"Havoc, this is Eightball," the radio crackled. "We're coming up on the target now."
"Copy, Eightball," Porter said. He waited a few seconds to see if any last-minute countermands came in from the National Command Authority. Porter didn't much care if they flattened all of Manhattan with nukes or with conventional munitions. It was their job to kill the enemy, and he was fully prepared to drop every last bomb in his plane, return to base, load her up, and do it all over again. He did know, however, that the civilians who gave him his orders could be fickle and that there was every chance that having flown all the way here, they might just turn around without shooting their wad. Like that time he'd been sent out to scare off a convoy of illegal refugee ships bound from India to California. At the last minute, the mission was scrubbed and the refugees were instead met by officials from the Immigration Service.
"Eightball, this is Havoc," Porter said. "Stand by." "Strike Force One is over the target, Mister President," Colonel Ralls reported. "Orders?"
Kipper could see the satellite track on the main screen in the operation center, a series of green symbols with attached alphanumerics over a wireframe map of Manhattan. Cloud cover obscured keyhole imaging from orbit, but several Predators and one of the Global Hawks were down below the cover with their eyes on midtown. Bursts of pale green and gray light flared on the screen, and flickers of tracer fire zipped back and forth at odd angles between clusters of individuals all over that part of Manhattan. He wondered how the military sorted any of this chaos out.
In his mind he had drawn a line around the lower end of the island, from the remains of the Flatiron Building down to Castle Clinton, and decided that was the part of old New York that he needed. Pretty much the same amount of land the Dutch originally bargained for when New Amsterdam was born. From Central Park North, a huge wedge of land to which only display was devoted, there was silence and stillness. But from about Times Square south, block after block was alight with fire and thunder. Dozens of screens displayed the inferno, but on the main window wall dominating the center of the room, eight linked displays were all focused on a few blocks around Rockefeller Center.
"Shouldn't the bombing already be in progress?" Culver asked.
"Very soon," Ralls said uncertainly. "Unless there's a last-minute change in orders."
Kipper shook his head. "Not this time. Can you patch me through to the commander of that wing, or flight, or whatever you call it?"
Ralls nodded. "We can, sir. If you'll wait one second." "Strike Force One, stand by for a message from the National Command Authority," the radio crackled.
"Ah, shit," said Porter. "Here we go." He requested authentication and got it. "Havoc copies. All Strike Force One elements, hold for instructions."
"They're calling it off," Chaplin said. "Waste of bombs, anyway."
"Least we got a steak dinner out of the flight," Hernandez said.
"Havoc, this is Architect. Do you copy?"
"Architect?" Chaplin asked. "Who the fuck would that be?"
Porter shook his head and keyed his mike. "Architect, this is Havoc. I read you five by five, Mister President. Go with your traffic."
He swapped a what-the-fuck look with his navigator.
"I won't take long, Colonel. I simply wanted to wish you good luck and good hunting. I also want you to understand… I want everyone in your flight to understand that today's orders are for you to carry out, but the responsibility for what you're about to do is mine and mine alone… Uh, over. Is that what I say. Over?"
"Yes, Mister President." Havoc grinned. "And thank you, sir. I will forward your message to the rest of the wing. Over."
"Thank you, Colonel. Go do it. Kipper over and out."
Porter shook his head as KC severed the comm link.
"What kind of a call sign is Architect, anyway?" Chaplin asked.
"Secret Service," Porter said. "That was the president of the United States, and the mission is on. Havoc to Eightball, do you copy? Over."
"Eightball copies. Over."
"Execute when ready, Eightball. Follow us in. Over."
"Eightball acknowledges. Out." The sky around New York was dense with air power, almost half the remaining air force and a quarter of the U.S. Navy's once-proud naval air arm. Flashes of lightning and rain lashed the veteran bombers as they felt their way through the storm front by radar and GPS. If bombing a sizable chunk of American real estate bothered any of the men or women in Porter's crew, they showed no sign of it as they began to descend toward the target area.
"We have uplink and hard target data confirmed," said Major Chaplin.
"Open her up, let in the fresh air," Porter said a second before a thick merchanical chunking sound preceded a moment's whirring as the giant bomb bay doors swung open.
"All boards are green. All packages hot."
The Second Bomb Wing emerged from the wall of thunderheads banked up to the southwest of the city. The way ahead was clear, and for the first time Lieutenant Colonel Porter felt some regret at what he was about to do. The city in front of them was the cradle of civilization in modern America, the place where all its creation myths began. Under the cloud cover and the slowly wandering smudges of rainfall it looked little different from his memories of the place from the world before the Disappearance. A cloudburst over the southern reaches of Manhattan obscured any view of the fighting in midtown. At this height, in the thick of the weather, the only evidence of the battle ahead was the murky bursts of gray-blue light that throbbed beyond the misty shroud. "Pull 'em back. Pull 'em back," Kinninmore yelled into his headset. The order went out across the battalion's comms net, pushed down to company commanders, who sent it on to platoon commanders, who barked the directive in person at their senior NCOs, and before a minute had passed the U.S. forces laying siege to the main enemy concentrations holed up in Rockefeller Center began to withdraw along prepared axes. The shattered buildings and piled-up traffic provided good cover from the plunging fire, but dozens of smoke grenades soon bathed the scene in a thick, white fog of war.
Kinninmore waited with a small squad for personal protection, listening intently to his company COs reporting in as they made for the layup point two blocks back to the south. The volume of fire from the dark, hulking labyrinth of the center increased viciously, and he ducked as rounds began to whip past his head, pinging off metal car bodies, shattering nearby windows, and occasionally striking flesh with a dull, terrible thud.
Within six minutes the tactical withdrawal was complete, and the colonel signaled to his own detail that they could bug out, which they did with considerable speed and profanity. Kinninmore felt one bullet snag a fold in his pants leg as he sprinted away from the buildings, but he didn't dive for cover, knowing that he was in much greater danger remaining in close proximity to them. At one point, just as he ducked out of the main line of fire, he was tempted to look up to see if he could spot any of the laser designators painting the landmark, but he plowed on, calling himself an idiot for even entertaining such a foolish notion. "FAC confirms all friendlies have exited. We are cleared to release."
"Weapons," said Havoc, "you have a go. Bring down the sky, Michelle."
He heard the acknowledgment and a brief burst of chatter down the link before two heavy clunks signaled a sudden loss of weight beneath the wings of the Stratofortress, causing it to jump nearly a hundred feet higher into the air. He tried to watch the pair of hardened penetrators as they began their fatal dive toward the target, but the GBU-28s quickly disappeared into the cloud cover and there was no chance he would have seen them anyway. He just couldn't help himself. He knew they would fire their little rocket motors in a second, accelerating the pair of five-thousand-pound bunker busters down toward the city. The kinetic impact alone would be enough to destroy vast swaths of any normal target, but the 630 pounds of high explosive that would detonate deep inside the target building, collapsing it from within, would seal the deal.