They were replaying his exchange with the senator. It was the most played clip of the day and, unless some disaster, political assassination, or sports star scandal occurred, it would probably be the stuff of Sunday morning news shows. In the few short hours that he was home, Bill had already gotten calls from every major paper and news magazine. Now, as she watched the clip of Bill’s confrontation with the senator for the third time, something in Janice’s mind confronted her. Her body started to morph into something like the fetal position around a throw pillow. She was riveted to the screen as the two men, one of them who she loved and trusted, were engaged in a discussion that was the stuff of nightmares. As a little kid who had grown up during the Cold War, expecting to be atomically bombed into ash shadows at any moment, she had studied, and was familiar with, the feeling of certain doom that was encircling her. Living under the threat of nuclear annihilation made many of her older patients and predecessors create the anti-culture and alternate-culture movements. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll were largely the self-medication that the generation before hers had prescribed for a bad case of the nuclear heebie-jeebies.
Although she didn’t know the senator, his party affiliation made it a good bet they shared very few common views. But as she listened to his proposal, which her man Bill rightly framed as insane, she felt something deep within her resonate to the radical ultimatum. It was an anger brewing, being stirred up by the senator’s declaration that the “Arab Street should no longer be a one-way street,” that they can’t be constantly whipping up the winds of hatred against America, yet remain immune to the consequences. Her hand was resting on her already protruding belly as she felt a warmness, a comfort, wash over her from the senator’s words. This was a disconnect that she had never experienced. Intellectually, there was no question the idea of nuclear retaliation was an unfair, inappropriate response. Yet, emotionally, she wished the senator had won the argument, even over her own man. She turned her own profession inwards and diagnosed herself. Her self-image and long-held beliefs accounted for her instant and magnetic attraction to her husband’s level headed, “fair” position. However, a whole other part of her, a new part, wanted to gnarl and roar causing any who would threaten the budding life within her to cower and scamper away.
The result of this self-inspection was Bill returning from the kitchen to a different woman from the one he left a minute ago — something that would not be a singular event in the next five months. He sensed something in the catatonic way Janice locked onto the TV.
“I hope you still think the guy on the left is hunky?”
“I am suddenly sad.”
“No hunkiness?”
“Do you realize what happened here?”
“You mean on the show? Yeah, I held my ground against a reactionary, blowhard hawk.”
“That’s not it. You proved that we are all going to die in a nuclear barbeque.”
“I must have missed that part.”
“This isn’t funny. There couldn’t even be a televised discussion of this without you threatening this guy with violence. And I am sure if he had his Second-Amendment-protected-right-to-carry an assault weapon on him, he would have shot you where you sat.”
“Okay, so it got a little heated.”
“Bill, what chance do we have to survive this thing when even just talking about it went nuclear?”
Janice started sobbing. Bill didn’t have any reference for this. Janice was not from the waterworks crowd. He sat down next to her and put his arm around her.
She recoiled slightly. “You’ve got to stop this thing!”
“Me? Stop what?”
“You gotta make sure this doesn’t happen. I waited a long time to have a baby and now there’s a chance the world will end!”
“Whoa, whoa, the world isn’t going to end.”
“Bill, I’m scared. I’ve never been this scared before.”
“Jim Mitchell is a good man, Janice. I’ll be there and if anything is going to happen, I’ll know. We’ll be okay… the three of us.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The head of Homeland Security reported to the 15 men and 32 assistants crammed into the war room of the White House. “All ports are in lockdown, all border crossings are under manned aircraft and unmanned aerial drone surveillance. The Coast Guard is in full inspect and detect mode. Radiation detectors are at 17 major airports, but that still leaves a gaping hole in our baggage screening. There are airborne radiation detectors on 1400 state and municipal helicopters and all N.E.S.T. units are fully deployed and operational. In addition to the Nuclear Emergency Support Teams, the big cities have just shy of 2,300 handheld and truck-mounted rad detectors between them.”
“Okay, we’ll work on emergency legislation to beef up airport detectors and increase public information messages. What about if it’s already here?” Reynolds said.
Joey Palumbo, the Special Assistant to the President attached to the science office filled in. “The timelines on possible entry of the suitcase device prior to our alert are marginal, meaning we doubt they would have sat on these devices for very long. They have been covertly obtaining them since the break up of the U.S.S.R. It is possible that we, or more correctly the boys of Delta Foxtrot, stumbled upon the Nursery very early in their planning. And at that time, they had only managed to get one unit out of the facility.”
Bill was seated to the right of Joey, looking at the faces of the men and women around the room. He was thinking about Janice and the promise he made to her and his child yet to be. Back when he was growing up they called this the unthinkable: the actual use of nuclear weapons between warring factions. The people seated around the table here today were starting to learn how to get their brains around the unthinkable in a directionless effort to stop the unthinkable from becoming the inevitable. The sobering enormity of the task of trying to find the device was demonstrated when somebody, maybe American Tourister for all Bill knew, calculated that there were 700,000,000 suitcases in, and going through, the U.S. at any given moment. Of course, there was no rule in the terrorists’ handbook that said a suitcase nuke needed to remain in a suitcase. So very quickly one out of 700 million started to look like good odds against one in “everything bigger than a breadbox.”
The Surgeon General was reporting on the strain on the nation’s hospitals if there were a detonation in a medium-sized city. Hiccock knew calculations for cities like New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles were useless since four square blocks of those cities could mean 100,000 people killed or wounded and these Russian devices were capable of 100 square blocks of destruction, with partial destruction reaching out to almost two miles. What’sMYCEP.com had gotten those numbers right. Real estate values in most cities were dropping as firms pushed up moving dates or broke leases to flee the possible blast epicenters of 200 cities. All this economic and civil chaos was in full gear and yet there was no credible or actionable intelligence to suggest that terrorists planned to attack a specific city at all. Boulder Dam or any dam would also make a devastating statement. Fort Knox, Kentucky would be a major blow. (On second thought, Bill doubted the terrorists had ever seen the movie “Goldfinger” with its plot to irradiate the American gold supply thus rendering it untouchable for thousands of years.) You could even try to wedge the thing at some geo-critical point in the California mountains and use the energy of the blast to possibly initiate a tremor that could tear open a rift in the San Andreas fault and cleaver all of California into the sea.
“Anything else?” the Head of Homeland Security asked the room.
Bill was tempted to add something but held back. Instead, he leaned over to Joey. “Joe, we need a special team here. You and whoever you think we’ll need, have them remain in the room after the others leave.”
In five minutes, six people remained around the large table. Bill had convinced the facilities manager of the White House to put the next meeting intended for that room into the Mural room. Bill took out two folders and a fresh pad from his portfolio. He drew a bull’s eye target on the yellow-lined paper then split it in two.
“Here’s the way I see it. One of two realities; the bomb already here, or on its way here. The new tighter
