The EKV carried no explosive. It was a hit-to-kill weapon, designed to destroy its target with the kinetic energy created by its tremendous speed, in much the same way that speed and inertia could transform the simple lead pellet of a rifle bullet into a lethally destructive projectile.
The timing was flawless. The microsecond clock in the kill vehicle’s digital brain clicked down to zero at the precise instant that the EKV reached its designated coordinates in space. The kill vehicle and the target warhead slammed into each other at a combined closure rate of more than 50,000 kilometers per hour. The resultant explosion was like the flare of a tiny sun, as the tremendous force of the impact was converted instantly to several hundred megajoules of raw heat.
EKV #6 and its unseen target were no more.
Seen from the tracking screens of the Command and Control, Battle Management, and Communications Control Center of the United States Strategic Command, the destruction of EKV #6 and its target was considerably less dramatic. There were no brilliant flares or explosions, just a soft computer bleep, followed by three brief messages in the alert window:
> TELEMETRY LOST, EKV #6
> TRACK NOT CONTINUED, BALLISTIC TARGET “FOXTROT”
> SUCCESSFUL INTERCEPT PROBABILITY = 97.4 %
Air Force Major Lionel Humphrey read the lines of text and let out a shaky breath. It was working … It actually seemed to be working …
“Yeah!” one of the console operators exclaimed. “Oh yeah! I think it’s gonna …”
“Shut up!” Lionel snapped. His voice was overloud in the quiet of the control room. “Don’t jinx it,” he said in a softer tone. “Just shut the hell up … and let it happen.”
The unofficial and un-recommended evacuation of San Diego began within minutes of the first emergency alert bulletin. The word tore through the city like wildfire. San Diego was a prime military target: the aircraft carriers at North Island … the amphibious warfare base on Coronado … the warships at 32nd Street Naval Station … the submarine base at Point Loma. Any enemy who wanted to cripple the U.S. would nuke San Diego with the very first barrage of missiles.
It seemed like good logic. And in the pressure cooker of a city succumbing to terror, the idea morphed from educated guess to solid fact in the space of mere minutes. Suddenly, the word was everywhere … San Diego was a confirmed target. The only way to survive was to get out of the city NOW! People jumped in their cars and ran for the freeways like lemmings.
The first casualties were from a pileup on Interstate 8, near the Grossmont Boulevard exit — the inevitable product of too many vehicles moving too quickly through too small an area.
Near the middle of the pack and rolling at eighty miles an hour, the driver of a white Ford pickup misjudged his following distance and slammed into the rear of a green Toyota minivan. With a crunch of buckling steel and collapsing plastic, the minivan careened to the left, smashing into the right front fender of a silver BMW Z8 convertible and slewing the sports car sideways into the side of a fourth vehicle.
Startled by the unexpected impact, and by the split-second shock of his driver-side airbag ballooning instantly into his face, the BMW driver snatched his foot away from the accelerator pedal, and stomped on the brakes. It was an utterly natural reaction. Given the same set of circumstances, a lot of drivers would have done precisely what he did. But it was exactly the wrong thing to do.
With that simple act of reflex, a multi-car fender-bender was transformed into a chain-reaction, propagating backward through the speeding lines of traffic as cars, trucks, motorcycles, and buses crashed blindly into the wall of suddenly stationary vehicles to their immediate front. And amidst the rending of metal and the shattering of glass, drivers and passengers were crushed and broken right along with their vehicles.
The Russian warheads had not even penetrated the atmosphere, and already American citizens were beginning to die.
Charlie Sweigart tapped gently on the door to Gabriella’s room, and then opened it enough to stick his head in. “Hello?”
There was no answer. Gabriella was sleeping.
Charlie shuffled into her room, his hospital slippers making soft shushing noises as they slid across the tiled floor. He wheeled his IV rack in behind himself, taking care that his IV tubes didn’t catch on anything as he quietly closed the door. He probably didn’t need the IV anymore. He was over the hump now, and well on the road to recovery, but the doctors kept reminding him that advanced hypothermia was nothing to play around with.
He felt okay now, or at least well enough to finish his recovery at home. Of course, there might not be any home left to go to. His apartment was in San Diego, and if the news reports were accurate, California was coming unglued. Even if the missiles were shot down, or turned out to be a hoax or something, his two-bedroom loft in Mission Hills might not survive the panic that was ripping through his city.
There was nothing he could do about that now. The missiles would strike, or they wouldn’t. His little home would be preserved, or it would be destroyed. Ten minutes from now, the lid might come off the pot completely, and the superpowers could all start lobbing nukes at each other. Planet Earth might finally get its Third World War, but nothing Charlie could do from this hospital would make the slightest bit of difference. He could do nothing but wait, and Gabriella’s room seemed like a good place to do that.
He turned and looked at her. The sight nearly stole his breath away.
The tall ocean scientist was curled on her side, blue hospital sheets bunched and tangled around her long-limbed body, golden hair fanning across the pillow and spilling over the curve of her cheek. For a half-second, Charlie thought about brushing the hair from her cheek so that he could see her face more clearly. But he didn’t want to wake her, and he wasn’t at all certain that his touch would be welcome.
Gabriella had said things to him in those last few minutes of consciousness aboard the Nereus. Charlie knew that her words might have been nothing more than a delirious symptom of her advancing hypothermia, or even a wishful hallucination from his own cold-addled mind. He didn’t care. He wanted to believe in them anyway. And he didn’t want to break the fragile spell of his hopes by waking her.
He wanted Gabriella’s words to be real, and he wanted her to mean them. But he couldn’t control that, any more than he could control the warheads hurtling toward his country. So he stood and watched the gentle rhythm of her breathing. And his heart was so full that he almost didn’t care if the world came to an end.
With another computer bleep, another trio of messages appeared in the alert window of the STRATCOM tracking screens:
> TELEMETRY LOST, EKV #4
> TRACK NOT CONTINUED, BALLISTIC TARGET “DELTA”
> SUCCESSFUL INTERCEPT PROBABILITY = 97.4 %
To his right, Major Lionel could hear a man’s voice whispering, “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus.”