Then Kneecap received a flash message that one of the SS-19s had exploded in a nonnuclear detonation during reentry, its warheads tumbling down harmlessly before they could explode.
“An intercept?” asked the president.
“No, sir. Mechanical malfunction.”
“Pray God the other two will malfunction.”
They didn’t.
Intercepts took out three of the remaining twelve warheads of the other two rockets during reentry, but that left nine incoming.
The SAC B-1 bombers were disappearing quickly, the screens full of swarms of intercept fighters from both sides. Trainor was shouting, “Mr. President! Goddamn it — we’re down to the wire here. If we don’t strike back now—”
Mayne raised his hand to steady him. He felt strangely calm. It was now down to a Hobbesian simplicity: “If you use your sword, I must use mine,” and the life of man did indeed appear to be “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Accordingly, he wanted to alert General Carlisle to the possibility of all-out countervalue, city-for-city attack. But Carlisle was already dead, Omaha no more. The last thing Rick Stacy saw was the incoming trajectory, the computers’ cold neutrality announcing the incoming missile’s CEP was plus or minus three miles.
“Way off,” someone in Cheyenne Mountain said. It was, but the air burst of the SS-19’s 550 kilotons at four thousand feet above Omaha produced a multilevel but quickly flattening mushroom cloud, its coronas, like enormous smokers’ rings, transforming the merely colorful sunset of Nebraska into an explosion of astonishing beauty, the stunningly vibrant orange core of the mushroom turning the vast, undulating snowfields to watermelon pink, the circles now rising about the mushroom’s stalk vermilion-tinted, thinning as the red stalk rose through them, the circles now fading to purest white, like a host heaven-bound.
The overpressure of six pounds per square inch produced winds in excess of 130 miles per hour over an MDZ— maximum danger zone — of fourteen square miles, flattening every house in the area, pressures on them in excess of 115 tons, the supercyclonic winds blowing people out of office towers and buildings not already destroyed by the wind.
Three-quarters of the four hundred thousand people of Omaha were killed in a hurtling cyclone of debris as it rose higher and higher, obscuring the lower rings of the air burst, turning the atmosphere a reddish brown. Much of this “shrapnel” swirl consisted of thousands of bodies, superheated, many vaporized — the number of outright fatalities estimated by the superhardened-domed sensors to be 67 percent, the remainder fatally injured.
There were no survivors in a sixteen-square-mile area directly below the air burst’s center, and while, beyond the maximum danger zone of fourteen square miles, the survival rate climbed from 10 percent to 90 percent, at two hundred miles from the zone, these “survivors” were the unlucky ones— faces melted, all body hair gone, and for many, no visible injury, but all of them, particularly given the flatness of the terrain, walking receptacles of huge doses of radiation, doomed to agonizing deaths caused by radiation sickness and multiple cancers, those in SAC HQ dying through suffocation, trapped by the millions of tons of rubble over the venting systems and air intakes, the fireballs having raised the temperature so high that emergency oxygen-generating plants either exploded or were too warped to operate.
The first priority of outside rescuers, for whom not nearly enough anticontamination suits were available, was to get to the children of the outlying districts. For many of these, a half hour delay in reaching them meant death.
As the first tremors of the Omaha “strike” registered on the silo cluster known as Romeo, 750 miles away in Montana. Melissa Lange, deep in Romeo 5A on her last shift before her vacation had been due to begin, knew that Rick Stacy was either dead or dying. Immediately she informed both her crew partner, Shirley Cochrane, and Romeo’s MLC — master launch control — that she was “in violation of WESSR — weapons systems safety rules.”
“Reason?” inquired the duty officer in Romeo’s MLC.
“Emotional stress, sir.” Her voice was thin, all but inaudible. She paused. “My fiancé is — was — in SAC HQ.”
“Hold on.” There was a two-second delay, Shirley Cochrane tense in her chair, already buckled up, fully expecting the launch code to come chattering in at any moment, her seat pulled forward on the guide rails, her hands checking the belt for the third time. The Romeo MLC duty officer was back on the line. “Lange, you able to carry on?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very good. Your WESSR violation duly noted and negated by circumstances. Override command issued by Colonel Beaton. You are still on shift. Repeat, you are still on shift. Go to prelaunch status.”
“Yes, sir.”
Melissa turned back to her console gratefully, for the console was now the real world. She was allowed — had been ordered—to shut everything else out. “Hands on keys,” she instructed Cochrane. “Keys—” Her voice gave out. She coughed. “Key them on my mark. Three, two, one — mark!”
“Light on,” confirmed Cochrane. “Light off.”
There was the ten-second delay before Melissa could instruct, “Hands on keys.”
“Hands on keys,” came Cochrane’s confirmation.
“Initiate on my mark. Five, four, three, two, one. Now. I’ll watch the clock.”
“I’ve got the light,” said Shirley Cochrane. “Light on. Light off.”
“Release key,” said Melissa.
“Key released.”
Even now Shirley Cochrane half expected that the launch code would not come in, that the vote required from another LCC — launch control center — which was required before they could go to “strategic alert” would never come and that instead an ILC — inhibit launch command — would come in its place.
But the launch code did come, as the yellow lights turned to white into the waiting mode for “launch-fire-release”—the alert’s arrival announced by a high-pitched electronic ringing and then the voice of the man they had never seen, only heard, delivering the sixteen-word, four-numeral mixed sequence in clear, calm, modulated tones: “Sierra… Papa… Foxtrot… Hotel… Tango… Lima… Acknowledge.”
“Copied,” said Cochrane, advising Melissa, “I see a valid message.”
“I agree,” confirmed Melissa. “Go to step one checklist. Launch keys inserted.” Both women unbuckled and went to the midpoint red box, each of them taking out her red-tagged brass key and returning to her console, flipping up the clear safety cover and inserting the key, then buckling up again.
“Ready?” said Melissa.
“Ready.”
“Function select key, “ordered Melissa. “Switch to off.’ “
“It is.”
“MRTCEP to MRT,” instructed Melissa.
“MRT.”
“Sixty-five select.”
“Sixty-five.”
“Initiate activator clockwise.”
“Activator clockwise,” confirmed Cochrane, her delicate hand turning the black knob hard right.
“Take up alarm,” instructed Melissa. A deep buzzer sounded. Melissa then reached forward to the progress control panel, turning the knob clockwise to the fourteen-hundred-watts position.