“What's odd about it?”
“The energy from the initial flash was low. That might mean some clouds were in the way. The residual heat is quite high. This was a major detonation, comparable to a very large tactical warhead, or a small strategic one.”
“Here's the target book,” a lieutenant said. It was just that, a clothbound quarto-sized volume whose thick page's were actually fold-out maps. It was intended for use in strike-damage evaluation. The map of the Denver area had a plastic overlay that showed the targeting of Soviet strategic missiles. A total of eight birds were detailed on the city, five SS-18s and three SS-19s, totalling no fewer than sixty-four warheads and twenty megatons of yield. Someone, Kuropatkin reflected, thought Denver a worthy target.
“We're assuming a ground-burst?” Kuropatkin asked.
“Correct,” the Major replied. He used a compass to draw a circle centered on the stadium complex. “A two- hundred-kiloton device would have a lethal blast radius this wide…”
The map was color-coded. Hard-to-kill structures were colored brown. Dwellings were yellow. Green denoted commercial and other buildings deemed easy targets to destroy. The stadium, he saw, was green, as was nearly everything immediately around it. Well inside the lethal radius were hundreds of houses and low-rise apartment buildings.
“How many in the stadium?”
“I called KGB for an estimate,” the lieutenant said. “It's an enclosed structure — with a roof. The Americans like their comforts. Total capacity is over sixty thousand.”
“My God,” General Kuropatkin breathed. “Sixty thousand there… at least another hundred thousand inside this radius. The Americans must be insane by now.” And if they think we did it…
“Well?”Borstein asked.
“I ran the numbers three times. Best guess, one-fifty-KT, sir,” the Captain said.
Borstein rubbed his face. “Christ. Casualty count?”
“Two hundred-K, based on computer modeling and a quick look at the maps we have on file,” she answered.
“Sir, if somebody's thinking terrorist device, they're wrong. It's too big for that.”
Borstein activated the conference line to the President and CINC-SAC. “We have some early numbers here.”
“Okay, I'm waiting,” the President said. He stared at the speaker as though it were a person.
“Initial yield estimates look like one hundred fifty kilotons.”
“That big?” General Fremont's voice asked.
“We checked the numbers three times.”
“Casualties?” CINC-SAC asked next.
“On the order of two hundred thousand initial dead. Add fifty more to that from delayed effects.”
President Fowler recoiled backwards as though slapped across the face. For the past five minutes, he had denied as much as he could. This most important of denials had just vanished. Two hundred thousand people dead. His citizens, the people he'd sworn to preserve, protect, and defend.
“What else?” his voice asked.
“I didn't catch that,” Borstein said.
Fowler took a deep breath and spoke again. “What else do you have?”
“Sir, our impression here is that the yield is awfully high for a terrorist device.”
“I'd have to concur in that,” CINC-SAC said. “An IND — an improvised nuclear device, that is, what we'd expect from unsophisticated terrorists — should not be much more than twenty-KT. This sounds like a multi-stage weapon.”
“Multi-stage?” Elliot said towards the speaker.
“A thermonuclear device,” General Borstein replied. “An H-Bomb.”
“Ryan here, who's this?”
“Major Fox, sir, at NORAD. We have an initial feel for yield and casualties,” the major read off the bomb numbers.
“Too big for a terrorist weapon,” said an officer from the Directorate of Science and Technology.
“That's what we think, sir.”
“Casualties?” Ryan asked.
“Probable prompt-kill number is two hundred thousand or so. That includes the people at the stadium.”
I have to wake up, Ryan told himself, his eyes screwed tightly shut. This has to be a fucking nightmare, and I'm going to wake up from it. But he opened his eyes, and nothing had changed at all.
Robby Jackson was sitting in the cabin of the carrier's skipper, Captain Ernie Richards. They had been half- listening to the game, but mainly discussing tactics for an upcoming wargame. The Theodore Roosevelt battle group would approach Israel from the west, simulating an attacking enemy. The enemy in this case was the Russians. It seemed highly unlikely, of course, but you had to set some rules for the game. The Russians, in this case, were going to be clever. The battlegroup would be broken up to resemble a loose assembly of merchant ships instead of a tactical formation. The first attack wave would be fighters and attack-bombers squawking “international” on their IFF boxes, and would try to approach Ben Gurion International Airport in the guise of peaceful airliners, the better to get inside Israeli airspace unannounced. Jackson 's operations people had already purloined airliner schedules and were examining the time factors, the better to make their first attack seem as plausible as possible. The odds against them were long. It was not expected that TR could do much more than annoy the IAF and the new USAF contingent. But Jackson liked long odds.
“Turn up the radio, Rob. I forgot what the score is.”
Jackson leaned across the table and turned the dial, but got music. The carrier had her own on-board TV system, and was also radio-tuned to the U.S. Armed Forces network. “Maybe the antenna broke,” the Air Wing Commander observed.
Richards laughed. “At a time like this? I could have a mutiny aboard.”
“That would look good on the old fit-rep, wouldn't it?” Someone knocked at the door. “Come!” Richards said. It was a yeoman.
“Flash-traffic, sir.” The petty officer handed the clipboard over.
“Anything important?” Robby asked.
Richards just handed the message over. Then he lifted the growler phone and punched up the bridge. “General quarters.”
“What the hell?” Jackson murmured. “DEFCON-THREE — why, for Christ's sake?”
Ernie Richards, a former attack pilot, had a reputation as something of a character. He'd reinstituted the traditional Navy practice of bugle calls to announce drills. In this case, the 1-MC speaker system blared forth the opening bars of John Williams' frantic call to arms in Star Wars, followed by the usual electronic gonging.
“Let's go, Rob.” Both men started running down to the Combat Information Center.
“What can you tell me?” Andrey Il'ych Narmonov asked.
“The bomb had a force of nearly two hundred kilotons. That means a large device, a hydrogen bomb,” General Kuropatkin said. “The death count will be well over one hundred thousand dead. We also have indications of a strong electromagnetic pulse that struck one of our early-warning satellites.”
“What could account for that?” The questioner here was one of Narmonov's military advisors.
“We do not know.”
“Do we have any nuclear weapons unaccounted for?” Kuropatkin heard his president ask.
“Absolutely not,” a third voice replied.
“Anything else?”
“With your permission, I would like to order Voyska PVO to a higher alert level. We already have a training exercise under way in Eastern Siberia.”
