The third way point was the Hilton Hotel, soaring over four hundred meters into the night sky. The grandiose monstrosity had been built in the year after White Chinese independence, another tribute to capitalism.
The shining lights of the hotel were visible for dozens of kilometers to sea, the giant English block letters spelling hilton down the seaward edge of the black cylinder.
The missile had been directed to pass three blocks west of the Hilton, sufficiently far that its windows would not shatter from the low-level sonic boom. Reaching MacH 1.2 again, the missile shot toward the Presidential Palace.
As the missile flew over the thirty-meter high whitewashed wall of the palace complex, it was a full twenty-three milliseconds behind schedule. Less than twenty percent fuel remained in the reinforced tanks of the missile’s belly, making the missile lighter, and as the throttle valves opened fully, the missile was able to speed up slightly, flying in at MacH 1.24. It sped toward an inner wall. As the missile flashed overhead, several black dogs below barely had time to begin to curl their lips, their heads just beginning to turn upward, the first growl emerging from their throats a tenth of a second later, which would prove to be forty-five milliseconds too late.
The outer ring of buildings flew under the fuselage next, the three rows of office buildings and housing facilities laid out in an ornate geometry. The central row came by next, the buildings dark with the sleeping staff members. Finally the inner ring of buildings slipped past, surrounding a beautiful open courtyard, arranged with several dozen fountains spurting water illuminated by spotlights. Exotic landscaping divided the open space into at least three dozen different conversational areas.
Ahead, unlit except by the wash of lights from the courtyard’s fountains, the Presidential Palace loomed.
The palace was a mere three stories tall, but was over a kilometer wide. The facade was made of Italian marble with carved pilasters, a columned entrance to a high rotunda leading up steps to ornate bronze carved doors.
In the north wing, on the third floor, the president’s living quarters overlooked the greenery of the courtyard and the majesty of the inner palace complex. The living quarters had soaring plateglass windows, framed by heavy curtains, fronted by a small tiled deck filled with outdoor furniture, potted trees, and a fair-sized swimming pool.
The nose cone of the Shining March missile impacted the thick bulletproof plate glass of the president’s bedroom suite. The glass blew outward toward the deck.
That was the signal to the fuse software to detonate the explosives. A charged capacitor sent out an intense electrical pulse, lighting the fuse blasting cap. The cap flared into incandescence, setting off the primary explosive train deep in the heart of the warhead.
In a few milliseconds the missile passed all the way into the cavernous bedroom, under the carved marble ceilings almost fifteen meters above the polished hardwood floor. By the time the tail fins — sheared off by the shattering glass of the window — disintegrated, the explosion train was half through detonating. The secondary explosive train temperature rose to that of a bonfire.
Three missile lengths into the room, the weapon still five meters from the sleeping president’s bed, the tertiary explosive train ignited. Still no trace of the interior heat was visible on the dark skin of the missile, though the tertiary explosives raised the temperature of the high-density molecular explosive to that of the surface of the sun.
At last the skin of the missile vaporized as the detonation blew outward from it. The warhead turned into a fireball of pure plasma energy, the atoms and molecules of what had been solid matter turning to liquid, then to vapor, then to gas. As the temperature rose to thermonuclear range, the atoms’ electrons spun off into space, leaving their nuclei in a high-energy glow. The plasma expanded outward, the radiant heat of it turning the flesh of the president immediately to superheated gas, an expanding cloud that blew away from the plasma ball at sonic velocity. His bones liquefied next, then vaporized, joining the plasma front as the volume of energy expanded, now encompassing the entire room. All that had been solid microseconds before had all become glowing photons and spheres of protons and neutrons, electron waves flashing out into the abyss.
In the 1,500 milliseconds before the second missile entered the presidential palace, the plasma expanded outward, the flame front ahead of it blowing the walls and ceiling of the surrounding rooms away, until the upper floor within one hundred meters of the presidential living quarters was completely eliminated, burned cleanly off in a black arc.
Missiles two, three, and four flew in next, their detonators going off more by timing than by impact, and the remainder of the palace grew more insubstantial with each hit. By the time missile four’s explosion had become nothing more than an orange mushroom cloud flaming and rising above the courtyard where the palace had once been, the first wave of Flicker fighters streaked overhead. Detaching their bombs, the fighters pulled hard to the right and left to avoid the missile explosions.
Twenty Cultural Revolution bombs tumbled into the black and orange fireball of the palace, all of them detonating into white-hot fury in the already hellish conflagration.
The initial twenty-five seconds of the Shanghai attack had vaporized the primary target, and the second wave of Flicker fighters pulled up and turned away to their secondary targets.
Two minutes after the first missile’s detonation, there was a black carbonized crater, fully thirty meters deep, where the palace, courtyard, and inner circle of palace complex buildings had once proudly stood. The center row of buildings was little more than piles of rubble, bricks and marble and electrical wire, mournful fingers of steel-reinforcement rods sticking into the fiery night, melted glass resolidifying in ugly pools at the bases of the rubble. The outer ring of buildings, the few that were still standing, were in flames, fire pouring from the windows and rooftops. The two circles of walls, built to hold off terrorists and truck bombers, had crumbled but for a few uneven remnants.
In the city, 125 other Shining March cruise missiles had hit their targets. The 100 Flicker fighters sent in as backup had added to the chaos, making the previous century’s destruction of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Tehran, and Cairo seem minor by comparison. The Hilton hotel was blown to its foundation, the only thing recognizable the three-meter-tall red block letter H lying on top of what once had been a glass elevator, the glass shattered, half molten and black. Nothing was left of the Sword of Wong except granite dust, lying in a pile at the site.
Cargo ships were burning in the harbor, and one supertanker laden with crude oil exploded in a kilometer-wide fireball, the shock wave of it blasting through a city where almost five hundred shock waves had already passed.
No building taller than three stories stood. There was not a recognizable car left in the city, all the iron and steel and rubber that wasn’t crushed having burned in the city’s massive fires. Not a single tree or blade of grass within tens of kilometers was left.
And not a single person within twenty kilometers of the Presidential Palace survived. Those in the circle inside ninety kilometers walked through burning streets, their clothes sooty, their eyes glazed, tears streaming down their cheeks. A father stumbled through the gutted streets, silently crying, carrying two young daughters, their legs as thin as twigs, their pajamas burned off in sections. Both children were dead, the small one’s face burned off, the other’s intact with her small eyes staring unblinkingly into space.
Capturing the scene was the lens of a Satellite News Network camera, the images transmitted to the backpack of the sooty-faced cameraman, from the antenna on the backpack to a transmission van a kilometer away, and from there to the SNN orbiting communications satellite, relayed from there to SNN’s network news center in Denver, Colorado, and from there to television and Writepad receivers all over the globe.