A few quick turns of the locking collar to seat the cable properly, and the emergency trigger device was ready to go.
The key hung from a steel chain around his neck. Warmed to body temperature from weeks of continual contact with his skin, it felt nearly alive to his touch.
He slid the key into the trigger device’s lock bezel. Only then did he pause to consider what was about to happen.
This was not a practice run. The box in his hand was not a dummy, and the warhead of this missile was not an inert mockup.
When he turned this key, everything would be over. His mission. His career. His life.
In training, they’d assured him that turning the key would start a fifteen-minute timer. The countdown would appear in the LED readout window of the trigger device, telling Pak how long he and any remaining men of his squad would have to reach the life boats. When the timer hit zero, the missile’s fuel tanks would detonate, destroying all of the weapons in the cargo hold, along with the ship itself.
Pak hadn’t believed that part of his training. He was morally certain that the trigger device was set to detonate the warhead, not the fuel tanks. He was equally convinced that the so-called timer was a sham, designed to create the false impression that Pak might have a chance of surviving the emergency destruction procedure.
He resented the deception, along with its implied insult to his integrity as a warrior and a Korean citizen.
He didn’t need to be tricked into doing his job. He knew his duty, and he understood the consequences.
The air carried an increasingly heavy stench of burning metal. There was a loud clang from the direction of the entrance door. The Americans would be coming in now.
It was time…
He turned the key.
The force that had once annihilated Hiroshima ripped through his bones and flesh at the speed of light, vaporizing every atom of his body, along with the ship, several thousand tons of water, and every living creature within the bomb’s sphere of destruction.
Pak Myong-sun never saw the double-flash of the detonation, nor the toroidal fireball that followed the initial blast of radiant energy.
A few billion particles of his carbonized residue rode into the sky on the column of superheated smoke and debris that formed the stem of the growing mushroom cloud.
CHAPTER 4
Jonathan Clark was looking the other way when it happened. Later, when he had time to think back, he’d realize that was probably what saved his eyes.
For him, the whole thing came out of nowhere. He was enjoying the quiet night and the calm sea. The trade winds were providing a friendly eight-knot push out of the northeast, and the air temp was somewhere in the mid-seventies, making his cargo shorts and sleeveless USMC tee-shirt perfect for a bit of easy sailing under the stars.
A quarter moon was creeping toward the top of the mast — still an hour or so from meridian. Under its silvery glow, the hull of the Foxy Roxy cast a faint white oval against black waves, her mainsail a curving triangle of shadow against the Milky Way.
Below decks, Cassy was asleep in the forepeak, sharing the narrow berth with forty pounds of American Staffordshire Terrier. Roxy (the mutt in-question, and the namesake of the boat) was a good dog. Smart and obedient. But no amount of training could dissuade her from her self-appointed mission as a canine heating pad. It was no use trying to explain that humans don’t always need a furry furnace draped across their legs—especially in warm weather. Regardless of the temperature, Roxy was convinced that sleeping humans would wither and perish without her snuggly-drooly protection.
Roxy had come into Jon’s life as a therapy dog — a gift from the VA to help him cope with PTSD after the raging clusterfuck of Afghanistan. That had been a smart move on the part of some VA headshrinker. The dog was good therapy. The best.
No… Cassy was the best therapy. She knew how to make the nightmares go away. She could ride out his sudden bursts of anger and terror, then patiently guide him back toward reason and calm. She had an almost flawless instinct for when to let him rage, and when to reel him back in.
She also understood the importance of this ramshackle old boat. The soothing influence of waves and unbroken sky. The solitude of open horizons. The chance to let his defenses down.
None of this reached the level of conscious thought for Jon. Quite the contrary, he was busily engaged in not thinking. His forebrain was operating on autopilot while his hindbrain subliminally tracked the tension of the inhaul line, the ghostly digits of the compass, the boat’s angle of heel, the positions of the stars, the chuckle of swells against the hull, and countless other cues about his vessel and the sea around him.
Jonathan Paul Clark — former U.S. Marine Corps staff sergeant, late of the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, Bronze Star recipient, Purple Heart winner and certified Post Traumatic Stress Disorder basket case — was at peace with himself. Or as close to peace as he’d managed to get in a very long time.
So naturally, this was the moment when war reentered his life.
His head was turned to the right, his face tilted into the warm northeasterly breeze. Without warning and without sound, the blackness of the night was stripped away by a flash many times brighter than the sun. Everything within sight was instantly illuminated by a searing actinic light, like the firing of a flashbulb the size of a football stadium.
The light was gone in some tiny fragment of a second; the world plunged back into darkness even before Jon’s eyelids could reflexively snap shut.
His body obeyed other automatic responses as combat reflexes kicked in. He found himself on the deck of the boat’s cockpit, crouching behind the dubious cover of the formed fiberglass benches and transom.
His tightly closed eyes did nothing to blot out the large triangles of pinkish-purple that hovered in the left quadrant of his vision. Some analytical module of his brain recognized that the purple blobs had the same general shape as his mainsail. The nylon sail must have acted as a half-assed mirror, reflecting some of the brilliance of the flash back into his face.
If he’d been looking the other way, his retinas would be toast. At the very least, he’d be flash-blind. Maybe for a few hours. Maybe forever.
Through the open companionway he heard a yelp from Roxy, and the sound of someone stumbling around. Then Cassy’s voice, sleepy and confused. “Was that a lightning strike? What was that?”
“Get down!” Jon shouted. “Lay on the deck!”
He could hear more stumbling.
“Did you shine a flashlight in my face or something?” Cassy asked. “That wasn’t funny.”
“Down!” Jon yelled. “On the deck! I need a minute to recon.”
More movement from the forward cabin, the scrabbling of paws and several thumps. Then Cassy’s voice again, muffled this time. “Okay. We’re down. We’re safe. Do whatever you need to do.”
Jon got to his hands and knees, staying low and scooting his body around until he was facing toward the southwest — the direction from which the flash had come. He raised his head slowly, barely peeking over the top edge of the gunwale.
His left peripheral vision was still pretty much screwed, but he could see straight ahead and to the right. Way out on the dark horizon, a colossal doughnut-shaped fireball was climbing into the sky. Then came a sound, like the rumble of distant freight trains.