Without Warning Part 29

"Sir, I am afraid I must inform you that I will direct U.S. forces in theater to interdict this strike and stop it by any means possible. I will further contact our coalition partners and request any and all cooperation they might provide. And, I will immediately inform the governments of the targeted nations that your strike is inbound, and I will a.s.sist them in whatever way possible to repel it."

Warat received the rebuke with stoic reserve. Behind him, through the wide gla.s.s windows, life went on. Not normally. But it did go on. Some traffic moved through the streets. Children would be playing in suburban backyards as parents did their best to insulate them from the horror of a world collapsing in on itself. High above the idyllic panorama Ritchie saw the sun glint on the wings of a commercial airliner, outbound. For where, he had no idea, but it was undoubtedly full. The Israeli envoy sighed and quickly recovered his composure.

"My government expected that you might react in this fas.h.i.+on, Admiral. It would be the honorable thing for you. However, I must point out that your own forces have degraded the air defense nets of Iran and Iraq to the point where they cannot deny our air forces. And the IAF has done the same to the Syrian air force over the last week of fighting. By warning them, you will do no more than condemn millions to spend their last hours in abject fear."

Ritchie slammed an open hand down on the desk, with a thunderous crash.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n you, will you listen? You cannot do this and you must not. I am ordering my theater commanders to interdict your sorties with deadly force. We will shoot you down!"

Warat's chin moved up and down like a bobble-headed doll on a dashboard. His shoulders twitched, and when he spoke he did not look Ritchie in the eye.

"My government has prepared for such an eventuality, Admiral. The weapon packages will be delivered with an escort of IAF fighters. They will engage any hostile force that tries to prevent them from accomplis.h.i.+ng their mission. Any. Hostile. Force."

"My G.o.d," breathed Ritchie. "You'll kill us all. If you do this how long do you imagine it will be before some maniac in New Delhi or Islamabad decides that they need to get the drop on their nemesis? How long will it be before Russia and China decide that things will be a lot simpler with us, here in Hawaii, out of the picture?"

"I cannot answer these questions, Admiral, as you well know. But I can tell you that if we do not act, the Jewish people and their state will be wiped out in a second Holocaust. And you know that I speak the truth."

Ritchie dropped his head into his hands and rubbed at eyes that burned with a lack of sleep.

"Get out," he said quietly.

Negev Desert, Israel

The envoy had lied. Or rather, he had not told the whole truth, because he did not know it. The targeting list Warat provided to Ritchie was incomplete, as were other details of the attack, including the fact that many of the warheads would be delivered by Jericho II missiles, not piloted aircraft. In addition to the cities and military facilities on the list, the Israeli cabinet had added a further thirty-eight sites. Suspected Iranian nuclear centers in Natanz, Ardakan, Saghand, Gas.h.i.+n, Bushehr, Aral, and Lashkar Abad were all slated for destruction, along with the cities of Tabriz, Qazvin, s.h.i.+raz, Yazd, Kerman, Qom, Ahwaz, and Kermanshah. Five of the nuclear-tipped missiles were inbound on Libya as the amba.s.sador sat down with Admiral Ritchie, while another three were headed for military bases near heavily populated Egyptian cities. But one mission, the last to depart, had a very different target. The Aswan High Dam.

Colonel Rudi Molenz sat quietly in the c.o.c.kpit of his F-15I Ra'am at the end of the main runway of Hatzerim Air Base in the Negev Desert. Tel Aviv and his family lay fifty miles to the north, but the bejeweled cl.u.s.ter of lights would be dimmed tonight, as the city hid itself in the dark. He would not be able to glance back over his shoulder after takeoff and smile at the thought of his two little children safely abed, somewhere in that ma.s.s of glowing pearls, surrounded by soft toys and dreaming of Daddy's return. Because there was no guarantee that Daddy would ever be coming home. And worse than that, no certainty that home itself would survive the night or the next day. Behind him, his weapons system officer, Lieutenant Ephron, hummed tunelessly, irritating Molenz, who said nothing. Ephron was nervous, and the flat, atonal droning was his release valve. It was the same before all of their missions. When they finally had a release from the tower, the little putz would shut the f.u.c.k up and do his job flawlessly. He always had before.

A brief crackle in the earphones of his bulbous DASH helmet.

"Attention Reach One Ninety, please stand by ..."

Molenz felt his b.a.l.l.s shrivel, and became acutely aware of silence in the back of the c.o.c.kpit.

The voice crackled in his display and sight helmet again.

"You have clearance to execute Plan Magenta. Preliminary release codes Echo Kilo Four Niner Three Niner Foxtrot."

Molenz had burned the one-use code into his memory but checked the mission pad Velcroed to his leg anyway.

"Release confirmed. Reach One Ninety away."

The enormous power of the aircraft's two F-150 Pratt & Whitney engines came roaring up like an angry leviathan as the pilot's head-up display blinked into life. The caged fury of the jet fighter completely enfolded him, and as always he felt the deep-body thrill of having so much potential power in his hands. Beneath the old familiar sensation, however, lay a dread that ran deeper than anything he had experienced in all the years he had been flying combat missions. It was not the fear of his own death, but of becoming Death itself, because attached to the underside of his Strike Eagle was a thirty-kiloton nuclear warhead in a specially hardened penetrator casing. It was designed to slam into the base of the Aswan High Dam and drill down through ten meters of concrete before birthing a small supernova to atomize much of the dam's solid ma.s.s, releasing the superheated waters behind to roar down the Nile Valley like a megatsunami toward Cairo.

Part of him could not believe that he was doing this, that it was even happening. But the two aircraft ripping down the tarmac right after his were real. As were the dozen flights he'd watched leaving earlier for much farther-flung locations. He'd known many of those pilots. Commanded some of them. Trained others. Their good-byes were restrained but heartfelt. Unlike Molenz they were flying single-engine F-16s with modified drop tanks to get them all the way to Iran while flying low and fast through the wastes of northern Iraq. They would traverse the edge of the Kurdish regions, where years of British and American enforcement of the no-fly zone had denuded Iraq of air-defense a.s.sets. Even with drop tanks, however, there would not be enough fuel for them to return. Extraction teams were standing by to evac anyone who made it to the preset rendezvous points. But Molenz knew from looking into the men's eyes as they shook hands, and in some cases hugged, that they were going to their deaths.

The Israeli air force flights left in groups of three. One F-15 carried the warhead, while the two escorts carried air-to-air load outs. Those headed for targets in Iran and Iraq did not expect to encounter any significant resistance en route. The top-secret electronic-warfare suites installed for this mission were designed to maximize the escorts' effectiveness against any allied aircraft they might encounter. It was possible that coalition aircraft might try to stop them, but Molenz and his peers figured they had enough on their plate as it was. They were no threat.

Molenz pulled back on the stick, and the Strike Eagle clawed its way up into the stars. At twenty thousand feet he performed his usual contortionist feat anyway, straining to catch a glimpse of the capital off on the northern horizon. It was definitely dimmer, but not completely blacked out. What would be the point? Modern sensors meant that pilots no longer had to feel their way through darkened enemy airs.p.a.ce, seeking out targets to bomb. Iraqi Scuds had been landing in Israel for days, despite the best efforts of the Patriot batteries and the promises of General Franks that coalition special forces would own the western deserts from where the missile threat originated. The promises meant nothing. The threats issuing from the Iraqi dictator in hiding, however, had to be taken seriously, and since the flooding of Baghdad those threats had become increasingly shrill and apocalyptic. It almost seemed as though Hussein and the Iranian president were racing each other toward a rhetorical abyss.

And now, thought Molenz, the abyss races toward them.

Behind him, Ephron ran through another check of the Elisra SPS-2110/A Modified Electronic Warfare System and the LANTIRN pods while Molenz checked the APG-70 terrain-mapping radar. Even in the foulest weather, in the darkest hours of night, the radar provided him with a picture-perfect return from the ground, making it possible to pick out even small targets like mobile batteries tucked away in a dry wadi. The dam was just under four thousand meters in length, and a hundred and eleven meters tall, containing forty-three million cubic meters of concrete and fill; there wasn't much chance of him missing the dam.

Molenz edged their nose around to the south, to skirt Beersheba and trace the length of the border with Jordan, on a course for the headwaters of the Gulf of Aqaba. The three jets flew low and fast, operating up near the edge of full military power, shrieking over the ghostly blue-black desert at Mach 2.5. They maintained radio silence, each man alone with his own thoughts as the demands of the mission allowed. A few minutes before they would overfly the resort city of Eilat, he pushed the stick over and sent them rocketing toward the Egyptian border. Beyond lay the Sinai Peninsula and the rocky wastes of the biblical Wilderness where Moses and the Israelites wandered for so many years. Mountains lay ahead, a jagged-edged void of darkness blotting out the stars corresponding to the image scrolling down the APG-70 screen, bathing him in the softest of glows. During a brief interlude, they traversed a particularly desolate and empty stretch of mountainous wasteland, and the pilot became aware of the beating of his heart. For one perverse second he couldn't help thinking of the millions of hearts he was about to still forever. Pus.h.i.+ng the thought away like a fearful specter, he concentrated on the return from the radar and the threat boards. Nothing untoward. The Egyptian air force was steadfastly refusing to offer even the slightest provocation to its neighbor, for fear of unleas.h.i.+ng exactly the sort of h.e.l.lfire that Molenz now carried with him.

They didn't seem to know that he was even in their airs.p.a.ce.

Whatever moral qualms Molenz had suffered before accepting this mission-and they had been many-he had nonetheless volunteered for it. They all had. He would destroy the dam, and doom millions tonight, none of whom had raised a hand against him or his country. But there were millions more who would, who wanted to, and who, even now, were battling with the Egyptian government's security forces on the streets of a dozen cities, attempting to overthrow the Mubarak regime because of its supine response to what they called Zionist aggression. And they were winning. That was the h.e.l.l of it. They were winning, and very soon they would sit in the presidential palace and turn their blood-dimmed eyes on his home and his family, and it was wrong and it was tragic, and he might well burn for the sin he was about to commit. But Rudi Molenz was convinced that if Israel did not reach out now, at this very moment, and hammer its mortal enemies into the dust, then the Jewish state and people would surely perish.

He shook his head, a quick constrained movement inside the helmet. They were coming up on the Gulf of Suez, one of the trip points in the flight, where they would be exposed to the radar and weapons of the Western naval forces operating in the area. They had no IFF codes for this flight, and as lead planner for the squadron he knew that an envoy had been dispatched to Hawaii to inform the Americans at the last possible minute what was about to happen. But they would not know just yet. He checked the mission clock.

Fifteen minutes.

In fifteen minutes they would find out.

But in half that time he would be over the target.

The Gulf flashed beneath them and Ephron sat quietly waiting for the warning tones and pings that would tell them they had been painted by the sophisticated arrays of the naval vessels below.

The warning was not long in coming. Three harsh discordant tones sounded, and Lieutenant Ephron went to work, firing up jamming sets and countermeasures. Molenz focused his attention down to a stiletto point, determined to see them through this pa.s.sing hazard.

It was over as quickly as it had begun. The waters dropped away and suddenly the giant wind farm at Zafarana appeared in the crisp aquamarine glow of his terrain-rendering APG screen. Huge alien-looking structures blurred beneath them, recalling for Molenz an unbidden childhood memory of running alongside a picket fence through which a setting sun had cast its dying rays.

Behind him, Ephron requested permission to arm the warhead.

"Granted," said Molenz. "Primary release code Alpha Two Four Delta Zero Two November Three Two Five One Echo. Confirm."

"Confirmed."

"You are released to arm."

Ephron, whose voice was shaking, busied himself on a small keyboard, tapping out a long series of commands before announcing, "The weapon is armed."

Molenz dry-swallowed.

The port wing dipped thirty degrees and the plane began to track to the south as he leveled off, dropping the flight into the folds of a long valley that ran roughly parallel to the Nile. The faintest silver crescent of light bleeding over the ridgeline to the west would be Luxor, often acclaimed as the world's greatest open-air museum. The temple at Karnak, the Valley of the Kings, the ruins of Thebes, they were all just a few minutes' flying time away.

Molenz pressed on, allowing the Strike Eagle to begin its climb to a safe release height.

As all three birds emerged, screaming from the folds of the ancient valley, he finally saw what he was about to do. Towns and villages clung to the edge of the Nile, their weak, twinkling lights marking its sinuous path through the night like illuminated buoys.

He pressed back into the flight seat, he poured on power for alt.i.tude.

Ephron announced from behind him that the automatic targeting system had a lock and requested that Molenz release control of the aircraft to him.

The pilot agreed and felt that brief, awful moment of loss as microprocessors took over. The Eagle rolled and turned to bear down on its target, just like the bird of prey for which it was named.

The was an audible clunk and the plane jumped, suddenly free of the dreadful burden that had fallen away from beneath them.

All three aircraft pitched over and raced due east, away from the terrible thing they had just done.

The warhead slipped quietly down through the warm moist air. It did not whistle or shriek to announce its death dive. A pa.s.sing sibilant hiss and the whirring of guidance fins at the tail were the only sounds it made. In the nose of the bomb a small electronic device slavishly tracked the laser-designated aim point at the base of the dam, for as long as the warplanes were able to maintain the link. By the time they broke contact to escape the blast, the weapon had already settled into a stable descent. It struck the angled concrete wall of the Aswan High Dam at near supersonic speed with a thunderous boom that shook the entire structure.

Designed to spear deep into extremely hard, multilayered underground facilities, the penetrator, the elongated narrow-diameter spike of superhard-ened nickel-cobalt steel alloy, was enhanced with a void-sensing Hard Target Smart Fuze that measured the progress of the warhead into the body of the dam, delaying detonation until an optimal depth had been reached. Israel had long ago learned the art of reducing the size of its nuclear devices without sacrificing their destructive power. Some of the bombs falling on cities through the Middle East at that very moment topped out in the megaton range. The blast and heat and radiation effects they yielded were vastly greater than those of the primitive bombs that the U.S. had dropped on j.a.pan in 1945.

The device that lay, for all of a millisecond, sleeping beneath thousands of millions of tons of cement was modest in comparison, although twice as powerful as the Nagasaki and Hiros.h.i.+ma bombs. It did not need to be a city killer, however. It merely needed to bring down a wall, and did so by instantly turning a significant portion of it into a white-hot plasma. The Smart Fuze, having determined that an optimum penetration had been reached, signaled the bomb to compress a sphere of subcritical explosive material around a pluto-nium core, setting off a fission reaction.

Surrounded as it was by the crus.h.i.+ng ma.s.s of the Aswan dam, the initial burst of radiation could not escape and so began to rapidly heat the encasing medium to tens of millions of degrees, vaporizing everything within the expanding sphere of gas. Growing toward its maximum size, the fireball cooled rapidly, until it no longer possessed the heat to transform solid ma.s.s into gaseous residue. Having disintegrated the wall, however, it did have more than enough thermal power to flash-boil the waters of the dam. The blast front, with nowhere to easily dissipate, transferred much of its energy into a shock wave that sped outward from ground zero, imitating the effect of an earth-shattering quake. It struck the older, smaller original dam wall a little farther downstream like a hammer of the G.o.ds.

A few thousand people who lived in the small settlement around the dam died instantly in the explosion, leaving n.o.body on the ground to witness what happened as the Nile was set free.

High above, however, Molenz had a perfect view and whispered a prayer, asking forgiveness for what he had done. As the immediate effects of the explosion cleared, a mountainous wall of hot, irradiated water was unleashed on the valley below. A giant, boiling wave, over a hundred meters high, began its journey to the sea. It roared out of the huge lake, punched through the mushroom cloud that rose inexorably over the void where one of the great engineering marvels of the world had stood just a few seconds earlier. He could hear nothing in the c.o.c.kpit, over the roar of the Eagle's twin engines, but the pilot imagined that hearing that monstrous wall of angry, su-perhot white water rus.h.i.+ng toward you would have to sound something like sticking your head inside the F-15's afterburner.

He watched the progress of the wave for as long as he could, saw it sweep over Luxor like a giant ocean dumper rolling over a child's toy at the beach, before something even more terrible caught his eye.

The rising of a new sun, hours before dawn, far off to the north.

Where Cairo once stood.

PACOM HQ, Hawaii

The tremor in Admiral James Ritchie's hand was obvious as he read from the briefing note. He managed to keep his voice steady, though. Wouldn't do to be caught p.i.s.sing his pants in a room full of civilians.

"Casualties from the immediate effects of the first strike are estimated at eighty-five million," he said. "Further casualties from the breaching of the Aswan dam may double that."

The dozen men and women arrayed around the grand oak table in the governor's dining room were ashen-faced. And some of them were visibly shaking. Governor Lingle had tears in her eyes. The room was crowded and hot, partly because of the amount of audiovisual equipment that had been brought in to effect the teleconference with Anchorage and Olympia, the Was.h.i.+ngton state capital.

The surviving civilian authorities of the United States of America were in shock. Perhaps even more traumatized than they had been by the Disappearance. Ritchie wasn't sure why. Perhaps it had something to do with the completely inexplicable nature of that event. Perhaps they were all still in a sort of denial. Everyone in this room, however, everyone involved in the conference, had grown up with the specter of nuclear war lurking at the edge of consciousness. It was not merely explicable. It was familiar.

"Indirect deaths, in the short term, from radiation poisoning and injuries, are estimated by our modeling to climb as high as another thirty million over the next month."

He heard somebody curse softly but continued on.

"Medium-term fatalities, from the collapse of governing and societal systems, may double or triple that again," said Ritchie. "There may be unquan-tifiable effects, farther afield. Millions of bodies and radioactive debris have been flushed out of the Nile delta into the Mediterranean, for instance, where they will contaminate the environment and enter the marine food chain."

A woman sitting by Governor Lingle covered her mouth and ran from the room.

Jed Culver, who had been standing near the door, waiting to speak, yanked it open to let her through. He was sweating profusely, and appeared blotchy and unwell.

"General Franks reports that coordinated attacks on U.S. forces in the area have ceased," said Ritchie. "Iraqi forces are requesting cease-fires or surrendering en ma.s.se. Iranian forces are withdrawing. Further, there seems to be no evidence of any national command authority in either country that survived the Israeli strike. In the areas of Iraq still under our nominal control as part of Operation Katie, local Iraqi government leaders have requested humanitarian aid. We have had similar requests from the surviving civilian leaders.h.i.+p in Syria and Egypt. Iran has also requested our a.s.sistance."

He paused as a Republican state senator from Alaska swore loudly and colorfully.

"Uncoordinated attacks by nonstate actors continue off the coast of Lebanon and in Afghanistan. General Musharraf survived yet another a.s.sa.s.sination attempt this morning in the aftermath of the attacks. He informed me personally that Pakistan has now gone to full readiness to retaliate against anyone, Israel, India, anyone who even remotely threatens his country."

Ritchie let his hand drop and looked around the room, taking in the cameras beaming his image across the Pacific to Olympia and Anchorage as well.

"I have no national command authority to whom I can turn for orders," he said. "Our own nuclear deterrent is effectively useless without said authority. I can give orders to fire all day and night long, but the commanders of our ballistic missile subs will not follow them without presidential authority. That is why we originally scheduled this meeting. I believe that if we had had such an authority, if we had had a president and even the semblance of an emergency government, this ... holocaust could have been avoided."

He had spoken the word without forethought, but having done so, did not regret it.

"This is not your fault," he said with a mounting and voluble anger that seemed to say just the opposite. "You have all had a h.e.l.l of a time dealing with the impossible demands of our own emergency. But I promise you, if you cannot come to some sort of working arrangement, if you do not leave this room tonight with a plan to immediately rebuild some basic form of national government, then what happened today will happen again and again and again until the only evidence that civilization ever arose on this planet will be its radioactive ruins."

And with that, he turned and stormed out of the room.

Seattle, Was.h.i.+ngton

Suzie was in the lounge room, watching Toy Story with her friend Emma, when Kip heard the news. Emma's mom had a transit pa.s.s and voucher for the food bank in Bellevue, and Kip had spent the morning on the phone to Fort Lewis-another "privilege" of his newly elevated status-making sure that this time all of the security that should have been in place was. He was running through a checklist of all the aid centers with a Lieutenant Some-body-or-Other when he heard Barbara cry out from across the kitchen.

"Just hang on ... I'll call you back," he said.

She had the radio on, listening to a news bulletin, which Kipper didn't put much stock in because of the army's control of the airwaves. Yesterday's shootings at Costco, for instance, had been reported as a "serious disturbance," possibly "Resistance-related," which had halted food distribution for the day. Nothing more.

Whatever Barb had just heard, though, had to be something more than the anodyne pap and propaganda that Blackstone's people let out. She was pale-skinned by nature, but at that very moment she looked almost translucent, as though every drop of blood had rushed away from her face. Her hands shook visibly as she raised them to her mouth.

"What is it, Mommy?"

Suzie and Emma had appeared at the door, drawn by the cry of an adult. Both of them wore very grown-up frowns. Kip hustled them back into the lounge room with a promise of "emergency chocolate" from the camping rations before hurrying back to his wife.

"What's up?" he asked. Her eyes were wide with fear.

"A war," she said. "A nuclear war has started."

Kipper's stomach flipped over.