“Negative. There’s no time.” Dodson frowned. Somebody over at the White House wasn’t thinking straight. He checked the clock again.
Four minutes left. They’d barely have been able to get a chopper airborne before the bomb went off.
“Shit,” the Marine lieutenant colonel said suddenly.
Dodson swung around. “What?”
“We just got a call from Norfolk, sir. There’s a Spruance-class destroyer en route to Baltimore for a goodwill visit— DD987, O’ Bannon.”
The general swore suddenly. “Where is she exactly?” He followed the Marine officer’s pointing finger to a large digital map of the Chesapeake Bay region and paled. “Christ almighty … get a flash warning off to her! Now!”
The long, gray, graceful silhouette of the destroyer O’Bannon slid quietly through the waters of the Chesapeake Bay — moving north at a steady twelve knots. To the west, lights marked the location of the Patuxent River Naval Air Warfare Center. Smaller lights glimmered on the eastern shore — marking waterfront homes belonging to wealthy Washingtonians or locals.
Lieutenant Mike Rydell, U.S. Navy, O’Bannon’s watch officer, felt his jaw drop open. He stared at the signal rating. “We just got what?”
“A flash nuclear strike warning, Lieutenant! They say it’s no drill!”
Rydell grabbed the message from the rating — scanning the coordinates shown and comparing them with the bridge plot. Oh, hell. The Navy ran periodic exercises on how to respond to a nuclear attack, but he’d never expected to ever do it for real not in a million years. He froze for an instant, but only for an instant, and then reacted.
Rydell tossed the message to one side and whirled around — already snapping out orders. “Captain to the bridge!” He swung toward the helmsman. “All ahead flank! Left full rudder! All lookouts inside! Sound General Quarters! Now!”
Caught by surprise themselves, the rest of the bridge crew stared back at him for a split second — their horrified faces ghostwhite even under the red lamps used to preserve night vision.
Then they exploded into action.
Klaxons howling, the destroyer heeled sharply to port, throwing a higher bow wake as four eighty-thousand- horsepower gas turbines kicked her up toward full speed.
Thorn nudged the controls slightly, altering-course to bring the aircraft onto a heading of one five five degrees. The bomb-laden turboprop should be right in the middle of the channel now. And almost directly over those poor bastards aboard that destroyer.
His hands tightened again.
My God, he wondered desperately, isn’t there someplace else I can send this damned thing? He forced the thought away. There wasn’t anywhere else.
He glanced at the digital readout winding down in the corner of his display. “Ops Center, this is Thorn. Thirty seconds.”
Dodson’s strained voice came over his headset. “Understood, Colonel. Give me a running count, please.”
Thorn felt Helen’s tense hand on his shoulder. She squeezed slightly.
He cleared his throat. “Twenty-five. Twenty. Fifteen.
Ten.
“Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four …” His pulse hammered in his own ears. “Three. Two. One.”
The screen blanked abruptly — wiped clean of all data. Static replaced the picture on the video monitor.
Thorn swallowed hard. “Detonation.”
Surrounded by a crowd of stunned prisoners and Fairfax County police, Sam Farrell stared southeast.
A roiling fireball flashed above the horizon, turning darkness into a flickering, deadly, man-made day for several seconds.
Slowly the fireball faded from white to orange to a final dull, bloody red.
At last, even that vanished — leaving the stars and the night sky untouched.
Fifteen thousand feet over the still, placid waters of the Chesapeake Bay, the Jetstream 31 turboprop ceased to exist blown first into its constituent atoms and then stripped down even further into a muddled sea of subatomic particles.
In its place, a sudden pinpoint of boiling energy burst into existence — a fireball spearing through the night sky ten thousand times hotter than the surface of the sun. Gamma rays sleeted outward — smashing into and ionizing the surrounding air molecules.
Chemical reactions formed a dense layer of smog tens of meters deep around the small, still-expanding fireball.
X rays raced outward ahead of the plasma core, heating everything in their path to tens of millions of degrees.
Two hundred microseconds after detonation, a shock wave formed at the surface of the fireball — roaring away from the explosion at one hundred times the speed of sound.
Four miles from the base of the mushroom cloud, the shock wave was still moving at nearly the speed of sound when it slammed into O’Bannon’s stern. Caught in its powerful, howling grip, the destroyer bucked forward — buried under a wall of water thrown skyward. Railings, radar, and radio antennas all tore loose and vanished.
The ship disappeared from view inside a maelstrom of spray and flying debris.
Thorn sat numbly, staring at the static on his screens and listening to the crackling hiss over his headset. There were nearly four hundred men aboard that destroyer. Men who might already be dead — fried by heat or radiation, crushed by impact, or trapped in a ship already heading for the bottom.
Helen stood at his side, her hand still on his shoulder.
A voice sounded in his headset. “This is Dodson.” Thorn sat upright.
“Go ahead, sir.”
“We’ve reestablished contact with Par River, Colonel,” the general said “They’ve taken a hell of a lot of damage — planes thrown around, instruments smashed, but nobody was hurt.
They all made it into cover in time.”
“What about O’Bannon?” Thorn asked softly.
Dodson hesitated, then replied: “There’s no word, yet, I’m afraid.
We’re still trying to make radio contact.”
Thorn stiffened feeling as though he’d been punched in the stomach. “I see.”
“Look, son, you did everything you could. Nobody could have done more,” Dodson said.
Thorn shook his head. “I wish I could believe that, General.”
He lowered his head, staring blankly.
Helen knelt beside him. There were tears in her eyes. “Oh, Peter …”
Thorn’s head snapped bolt upright. There were cheers coming through his headphones!
“Thorn, this is Dodson!” the general said suddenly. “Par River just called in. They’ve established contact with O’Bannon by signal lamp.
Her radio antennas were smashed, but she’s still afloat! Par River says she’s battered, she’s lost most of her topside gear, and she’s scorched as hell, but she’s steaming in under her own power!”
“What about casualties?” Thorn heard himself ask, still not daring to believe the destroyer had survived the blast.
“They have wounded ? mostly impact trauma cases-but no fatalities,” Dodson answered. “Whoever was on watch put her stern to the blast point and ran like hell! She made it just far enough away to ride out the shock wave!”
Slowly, with shaking hands, Thorn pulled off the headset and turned toward Helen.
