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Nothing happened.

Or at least, nothing happened for several minutes.

Other that was, than for the belated wailing of the sirens; the unearthly, ululating howl first cranked up in the southern part of the town and washed north with an ever-increasing keening anger.

Suddenly, the whole building shuddered as if it had been hit by a hurricane force gust of wind; windows rattled, timbers creaked, and in the seconds after the dying pressure wave roared past there were moments of absolute silence.

Four or five minutes?

That meant Bellingham was forty to fifty miles away from the bomb.

There had been no ground wave like there had been an earthquake; so the bomb was definitely an airburst…

Nobody moved.

The next bomb might be closer, much closer.

Chapter 2

22:02 Hours Zulu (Washington DC Time)
Saturday 27th October 1962
B-52 ‘The Big Cigar’ 23 miles south-west of Gorky

First Lieutenant Nathan Zabriski watched the green and grey repeater screens, and listened to the hiss and cackle of the intercom and felt like being sick. The clock ticked down remorselessly as the huge bomber screamed north-west in a desperate shallow dive to escape the deadly twin envelopes of her bombs when they air burst above the cities of Gorky and Dzerzhinsk, approximately two hundred and fifty miles east of Moscow. He checked the bulkhead clock; one hundred and twenty-seven minutes since the earth fall of the first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile strikes; and one hundred and nine minutes since the barrage of Polaris submarine launched ICBMs started to plummet onto the cities of the Eastern Soviet Union and its satellites. Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Kharkov, Minsk, Warsaw and half-a-hundred other places would be burning; but on the ground the surviving Red Air Force interceptor and missile forces were still attempting to fight back.

Onboard The Big Cigar it was business as normal. Exactly like a training exercise except for the impenetrable communications mush.

After the first strikes the whole Soviet air defence system had come alive like a giant wasp’s nest prodded with a big stick and then kicked around a field. Hundreds of fighters were airborne and for a while it had seemed as if no bomber could possibly survive. The British V-Bomber Force ought to have fallen on the western flank of the Soviet air defence net as the first ICBMs lit up over their targets but it was patently obvious that that had not happened. The Brits had not turned up for the party and it was not until the relentless salvoes of Polaris submarine launched ballistic missiles, many targeted against Red Air Force airfields, radar stations, missile batteries and dispersal areas in the Baltic States, Poland, East Germany, Byelorussia, the Ukraine and the north around Leningrad, Murmansk and Archangel began to rain down, that eventually the Soviet Union’s command and control of their air space had been sufficiently dismantled and degraded, to allow the surviving bombers in the first two strike waves to penetrate deep into the USSR. Now, with the air defence radar net torn to pieces and its command and control system shredded the Soviets were blind and mute. Interceptors still circled, or raced hither and thither and the massed surface-to-air missile batteries filled hundreds of square miles of empty air with ragged and wastefully speculative undirected spasms of violence but it was like watching a blind giant flailing thin air with a mighty club, murderously hit and miss, occasionally finding a target by pure happenstance. Farther into the Russian heartland pockets of the formidable air defence system might still survive, but over the Ukraine the Red Air Force was powerless to curtail the torment. In the frigid vastness of the Russian night the surviving B-47s and B-52s of Strategic Air Command were sowing a terrible thermonuclear whirlwind across the steppes.

Nathan Zabriski had honestly believe the Brits would fly to Hell and back if that was what it took; that they had failed to show up at the critical moment when the first wave of B-47s and B-52s crossed into defended Soviet air space and suffered sixty to seventy percent casualties overflying the virtually intact defences — forcing the survivors to initially turn away to avoid certain immolation — had enraged him and his comrades, and oddly, sparked a series of horrible pangs of doubt in his mind.

Why had the Brits not joined the fight?

Had the British already been knocked out of the fight by the Soviet first strike? Was it possible that the RAF’s entire V-Bomber Force had been caught on the ground?

And if so, what did that mean for the folks back home…

Every burst of static over the communications net was another warhead bursting over another city, or striking ground or water to take out another airfield, or bridge, or rail centre, or port or troop concentration. Nathan Zabriski might be far too junior to see the big picture in any detail but he knew enough to know that he was participating in a global catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.

“One minute to Gorky air burst!” He reported tersely.

Theoretically, under SIOP-63 — Single Integrated Operational Plan 1963 — which had been promulgated during the previous summer in an attempt to rationalise the somewhat chaotic, inefficient overkill strike planning of the late 1950s under which the US Air Force, Navy and Army basically attacked whatever they wanted to attack with little or no regard for overall strategic, or even regional tactical integration; The Big Cigar was operating as a component in a single integrated attack plan. SIOP-63 sought to avoid wasteful overkill with bombers, submarines and land-based ICBMs all targeting the same objectives, thus obviating the pre-SIOP-63 risk of a large number of high priority enemy assets being overlooked, or ignored because the Air Force assumed the Navy or the Army would be ‘taking care of business’.

SIOP-63 achieved ‘integrated targeting’ by combining all the different targeting priorities and offering the President of the United States of America — the Commander-in-Chief — a menu of five incrementally more massive strike options.

Specifically, option one targeted Soviet missile sites, bomber air fields and submarine bases. Option two included military targets located at a distance from cities such as airfields, missile batteries and warships at sea. Option three permitted the targeting of any or all military forces or installations regardless of whether they were situated near or co-located with, concentrations of major civilian population. In a logical escalation option four targeted all command and control centres and by definition, the enemy high command. Only the final, fifth option, envisaged an all out, or ‘spasm’ attack. The planners had pragmatically, they believed, regarded this last option as primarily a second response, or retaliatory exercise.

In practice the President had, when confronted with the actual logic and real time stresses of global nuclear war, had inevitably concluded that adopting any or all of options one to four was a very good way to guarantee that tens of millions of Americans would be killed. Thus, earlier that day the President of the United States of America had determined to gather every resource to hand and to throw it at the Soviet Union in a great ‘spasm’ of thermonuclear violence in the vain hope that, under such a ferocious all out attack the enemy’s capacity to retaliate would be obliterated by a massive ‘first strike’.

Nathan Zabriski was cognisant of the fact that Gorky, formerly Nizhny Novgorod in Tsarist times, with a population of around a million people was the fifth most populous city in the Soviet Union. He also knew that it was a regional centre of government, a major transportation hub and an important industrial centre.