As he stood in the midst of his frantic staff, monitoring the approach of the SR-71, Moskanko watched in dismay as the blurred television image of Bakunin shook its head sadly.
“Do you understand?” Moskanko repeated.
“Viktor Semyonovich, you have gone mad,” Bakunin said softly, gesturing at Moskanko with the scissors. “Once you had my loyalty, but now I can no longer believe in you.” Bakunin’s face was oddly untroubled despite his words.
The defense minister roared: “Kapitsa, arrest that man!”
The stunned secret police officer was reaching to pull his gun from his belt as Marshal Bakunin leaned out of television view and using Bruk’s fingernail scissors deliberately snipped the wires that connected the transistorized battery to the marble of Einstinium 119. In the Moscow defense center, the television screen went blank before Moskanko’s eyes.
Gazing at the morning sunlight streaming in through his window, Joe Safcek was imagining Martha waving to him as he came up the driveway. She was reaching for him at the moment when the plastique imploded onto the marble of dark gray particles. In the next millisecond, Colonel Joe Safcek was incinerated in his bed.
At the moment of detonation, an intense bluish white light lit the sky. In seconds a brilliant orange fireball formed over several hundred yards and vaporized the laser and all buildings in the complex. It lapped at the surrounding slopes and roared through the gullies toward the highway a mile and a half away.
In the Maryland mountains, the time was precisely 11:08 P.M. — zero hour minus ten minutes.
On the road leading north from the laser complex, a terrified driver crawled from the wreckage of his vehicle and watched a herd of sheep bleating mournfully as they trudged, blind and helpless, along the roadway. Their blistered flanks were turning into blackened running sores, and the sheep stumbled and retched onto the grass as radiation invaded their bloodstreams and raced to consume them. The long line of animals trampled unseeing over the blackened corpse of their shepherd.
In a field two miles south, a farmer was driven head first through a tree trunk.
Two teen-age girls hiking through the desert flowers two and a half miles east of Ground Zero were blinded by the glare and felt a scorching wave of heat pass over them.
At a Soviet Army training camp three miles away, men standing in line for a meal felt the hot blast and saw their uniforms erupt in tiny puffs of fire that caught and fed on them. All military vehicles in the motor pool fused into grotesque lumps of steel.
Marshal Moskanko had sat staring a moment at the dark screen. Then he lunged to the phone and tried to raise Tashkent. The line was dead. Moskanko cursed loudly. “Have we got a satellite anywhere near Tashkent?”
The duty officer at the control board ripped a piece of paper from a computer and handed it to the defense minister. The numbed Moskanko read it with a growing feeling of doom.
NUCLEAR DETONATION NORTH OF TASHKENT IN FOURTEEN KILOTON RANGE…
In the depths of the Maryland mountain, William Stark stood ashen-faced as he watched the television. In his hand, the knuckles white, he clenched a cable, Moskanko’s reply to his hot-line warning that the SR-71 was coming in:
RECALL BOMBER IMMEDIATELY FROM SOVIET TERRITORY. DESTRUCTION OF LASER WILL BE REGARDED AS AN ACT OF WAR AND WILL BRING INSTANT RETALIATION AGAINST YOUR COUNTRY BY ALL SOVIET SYSTEMS.
On the screen, the mushroom cloud had changed colors in seconds from pink to salmon to azure and ugly black. The laser works had just disappeared in the enormous pillar of energy beneath the lurking Samos. General Stephen Austin Roarke could not believe it.
“The strike plane isn’t due over the target for four minutes, but it’s gone anyway,” he screamed into the President’s ear. “It’s gone! It’s gone!”
Stark grabbed at the red phone. To Ellington on the other end he shouted: “Call it back! Call it back! Right now!” Ellington screamed into the radio: “Abort, abort” as he punched the recall alarm. Two hundred and twenty miles west of Tashkent, the SR-71 crew had no need to be told. From their perch in the sky, the men could see the twisting column of flame ahead of them and feel the spreading shock waves.
The strike plane turned quickly to the right. The pilot spoke to Incirclik: “Roger on abort, roger on abort. The target is no longer functional.”
At Incirclik, General Ellington repeated the words over the telephone to William Stark, who sank into a chair and watched the mushroom in horrified fascination. The spectators in the underground White House held their breaths as they witnessed the fury unleashed by the tiny marble of nuclear material. No one spoke. Only the impersonal chatter of radios and teletypes intruded.
On the third floor of the main hospital in Tashkent, Luba Spitkovsky was blissfully unaware of the violence swirling around her. Still unconscious after surgery for massive gunshot wounds in the stomach, she lay motionless as the ceiling cracked and plaster showered down on her. The KGB man guarding her ran into the hall in panic. Luba did not stir.
At the Navoi Opera House the roof ripped, and beams cracked. Inside, three glistening chandeliers whirled wildly, then crashed sickeningly into the rows of seats beneath.
On Komsomol Lake, amateur sailors with their girl friends were swamped by the suddenly thrashing waters, which soon smothered them and stifled their screams.
In the Soviet defense command center, Marshal Moskanko stared at the men around him. His shaking hands betrayed his turmoil. Omskuschin and Fedoseyev looked at each other in silence while someone switched on the cameras in a Cosmos orbiting two hundred miles northeast of Tashkent on a course leading it over the Chinese Communist nuclear-test facilities in the Sinkiang Desert.
The marshals of the Soviet Union looked at the wall screen and saw clearly the mushroom that Joe Safcek had planted.
Because the bomb was set off at ground level and in a sparsely populated region, its destructiveness did not match the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The fireball was blocked by the hills and valleys from spreading wildly down toward Tashkent. Even the full effects of the blast were muzzled somewhat as it reached the northern outskirts of the metropolis. But the inhabitants would never be the same after that day.
They saw the malevolent mushroom rising over them and then felt the concussion reach out to touch them.
Slivers of glass, carried like rain through the air, slashed thousands of pedestrians. On every street, houses buckled and crumbled under the impact of the shock wave. They swayed and fell, spewing out their collection of flotsam and furniture. Streetcars and busses overturned, and automobiles were rammed into buildings with the velocity of artillery shells. The cries of the trapped and dying were joined by the clamor of ambulances and fire trucks, rushing to extricate them from the debris.
In the town of Chirchiz, eleven miles to the east, Olga Spitkovsky heard the rumble, then was thrown to the floor by the shock wave, which broke every window in the house. As Mrs. Spitkovsky rose, she stepped on a picture of her daughter, Luba, gone for so long from her country and her family. Luba’s mother wiped the blood off her face and ran outside to see what had happened to her town that day.
It had taken the bomb less than five minutes to spend its terrible fury.
Stark roused himself from the hypnotic vision on the screen to ask for Midas readings. Sam Riordan spoke to California. The monitor said Soviet missile sites were not on alert yet. Stark listened.