Kruszkegin went to his office and locked the door. Sitting at his desk he took out a Cuban cigar and lit it. He thought about the brief message from his nephew and looked at it again. 'Say your prayers.'
It was a joke; that is, it had been a joke four years earlier when he had helped young Yuri, his namesake, get the position on Khromchenkov's staff. 'What shall I say,' his nephew had asked him at that time, 'to warn you, should we ever decide to launch a major nuclear attack?'
Kruszkegin remembered his response: 'Just tell me to say my prayers.'
Russia (3:36 p.m. Moscow/Israel, 8:36 a.m. New York)
The heavy German-made cover slid quickly back from the underground silo, clearing the way for the missile inside. At eighty-seven locations scattered around the Russian Federation, the same foreboding sound of metal against metal was followed by the release of mooring clamps, and then by the roar of rocket engines firing. Slowly the missiles rose from their tranquil catacombs, hidden at first by the white clouds of exhaust which rose around them. Emerging above the banks of smoke, the missiles crept heavenward, picking up speed as they continued in their course. Their targets were not limited to Israel alone. In truth, Israel had now become insignificant. Khromchenkov's plan for restoring Russia to world prominence was to control the world's oil supply. With this launch it would no longer be necessary to use Israel for a staging ground to take control of Egypt's and Saudi Arabia's oil fields. Now that would be accomplished with one stroke. Israel needed to be taught a lesson and so six warheads had been targeted at its cities. But the hundreds of other warheads, as many as sixteen MRVed warheads in each missile, were targeted at every major city in every oil-rich country in the Middle East. Throughout Russia the military was put in readiness for the invasion to follow.
West of St. Petersburg a farmer ceased his work in confused wonder as the ground shook and the roar of engines reached his ears. Turning, he saw the sun briefly eclipsed by a rising missile which cast a shadow over him and his efforts. At the Cathedral of St. Basil in Moscow a wedding party looked skyward toward six rising plumes of exhaust. On a bridge in Irkutsk, children watching a puppet show were startled as the puppeteer suddenly ceased his craft to stare at the foreboding display in the sky. In Yekaterinburg, at a 10 kilometer race, skaters and spectators alike stopped in silent terror as the sun reflected off the hulls of four missiles speeding skyward. Throughout Russia similar scenes were played out.
Eighteen and a half seconds into their course, at a point approximately two miles into the air, as people in cities, towns, and farms around the country watched… the unexplainable happened.
At the core of each of the multiple warheads carried by the missiles, in an area so infinitesimally small, an incomprehensibly immense burst of energy was released. In less than a hundredth of a millionth of a second the temperature of the warheads rose to over a hundred million degrees Kelvin – five times hotter than the core of the sun – creating a fireball which expanded outward at several million miles per hour. Instantly everything within two to four miles of the blasts was vaporized: not just the farmer, but the tools with which he had worked; not just the wedding party, but the cathedral from which they had come; not just the children and the puppeteer, but the bridge on which they stood; not just the skaters and spectators, but the frozen river on which they had raced. Even the air itself was incinerated. For eight to fifteen miles around each of the exploding warheads, what was not vaporized burst instantly into flame.
As the fireballs expanded they drove before them superheated shockwaves of expanding air. Reflecting off of the ground they had not vaporized, the secondary shockwaves of the blasts fused with the initial shockwaves and propagated along the ground to create Mach fronts of unbelievable pressure. Buildings, homes, trees, and everything that had not already been destroyed were sheared from the surface of the earth and carried along at thousands of miles per hour. The death toll in the first fifteen seconds alone was over thirty million.
The huge fireballs, having expanded to as much as six miles in diameter, now rose skyward, pulling everything around them inward and upward like huge chimneys. Hundreds of billions of cubic meters of smoke and toxic gases created by the fires, together with all that had been blown outward by the blasts, was now drawn back to the center and carried aloft at five hundred miles per hour into scores of mammoth irradiated mushroom clouds of debris which would rain deadly fallout for thousands of miles around.
Tel Aviv (5:20 p.m. Israel)
The unsecured black phone rang and Lieutenant Colonel Michael White answered according to standard operating procedure, simply stating the last four digits of the phone number. The voice on the phone was that of the Israeli Prime Minister calling from his recently-liberated office in the Knesset. 'Congratulations,' he said. 'Not one missile left Russian air space. All Israel owes you their life and their freedom.'
'Thank you, Mister Prime Minister,' Colonel White said. 'But it wasn't us. Our line of control was cut hours ago. Our strategic defense is still entirely inoperable.'
Chapter 17
Master of the World
Two months later – New York
Former Assistant Secretary-General Robert Milner and Namibian Ambassador Thomas Sabudu paused briefly to be sure everything was in order before stepping onto the elevator. When they reached the British Mission on the 28th floor they were warmly greeted by Jackie Hansen and shown into Hansen's inner office.
'Good afternoon, Bob; Ambassador Sabudu,' Hansen said as he left his desk to show his guests to the sitting area in his office. 'How have you been, Bob?' Hansen asked.
'Not bad for an old man,' answered Milner.
'For an 'old man' you certainly haven't slowed down at all. I think I see you around the U.N. more now than when you actually worked there.'
Milner laughed. 'Well, now that I don't have to be there, it's a lot more fun.'
'So, are you just operating out of your briefcase now?' Hansen asked.
'Oh, no,' Milner answered. 'Alice Bernley let me set up shop in a spare room down at the Lucius Trust.' Jackie brought in tea and scones and the three men sat down to business.
'So, what can I do for you?' Hansen asked, looking alternately at Sabudu and Milner.
'Jon we're here – Ambassador Sabudu officially, and me unofficially – on behalf of certain members of the Group of 77,' Milner began, referring to the caucus of Third World countries which had originally consisted of seventy seven countries but which had since grown to include more than one hundred and fifty nations.
'We have come,' said Ambassador Sabudu, 'because on two previous occasions you have addressed the General Assembly on the subject of reorganizing the U.N. Security Council.'
'Yes,' Hansen recalled, 'once just recently. But I'm sure you understand that on both of those occasions my intent was to dramatize the seriousness of another point. Most recently, it was just after the Russian invasion of Israel and my motion to reorganize the Security Council was to make the point that Russia could not just start invading other countries and assume the United Nations would do nothing about it. It was never my intent that the motion would pass. If Russia had been removed from the Security Council, I think it's a pretty safe bet they'd have dropped out of the U.N. altogether and we'd have lost the opportunities the U.N. provides to settle disputes diplomatically. So, as I said, my motion was simply to make the point, not to actually change the Security Council.'
'Yes, of course,' Sabudu responded.
'Jon,' interjected Milner, 'we'd like for you to bring it up again; this time in earnest.'
Hansen sat back in his chair.
'Ambassador Hansen,' Sabudu began.
'Please, call me Jon.'
'All right then, Jon. As you know, many things have changed in the two months since the nuclear devastation
