America (21 page)

Stuffy Stalnaker grabbed his hat and walked out of the office, headed for the war room.

*   *   *

Aboard
America,
Eck heard the throb of the P-3 Orion's engines as it approached the area and reported it to Kolnikov, who looked at his watch. Fourteen minutes had passed since the last missile was launched. Maybe the crew of the Orion saw the missiles come out of the water. Or a satellite did. Or maybe they were just flying by.

“Sonobuoy,” Eck said when he heard the splash.

Okay, the patrol plane wasn't just flying by.

Kolnikov checked the tactical display. The computers displayed the sonobuoys, which went in on a general search pattern.

The sub was descending through twelve hundred feet, making twenty-two knots.

The patrol plane would put buoys in a circle around the launch site, hoping to pick up the sub as it went under one of them. Well, we will find out just how quiet this boat is, Kolnikov thought.

“All ahead one-third,” he told Turchak, who adjusted the power lever.

“Level at fifteen hundred feet,” Kolnikov added. “I want to motor straight out of the area. If they hear us they'll tell us all about it. Rothberg, be ready to launch decoys if they put a weapon in the water, but don't do anything until I tell you. They may drop something to panic us.”

“Like a fake torpedo,” Boldt suggested.

“That would panic me,” said Turchak.

“No, it wouldn't,” Kolnikov replied. “You're tough, like the steel of a Soviet hammer. All the men of the submarine forces are tough. Isn't that what the politicians always said?”

“Those assholes who had never even been out on a park pond in a rowboat?”

“Those are the ones,” Kolnikov agreed.

*   *   *

The foreign liaison officers were gone when Jake got back to the office. Toad Tarkington was there, waiting for him.

“They went out of here like their underwear was on fire,” Toad told him. “I think Ilin ran for the subway.”

“I've got a car and driver waiting outside,” the admiral told the commander. “The commandant has called the White House for me. They'll let us through the gate over there if we go now.”

In the car on the way over, Jake didn't say anything of importance. The driver, a navy petty officer, didn't need to hear any of this.

At the White House the gate guard examined their ID cards and Pentagon building passes and waved them through. A military aide met them in the driveway and led them to a small office in the basement. The walls were painted government puke green. It could have been an office in the basement of any government building in the country. Fifteen minutes after they arrived, Jake was handed a classified transcript.

He signed the disclosure sheet and passed it to Toad, who also signed his name. The transcript was so highly classified that the aide sat in the room and watched them read it, to be sure they didn't make notes or steal pages.

Jake opened the file and began reading. It took him twenty minutes to read the entire transcript, which covered the events of Saturday morning, from the notification that intruders were boarding
America
until she submerged two hours and forty-one minutes later. When he finished he passed the transcript to Toad and sat lost in thought while Toad read the pages.

“What is Cowbell?” Toad asked when he finished the transcript.

“I don't know,” Jake replied. He opened the transcript to a page he had dog-eared and read it again. After he had studied the page, he returned the transcript to its classified folder and handed it to the aide. He glanced at his watch. Nearly ten o'clock. God, what a long day!

When they were in the driveway behind the White House waiting for the navy sedan to be brought around, Toad said, “Admiral, it seems to me that the national security adviser recommended that the submarine not be destroyed because it had Cowbell and he thought we could find the thing later.”

“Umm,” Jake Grafton grunted.

“The fact that there were an unknown number of Americans still aboard was certainly a factor in the decision not to tell
Jones
's skipper to shoot, but as I read that transcript, the critical factor was Cowbell. They thought they could find that boat anytime.”

“‘Anytime.' He used that word, didn't he.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, Cowbell or no Cowbell, it seems to be lost now.”

“Apparently,” Toad said slowly.

“Oh, it's lost, all right. If the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the chief of naval operations, and the commandant of the Marine Corps don't know where that pigboat is, believe me, nobody in uniform does.”

“So what is Cowbell?”

“Beats the hell outta me.”

“Whatever it is, it's probably so classified no one will tell us squat.”

Toad stood silently for several seconds, letting the sound of the airplanes going into Reagan National wash over him, before he spoke again. “If they hadn't thought they could find that boat again, what do you think the president would have done? After all, he knew there were Americans still aboard.”

“Would have been a hell of a dilemma. Sometimes all your options are bad.”

“Ignoring Cowbell—because we have no idea what it is—if you had been on the hot seat and had to decide, you would have ordered
Jones
's skipper to shoot, wouldn't you?”

Jake Grafton nodded. “Bad options and all, I thought that was what the president should have done. I wondered why he didn't.”

The navy car pulled to a stop in the driveway, and Jake Grafton walked behind it to get in on the other side. That was when he heard a small jet engine running hard. The noise was higher pitched than the rumble of the airliners in the Reagan National Airport traffic pattern over the Potomac, which was the only reason he noticed it, because while the volume was increasing, it was not loud.

Instinctively Jake Grafton knew what it was. Without conscious thought he looked up into the darkness, although of course there was nothing there that he could see.

Now the pitch of the engine changed dramatically.

“Incoming!” he roared and threw himself forward onto the concrete of the driveway.

He heard a whoosh, then the concussion of an explosion rocked the car and pummeled his back. He felt heat.

As pieces of burning wood and a snowstorm of masonry and plaster and other debris cascaded down, Jake turned and looked. The air was filled with flying debris and dirt. Many of the lights in the building were out. Still, he could see that the missile had smashed into the topmost story of the White House, blowing out a huge hole and tearing off a major chunk of roof. An inferno of hot yellow fire burned in the hole now, so bright it was almost impossible to look at.

“Holy shit!” shouted Toad Tarkington.

The hot fire cast a flickering, ghastly light upon the lawn and the two naval officers, who were still crouched beside the car, frozen in place, staring at the shattered building. The guard by the door was on the ground, apparently unconscious. As pieces rained down, Jake glanced at the car. At least the glass of the windows was still intact.

“A Tomahawk!” Toad whispered in the silence that followed the blast.

“Quick,” Jake said to the petty officer behind the wheel as a fire alarm began sounding. “Haul ass! Get that thing out of here before the fire trucks arrive. We'll meet you down the street. Step on it!”

As the car sped away, Jake stripped off his blouse and hat and tossed them on the grass. The guard by the door had a bump on his head—apparently he had been knocked down by the concussion and hit his head on the concrete.

Jake sat the man against the wall, then ran into the White House. Toad Tarkington was right behind.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Jake Grafton and Toad Tarkington met two dazed Secret Service agents inside the door.

“What the hell happened?” one of them shouted over the raucous blaring of the fire alarm.

“A missile hit the upper story and set it on fire,” Jake replied. “Let's check if there is anyone up there injured.”

He and Toad were running up the main staircase in the White House when a light flashed in the sky. Each man felt a transitory jolt of energy, as if he had inadvertently touched a hot spark plug just for an instant. Simultaneously, every light in the building went out and the siren died abruptly.

“What was that?” the first agent asked.

“Transformer somewhere blew out,” the other one called. “Let's check for people.” The words were barely out of his mouth when the dull boom of an explosion echoed faintly through the building.

“Flashlight!” Toad said bitterly. “Kolnikov fired a Tomahawk with a Flashlight warhead.”

Flashlight was a highly classified warhead, an electromagnetic bomb, or explosive flux generator, mounted on the nose of a Tomahawk. When the warhead detonated a few hundred feet over a city, the explosion generated an intense electromagnetic current in the coil that surrounded the explosive. In the tenth of a microsecond before the explosion ripped the warhead apart, the energy wave was directed into an antenna and broadcast. A trillion watts of microwave energy raced away at the speed of light to fry every electronic circuit they hit, which was all of them. Electrical power switches, telephone switches, the chips in computers, cars, toys, calculators, servers … everything! In a fraction of an eyeblink, 150 years of technical progress were wiped out for several miles from the epicenter of the explosion.

As he ran up the staircase in the unnatural silence, Jake Grafton faintly heard the engines of an airplane moaning in the darkness. “Oh, my God!” he whispered.

*   *   *

Victor Pappas was the captain of an Airbus A-321 on final into Reagan National, flying past the Lincoln Memorial, right down the river, when the E-bomb detonated a few hundred yards from his right wingtip.

Everything in the cockpit went black. At first he thought he was flash blind, and he blinked mightily, trying to clear his eyes. He knew exactly what had happened—lightning!

Then he realized that the city below him was dark, coal black. Even the airport. Everything had disappeared!

“Jesus,” he said into the mike at his lips, but it too was dead, without the usual feedback tone that told him it was working.

This is more than just a power failure!

He keyed the radio mike. No sound at all in his headset.

The moon was still there, the stars. He could see the reflection of the night sky on the Potomac, see the empty area that must be the airport.…

To land without lights at a blacked-out airport is crazy! What has happened?

The copilot was shouting in his ear. Something about the generators. He reached for the emergency generator and deployed it, a little wind-powered device that popped up from a wing root into the slipstream. He had never in his career had to deploy one before now—only in the crazy emergencies of the simulator—but he had never before had a complete, total electrical failure. The entire glass cockpit was dead … even the goddamn batteries had bit the big one.

But the emergency generator didn't pick up any of the load.

Holy…!

Time to add power, get the hell out of here, and figure this shit out over an airport with lights!

That decision made, he pushed the power levers forward and pulled back ever so slightly on the control yoke. And got the shock of a lifetime.

Nothing. No response.

This isn't happening! Not to me, not with 183 people on board! Please, God, not this!

He pushed the yoke forward a smidgen, reduced power. Nothing. The engines were still running—he would have felt it had he lost one—but the inputs to the controls had absolutely no effect.

Ten seconds had passed since the flash, no more than that.

A total power failure, he thought, one chance in a zillion and by damn it's happening! That flash must have been lightning—it must have fried everything in this plane! The computers are cooked. Lightning! The plane is fly-by-wire, with computers that move the flight controls, that regulate fuel flow to the engines, that—

The plane began a slow roll to the left. A few degrees a second. Victor Pappas felt the plane roll, saw the moon and night sky and barely visible river move. Without conscious thought he twisted on the yoke, turned it to the right and pulled back slightly, trying to counter the nose-down drift that instinct told him was coming.

Oh, Jesus, there it was, the nose was dropping … twenty degrees angle of bank, turning toward the Anacostia Naval Station … the nose dropping …

He slammed the throttles full forward. Nothing.

In slow motion the airliner continued to roll, the nose dropping toward the Earth. Behind him someone screamed.

Victor Pappas released the controls. One hundred and eighty-three people! He closed his eyes and began praying.

The airliner had reached ninety degrees of bank, thirty degrees nose down, when it slammed into the Earth.

*   *   *

At D.C. General Hospital, Dr. Apollo Ice had two patients on ventilators. One of them, an eighteen-year-old male, had been shot in the head earlier in the evening during a gang-related fracas outside a district bar. The other, a fourteen-year-old girl, had taken thirty sleeping tablets, all that remained in a bottle containing a prescription for her mother, after her first boyfriend told her she was ugly and he didn't want to be her boyfriend anymore.

Dr. Ice was in the ventilator room checking his patients when the power failed. He stood in the darkness waiting for the emergency generator to kick in. As the seconds passed, he counted.

When his count reached ten seconds he knew he had a decision to make. He didn't know why the emergency generator hadn't come on-line, supplying power—he didn't know that the switches in the circuit were fried—but he knew for an absolute fact that both his patients would die without air, which the machines had been providing.