“Sir, give me a moment. I’ve going to get my ops to track this.”
“Of course,” Neel replied, but the colonel was already off camera, directing his personnel to action.
11:56.
The colonel reappeared shortly. “I’m sorry, sir. We’re bringing up satellite imagery to see what we can see.”
“Any way you can share your feed with us? The president said they were launching at noon.”
“Umm…” The colonel looked off screen and asked someone to change the view. A colorful map of radar-produced clouds covered the screen with an outline of the United States in the background. “There you go, sir. We’re going to zoom in… Yeah. There are hot spots blooming in the Dakotas and Wyoming.”
“Hot spots? What’s that mean?”
11:58. Neel blinked. He’d lost an entire minute.
“I’m not a nuclear officer, sir. I’m a pilot. But I imagine those are the rocket motors on our ICBMs warming up for launch.”
“Okay, that makes sense,” the general replied. “There’s another aspect to this. As we were talking, the president told me that the Iranians had discovered the Cheyenne Mountain Complex and were attempting to breach it.”
“Good luck,” McTaggert scoffed. “Those blast doors are designed to take a near-direct hit from a nuclear bomb. They aren’t getting through them.”
“They figured that out too, so they’re tunneling directly through the mountainside. We could hear explosions over the speakers, then the alarms started going off and the Secret Service grabbed him. I think they breached the facility.”
11:59.
“Hey, sir. Are you seeing this? The heat blooms have become legitimate heat signatures with— My ops just confirmed launch. We have just launched missiles, sir.”
The digital clock on the wall ticked over to 12:00.
“Did we just start World War III?” Major Blackledge mumbled, staring at the screen on the wall.
“God, I hope not,” somebody replied.
“Are the Russians or Chinese responding?” Neel asked.
“We’re trying to determine that now, sir. My OPSO says that the missiles from the Dakotas are headed generally toward Iran, but the ones from Wyoming are headed over the Pacific.”
“We’re hitting North Korea as well,” the general replied much more casually than he actually felt. “How long until the missiles hit Iran?”
“Um… Fifteen, twenty minutes? None of us here at Holloman are Nukes, sir, so that’s just a guess on our part.”
“Understood, Dan. You guys are doing a great job. Thank you. Do you think we can see what’s happening at Cheyenne Mountain while we wait?”
“I’m sorry, but we don’t have access to any of the satellites tasked to cover that area.”
Neel nodded silently. The NSC would want sole control of that type of satellite, of course. “Is there any response from the Chinese or the Russians?”
“We’re not seeing anything from them. We know they weren’t wiped out, but as far as we can tell, they’re in about as much of a degraded state as we’re in.”
“Degraded state?” Neel chuckled aloud. “Dan, if you call what we’re going through here in the US a ‘degraded state’ then I’d hate to see what you call a disaster. Best estimates is that we have five or six million people left alive out of a nation of three hundred and thirty million. We’re pretty damn degraded.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean—”
“No, it’s alright. I was just… You know what? Never mind, Dan. You and your people are doing a fantastic job and we appreciate your help. Can you switch over to the Middle Eastern view, please?”
The colonel replied, but Neel stopped listening. Instead, he was focused on the little blinking dots traveling at what he imagined was supersonic speed. His old infantryman’s mind couldn’t fathom the speed that the missiles were traveling, but it was a whole lot faster than anything that he’d ever seen before.
The missiles from England were already over Turkey—what used to be Turkey. Now it was just another place, filled with the infected. How had the Iranians kept their borders safe? Why weren’t they completely overrun like everywhere else in the world? Obviously, the easy answer is that they were prepared for it and had defended themselves against the threat, but it had to be more than that. They had hundreds, no, thousands of miles worth of border with their neighbors, but reports of infection were nonexistent, and the few intermittent reports that he’d seen said they were completely free of the infected. How? There had to be… The facility. They’d been working on a vaccine, he’d learned that much from the shoddy translation work his intelligence team was able to do using a translation program, but a lot of it didn’t make sense because the writing was difficult to read for their Western eyes. Had they developed something that they’d been able to use successfully to keep themselves safe?
“Sir?” someone said. “Sir? The missiles are almost at the target.”
Neel blinked. He’d allowed himself to completely zone out, staring at the screen as he thought. The little blinking dots that represented the missiles had passed through the computer-generated lines representing Iran’s international borders. He didn’t know the geography of Iran like he did Iraq and Afghanistan—the US hadn’t fought there. He knew there were several major cities and it appeared as if the missiles had been aimed at multiple targets across a wide swath of the country.
“Is this real time?” he mumbled.
“Yes, sir,” Dan McTaggert replied from the VTC’s speaker system. “We should be seeing the detonations soon.”
“What about the missiles that we launched at them, or at North Korea?”
“Those have to travel at least twice as far, so we’ve got some time before those become relevant, sir. But I do have my airmen tracking them.”
There was a bright light in the center of Iran, followed by several more around the country and a couple more explosions nearer to the first one.
