Without Warning (49 page)

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 passing 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 altitude.

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 passing 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 Japan 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 Hiroshima 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 crushing mass 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 mass 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 gods.

A few thousand people who lived in the small settlement around the dam died instantly in the explosion, leaving nobody 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 cockpit, over the roar of the Eagle’s twin engines, but the pilot imagined that hearing that monstrous wall of angry, su-perhot white water rushing 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.

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 pissing 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 Washington 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 masse. 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 leadership in Syria and Egypt. Iran has also requested our assistance.”

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 assassination 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 hell 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.

Suzie was in the lounge room, watching
Toy Story
with her friend Emma, when Kip heard the news. Emma’s mom had a transit pass 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.

“What d’you mean?”

“It’s on the radio,” she said in a quavering voice.

He cast a quick look back over his shoulder, but the kids were back watching the movie. He stood next to Barb, who grabbed on and held him tightly. She seemed even more scared than she’d been after the Disappearance.