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 levelled 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. The IAF colonel pressed back into the flight seat as 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.
There was an audible clunk and the plane jumped, suddenly free of the dreadful burden that had fallen away from beneath them. All three aircraft then 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 – an elongated narrow-diameter spike of superhardened 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 throughout 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 the primitive bombs that the US had dropped on Japan in 1945.
The device that lay, for all of a millisecond, sleeping beneath 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 white-hot plasma. The Smart Fuze, having determined that an optimum penetration had been reached, signalled the bomb to compress a sphere of subcritical explosive material around a plutonium core, setting off a fission reaction.
Surrounded as it was by the crushing mass of the Aswan High Dam, the initial burst of radiation could not escape and so began to rapidly heat the encasing medium to tens of millions of degrees, vaporising everything within the expanding sphere of gas. Growing towards 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, though, it did have more than enough thermal power to flash-boil the waters of the dam. With nowhere to easily dissipate, the blast front transferred much of its energy into a shockwave that sped outwards from ground zero, imitating the effect of an earth-shattering quake. It struck the smaller, original dam wall a little further downstream like a hammer of the gods. A few thousand people who lived in the small settlements around the dams 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 metres 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, super-hot white water rushing towards 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 had 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 roomful 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 dams 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
The surviving civilian authorities of the United States of America were in shock. Perhaps even more traumatised 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 spectre of nuclear war lurking at the edge of their consciousness. It was not merely explicable, it was familiar.
‘Indirect deaths, in the short term, from radiation poisoning and injuries, are estimated by our modelling 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. There
