Nagoya understood both parties’ concerns but he also thought both concerns were mis-directed. The importance of the Can was not to be an early warning system against a threat they could do little about, but rather to study the gates, to try to unlock the secret of what they were and possibly what was on the other side.
Still, Nagoya had spent enough years working for the government that he knew it best to placate the powers that be. He had the Can switching between the two as quickly as possible, forwarding data to his own military’s headquarters and the Pentagon War Room.
Meanwhile, he focused on studying the mound of data they had accumulated in the last twenty-four hours.
At least until the Can picked up a spike of muonic activity on the north edge of the Bermuda Triangle gate.
“We’ve got activity!” Colonel Croner, the supervising officer in the AWACS announced over the intercom. “Coordinates, four-seven-three-six-eight-one. Lock in all weapons’ systems, prepare Patriots for launch on confirmation of Trident.”
Croner only hoped one missile came out, What everyone was keeping their fingers crossed against was a multiple launch, with the Wyoming clearing all twenty-three remaining missiles in less than two minutes.
“We have a target coming out of the gate,” a radar operator announced. “Vertical at grid. Signature- a Trident!”
“All systems engage,” Croner ordered. “Keep your eyes open for a second launch.”
The Trident ICBM was already shedding its first stage rocket as four Patriot missiles roared off the deck of the USS Washington twenty miles to the north on an interception vector.
At the highest altitude they were capable of maintaining, navy and air force jets were vectored in over the Bermuda Triangle gate toward the path of the upcoming missile.
It was already too late for any of the surface ships to engage with either their guns or their anti-aircraft missiles and those crews could only watch helplessly the battle on the screens in their operations center.
One F-18 Hornet fighter pilot spotted the bright flame from the second stage of the Trident. He turned toward it firing his air to air missiles on straight trajectory as his radar couldn’t lock on the fast-moving target and then pressing his thumb down on the trigger of the 20mm Gatlin gun, hoping that by some miracle something would hit the Trident.
It roared past him a half-mile away so fast he never saw the missile itself, just the flame and smoke from the burning rocket fuel. Then his warning lights went on as one of the Patriots locked onto his aircraft as the most convenient target.
He barely had time to scream a curse as the Patriot hit and the jet blossomed into a fireball..
The other three Patriots were already being outpaced by the Trident and, after expending their fuel, began to come back down to earth.
Unimpeded, the Trident’s second stage fell off and the third ignited.
In the War Room, Foreman watched the explosion of anger and curses from the military men that surrounded him. Once more they’d thrown the best defense they had against the Shadow and failed- this time though, the frustration was doubled by the fact the Shadow’s weapon was one of their own.
They’d known there was almost no chance of stopping an ICBM once it was launched and that knowledge had just been confirmed.
Foreman was linked to the AWACS and he had one major concern. “Colonel Croner, do we have multiple launches?”
“We show no second launch yet, sir. We’re past due for a second missile if they’re firing in salvo.”
Foreman relaxed slightly. This wasn’t the end.
He looked up at the master screen at the front of the War Room. The Trident was now being tracked by Space Command as it moved north-north-east across the Atlantic.
“Projected impact?” he asked of no one in particular.
“Spread pattern, along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,” an air force officer answered. “This time, much further north, at max-range, four thousand nautical miles.” The officer used a laser pointer. “In the vicinity of Iceland. We won’t know exact touchdown points until the warheads actually land.”
Iceland is a geological anomaly, almost unique on the face of the Earth. It was one of the few remaining land masses still above sea level, produced by the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It is a very young island, in terms of geographic age, still in the throes of change.
The landscape was so twisted by the forces of nature that ravaged it, that it had been chosen by NASA to send the crew of Apollo in 1968 to train on, as it was the one place on earth they felt most closely resembled the lunar surface.
In 1973 the island of Heimaey off the southern coast had to be evacuated after a large eruption by the volcano Helgafell. Earthquakes are common and the island is dotted with hot springs. The center of the island is a high plateau surrounded by mountains leading down to the coast where most human habitation was clustered, between the rocky slopes and the sea. A tenth of the island’s mass was covered by glaciers, the largest being Vatrnajokull, which alone encompassed over three thousand two hundred square miles.
The island had no armed forces, the only military present being that of the Americans serving at the airbase at Keflavik. Thus the only ones who had a warning of the incoming Trident missile were those from the country that had built the missile.
There was nothing for anyone to do except pray these warheads also struck the ocean, as the first missile’s had.
That hope disappeared in the flash of the first MK5 nuclear warhead detonating on the southern shoreline where the Pjorsa River reached the ocean. Ten seconds later, thirty miles to the north-north-east the second warhead impacted. In slightly over a minute, all eight warheads, each one many times the power of the one that was dropped on Hiroshima, impacted and detonated in a line bisecting Iceland, directly along the center of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
Only five thousand people died in those initial explosions, due to the sparse population in the interior and on the two spots on the coast directly affected.
In Reykjavik, the earth shook and the sky to the east glowed red. Electro-magnetic pulse washed over the city, shutting down almost everything ran by electricity. One hundred thousand of the quarter million people who inhabited Iceland lived in the capital city and most rushed out to the streets, fearing an earthquake, then noting the glow in the sky.
The nukes had hit every thirty miles, close enough that the force of their blasts reached each other. In essence, the bombs split Iceland in half, letting lose the pent up energy of the unquiet earth below.
Magna flowed into the cracked earth, pushing upward toward the surface. One of the bombs had been aimed directly into the crater of a long-dormant volcano. The nuclear explosion took off the top five hundred meters of the mountain. Within minutes, a secondary explosion blew the rest of the top of the mountain off as gasses powered their way up.
In Deeplab, Ariana Michelet was getting live satellite imagery forwarded to her from Foreman through the Glomar Explorer. The center of Iceland glowed red in the thermal imaging and already one volcano was spewing a large cloud of deadly gas into the sky, the trade winds pushing it safely to the north and east for the moment.
“What do you make of it?” Foreman asked.
Ariana knew the CIA man had access to hundreds of experts through the War Room but she sensed he wanted the truth, up front and as quickly as possible. She knew what she was seeing- ever since the previous Trident firing, she had been thinking about possible scenarios and this fit.