and overwhelmed by the sheer number of victims and the extent of their wounds. Badly burned, their organs laced with radioactive particles, the luckiest of these holocaust victims will drift back and forth into a morphine-induced sleep while they await death, their only salvation.