“Okay. You should have plenty of range left. Here’s what I want you to do. Maintaining your air speed and your current rate of climb, come left to new heading one two zero. That’ll take you out over southeastern Maryland to Chesapeake Bay. I’ll relay further instructions as needed.”
“Understood.” Thorn complied, carefully moving both the joystick and the rudder control. “I also suggest you alert both the FBI and the D.O.D about this situation.”
“Don’t you worry about that, Colonel,” the traffic controller said. “The shit’s already hitting the fan all over Washington. For your sake, I really hope this isn’t some cock-and-bull story to get attention.”
“Considering that I’m not a trained pilot, and that there is a real nuke aboard that plane, you’d be a lot better off hoping I’m full of crap,” Thorn snapped back. He adjusted the controls again. “Coming left to one two zero. Let’s get this crate out over the Atlantic as fast as possible.”
New bits of data flowed through the onboard computer inside the Jetstream 31. Range to target: Increasing. Heading: Steady. Time elapsed since original projected detonation: three hundred seconds.
The data triggered a new subroutine-one added by Dr. Saleh, Ibrahim’s computer expert, after Reichardt’s German specialists finished the basic programming.
A readout attached to the TN-1000 suddenly blinked to life.
It read 00:15:00.
Thorn saw a new set of numbers flicker into existence in the lower right-hand corner of his monitor:
00:14:59.
00:14:58.
00:14:57.
His heart seemed to stop. “Oh, hell.”
Helen leaned closer, her own face pale. “What is it, Peter?”
“The bastards must have put in another backup arming trigger,” Thorn said quietly. “I think that bomb is going to detonate in less than fifteen minutes. And there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
Engel, the German technician, stared at the damning numbers on the screen in shock. “It is impossible. I did not write such a subroutine.”
The other man was probably telling the truth, Thorn decided.
From what they’d seen so far, Ibrahim and Wolf had both liked to exercise complete control. He’d bet that few, if any, of their subordinates had ever known all the pieces of the puzzle. Not that it made much difference now, he realized coldly.
The hard truth was that fourteen-plus minutes didn’t leave him enough time to get the plane safely out over the ocean. He ran the numbers hastily through his mind. He could fly that aircraft roughly fifty or sixty nautical miles further down-range before the nuke went off. On its present course, that would put the new detonation point somewhere over thinly populated Dorchester County, Maryland. That was better than having the bomb explode right over Washington but there were still half a dozen or more small towns inside the probable blast radius. And that meant civilian casualties could number in the thousands.
Thorn keyed the radio mike. “Washington ARTCC. We have a new problem here.”
“Go ahead, Colonel.”
Thorn quickly laid out the situation they were facing.
There was a moment’s silence before a stunned voice came back over the circuit. “Oh, God.”
Thorn saw the detonation countdown on his screen blink through 00:13:00. His hand tightened on the joystick. “Look, I need some help here. Right now!”
“I’m patching you through to the Pentagon Crisis Operations Center,” the anxious air controller said hurriedly. “Wait one.”
Thirty seconds passed before another voice, this one older and calmer, sounded in his headset. “Colonel Thorn? This is Brigadier General Dodson. Let me make sure I’ve got this straight: We’re looking at the detonation of a 150-kiloton Soviet-era warhead in roughly twelve minutes, right?”
“Yes, sir.” Thorn could see streetlights glowing against the dark earth below. The aircraft was over Washington’s fastgrowing southeastern Maryland suburbs now.
“Then here are the parameters we’re facing,” Dodson continued.
“Assuming optimum burst height, we can expect the following …”
Thorn listened to the general’s grim statistics in silence. They paralleled his own rough mental calculations. Lethal radiation exposure up to one and a half miles from the detonation point.
A shock wave strong enough to tear most houses apart out to four and a half miles, and to shatter glass nine miles away. And a thermal pulse hot enough to cause second-and thirddegree burns to anyone caught outdoors over an area eleven miles in diameter.
He grimaced. The optimum burst height for a warhead of this size was around two thousand feet. Pushing the aircraft up to nearly fifteen thousand would help reduce the damage when the bomb went off — but it was still going to be ugly. Very ugly.
Thorn waited until the general finished giving him the bad news. “So, then what do you suggest, sir?”
“We can’t have this damned thing going off over land,” the other man stated firmly.
“agreed.”
“Then we’re down to just one option, Colonel,” Dodson said.
“You’ll have to fly it south over Chesapeake Bay.”
Thorn nodded to himself. Then he stopped suddenly, remembering the maps he’d studied of the Washington area. “Sir, that means the bomb’s going to detonate—”
“Six miles away from the Par River Naval Air Warfare Center,” the general finished. “I know, Colonel. But we’re getting a warning through to them right now. We couldn’t possibly alert any civilians anywhere else in time. So we’re just going to have to ride this one out.”
“Jesus,” Thorn said softly.
“I don’t like it either, Colonel,” Dodson agreed. “But it’s the best we can do. So you just concentrate on keeping that plane in the air long enough to give us a chance to put the alert out to everyone we can.”
“Yes, sir.” Thorn refocused his attention on the controls in front of him. The detonation countdown flickered through 00:09:00.
Brigadier General Andrew Jackson Dodson, U.S. Air Force, tore his gaze away from the clock. They had a little less than six minutes left. He swung around toward the short, balding Navy captain at his right.
“What’s the word from Par River, Frank?”
“The sirens just went off, sir. I’ve got the duty officer on the phone now. He understands the situation. Everybody’s heading for the shelters.”
“What about their equipment?” Dodson asked. Par River was the U.S. Navy’s premier test center for new aircraft.
“We’re going to lose some planes, sir,” the Navy captain admitted.
“It’s not a combat base. The hangars aren’t hardened.”
“Understood.” Dodson nodded. That was going to hurt. But it was still better to lose hardware — even expensive hardware — than lives.
The Air Force general turned toward one-of his other officers, a Marine lieutenant colonel. “What about civilian air traffic, Jim? Anything inbound?”
“No, sir,” the Marine answered. “Washington ARTCC is rerouting everything well north or south. Not that there’s much in the air right now.”
“What about shipping traffic?” the general asked. The Chesapeake Bay intercoastal waterway was one of the busiest shipping lanes in the U.S. “I’ve checked with both Baltimore and Norfolk. There’s nothing in the danger zone.”
Dodson nodded again. Thank God for small favors, he thought. This early in the morning there wasn’t much stirring along the eastern seaboard.
“General,” another aide said suddenly, motioning to the secure phone in his hand. “The White House is on the line. They ant to know if they should evacuate the President.”
