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The helicopter shook violently.
Gogolov hung up the phone. His eyes locked onto the Doppler display. They were engulfed by a raging electrical storm. He quickly buckled his seat belt and looked out the window, but there was nothing to see. Day had turned to night, but for the strobe effect of the lightning.
Zyuganov was hyperventilating, insisting they were all going to die. Every flash of lightning, every bone-crunching thunderclap drove the man deeper into panic.
“Commander,” Gogolov ordered, “get us on the ground — now.”
Before the pilot could react, the front windshield of the chopper shattered.
Zyuganov screamed.
Gogolov realized what had hit them — a hailstone the size of a small bomb. And when another bolt of lightning lit up the sky, it was clear the sky was full of them.
Freezing rain and winds poured into the cabin. Gogolov and Jibril tried to protect themselves with their hands, but suddenly a smaller chunk of ice came hurtling through space, impaling Zyuganov between the eyes.
“Erin, watch out,” Bennett shouted.
It was almost too late. An FSB Mercedes swerved in behind them and was gaining on their right. McCoy grabbed a Beretta and lowered the window. She squeezed off six rounds. The windshield of the pursuing car shattered. The Mercedes spun out of control and smashed through the plate-glass window of the Hotel National.
Bennett blew through the intersection of Tverskaya and Mokhovaya. Smashed cars piled up behind him, but at least a dozen more were still in hot pursuit. They were coming in from either side now, leaving them only one path — directly into Red Square. But they had no choice. They had to find a way out of the city before they were completely surrounded and the noose tightened around their necks.
Bennett raced through the promenade outside the State Historical Museum, then through the floodlit Resurrection Gate and into the square that had come to symbolize the Evil Empire. He could see Lenin’s Tomb and the Kremlin to his right. St. Basil’s Cathedral lay straight ahead.
From the roof of the Kremlin, someone fired a rocket-propelled grenade.
Bennett saw the flash of the ignition but had no time to swerve. The RPG sliced the air directly in front of them, barely missing their front windshield and leaving a flaming white contrail in its wake.
The missile exploded inside the GUM Department Store. McCoy saw two more commandos race into the square ahead of them, preparing to fire. Bennett saw it, too. There was still nothing he could do. They weren’t close enough to shoot the men down, and turning at these speeds would roll the car and kill them both instantly.
McCoy screamed. Bennett held his breath and prepared to die.
But then — directly ahead of them — the ground suddenly split open and seemed to swallow the men alive.
The walls of the Kremlin began to collapse.
The earth below them shook with fury.
Bennett hit the brakes. Behind them, too, a great rift suddenly ripped apart the pavement of Red Square, swallowing their pursuers and setting off a series of explosions that swallowed their screams as well.
And then, in the darkness, Bennett saw a fireball streaking through the sky. His mouth opened in horror but emitted no sound. He wanted to shield McCoy, but he could not move.
The first fireball hit the Presidential Administration Building inside the Kremlin and engulfed the whole complex in flames. Seconds later, one fireball after another began smashing into the buildings of the Kremlin, obliterating them before Bennett’s eyes. Flames and smoke shot fifty, sixty feet into the air.
Then Lenin’s Tomb was hit.
St. Basil’s Cathedral exploded into a billion pieces.
The museum was ablaze.
Within moments, it seemed the entire sky was on fire. Bennett didn’t know if they were missiles or meteorites or “hellfire and brimstone.” All he knew for sure was that the firestorm predicted by Ezekiel had begun.
The earthquake had ended, but a new chapter had opened.
“Mr. President, Moscow is under attack.”
MacPherson turned to Kirkpatrick, then to the live satellite feed. “You said the Israelis hadn’t launched yet.”
“They haven’t, sir.”
“What are all those inbound tracks?”
“They’re not from Israel and they’re not from us.”
“Then where are they coming from?”
Kirkpatrick turned and looked MacPherson in the eye.
“They’re coming from space, sir.”
MacPherson had no reply.
Mordechai stared at the computer monitors.
In the blink of an eye, the computer track of the Russian ICBM just disappeared. Doron saw it, too, as did Modine and the rest of Doron’s team. They were aghast, unsure what had just happened, unsure what to do next.
“Somebody tell me what’s going on,” Doron demanded.
Modine worked the phones, starting with the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon. “Sir, Moscow’s been hit,” he told Doron. “Tehran, too — we’re getting reports from all over, sir.”
“But how? What happened? We never fired.”
“That’s what the White House wants to know,” said Modine. “The Pentagon’s telling the president they’ve detected no launches out of Israel or anyone else in the world. Just the Russian launch out of Siberia. But everyone still thinks you ordered a massive nuclear counterstrike.”
“But I didn’t,” Doron said, and then he turned and looked at Mordechai.
Ken Costello could not speak.
NORAD was now tracking thousands of “missiles”—what else should they call them? — striking Russia, Iran, and every coalition country. None of them had lifted off from Israel. The computers showed no heat plumes, no launch warnings of any kind, only fiery projectiles entering the earth’s atmosphere and hurtling toward Asia, Africa, and Europe.
Costello watched in stunned silence as satellite feeds showed every Russian nuclear missile silo and military base being hit, one after another.
Iranian and Libyan military sites and government buildings were obliterated in front of his eyes. The same appeared to be true of every country allied with Gogolov. One by one, the militaries of the entire coalition were being decimated.
NORAD and CIA monitors translated each impact with blinding flashes of white light, causing a hypnotic, almost strobe-light effect within the dim setting of the Situation Room.
Mosques and national symbols were being hit as well. Live coverage from Al-Jazeera showed fireballs hitting Mecca and Medina. In a millisecond, hundreds of thousands gathered to pray for the destruction of Israel were incinerated on live television. Local coverage from Istanbul showed the seventeenth-century Blue Mosque now a smoldering wreckage. Berlin TV showed the Reichstag utterly destroyed. Casualties around the world were rapidly mounting into the millions.
As the world watched in horror, scorching fire rained from the heavens onto the coalition forces. Within minutes it seemed as if the whole of Lebanon, Syria, and Saudi Arabia was a blazing inferno.
And then there was the carnage occurring on the mountains of Israel.
Amid the chaos on the battlefield, coalition forces were now attacking each other, mistaking fellow tank and infantry units for advancing Israeli divisions. Meanwhile, several dozen fighter pilots had managed to take off from Russian aircraft carriers in the Mediterrean, but one by one their planes were consumed by the firestorm. A few MiGs unleashed their missiles at Israel, but their efforts were in vain. The heat-seeking missiles were simply drawn to the raging fires on the coalition warships behind them, killing what few sailors were left alive.