Arc Light (14 page)

“General Zorin,” the officer seated at the nearest communicator said to him in a low voice, nodding across the room.

When Zorin looked up, he saw Captain Melnikov, pistol raised. Lubyanov's shouts could be heard over the open intercom, coming to his receiver from a distance.

“General Zorin,” the scared Melnikov said uncertainly, “please. Please!”

Lubyanov's shouts came closer to the phone and then he shouted “General . . . !”

Everyone in the room jumped at the tearing screech of the telephone, followed almost immediately by the beginnings of a rumble that over the next few seconds rose to such a vibration that everyone grabbed onto tables and walls. The overhead lights went out, and a fraction of a second later the emergency lights recessed around the walls came on, leaving the room distinctly darker than before. Just as Zorin thought the vibrations would begin to tear the room apart, the rumbling began to subside slowly. Shouts could be heard from outside the conference room.

The door to the conference room burst open, and along the ceiling in the main room of the command center the faint haze of smoke could be seen drifting in, which lit with each spark of the electrical fires that snapped and popped furiously from the radios and other electronic gear outside. Army officers in full combat gear stood
there staring at Captain Melnikov and Zorin, uncertain what to do.

A second jarring thud, and the rumbling that followed reverberated again through the room. There was a smaller explosion from down the hall and a flash of light, and the emergency lights went out completely. The glow from the two screens dimly lit the faces of the officers sitting erect and poised at the table, Zorin and Captain Melnikov standing behind them.

Beams from the flashlights of several soldiers began to dance around the room. Melnikov was spotlit in one, and, for an instant, Zorin saw a man at the door with rifle raised at the captain but with his eyes on Zorin. Zorin looked into the eyes of Melnikov and then at the soldier in the door and shook his head. As the emergency lights flickered back on, Zorin walked over to Melnikov and took the pistol from his hands, meeting no resistance.

Suddenly, a man came running into the room, his eyes wild as he shouted to Zorin. “There was an explosion! A nuclear detonation! We saw it! It was just to the south of the city! There is . . . there is an enormous fireball rising up over the skyline!” The faces of the men standing in the doorway registered the same shock as the man who was speaking.

The lights and television set came back on after the loss of power, the army translator in front of the TV staring into the dark screen. Before the picture appeared, the American reporter could be heard speaking rapidly in English. It was now their only source of outside information—the satellite transmission received by their simple Kremlin dishes incapable of interruption or jamming and not having been burned up by the nuclear detonations' pulse—and everyone in the room seized upon the now glowing screen in the darkened underground room.

“There is some sort of nuclear alert under way,” the bespectacled army translator began in a monotone inconsistent with the agitated sound of foreign reporter's voice or the force of the words spoken. “CNN News has now received over a dozen reports from all across the country—bombers taking off from half a dozen bases, an aircraft carrier in Norfolk literally cutting her mooring lines and sailing with a third of her crew still on shore, evacuation of the federal government and activation of the first emergency centers at numerous state and local government levels. There has been no word from Civil Defense or FEMA yet as to what actions, if any, they would advise ordinary citizens to take, but on the line from Connecticut we have Simon Gardner, author of the book
Armageddon: It Could Still Happen.
Mr. Gardner, are you there?”

“Yes, I can hear you.”

“Can you tell us, please, in as few words as possible, for obvious
reasons, what it is that ordinary Americans sitting at home tonight might be able to do if the worst is true.” The Russian translation came a second or two after the English, and Zorin could hear the tremble, the edginess, in the newsman's voice.

“Sir,” they heard weakly over the intercom, “we need medical assistance.” The words were forced out, forced in hisses through pain by Lubyanov on the roof. “Most of my men are burned. All of their exposed skin—it's burned pretty badly.”

“Close that door and seal it!” Zorin said to the soldiers standing there. He looked at Captain Melnikov, who stood with his head bowed. Zorin turned to stare at the communicators for a moment before he could muster the energy required to speak—to issue the orders.

Seven seconds after ignition of the SS-18's booster rocket and three seconds after its rocket nozzles emerged from its underground silo, the heat sensors of the 5,200-pound Block 14 satellite warmed sufficiently in the glow of thermal radiation from the exhaust plume to trigger a detection signal. Suspended at an altitude of 35,786 miles above the equator and spinning at the rate of seven rotations per minute, the satellite's sensors immediately calculated the intensity of the signal and the location on earth from which the signal originated.

The onboard computer began the process of comparing the detection information against a library containing temperature and location data on all previous detected launches. When a match was found two seconds later, the satellite transmitted a detection alert to earth. “Missile Launch//Russian SS-18//Kartaly Missile Field Silo No. 42//0525:17:36Z.”

The first alarms sounded at the large Ground Processing Station at Nurungar, Australia, and the Simplified Station at Kapaun, Germany, both of which received the transmission directly from space. A laser on the satellite simultaneously pulsed the digitized information to the other two Block 14 satellites over South America and the central Pacific, which in turn beamed it down to trigger the alarm klaxons at Buckley Air National Guard Base in Colorado and in the six eighteen-wheel tractor-trailers roaming randomly amid the vast New Mexico desert from which the Air Force Space Defense Command operated its Mobile Ground Stations, the last defense against a surprise attack.

All of the ground stations simultaneously relayed the information
to the command centers. Alarm after alarm shattered the quiet of the sealed war rooms and underground bunkers. At the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon, the “Tank.” At the Alternate National Military Command Center buried deep inside Raven Rock Mountain on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border seventy miles north of Washington. At the blast-hardened three-acre ACC Command Post located on three subterranean floors at Offut Air Force Base outside Omaha, Nebraska. And in the fifteen spring-mounted steel buildings in the massive hollows of a great granite mountain, the
NORAD
Cheyenne Mountain Complex, in which the hearts of seventeen hundred people skipped a beat before they solemnly began the routines long rehearsed for their last minutes of life.

As the first signal reached
NORAD
outside Colorado Springs, Colorado, fifteen seconds after rocket motor ignition, the infrared sensors of the Block 14 satellite had begun processing four new heat signatures of similar intensity and location and buffered two dozen additional detections for which matches would be sought. The buffers would have data queued for processing for the next three minutes and forty-seven seconds, an eternity in computer time.

General Albert Wilson, commander in chief of the joint U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command, stood behind a Canadian officer at the Atomic Energy Detection System console in the area of the large room designated the Air Defense Operations Center. They were reviewing yield data on the Chinese missile detonations just south of Moscow that were inconsistent, satellite luminosity measurements differing from seismic reports. “Those ABMs the Russians fired must at least have deflected the Chinese missiles or caused a malfunction,” the Canadian officer suggested.
Or the Chinese make shitty missiles,
Wilson thought. “They just missed the southern suburbs of the city.”

The strident warning klaxon jarred Wilson. He looked across the frozen and silent personnel in the previously active room and saw the spinning red bubble light above the remote console of the complex's Missile Detection Center.

“I have an event!” the officer seated beneath the light shouted in surprise, spilling hot coffee from the Styrofoam cup on his fingers as he rushed to put the cup down. “Probable SS-18 launch from
Kartaly Missile Field!” he read from the monitor on his console, his fingers spinning the track ball to the side of his monitor and clicking the long cursor bar beneath.

My God!
Wilson realized.
European Russia!
As he strode over to the Missile Detection Center, he looked up at the sixteen-foot-square screen of the Command Center Processing and Display System, or Big Board, covering the wall at the front of the room. A blinking red triangle had lit up on the map of western Russia.

“I have four more events!” the officer shouted, nearly jumping out of his seat. “SS-18s out of Kartaly Missile Field!”

General Wilson put a hand gently but firmly on the shoulder board of the captain and looked at the small screen in front of the man. It was the familiar map of the Kartaly Missile Base, the blinking red boxes indicating the now empty silos. Along the bottom bar Wilson found the information he was looking for. TOT MISL—Total Missiles—was up to 8 and rising as the “events” mounted. TTG—Time To Go before first detonation—read 00:29:37, the seconds ticking inexorably down.

Wilson turned to the man seated next to the captain. “Take the DSP off ‘Auto-Detect' and run an error check.”

The captain in front of Wilson announced twenty-four new events, breaking them down by different missile fields all over European Russia, as the officer's hand flew back and forth along his track ball. Red triangles were popping onto the Big Board, the computer plotting the detections far ahead of the officer's ability to read them off.

This is not right,
a voice in Wilson's head repeated over and over again.
They've already taken the Chinese strategic forces out.

“Error check negative, sir,” the officer to Wilson's right said as he held Wilson's stare.

Another man ran up to Wilson from his station. “
ELINT
reports postlaunch telemetry transmissions verified.”

Wilson shouted over to the communications duty officer, “Send an
OPREP
-3
PINNACLE NUCFLASH
4 to the National Command Authority on Nightwatch: SRV is ‘Valid,' repeat System Report Verification is ‘Valid.' ” Wilson could see the man's Adam's apple bob and knew what he was thinking.
NUCFLASH
4
—
detection of unidentified objects by missile-warning system creating risk of nuclear war.

Wilson went up the stairs to the balcony overlooking the large open room, the Canadian and American airmen and officers making way. Stepping up to his desk that faced the room and the Big Board, Wilson picked up the white telephone receiver inset into the console and hit
INTERCOM
. “This is
CINCNORAD
.” His voice boomed out across the large open space of the room and in the other buildings
of the complex. “I am declaring an Air Defense Emergency—Air Defense Warning Yellow, repeat, Air Defense Warning Yellow.” He picked up the “red phone” and heard the Pentagon operator announcing, “National Military Command Center,” as the phone reached his ear.

The one knock on the door was barely distinguishable from the sound of it bursting open. An out-of-breath air force captain announced, “
CINCNORAD
has declared ‘Lemon Juice'!”