James Barrington - Overkill

Even so, its effects were immediate and devastating. The office building vaporized almost instantly, as did some four square miles of the centre of the city. Slightly over one hundred and seven thousand people died in less than one fifth of a second.

Half a second after the detonation, the temperature at the epicentre of the explosion reached several million degrees, and a massive fireball rose from the ground and expanded to cover most of the city of Abilene, starting innumerable ground fires that flared out of control, burning the living and incinerating the bodies of the newly dead. Anything combustible burned. Garage fuel storage tanks, domestic gas supplies and automobile petrol tanks exploded, adding to the carnage. It was doubly unfortunate that a major part of Abilene’s industrial area is given over to the production of natural gas and petroleum, and the explosion of these highly combustible fuels significantly increased the devastation caused by the fireball. A further thirty-one thousand people perished directly as a result of the fireball.

Another half a second later the shockwave from the weapon began to spread outwards at unbelievable speed in a circular pattern, demolishing the few remaining buildings and flinging vehicles and people high into the air. Its force would not be spent until it was well clear of the city limits, and even at the very edge of the city it was still strong enough to flatten houses. The shockwave killed another sixteen thousand people. Convection currents generated by the explosion sucked dust into the air, hauling it high above the shattered community and forming the terrifying and completely unmistakable shape of a mushroom cloud.

Almost everyone within three miles of ground zero who survived the detonation died as well, but more slowly, killed by the lethal but invisible fusillades of neutrons and gamma radiation generated by the explosion.

Even people several miles away from Abilene would die, even more slowly, over the succeeding weeks and months, killed by the fallout – the material vaporized in the fireball which would condense to form microscopically fine particles full of highly radioactive and long-lived contaminants like plutonium–239 and strontium–90. The final death toll from the Abilene weapon would top one hundred and eighty-five thousand, though nobody would ever be able to work out the exact number who perished, and the cost of the damage was quite literally incalculable.

Friday

St Médard, near Manciet, Midi-Pyrénées, France

The trooper was within twenty yards of the outhouse before Jaafar Badri heard anything at all. This was partly due to the trooper’s skill in silent movement, and partly because of the constant cracking of the unsilenced sniper rifle a hundred metres away and the smashing of its bullets against stone. All Badri heard was a faint slither, but it was enough. He crouched down almost to floor level, cautiously extended the muzzle of the Kalashnikov around the broken doorframe, and waited, eyes wide and staring into the darkness.

The trooper stopped moving, as he had been told to, lay flat on the ground and lobbed a small stone over to his right. Badri moved further out of the doorway, swinging his assault rifle to point at the sound he had just heard, and pulled the trigger. As the first round from the Kalashnikov crashed through the undergrowth, Colin Dekker, who had positioned himself to the left of the outhouse and with a clear view of the doorway, fired his silenced Hockler twice, hitting Badri in the chest and right shoulder.

The Arab crashed against the doorway, but with a supreme effort of will sat almost upright, pulling the muzzle of the Kalashnikov around towards Dekker. It didn’t do him any good. Three Hocklers fired at him almost simultaneously, bullets ripping through his chest and torso, and he slumped to the ground, dead.

Abbas ignored the sounds behind him, and concentrated on inputting the second firing authorization code for the Albany device. He had only three digits to go when Richter shot him in the back.

North American Aerospace Defense Command, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado

The normal silence of the NORAD control room was suddenly shattered by the sounds of warning bells and klaxons, and the giant vision screens flickered into life as lines of red text appeared. ‘Nuclear detonation, nuclear detonation! Location is Continental United States, south-central region. Central Texas. Detonation confirmed by seismic sensors. Stand by for estimate of ground zero position.’

General Wayne Harmon ran from his office to the control room, sat down at his desk and snatched up his headset. There was a confused babble of voices, which he swiftly silenced. ‘No way it was an ICBM. It had to have been sub-launched. Why didn’t we get a launch detection?’ he snapped.

‘No idea. We saw nothing on radar from the DEW or anywhere else, and neither did the DSP birds.’

Missile launches are detected by one of three Defence Support Programme surveillance satellites in geosynchronous orbit twenty-two thousand three hundred miles above the surface of the Earth. One is positioned over Central America, the second over the middle of the Pacific Ocean and the last above the Indian Ocean, and they maintain a constant watch of the Asian landmass and the oceans. Each DSP bird is fitted with a massive infra-red telescope which can identify the heat flare of the missile’s engines within one minute of launch. Only if there is heavy cloud above the launch site will the system not detect the missile until it clears the cloud tops. Launch and initial trajectory data are transmitted from the DSP satellite to the two Readout Stations located at Aurora, Colorado and Alice Springs, Australia, where the data is automatically compared with that from previous launches to determine whether or not the missile is on a ‘threat fan’ – that is to say, on a path ending in the United States or inside any allied nation.

‘Bullshit. Play back the tape – there must have been something and we missed it,’ Harmon said and reached for the JANET phone. ‘JANET’ is the Joint Chiefs of Staff Alerting Network, which links the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon and all other principal command headquarters.

‘Ground zero location confirmed as Abilene, Texas. Initial estimates from the seismographs suggest a weapon size of around thirty kilotons.’

‘Thirty kilotons? That’s bullshit too,’ Harmon snapped. ‘The Russians haven’t got any nuclear weapons that small – at least, none that they’d bother launching at us. This has just gotta be some kind of a screw-up.’

Camp David, Maryland

‘There’s been a what?’ the President asked into the telephone, his face going pale. ‘Where?’

‘Satellite surveillance reports ground zero as Abilene, Texas, Mr President,’ General Harmon replied, ‘but the situation is still confused.’

‘What do you mean “confused”?’ the President snapped. ‘Are you telling me you don’t know if a nuclear weapon has been detonated or not?’

‘No, Mr President. Detonation of a device definitely took place – the seismic data has already confirmed that – but the rest of the data doesn’t make sense. First, we had no launch detection of any sort, so the weapon didn’t arrive here on an ICBM or in a missile from a Russian boomer. We’ve checked the recorded data and all our systems, and there was definitely no launch. Second, the weapon is way too small. The seismic data puts it at around thirty kilotons, maybe even less, and all the Russian first-strike weapons are way up in the multi-megaton range. This thing was more like a tactical weapon.’