“Multi-stage?” Elliot said towards the speaker.
“A thermonuclear device,” General Borstein replied. “An H-Bomb.”
“Ryan here, who's this?”
“Major Fox, sir, at NORAD. We have an initial feel for yield and casualties,” the major read off the bomb numbers.
“Too big for a terrorist weapon,” said an officer from the Directorate of Science and Technology.
“That's what we think, sir.”
“Casualties?” Ryan asked.
“Probable prompt-kill number is two hundred thousand or so. That includes the people at the stadium.”
I have to wake up, Ryan told himself, his eyes screwed tightly shut. This has to be a fucking nightmare, and I'm going to wake up from it. But he opened his eyes, and nothing had changed at all.
Robby Jackson was sitting in the cabin of the carrier's skipper, Captain Ernie Richards. They had been half-listening to the game, but mainly discussing tactics for an upcoming wargame. The Theodore Roosevelt battle group would approach Israel from the west, simulating an attacking enemy. The enemy in this case was the Russians. It seemed highly unlikely, of course, but you had to set some rules for the game. The Russians, in this case, were going to be clever. The battlegroup would be broken up to resemble a loose assembly of merchant ships instead of a tactical formation. The first attack wave would be fighters and attack-bombers squawking “international” on their IFF boxes, and would try to approach Ben Gurion International Airport in the guise of peaceful airliners, the better to get inside Israeli airspace unannounced. Jackson 's operations people had already purloined airliner schedules and were examining the time factors, the better to make their first attack seem as plausible as possible. The odds against them were long. It was not expected that TR could do much more than annoy the IAF and the new USAF contingent. But Jackson liked long odds.
“Turn up the radio, Rob. I forgot what the score is.”
Jackson leaned across the table and turned the dial, but got music. The carrier had her own on-board TV system, and was also radio-tuned to the U.S. Armed Forces network. “Maybe the antenna broke,” the Air Wing Commander observed.
Richards laughed. “At a time like this? I could have a mutiny aboard.”
“That would look good on the old fit-rep, wouldn't it?” Someone knocked at the door. “Come!” Richards said. It was a yeoman.
“Flash-traffic, sir.” The petty officer handed the clipboard over.
“Anything important?” Robby asked.
Richards just handed the message over. Then he lifted the growler phone and punched up the bridge. “General quarters.”
“What the hell?” Jackson murmured. “DEFCON-THREE — why, for Christ's sake?”
Ernie Richards, a former attack pilot, had a reputation as something of a character. He'd reinstituted the traditional Navy practice of bugle calls to announce drills. In this case, the 1-MC speaker system blared forth the opening bars of John Williams' frantic call to arms in Star Wars, followed by the usual electronic gonging.
“Let's go, Rob.” Both men started running down to the Combat Information Center.
“What can you tell me?” Andrey Il'ych Narmonov asked.
“The bomb had a force of nearly two hundred kilotons. That means a large device, a hydrogen bomb,” General Kuropatkin said. “The death count will be well over one hundred thousand dead. We also have indications of a strong electromagnetic pulse that struck one of our early-warning satellites.”
“What could account for that?” The questioner here was one of Narmonov's military advisors.
“We do not know.”
“Do we have any nuclear weapons unaccounted for?” Kuropatkin heard his president ask.
“Absolutely not,” a third voice replied.
“Anything else?”
“With your permission, I would like to order Voyska PVO to a higher alert level. We already have a training exercise under way in Eastern Siberia.”
“Is that provocative?” Narmonov asked.
“No, it is totally defensive. Our interceptors cannot harm anyone more than a few hundred kilometers from our own borders. For the moment, I will keep all my aircraft within Soviet airspace.”
“Very well, you may proceed.”
In his underground control center, Kuropatkin merely pointed to another officer, who lifted a phone. The Soviet air-defense system had already been prepped, of course; inside a minute radio messages were being broadcast, and long-range search radars came on all over the country's periphery. Both the messages and the radar signals were immediately detected by National Security Agency assets, both on the ground and in orbit.
“Anything else I should do?” Narmonov asked his advisors.
A Foreign Ministry official spoke for all of them. “I think doing nothing is probably best. When Fowler wishes to speak with us, he will do so. He has trouble enough without our interfering.”
The American Airlines MD-8o landed at Miami International Airport and taxied over to the terminal. Qati and Ghosn rose from their first-class seats and left the aircraft. Their bags would be transferred automatically to the connecting flight, not that either one particularly cared about that, of course. Both men were nervous, but less so than one might have expected. Death was something both had accepted as an overt possibility for this mission. If they survived, so much the better. Ghosn didn't panic until he realized that there was no unusual activity at all. There should have been some, he thought. He found a bar and looked for the usual elevated television set. It was tuned to a local station. There was no game coverage. He debated asking a question, but decided not to. It was a good decision. He had only to wait a minute before he overheard another voice asking what the score was.
“It was fourteen-seven Vikings,” another voice answered. “Then the goddamned signal was lost.”
“When?”
“About ten minutes ago. Funny they don't have it back yet.”
“Earthquake, like the Series game in San Francisco?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, man,” the bartender replied. Ghosn stood and left for the walk back to the departure lounge.
“What does CIA have?” Fowler asked.
“Nothing at the moment, sir. We're collecting data, but you know everything that we — wait a minute.” Ryan took the message form that the Senior Duty Officer handed him. “Sir, I have a flash here from NSA. The Russian air-defense system just went to a higher alert level. Radars are all coming on, and there's a lot of radio chatter.”
“What does that mean?” Liz Elliot asked.
“It means that they want to increase their ability to protect themselves. PVO isn't a threat to anybody unless they're approaching or inside Soviet airspace.”
“But why would they do it?” Elliot asked again.
“Maybe they're afraid somebody will attack them.”
“God damn it, Ryan!” the President shouted.
“Mr. President, excuse me. That was not a flippant remark. It is literally true. Voyska PVO is a defense system like our NORAD. Our air-defense and warning systems are now at a higher alert status. So are theirs. It's a defensive move only. They have to know that we've had this event. When there's trouble of this sort, it's natural to activate your own defenses, just as we have done.”
“It's potentially disturbing,” General Borstein said at NORAD HQ. “Ryan, you forget we have been attacked. They have not. Now, before they've even bothered to call us, they're jacking up their alert levels. I find that a little worrisome.”