James slides his flight chair down the rail away from the teletype and toward the computer keyboard. “Okay, Brother David,” he says, hitting the words with just a hint of sarcasm, “let’s work on the codes.” With that, his fingers dance across the keyboard, and six-digit alpha-numeric combinations begin scrolling down the monitor. David watches him work, his eyes never straying from the monitor.
The two men have known each other since elementary school and later, both were both expelled from a prep school outside Colorado Springs. At the time, David’s father was a consultant to the North American Aerospace Defense Command, commonly called NORAD, headquartered deep inside Cheyenne Mountain.
The mountain is a hundred million years old, but for the last thirty-five years, has housed a city, a complex of fifteen steel buildings constructed on steel springs to negate the earthquake effect of a nuclear blast. As a child, David accompanied his father to the nerve center of NORAD, the huge room known as the Air Defense Operations Center. David was thrilled to enter the long tunnel under the rock and wait for the huge steel blast doors — encased in concrete collars — to swing open. His father told him how Blast Door One is set flush with the tunnel’s rock and designed to blow inward from a direct nuclear hit, guiding the fireball through the tunnel and out the south side of the mountain. A second blast door just fifty feet away is intended to withstand the blast and protect the 4.5 acre grid of buildings and personnel inside the rock.
In theory. In the event of near misses.
But if a massive Russian SS-18 penetrator/warhead package hit the mountain directly above the Op Center, it would be a different story. The hardened penetrator would hit the earth at seventeen thousand miles an hour, melting the granite and digging dig a shaft three hundred feet deep. The warhead would follow, setting off the largest manmade explosion in history. Other penetrators and warheads would follow, and if a cavity were opened inside the blast doors, the intruding warhead would shoot a flame of gases reaching ten thousand degrees down the tunnel and through the Op Center, incinerating everything and everyone inside. The expanding gases, moving in excess of three thousand miles and hour, would create a pressure wave that would blow off the blast doors, from the inside out, and the mountain would spew flames like an ancient volcano.
David was nine years old when his father told him these things, and for weeks, the boy awoke each night with dreams of nuclear explosions and firestorms sweeping through the mountain and the nearby town. They weren’t nightmares, for David was not frightened by the visions of mushroom clouds and vaporized human beings. Instead, the visions fascinated him just as a bottle filled with fireflies might enchant other youngsters.
By the time he was eleven, no other child in the world knew as much about the strategic uses of nuclear fission. “The core is surrounded by U-235 and then a layer of U-238,” David told his tow-headed friend James when they worked on a fifth grade science fair project.
“What if you can’t get any U-235?” James asked.
“Plutonium will do,” David says, confidently, as if he were substituting margarine for butter. “When the deuterium and tritium undergo fusion, high-energy neutrons cause the U-238 to undergo fusion.”
Mrs. Scoggins, their teacher, had assumed the project would focus on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Mrs. Scoggins had assumed wrong.
David and James constructed a scale model illustrating the effects of a Russian missile’s ten megaton air burst over downtown Denver. On the poster board, they headlined the project in red letters, “Rocky Mountain RAD.” Mrs. Scoggins looked at the display, patted her grey bun of hair and wrinkled her forehead.
“Roentgen Absorbed Dose,” David explained, happily, pointing to a chart on the poster board. “About 450,000 RAD within a mile of ground zero. A measly thousand will kill you, ‘course you’d already be vaporized by the heat, so what’s the big deal?”
“The big deal,” she repeated, staring at the display, “is that I don’t understand whatever possessed you to do this, this… ” She couldn’t finish because she was staring at the rest of the display. Besides statistical data showing atmospheric pressure and whole body doses of gamma rays, there were Ken and Barbie dolls with charred skin and melted eyeglasses, both courtesy of a backyard hibachi, plus some broken false teeth and a shattered pocket watch, its hands crumpled at 8:34.
“We figured an air burst in morning rush hour for maximum kill ratio,” James explained.
Mrs. Scoggins blanched, looking at the boys as if they had just strangled her pet cat, but she gave them both A’s, then sent them to the school psychologist for counseling.
While their classmates played ball or fished, these two sat in David’s bedroom and talked for hours about optimum detonation altitudes, initial radiation yields, and the triggering devices for fission-fusion-fission bombs. James had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, and David had most of the answers.
“The blast,” James would ask, “do you see it or hear it first?”
“See it. A bluish-white flash, some ultraviolet, too.”
“Cool.”
“The temperature at ground zero is eighteen million degrees.”
“Fahrenheit or centigrade?” James wanted to know.
“Fahrenheit. It creates a fireball that generates radiant heat traveling at the speed of light.”
“A hundred eighty-six thousand miles a second,” James added, knowingly.
“Then comes the blast. It’s really a pressure wave moving at about eleven hundred feet a second. It hits the ground and bounces up, doubling the pressure into a mach wave. Then you get your negative pressure, and that’s really neat, because it causes a firestorm, flaming winds at six hundred miles an hour.”
James whistled. “Wow. Small craft should stay in port.”
“Yeah. The fireball sucks debris into the air and all that vaporized crud forms the mushroom cloud.”
“Way cool,” James says, working on the idea of it. “You think you could score some U-235 so we could build one.”
“Sure,” David boasted.
He was right, though he never figured it would take this long.
-26-
STRATCOM
In the War Room at STRATCOM, technicians work at the unhurried pace of men and women used to the routine. In subdued light, a dozen hypnotic beams endlessly circle their radar screens while teletypes clack noisily. On the front wall, the huge screens occasionally flick with the movement of submarines or a satellite photo of a military installation in the Middle East. American and Canadian Air Force personnel roam among the computer consoles, as do some visiting NATO officers. Technicians sit at desks watching computer monitors that are recessed into desks, not visible only to foreign visitors.
Technical Sergeant Bill Ryder, U.S.A.F. E-6, a skinny thirty-year-old, tears a scroll of paper from a teletype and carries it to Colonel Frank Farris, who sips coffee while he watches the wall screens with little interest. “This just came in from 47-Q, sir.”
“Good. They finally responding?”
“Not exactly, sir.”
The colonel frowns and studies the teletype through his wire-rimmed bifocals. He is fifty-one, has a receding hairline and a soft belly. “What the hell is this ‘Morning Star’ gibberish?”
“Don’t know, sir. It’s not part of the code.”
“You raise the base?”
“Tried, sir. No answer from Security Command, nothing from the capsule, except for the teletype. We thought their power was down until we got the message.”
“Shit. Have Cryptography take a look at it. When will we have the satellite photos?”