President Lanoha watched his wall sized monitor which showed the number of splinters and rocks falling on the cities. He smiled as the number kept decreasing. He turned to his CoS, “I like this. It looks like we’re destroying all of the splinters. We’re succeeding way beyond my best estimates.”
“Sir, we’re saving millions, but the large rock is still going to hit us really hard. The destruction of the splinters is giving the people a false hope. They think we’ll be able to save them from the large rock and we both know that’s not going to be case. We can’t even strike the rock because we’re all but out of surface to air missiles. Everyone who had any used them taking down the splinters.”
“I hadn’t thought of that. I better start trying to write a speech explaining it to our people.”
“Yes, sir. That’s an excellent idea, I’ll ask your speech writer to see you.”
“Thank you, by the way. what’s President Aristov doing about Moscow and the area around his capital?”
“Sir, He’s moving his people away from Moscow as quickly as he can. He expects they will have more than 65% of the people moved at least three hundred miles away…”
“Is three hundred miles far enough away?”
“No, sir it’s really not. The shock wave is going to destroy everything maybe up to a thousand miles from ground zero.”
“Ground zero?”
“Sir, it’s the name we give of the point of impact. We shared with him all of the data we had, by everything I mean everything and that includes the blast maps and every bit of data we had.”
“Thank you. Where has he gone?”
“He’s inside the Russian counterpart to our Cheyenne Mountain in Siberia. He will be safe there. Sir, I strongly suggest you move as quickly as possible to Cheyenne. Washington most likely isn’t safe.”
“I know, my bags are already on Marine One. I plan to leave within the hour.”
“Sir, the sooner the better, the rock may create a world wide massive EMP when it explodes.”
“Okay, I’ll leave right now. Keep me informed on the secure radios.”
“Yes, sir.”
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The world’s media broadcast pictures and videos of the missiles rising into the skies, they showed the flashes of the missiles’ explosions. They also showed the flashes of light and burning tails of the rocks burning across the skies. They happily reported the rocks were intercepted and they were burning up in the sky. The media mistakenly reported that the world was saved. The media celebrated the military’s success. They’d forgotten about ‘Robert’s Rock’ the large one which was still coming. They’d ignored the part about the size of ‘Robert’s Rock’ and how it was too large to destroy with missiles that carried warheads of less than twenty pounds of explosives and some carried no warheads as they were designed to strike the incoming missile and destroy it by a head to head collision, a bullet hitting another bullet. Only the rock coming towards Earth wasn’t a bullet, it was a mountain, and nothing was going to stop it from crashing into the Earth.
A small fact overlooked in the crisis of the asteroid arriving soon was the Russian military was reloading their ICBM silos with fresh missiles. America’s Minute Man silos weren’t designed to be reloaded, the thought being there wouldn’t be anything to launch a second salvo at in an all-out nuclear war. America had designed one missile system and silo to be re-loadable, the MX, also called the Peacekeeper. It is a very large missile capable of carrying ten nuclear warheads. The missiles had a very short life span and were withdrawn from service within ten years. America’s only other re-loadable nuclear delivery systems were her bombers and her missile carrying submarines which she had 14 and only a handful were ever at sea at the same time. The boats were old, they were waiting for their replacements to be completed so they could retire. Many of the submarine’s systems regularly failed and parts were nonexistent since the boats had been manufactured more than thirty years ago. Their computers had been updated but many of the other systems were constantly failing. 3-D printing managed to keep them operating until their replacements were due to arrive in the 2030s, however the asteroid was going to have a say in that schedule.
President Lanoha decided not to stop the celebrations since he didn’t think he could without resorting to violence which he knew there was going to be a lot of very soon. He’d issued orders to critical companies to relocate south and the government helped offset their costs. Primary among these were every company that made freeze dried food and first aid equipment.
