As the President looked down on the city, the word “cindered” kept rolling over in his mind. That was the word that the Federal Emergency Management Agency used to describe those who were left without warning and unprotected in the event of a nuclear detonation. “Cindered” was a term for the casualties. It was the government word for “the dead.”
The helos whisked along, cutting through the cold air. The President watched the tree-lined Potomac slip underneath him, then leaned back and closed his eyes. The Presidential helicopters turned to the north. Following the Potomac River, they made their way toward the Virginia countryside.
“But, sir,” Nahaylo was pleading.
“Don’t ‘but, sir’ me!” Fedotov cried. “I’m not blind. I’m not stupid. Look at the screen, General Nahaylo. Look at the screen and tell me what you see!”
The general did not look away, but instead locked his eyes with Fedotov’s. “I know what’s up there, sir. I understand the critical nature of the situation.”
“Oh, is that right?” Fedotov replied, waving his arms wildly toward the five dots on the screen. “Well, let me tell you something, General. Those are American cruise missiles. Now maybe they’re nuclear. Maybe they’re not. But do you really expect me to just sit here and wait, hoping they just go away!
“I have to assume the worst here, Nahaylo. I just can’t wait until half of Moscow goes up in a ball of flames. We will be dead by then, General. You. Me. Everyone in this room. Then how do you propose we respond? Which is exactly what the Americans are hoping we do. Can’t you see that. They expect us to wait around in a terrified stupor, hoping for the best, not choosing to escalate things, until it is too late, and we are vaporized into a cloud of black mist.
“So, no, I will not wait. I want our Satans in the air! Get me the launch box! Get me the codes! Now!”
General Nahaylo tried once again.
“Sir, I must remind you. The first missile, the stealth missile, has already been destroyed. Whether it flew off course and crashed, or simply malfunctioned, or just what, we do not know. It is possible the Americans destroyed it. But it doesn’t matter now. It is gone. And though the other five missiles are proceeding to their targets, we still have a chance. It is possible that we might shoot them down. They arc not as stealthy. They are not as fast. And, sir, most important, they might only be conventional weapons. We don’t know that they have nuclear warheads. We must give it a little time. We must wait and see.”
“No! No!” Fedotov shouted back. “I will not sit here and wait to be destroyed. I will not roll over like a dog on his back and expose my jugular vein. They…,” Fedotov pointed toward the red dots on the screen. “They are the ones who asked for this battle. They are the ones who started this fight. Without warning… without cause… without reason.
“So, don’t sit there, my friend and tell me to be patient, when in reality, I am just waiting to die!”
Nahaylo stepped toward the president with pleading eyes. “Sir.” The president knew what he meant. But he no longer cared.
President Fedotov turned from Nahaylo and nodded his head to the three-star general who stood at his side.
Within thirty seconds, he was handed a large, black, leather briefcase. It was eighteen inches long, with rounded corners, and a single brass lock.
The President picked up the briefcase. He was watched very closely by his military aides as he unlocked it and opened it up. He was surrounded by nine heavily armed and specially trained military guards. A look of puzzlement came over Fedotov’s face as he opened the briefcase and stared at the unfamiliar keyboard. Anticipating he would need help, a command-and-control specialist emerged from the crowd of military advisors and came forward to talk the President through the launch codes and procedures.
It didn’t take much time. Once the briefcase was open, it was only a matter of seconds before a single SS-18 ICBM missile was launched and sent climbing upward to its cruise altitude of 150 miles above the earth. Within five minutes, the missile was over the Greenland Sea on its way up over the pole.
Inside the missile, a digital computer was hard at work. Dual laser-gyros determined the missile’s actual position and fed the information into the navigation computer. The navigation system then made tiny adjustments to keep the missile flying along its intended flight path.
As the missile leveled off in sub-orbit, the computer began to feed the target coordinates to the ten individual nuclear warheads. Two of the warheads were commanded to fall over the White House. Two were directed to Capitol Hill. Two were given the coordinates of the leafy, tree-filled courtyard that sat in the center of the Pentagon.
The Russians were strong believers in redundancy. They always sent at least two warheads to every priority target. Their philosophy was, if one missile was good, then two had to be better.
With six warheads targeted for D.C., there were still four warheads yet to be given an objective. The targeting computer continued to search its memory bank. After several seconds, it found what it was looking for. The coordinates of the secret Underground Presidential Command Center in central Virginia were then fed to the remaining four warheads.
When the four warheads descended back through the atmosphere, they would maneuver away from each other until they were two hundred meters apart. They would then spread into a box pattern. Their detonation sequence was set to “impact delay,” which meant the warheads would not detonate until they had penetrated the soft earth that lay over the Presidential Command Center. By the time their mushroom clouds of glowing fire were sent climbing over the gentle Virginia countryside, the President of the United States would already be dead, recorded in history as one of the “cindered.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Ammon knew immediately what he had to do when he saw the missiles launch.
Jamming his engines into full afterburner, he pulled back hard on the stick. The Bone began to accelerate skyward, climbing through the air in a vertical angle. Ammon felt disoriented and dizzy as he stared up into the darkness. His head tumbled and his eyes lost their focus as nothing but sky filled his windscreen. He checked his altimeter. Eight-thousand feet. He rolled the aircraft inverted and pulled while hanging upside down in his harness, then rolled the aircraft once again. He was level at 10,000 feet. High enough. The signal to the missiles should get to them from this altitude.
Reaching forward, to the left of his seat, he flipped up a yellow safety cover, exposing the toggle switch that was hidden underneath. He pushed the switch down. A light tone began to sound in his headset as a message appeared on his CRT.
“SELF-DESTRUCT MECHANISM ACTIVATED. SELECT DESIRED MISSILE TO DESTROY”
Ammon began to furiously punch in the numbers. He would have to destroy the missiles one at a time. He finished punching in the coded indentifier of the first missile. He hit the “SEND” key. A two-second, coded, microburst radio signal was sent out from Reaper’s Shadow’s lower antenna, commanding the first nuclear missile to self-destruct. The last-ditch safety recall mechanism kicked into gear, blowing the missile into a thousand tiny pieces.
“MISSILE YB#$YB45 DESTROYED.” appeared on Ammon’s screen.
Morozov looked up and sucked in his breath.
“DO YOU WANT TO SELECT ANOTHER MISSILE?” the computer asked Richard Ammon.
“Y,” Ammon tapped into the keyboard.
“SELECT DESIRED MISSILE.”
Ammon typed as fast as he could. Morozov screamed and cursed from the back.