There was a white dot in the center of the display.
“Nichevo…” He shook that off at once. “Isolate and zoom in!” he ordered loudly. The colonel working the controls was sitting right next to him, and was already doing just that.
“ Central United States, General. Double-flash thermal signature, that is a probable nuclear detonation,” the Colonel said mechanically, his professional judgment overpowering his intellectual denial.
“Coordinates.”
“Working, General.” The distance from the Center to the satellite ensured a delay in getting things to happen. By the time the satellite's telescopic lens started moving in, the thermal signature from the fireball was expanding rapidly. Kuropatkin's immediate impression was that this could not possibly be a mistake, and as hot as that image was, what materialized in the pit of his stomach was a fist of ice.
“ Central U.S., looks like the city of Densva.”
“ Denver, what the hell's in Denver?” Kuropatkin demanded. “Find out.”
“Yes, General.”
Kuropatkin was already reaching for a telephone. This line was a direct link to the Ministry of Defense and also the residence of the Soviet President. He spoke quickly but clearly.
“Attention: This is Lieutenant General Kuropatkin at PVO Moscow Center. We have just registered a nuclear detonation in the United States. I repeat: we have just registered a nuclear detonation in the United States.”
One voice on the line swore. That would be President Narmonov's watch staff.
The other voice, that of the Defense Ministry's senior watch officer, was more reasoned. “How sure are you of this?”
“Double-flash signature,” Kuropatkin replied, astounded at his own coolness. “I'm watching the fireball expansion now. This is a nuclear event. I will call in more data as soon as I have it — what?” he asked a junior officer.
“General, Eagle-II just took one hell of an energy spike, four of the SHF links just shut down momentarily, and another is gone completely,” a major said, leaning over the General's desk.
“What happened, what was it?”
“I don't know.”
“Find out.”
The picture went blank just as San Diego were coming up for their third-and-five at the forty-seven. Fowler finished off his fourth beer of the afternoon and set the glass down in annoyance. Damned TV people. Someone probably tripped over a plug, and he'd miss a play or two in what looked like one hell of a game. He ought to have gone to this one, despite the advice of the Secret Service. He glanced over to see what Elizabeth was watching, but her screen had suddenly gone blank as well. Had one of the Marines driven over the cable with a snow-plow? Good help certainly was hard to come by, the President grumped. But no, that wasn't right. The ABC affiliate— Baltimore 's Channel 13, WJZ — put up its “Network Difficulty — Please Stand By” graphic, whereas Elizabeth 's channel was just random noise now. How very odd. Like any male TV viewer, Fowler picked up the TV controller and changed channels. CNN was off the air, too, but the local Baltimore and Washington stations were not. He'd just started wondering what that meant when a phone started ringing. It had an unusually atonal, strident sound, and was one of the four kept on the lower shelf of the coffee table that sat right in front of his couch. He reached down for it before he realized which one it was, and that delayed understanding caused his skin to go cold. It was the red phone, the one from North American Aerospace Defense Command at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado.
“This is the President,” Fowler said in a gruff, suddenly frightened voice.
“Mr. President, this is Major General Joe Borstein. I am the senior NORAD watch officer. Sir, we have just registered a nuclear detonation in the Central United States.”
“What?” the President said after two or three seconds' pause.
“Sir, there's been a nuclear explosion. We're checking the exact location now, but it appears to have been in the Denver area.”
“Are you sure?” the President asked, fighting to keep calm.
“We're re-checking our instruments now, sir, but, yes, we're pretty sure. Sir, we don't know what happened or how it got there, but there was a nuclear explosion. I urge you to get to a place of safety at once while we try and figure out what's going on.”
Fowler looked up. Neither TV picture had changed and now alarm klaxons were erupting all over the Presidential compound.
Offutt Air Force Base, just outside Omaha, Nebraska, was once known as Fort Crook. The former cavalry post had a splendid if somewhat anachronistic collection of red brick dwellings for its most senior officers, in the rear of which was stabling for the horses they no longer needed, and in front of which was a flat parade ground of sufficient size to exercise a regiment of cavalry. About a mile from that was the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command, a much more modern building with its own antique, a B-17 Flying Fortress of World War II, sitting outside. Also outside the building but below ground was the new command post, completed in 1989. A capacious room, local wags joked that it had been built because Hollywood 's rendition of such rooms was better than the one SAC had originally built for itself, and the Air Force had decided to alter its reality to fit a fictional image.
Major General Chuck Timmons, Deputy Chief of Staff (Operations), had availed himself of the opportunity to stand his watch here instead of in his upstairs office, and had in fact been watching the Superbowl out of one eye on one of the eight large-screen TVs, but on two of the others had been real-time imagery from the Defense Support Program Satellites, called the DSPS birds, and he had caught the double-flash at Denver just as fast as everyone else. Timmons dropped the pencil he'd been working with. Behind his battle-staff seat were several glassed-in rooms — there were two levels of such rooms — which contained the fifty or so support personnel who kept SAC operating around the clock. Timmons lifted his phone and punched the button for the senior intelligence officer.
“I see it, sir.”
“Possible mistake?”
“Negative, sir, test circuitry says the bird's working just fine.”
“Keep me posted.” Timmons turned to his deputy. “Get the boss in here. Beep everybody, I want a full emergency-action team and a full battle-staff — and I want it now!” To his operations officer: “Get Looking Glass up now! I want the alert wings postured for takeoff, and I want an immediate alert flashed to everybody.”
In the glassed-in room behind the General and to his left, a sergeant pushed a few buttons. Though SAC had long since ceased keeping aircraft in the air around the clock, thirty percent of SAC's aircraft were typically kept on alert status at any time. The order out to the alert wings was sent by land-line and used a computer-generated voice, because it had been decided that a human might get excited and slur his words. The orders took perhaps twenty seconds to be transmitted, and the operations officers at the alert wings were galvanized to action.
At the moment, that meant two wings, the 416th Bomb Wing at Griffiss Air Force Base, Rome, New York, which flew the B-52, and the 384th, which flew the B-1B out of nearby McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas. At the latter, crewmen in their ready rooms, nearly all of whom had also been watching the Superbowl, raced out the door to waiting vehicles which took them to their guarded aircraft. The first man from each crew of four slapped the emergency-startup button that was part of the nosewheel assembly, then ran further aft to sprint up the ladder into the aircraft. Even before the crews were strapped in, the engines were starting up. The ground crews yanked off the red-flagged safety pins. Rifle-armed sentries got out of the way of the aircraft, training their weapons outward to engage any possible threat. To this point, no one knew that this was anything more than a particularly ill-timed drill.