The colonel reached for the phone and cupped the mouthpiece with increasingly sweaty palms. His heart was racing as pure adrenalin coursed through his body. Before he addressed the secretary, another airman in the command center spoke excitedly.
“Sir, another launch detected. Strike that. Multiple launches detected. Four, five, six. Check that! We’re up to nine, ten …”
The colonel’s mind tuned out the remainder of the airman’s announcement. God help us, he thought to himself as his mind raced to process what was happening. They’d emptied their fixed missile locations first, the ones America’s intelligence community were aware of. Now they were utilizing their road-mobile ballistic missile launchers, moving targets that were near impossible to track.
The colonel didn’t wait for the final count. He pressed his left index finger into his ear to block out the airman’s announcement and turned his attention to the defense secretary.
“Mr. Secretary, we have multiple ballistic missile launches from the DPRK. Our count is above a dozen, sir. They’re sending everything they’ve got.”
Part I
Day eight, Friday, October 25
Chapter One
Friday, October 25
Interstate 66
Fairfax, Virginia
Peter Albright was paralyzed, his eyes transfixed on the rearview mirror as the spectacle unfolded behind him. The phenomenal destruction inflicted by the nuclear explosion could only be described as an enormous hurricane coupled with an intense firestorm of unprecedented proportion.
He was briefly blinded as the fifty-kiloton bomb detonated somewhere in Washington, DC. The precise location didn’t matter at that moment. Only survival.
Peter had the presence of mind to grab his sling backpack before he flung open the door. He frantically stumbled out of the car, rolling across the rough asphalt pavement of Interstate 66 until he hit the concrete divider with a thud.
He knew what was coming. As if to confirm his fears, he looked back toward the nation’s capital. He blinked twice in an effort to awaken himself from the horror. The conscious act only forced his adrenaline to kick him in the ass.
Peter began to run away from the blast at a pace he didn’t think he was capable of. Stranded motorists, their vehicles’ electronics destroyed by the immediate surge of electromagnetic energy, stood in awe of the spectacle. He didn’t waste his energy on warning them. They’d find out what was coming soon enough.
He zigzagged across the five lanes of traffic, dodging panicked Virginians and stalled cars. A few ran near him. Others stood holding their arms over their eyes to avoid the blinding light that could be seen for a hundred miles.
Then he heard it.
It was a low growl at first. The sound of a beast warning any living being around it that it was dangerous.
Then the growl grew louder. A roar coupled with the rumble of a massive avalanche. It was deafening as it approached faster than Peter’s athletic body could flee it.
Run! Dammit! Run!
He began to stumble just as a wave of searing heat radiated outward from the detonation some eighteen miles away. The scorching wind generated by the massive fireball, the core of which reached tens of millions of degrees, as hot as the sun, swept outward in all directions.
By the time it reached Peter, it was no longer deadly, but it was certainly powerful. It struck him in the back and sent his helpless body flying forward. It was a stroke of luck or the hand of God that saved him.
The wind, coupled with the gravity of the Earth, body-slammed him into the gravel of the highway shoulder. He rolled over and over through the tall grasses, avoiding the steel guardrail because a prior accident had split it into two twisted parts.
Seconds later, Peter found himself facedown in a drainage ditch covered in warm, muddy water. His skin smelled warm. Sunburned. Like he’d spent too much time at Virginia Beach on a scorching August day.
Instinctively, he tossed and turned in the shallow water, covering himself with moisture. His mind thought he was on fire. He wasn’t, but the blast of heat he’d endured had certainly incinerated others closer to Washington.
Peter couldn’t recall how long he’d lain in the ditch. It could’ve been seconds or minutes. Eventually, the worst of the heated air had passed, and the roar that accompanied it had quietened. It was replaced by the sound of despair.
People screamed for help. They cried with angst. Others shouted instructions as if they were experts in surviving a nuclear explosion. Still more stood in awe, mouths open, watching the mushroom cloud rise to the heavens, illuminated by the flames roaring uncontrollably outward from the blast along the surface of the earth. Hungrily devouring buildings and vaporizing people in a flash, their charred bodies crumbling into ash onto the scorched ground.
As the fireball traveled outward from ground zero, the intense heat set gas lines, fuel tanks, and power lines on fire. The electromagnetic pulse destroyed anything electronic within two hundred miles of the ground detonation.
The colossal pressure wave hurtled outward at five hundred miles per hour, crossing the Potomac River, demolishing everything within seven miles. Houses made of wood were torched. Sturdier block, brick and steel construction might have remained standing. However, only their naked and warped steel structural supports remained. Utility poles snapped like toothpicks. The wave whipped through green space, snapping trees and leveling landscape. People were flung through the air and pummeled by deadly projectiles of brick, glass, and metal.
At the point of detonation, a crater fifty feet deep with a diameter stretching beyond the Pentagon was quickly filled with the now-boiling water of the Potomac River as it rushed to fill the void where the heart of America’s government once beat.
All of this happened within the first few minutes.
Peter had suddenly become hyperaware of his surroundings. His mind raced as he tried to recall everything he’d learned about the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. Living in the DC area, the thought of being the number one target of nuclear-capable nations made him more than a casual reader of news reports leading up
