“What are the casualty numbers?” interrupted Genser. “How bad is it?”
The general was unsettled by the question.
“We don’t have time for that,” said Alexander. He stared hard at the secretary of state to shut him up. “What about the other satellites, General?” he asked, glancing away.
Genser had been treated badly and knew it. He became flushed; the anger exploded as his face tightened. “You’re all insane. We should be talking to the Russians,” he shouted. “Not plotting to bounce the rubble.”
Alexander accepted the outburst calmly. He replied, choosing his words carefully. “This has a long way to go. We’d be wasting our time trying to negotiate a cease-fire until we’ve cut into the Russians’ strategic reserve.”
Genser glared. The general now answered.
“It’s too soon to give you a complete answer, Mr. Secretary. We detected a direct ascent ASAT launched against one of our photo recon birds, but it missed. We’ll have to wait and see if they fire at others when they pass over Russian territory. The coorbital ASATs they launched will take a few orbits to position themselves before an attack.”
Thomas felt an urge to focus with time critical. “The key,” he interjected, “is whether they try to take out our geosynchronous early warning, comm, and ELINT satellites. And the GPS constellation. Direct ascent ASATs take six to eight hours to reach geo, and with our I and W shot, we may not even know we’re under attack. I recommended defensive maneuvers while we still can.”
Bartholomew didn’t appreciate the tutorial. “I’d save the onboard fuel,” he countered, “until we’re certain. We don’t know they can attack satellites at geo. Maneuvering the satellites could disrupt comms.”
“We can’t assume they’re safe,” Thomas countered.
The vice admiral nodded approvingly. So did the marine to Bartholomew’s left. “General Thomas is right,” said Alexander. “Send the order. And include the recon birds; raise their altitude, even if we lose ’em for a time.” Bartholomew freed himself and moved aft, jerking one of the handsets from its bracket.
Alexander sat massaging his temples, trying to ward off one of his occasional migraines. This was not the time. His thoughts converged to one irrefutable fact. The survival of the United States hung on the momentous air battle shaping up over the Arctic. The war’s outcome would be settled over a desolate frozen wasteland, where magnetic anomalies distorted radar and communications, and atmospherics impaired visual acuity. It was up to the AWACS, the interceptors, and the bombers now.
CHAPTER 21
The lone nuclear bomb that incinerated the Pentagon struck at 7:52 p.m. The 500-kiloton reentry vehicle was hurled effortlessly over seven thousand nautical miles by an SS-25 ICBM. The mobile SS-25, a thorn in the side of American arms-control negotiators for a decade, had proven to be a masterstroke by the old Strategic Rocket Forces. Initially shunned, the old men in Moscow had finally recognized a trump card.
The portable missile was renowned for its accuracy, responsiveness, and survivability. Unlike its big brother, the ten-warhead, rail mobile SS-24, the SS-25 was ideal for ad-hoc targeting against enemy targets. No need to waste excess warheads on worthless piles of rubble. The SS-25 was a sharp surgical knife, perfect for limiting collateral damage, rather than the traditional multimegaton nuclear bludgeons the Russians had previously favored for decades. These mobile missiles gave the US Strategic Command fits. It was like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. In this case, the haystack was millions of square miles of rugged Russian territory.
The five-foot-tall reentry vehicle started its journey perched atop an SS-25, protected from the harsh elements and the hazards of flight by a filament-wound fiberglass nosecone. Its booster had been jettisoned from its canister, solid rocket motors propelling the sleek three-stage missile skyward. Accelerating hard by the second, it became a brilliant fireball trailing a slender tail of flame, illuminating the still night sky over Izhevsk. The missile discarded spent booster casings and rocket motors as each successive stage consumed its solid rocket fuel, shedding excess weight and rapidly gaining speed and altitude. At final burnout, well above the atmosphere, with the nosecone now discarded, the remaining hardware reached required suborbital velocity of over 16,000 feet per second. It then entered a ballistic trajectory, relatively free of atmospheric drag. At this point, the post-boost vehicle or bus commanded by the guidance computer gyrated through a series of precise thruster maneuvers to deploy the conical reentry vehicle. Spewed in tandem were heavy and light decoys and pounds of aluminum chaff to confuse detection and tracking radars and infrared sensors. By midtrajectory, a widely dispersed cloud of objects sped through space in lockstep, inexorably toward the target coordinates. Dropping from the near vacuum of space over North America, the light chaff, debris, and decoys were stripped away, disintegrating in the dense air of the upper atmosphere, leaving the red-hot reentry vehicle or RV to deliver its deadly nuclear cargo.
This particular SS-25 warhead detonated a few feet above the top of the Pentagon Metro station, more than seven hundred feet southeast from its designated ground zero or DGZ, the center of the Pentagon courtyard. Within a millisecond, the enormous release of fusion energy vaporized hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of dirt and rock and consumed the massive superstructure of the Pentagon as if it were swallowed whole. The blinding, incandescent fireball, heated to millions of degrees by the release of deadly X-rays, transformed the pinkish glow on the horizon into blazing daylight for tens of miles in all directions. The clear night sky enhanced the devastating thermal radiation effects, extending their lethal range far beyond that of hazy or overcast skies. Far below ground, the manned command center sagged and groaned like a wounded beast under the tremendous overpressure. The transmitted shock wave ruptured the main support walls, crushing and burying hundreds on duty under tons of cement slabs and debris. Vital communication links worldwide suddenly went dead, signaling the instantaneous evaporation of the NMCC, and with it, the president of the United States.
The split-second pause was broken by a loud cracking noise heard for tens of miles as the vicious blast wave rolled smoothly outward like a stone thrown in a still pond, traveling at the speed of sound. After the initial scorching flush of ultraviolet rays in the first tenth of a second, the nuclear cloud caught its breath then belched forth the full fury of its thermal energy in the visible and infrared wavelengths in a second horrific thermal pulse lasting several se-conds. Combustible material out to almost two miles was instantly incinerated, long before the arrival of the blast wave or the sound of the detonation. The fireball jerked violently upward, sucking up the weapon debris and dirt, rising at hundreds of feet per second. A close observer would swear the earth was vomiting its molten core. Cooling rapidly, it formed an expanding, reddish-brown nuclear cloud of vaporized material and water vapor, later to be dumped as lethal fallout far downwind from the explosion.
The monstrous detonation dug a crater over 180 feet deep and nearly 750 feet across. It was rimmed with a neat, concentric bank of pulverized ejecta that extended the total disfigurement of the earth to a third of a mile in diameter. The surrounding landscape out to three-quarters of a mile from ground zero was mangled, looking like the surface of the moon.