Of course not, thought Kozlowski. He himself would never have made it. God bless Captain Li.
The whine of the engines was deafening now as they approached the towering, 231-foot-long plane.
Li shouted, “We have orders to pick up the Secretary of Defense at Edwards AFB.”
Kozlowski nodded as they ran up the hydraulic steps into the belly of the fuselage. They made their way through a long communications section manned by six Air Force officers and then entered the battle staff compartment. Fifteen more officers, conducting their pre-flight checks, saluted.
“Let’s get the hell out of here!” Kozlowski shouted and strapped himself into a jump seat.
Li plunked down next to him, breathless. The GE 80-series engines wound up into a deep-throated roar and the jumbo jet started moving down the runway.
Kozlowski leaned back against his seat as the plane left the ground. He never felt more alive in his life.
11
President Rhinehart paced the floor in the bunker while his national security adviser gave him the latest.
“Marshall is on Looking Glass, Mr. President.”
Rhinehart nodded. Whatever political challenges the general had presented him, he was a genuine military asset. “And my doomsday plane?”
“Nightwatch just took off from Andrews,” Jack Natori said.
“Send Nightwatch to California to pick up Bald Eagle at Edwards,” said Rhinehart.
At that moment the tumblers in the vault door began to click-clack. Rhinehart and company looked at each other in surprise.
Rhinehart said, “I thought everybeen accounted for.”
“Everybody has been accounted for, Mr. President,” said chief of staff Stan Black.
“Then who’s that?” Rhinehart demanded.
All eyes turned toward the vault door as it slowly opened to reveal the bald, bullet-headed Secretary of Defense, Ryan O’Donnell.
“What have I missed?” O’Donnell asked in response to the incredulous stares.
Rhinehart gasped, “You’re supposed to be in California!”
“My kid’s in the hospital with the flu,” the Secretary of Defense explained. “I was going to catch a later flight. Central Locator said we’re covered.”
There was no response, only horrified expressions around the bunker.
O’Donnell stared back blankly. “What?!”
12
The Blue Line Metro shot down the tunnel, packed with suits and uniforms, all oblivious to the flashing red light behind the front axle of the chassis as the train screeched along the rails.
Inside the cars, faces were buried behind the pages of the
“Next stop, the Pentagon.”
The caution lights lining the edge of the platform ahead began to blink. As the commuters began to queue up, a beam of light from the Metro stabbed out of the tunnel.
Six Special Forces troops burst onto the platform and fanned out, parting the sea of commuters into waves of panic and confusion. Their commanding officer, Lt. Matt Omar, was once an Azerbaijani national in Baku, trained by the CIA and Oklahoma National Guard to fight terrorists, before Wanda Randolph of the U.S. Capitol Police brought him stateside and helped him become an American citizen. She had argued that anyone already putting his life on the line for America deserved it.
“Down there!” shouted Omar.
On the track, attached to the rail’s tie-plate, was a small black box on which an even smaller red light was blinking. The security cameras had missed it.
Omar dove for the device even as the Metro shot out of the tunnel and into the station. He desperately tried to disengage the signal box. He looked up helplessly at his partners a second before the Metro, brakes squealing, mowed him down, tripping the signal box and detonating the nuclear warhead bolted to the train.
Suddenly there was a blinding white flash.
13
The deer raised her head from the fresh powder of snow and stood deathly still while the pine trees, dripping white, trembled ever so slightly. Then she scrambled away over a slope past the “Danger! Restricted Area” sign and out of view of the security c
Hundreds of feet beneath the earth, behind a giant vault-like door of titanium cut out of the mountain, it was snowing inside too, on the monitors of the command center of the U.S. Northern Command.
USAF Maj. Gen. Norman Block, squat and brash, stared at two giant screens where his bosses used to be. “What the hell happened?”
“IONDS sensors detect a nuclear detonation within the U.S., sir,” his senior controller reported. “It’s Washington.”
Block looked at the reconfiguring screens. The left screen displayed TOT MISL 1 — total number of missiles launched. The right screen displayed TTG +00.00.35 — time to go before detonation. It was the plus sign that made Block’s blood jump.
“God Almighty,” he said.
What happened next went strictly according to plan as America’s so-called Post Attack Command Control System swung into action.
Block picked up the gold phone of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Alerting Network (JSCAN) from the console in front of him.
“Put me through to General Carver at SAC.”
14
Inside the underground command center of the Strategic Command, the gold JSCAN telephone started beeping in SC Commander Duane Carver’s office. Carver, a lean, low-key man, picked up and heard the news from
