Deluge.
Although 'terrible fire' was made up of ideological purists who planned for Armageddon, even they did not wish for total destruction. There were to be degrees of conflagration. Although certain places, mainly in North America, Europe, the Middle East and China, were to be made practically uninhabitable for generations, other locales — in America and Europe — were not to receive a full-scale 'dirty' missiling. There had to be something to inherit when the
Once the human command chain had been wiped out and early warning systems rendered inoperable, nuclear forces targets were next in line: ICBM and IRB sites, storage areas, sub bases. After that came the conventional military targets: supply depots, naval bases, air defense installations, marshaling yards, military storage facilities. From there it was logical to move to civilian and industrial targets: factories, petroleum refineries, ports, civil airfields, electronics industrial bases, nuclear reactors, areas where coal was mined and steel manufactured, power stations and grid centers, important cities. Some cities were to be wiped off the map, others neutralized by the latest 'squeezed' enhanced-radiation weapons, now capable of delivering a very 'clean' and short-term packet to within, quite literally, meters of their targets. Certain areas were to be drenched with chemicals.
On the face of it, all seemed simple enough.
But from the start, things went drastically wrong.
The
Unfortunately for the Russians, their intelligence was fatally out of date. Even as far back as the 1970s, command of the U.S. could pass to as many as sixteen civilian successors, as well as a number of top military advisers. This figure had been upped to twenty-five civilian successors during the Latin American crisis of the early 1990s, and the number of military advisers had been raised, as well. Further, it had been decided that one-third of this group could never be within one hundred miles of the President at any given time. Thus, decapitation was virtually impossible.
Not that this made much difference in the long run since, as it happened, the eleventh in line of succession that January day was a certain Air Force general called P. X. 'Frag' Frederickson — a somewhat gung-ho individual who, if the President had survived, would not have held his position of responsibility under the new administration.
But at twelve noon on January 20,2001, he did hold that position, and at 12:00:46, as he sat at the command console in the windowless 767 approximately one and a quarter kilometers above the city of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, he knew that a mushroom cloud had appeared over Washington. He also knew, as he stared at the flickering kaleidoscope of lights to the left of his seat and at the information clicking on-screen beneath them, that he was now the forty-fourth President, unelected, of the United States.
He did not need to launch into a complex series of button-tapping movements to 'find the key,' in other words tap out a sequence on the console that would release the lock of a small safe nearby, then tap out another sequence that would spring a drawer containing the authentication codes manual. The general knew all the codes he needed to know off by heart, though he should not have known even one of them. The general had made it his business to know the codes and to keep up with the irregular changes. Although he had absolutely no idea that such a group as
An arctic smile played on his craggy face as he reached out with spatulate fingers and swiftly keyed into the computer a set of high-priority sequential commands. Thus, three minutes and twenty-nine seconds before the two secondary bombs in Washington finished off the work of the first, the United States had launched.
The retentive memory and fierce hatred of a fifty-six-year-old Air Force general did not save the Western world. But on the other hand they certainly screwed
Within three heartbeats of Frederickson's keying in his last commands, the three U.S. space stations had shifted orbit. Instead of being destroyed they were crippled; even so they were still able to cripple the two Soviet stations. All contact with both was then lost.
The events of the next hour or so need only be briefly told. Silos of varying sizes across the length and breadth of the U.S., the continent of Europe and the Arctic blasted open, letting loose a terrible melange of weaponry. Submarines lurking in the oceans of the world shook almost in unison.
Within five minutes, towns, ports and defense installations in Eastern Europe were devastated. Within fifteen minutes the ICBMs swept in over the Arctic Circle, and entire cities in Russia itself began to wink out, to become smoking heaps of radioactive ash. Military bases and missile sites in the Kol'skiy Poluostrov — Kola Peninsula — Novaya Zemlya, Severnaya Zemlya, Novosibirskye Ostrova, Chukchi and Kamchatka, as well as those deep in the heart of Eastern Europe, disappeared in a flash.
Too late, of course. Just seconds too late. If Frederickson's strike had been preemptive, it would have turned Marxist-Leninist ideology into a dead philosophy, something to be yawned over in the history books.
But there were to be no history books, for even as Russia was disappearing under soaring fireballs and vast mushroom clouds, so was Western Europe, so was the Middle East, so was China.
And so, to all intents and purposes, was North America.
The commercial East Coast was obliterated by the retaliatory attack, as were the industrial belts around the Great Lakes and the petrochemical and defense manufacturing zones strung along the Louisiana coastline. The Southwest — most of Arizona, New Mexico, west Texas — became a land of fire. Cities vanished in the wink of an eye; new lakes were created; forests blazed. The area around Minot, North Dakota, was devastated, as was the Cumberland Plateau that stretched across Tennessee, and central Nebraska. Florida, southern Georgia, Alabama and eastern Mississippi were hit by a rain of biological and chemical agents, sub-fired from the Atlantic. Cheyenne Mountain, no longer considered a high priority target, was hit once, just at the moment when a singular experiment was taking place deep in its bowels.
But the most stupendous destruction of all took place on the West Coast. Here the Earth was tormented into giving birth to an entirely new coastline.
Months before, Soviet 'earthshaker' bombs had been seeded by subs along fault— and fracture-lines in the Pacific. Now these were detonated. At the same time the Cascades, from Mount Garibaldi in British Columbia down to Lassen Peak in California — that highly unstable stretch of the 'Ring of Fire' that encircles the Pacific — were showered with ICBMs and sub-launched missiles. The earth heaved and bucked and burst apart with a succession of cataclysmic shocks. The volcanos from Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helen's in the north to Mount Shasta in the south, and beyond, blew their stacks. Rock and magma blasted into the sky. Huge rifts tore into the mountains, thrusting deep into the heart of the Cascades. Vast areas of land and mountain lurched downward massively and the gap between the Cascades and the Sierra Nevada was breached, the Pacific Ocean boiling through in spuming waves a mile high.
Within minutes the hugely populated coastal strip from San Francisco to San Diego had gone, as though it had never existed. The Black Rock Desert was suddenly an inland sea with mountain peaks as islands. The mighty tremors, the colossal underground explosions, bucketed on down the fragile chain. Death Valley, the Mojave and Colorado Deserts were inundated. Baja, California, racked and tortured by the stupendous quake spasms, literally snapped off, fragmenting westward, disappearing beneath the churning waves. The Pacific lashed at the foothills of the Sierra Madre.
Here, the volcanic explosions went on for some years. Elsewhere there was only silence.
It lasted for a generation. The Nuclear Winter. Far worse than some had argued; not as horrific as others had theorized.
There were, of course, survivors. The world was not destroyed, only a way of life. The global population was cut down to perhaps one-fifth of what it had been. The ecosystems were utterly disrupted. The climate was transformed.
