Overkill (73 page)

But al-Qaeda believed that the only way that America could be induced to fire its entire nuclear arsenal at Russia, which was the prime objective of the plan, would be to ensure that America
suffered an overwhelming nuclear attack, clearly originating from Russia. The American and Russian governments might be able to avoid a full-scale nuclear exchange if only a few weapons were
exploded. They could, perhaps, negotiate some kind of reparation or settlement, particularly if the Russians could demonstrate that the attack had actually not been their doing. And that was not
what al-Qaeda wanted.
El Sikkiyn
was designed to ensure the total destruction of both America and Russia, hence the single, massive strike.

The problem that Hassan Abbas was facing, as the executor of
El Sikkiyn
, was time. Ever since he had switched on the laptop, he had been trying to complete the detonation routine. But
that required the inputting of two twelve-digit codes – twenty-four digits – for each weapon. It was a safeguard the Russians had built into the system, and there had been no way Abbas
could reasonably argue against it.

The other problem was that before any weapon could be detonated, the user had to select ‘Individual’, ‘Group’ or ‘Total’ to determine whether just one or a
number of weapons were to be fired. Abbas had selected ‘total’, but he’d only enabled thirty-two of the two hundred and three weapons, and he knew that there was no possible way
he could complete the authorization sequence for all of the devices before the unknown attackers would have worked their way around to the outhouse and killed him.

Abbas leaned forward again, decision made. If he couldn’t carry out his orders, he would just have to do the best he could in the time he had left. At least, he thought, with a wry smile,
nobody in al-Qaeda would be able to reproach him for it, because he knew with absolute certainty that he had only minutes left to live.

He flicked the touchpad and sent the cursor across the screen and cancelled the ‘Total’ detonation routine. With another swift movement he selected ‘Individual’ and chose
the first target on the alphabetically sorted list – Abilene, Texas.

At the old mill, Ross looked at his watch for the eighth time since the group had left, then nodded to the sniper. The trooper squeezed the trigger of his rifle and sent the
7.62mm round screaming up the hill, to smash harmlessly into the solid stone wall of the outhouse. Then he reloaded and did it again, and again, and again.

Badri jumped to his feet as the first bullet smashed into the two-feet-thick stone wall beside him.

‘That means they’re coming,’ Abbas called out, never taking his eyes off the screen of the computer. ‘Ignore the sniper – he will just be trying to distract us from
the men approaching. Prepare.’

With a grunt of satisfaction, Abbas pressed the last digit of the second authorization code for the Abilene weapon, flicked the cursor across the screen again, chose ‘Albany, New
York’ and began inputting the first code requested by the system.

Abilene, Texas

The city of Abilene was founded in 1881 as the railhead for the Texas and Pacific Railway and as the new destination for the Texas cattle drives, taking over both the name
and the business of the previous railhead – Abilene, Kansas. The city is situated in an area of low plains some one hundred and fifty miles west of Fort Worth, and straddles Taylor and Jones
Counties. It is home to just under three hundred thousand people.

The two-metre satellite dish had been positioned on the roof of the small downtown office building, located a few blocks north of McMurry University, by a local company some six months earlier,
and the coaxial feed cable had been run down into the smallest of the three rooms which comprised the office suite. There had been neither television set nor satellite receiver in the room when the
installation had been completed, so the aerial fitters had aligned the dish with one of the commercial satellites, as they had been asked to do by the dark-skinned businessman who had leased the
premises, and left, cash tucked in their pockets.

Three days, or rather nights, later, two men climbed on to the roof of the building with a signal strength meter and tools in their hands and re-aligned the dish to a more easterly satellite
that didn’t appear in any of the Clarke Belt charts.

Nobody noticed that the dish had been moved, and nor did anybody take much notice when the short, slim, dark-skinned businessman took delivery of a large and very heavy packing case two weeks
later. And a month after that he left the office for the last time, heading for a new assignment on the west coast, in Los Angeles. The rent on the office had been paid a year in advance, much to
the delight of the freeholder, the utility bills were all settled direct from a company bank account, and what little mail arrived was automatically intercepted and forwarded to another address, so
nobody had any need to go anywhere near the office suite. Not that it would have made any difference if they had.

When Hassan Abbas input the final digit of the second authorization code for the Abilene weapon, the Krutaya mainframe began an automated sequence of events. First it sent a ‘system
test’ signal to the small computer attached to the selected weapon, which instructed it to carry out a check of all its circuits. Thirty seconds later the mainframe sent a
‘prepare’ signal, and thirty seconds after that the ‘detonate’ signal was sent via the satellite.

None of this, of course, was apparent to anybody in Abilene. Inside the large locked steel case in the back room of the deserted office suite, a small orange light illuminated. Thirty seconds
later a red light came on, and after another half-minute a green light. The entire process up to that point had been completely silent, but within two seconds of the green light illuminating there
was a barely audible click from within the steel chest. That single faint sound was the noise of the trigger assembly being actuated, and it was followed by an extraordinarily rapid sequence of
events.

Within the case was a tempered-steel sphere which contained two sub-critical masses of uranium–235, surrounded by a shell of conventional chemical explosive. Outside this inner shell were
further chemical explosives arranged as thirty-two critically shaped lenses. When these shaped charges detonated in a sequence that was accurate to the nearest millisecond, they focused shock waves
which compressed and instantly ignited the inner chemical explosive shell, which in turn smashed together the two masses of uranium in the centre of the sphere, creating an immediate critical mass.
Precisely one third of a second later the uranium tore itself to pieces as the fission reaction began.

The atomic weapon that was dropped on Hiroshima was only about 1.4 per cent efficient, but weapons technology has always been a growth industry and advances in the casing design and the shaping
of the conventional explosive charges have greatly improved the efficiency of modern nuclear weapons. So although the Abilene weapon was only a fraction of the size of the Little Boy and Fat Man
twenty-kiloton bombs that had devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively, it had almost exactly the same calculated yield. The yield of each weapon had been specified by Dmitri Trushenko to be
sufficient to completely destroy the heart of the city in which it was positioned. Abilene, Texas, is a small city, and the weapon located there was one of the smallest of the
Podstava
devices and one of the few fission weapons that had been deployed.

Even so, its effects were immediate and devastating. The office building vaporized almost instantly, as did some four square miles of the centre of the city. Slightly over one hundred and seven
thousand people died in less than one fifth of a second.

Half a second after the detonation, the temperature at the epicentre of the explosion reached several million degrees, and a massive fireball rose from the ground and expanded to cover most of
the city of Abilene, starting innumerable ground fires that flared out of control, burning the living and incinerating the bodies of the newly dead. Anything combustible burned. Garage fuel storage
tanks, domestic gas supplies and automobile petrol tanks exploded, adding to the carnage. It was doubly unfortunate that a major part of Abilene’s industrial area is given over to the
production of natural gas and petroleum, and the explosion of these highly combustible fuels significantly increased the devastation caused by the fireball. A further thirty-one thousand people
perished directly as a result of the fireball.

Another half a second later the shockwave from the weapon began to spread outwards at unbelievable speed in a circular pattern, demolishing the few remaining buildings and flinging vehicles and
people high into the air. Its force would not be spent until it was well clear of the city limits, and even at the very edge of the city it was still strong enough to flatten houses. The shockwave
killed another sixteen thousand people. Convection currents generated by the explosion sucked dust into the air, hauling it high above the shattered community and forming the terrifying and
completely unmistakable shape of a mushroom cloud.

Almost everyone within three miles of ground zero who survived the detonation died as well, but more slowly, killed by the lethal but invisible fusillades of neutrons and gamma radiation
generated by the explosion.

Even people several miles away from Abilene would die, even more slowly, over the succeeding weeks and months, killed by the fallout – the material vaporized in the fireball which would
condense to form microscopically fine particles full of highly radioactive and long-lived contaminants like plutonium–239 and strontium–90. The final death toll from the Abilene weapon
would top one hundred and eighty-five thousand, though nobody would ever be able to work out the exact number who perished, and the cost of the damage was quite literally incalculable.

Friday
St Médard, near Manciet, Midi-Pyrénées, France

The trooper was within twenty yards of the outhouse before Jaafar Badri heard anything at all. This was partly due to the trooper’s skill in silent movement, and
partly because of the constant cracking of the unsilenced sniper rifle a hundred metres away and the smashing of its bullets against stone. All Badri heard was a faint slither, but it was enough.
He crouched down almost to floor level, cautiously extended the muzzle of the Kalashnikov around the broken doorframe, and waited, eyes wide and staring into the darkness.

The trooper stopped moving, as he had been told to, lay flat on the ground and lobbed a small stone over to his right. Badri moved further out of the doorway, swinging his assault rifle to point
at the sound he had just heard, and pulled the trigger. As the first round from the Kalashnikov crashed through the undergrowth, Colin Dekker, who had positioned himself to the left of the outhouse
and with a clear view of the doorway, fired his silenced Hockler twice, hitting Badri in the chest and right shoulder.

The Arab crashed against the doorway, but with a supreme effort of will sat almost upright, pulling the muzzle of the Kalashnikov around towards Dekker. It didn’t do him any good. Three
Hocklers fired at him almost simultaneously, bullets ripping through his chest and torso, and he slumped to the ground, dead.

Abbas ignored the sounds behind him, and concentrated on inputting the second firing authorization code for the Albany device. He had only three digits to go when Richter shot him in the
back.

North American Aerospace Defense Command, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado

The normal silence of the NORAD control room was suddenly shattered by the sounds of warning bells and klaxons, and the giant vision screens flickered into life as lines
of red text appeared. ‘Nuclear detonation, nuclear detonation! Location is Continental United States, south-central region. Central Texas. Detonation confirmed by seismic sensors. Stand by
for estimate of ground zero position.’

General Wayne Harmon ran from his office to the control room, sat down at his desk and snatched up his headset. There was a confused babble of voices, which he swiftly silenced. ‘No way it
was an ICBM. It had to have been sub-launched. Why didn’t we get a launch detection?’ he snapped.

‘No idea. We saw nothing on radar from the DEW or anywhere else, and neither did the DSP birds.’

Missile launches are detected by one of three Defence Support Programme surveillance satellites in geosynchronous orbit twenty-two thousand three hundred miles above the surface of the Earth.
One is positioned over Central America, the second over the middle of the Pacific Ocean and the last above the Indian Ocean, and they maintain a constant watch of the Asian landmass and the oceans.
Each DSP bird is fitted with a massive infra-red telescope which can identify the heat flare of the missile’s engines within one minute of launch. Only if there is heavy cloud above the
launch site will the system not detect the missile until it clears the cloud tops. Launch and initial trajectory data are transmitted from the DSP satellite to the two Readout Stations located at
Aurora, Colorado and Alice Springs, Australia, where the data is automatically compared with that from previous launches to determine whether or not the missile is on a ‘threat fan’
– that is to say, on a path ending in the United States or inside any allied nation.

‘Bullshit. Play back the tape – there must have been something and we missed it,’ Harmon said and reached for the JANET phone. ‘JANET’ is the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Alerting Network, which links the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon and all other principal command headquarters.

‘Ground zero location confirmed as Abilene, Texas. Initial estimates from the seismographs suggest a weapon size of around thirty kilotons.’

‘Thirty kilotons? That’s bullshit too,’ Harmon snapped. ‘The Russians haven’t got any nuclear weapons that small – at least, none that they’d bother
launching at us. This has just gotta be some kind of a screw-up.’