James Barrington - Overkill

‘And the weapon? What size device was used?’

‘Again, Comrade President, we do not yet have accurate data, but we believe the weapon to be very low-yield, probably thirty kilotons or less.’

‘So what sort of damage are we talking about? What casualties?’

Yuri Baratov spread his hands in a gesture of hopelessness. ‘We can’t begin to estimate it. The worst-case scenario would place the weapon in or near the centre of the city. That could produce a death toll of anything from one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand people. That’s most of the population, but by American standards it’s a small city. If the weapon was detonated some distance outside the city, perhaps half of those figures.’

‘So many?’ the President murmured, his voice shaking with emotion. ‘But you said it was a low-yield weapon.’

‘That is what we believe,’ Baratov replied. ‘But you must remember, Comrade President, that the weapon the Americans dropped on Hiroshima only had a yield of twenty kilotons, and that killed about one hundred thousand people.’

‘And the question the Americans will want us to answer, no doubt, is why a Russian nuclear weapon was detonated in an American city. And I too want that question answered. There is no possibility that this was some kind of a terrorist attack, and nothing to do with that idiot Trushenko’s Podstava , I suppose?’

Baratov shook his head. ‘I have already talked with General Sokolov, and he has confirmed that Abilene was one of the cities targeted by Trushenko, though he does not know either the calculated yield of the weapon or where it was located. But I do not believe in coincidence. This weapon was certainly one of the Podstava devices.’

‘Which of course raises yet another question,’ the President growled. ‘Modin and Bykov have just been placed under armed guard at the Embassy in London. Sokolov is here in Moscow in a cell in the Lubyanka and Trushenko is dead, killed in the Ukraine, so who fired the weapon?’

Again Baratov spread his hands wide. ‘I have no idea,’ he said.

‘Well, one thing is quite certain,’ the President said, getting to his feet. ‘I will have to go and talk to the Americans. Immediately.’

Vic-Fézensac, Midi-Pyrénées, France

‘There’s a phone box – stop the car,’ Richter called, and Dekker obediently hauled the Espace into the side of the road. Richter had been checking his mobile phone for the last eight minutes, ever since the idea had come to him, but the signal strength had stayed obstinately at zero. The box in Vic-Fézensac was the first public telephone he’d seen on the road since they’d left St Médard. He jumped out of the Espace, ran back to the phone box and lifted the receiver, feeding Euros into the slot as he did so. The phone rang only twice before Baker answered.

‘It’s Richter. The Arab who was calling himself “The Prophet”. It’s just occurred to me that perhaps his backdoor code could be the same, but in a different language. His screen name or whatever you call it was Yiddish, not Farsi or Pashto, which we would have expected of an Arab. Maybe he ransacked the languages of the world, using obscure words in dialects spoken by only a handful of people. He seemed to think the name “The Prophet” was some kind of a joke, so it’s possible he thought it was so funny he used it twice, if you see what I mean.’

‘Yes, maybe,’ Baker said doubtfully. ‘I’ve already tried accessing the system using “Dernowi”, but that didn’t work. I’ll run the word “prophet” through the dictionary program and see what it comes up with. I’ll call you.’

‘Right,’ Richter said. ‘You’d better make that your first priority – the Arab said that somebody else knew the backdoor code to the Krutaya mainframe, and I don’t think he was joking about that. Oh, and ask somebody there to get Lacomte to re-activate the mobile phone cells down here as soon as he can.’

‘Right. Is that it?’

‘No. Is Simpson there? I need to brief him on what we got out of the Arab. Some of what he said will certainly interest him, and I’m sure the Americans will be fascinated.’

Buraydah, Saudi Arabia

Sadoun Khamil was still sitting in front of the television set, but his smile had vanished and he was puzzled. The screen now showed long-distance television pictures of the ruins of Abilene, taken from a news chopper that was keeping some miles back from the devastation, presumably because of the danger from the fallout. That wasn’t what was puzzling him. By now, he had expected there to be news of other detonations, from all across the United States, but it was beginning to look as if the Abilene weapon was an isolated incident.

He would, he decided, wait only a further hour, and then he would have to contact al-Qaeda. In the meantime, he strode across to his computer to compose an urgent email, sent direct and this time in clear, to Hassan Abbas.

The Walnut Room, the Kremlin, Krasnaya ploshchad, Moscow

‘An Arab?’ Yuri Baratov could not keep the incredulity out of his voice. ‘Why would some fucking raghead have access to a Russian weapons computer?’

‘According to the American President, because the fucking ragheads, as you describe them, actually paid for it to be built. If the Americans are to be believed,’ the Russian President continued, ‘the Arabs – and by that the President actually means the al-Qaeda group – conceived the Podstava operation, behind which their own plan was hidden, and they also paid for the construction and placement of all the weapons, here in Europe as well as in America. That bastard Trushenko was the recipient of the funds, and no doubt he had a nice little nest-egg salted away somewhere. Your people can no doubt find out exactly where he chose and recover the funds for us.’

Baratov nodded, then shook his head. ‘I still don’t believe it,’ he said.

‘Well, the Americans do, and so do the British, who actually stopped the al-Qaeda operation. The Arabs’ intention, according to the President, was to detonate over two hundred nuclear weapons in America at the same moment. This, they believed, would be certain to initiate a massive retaliatory attack on us, and to which we would respond with whatever weapons we had left. In a little over twenty-four hours both Russia and America would have been effectively destroyed. The only good thing, if you can call it that, is that Trushenko and the others involved apparently had no idea what the Arabs actually had planned.’

Baratov was noticeably pale in the face, and his voice shook slightly as he replied. ‘But why? Why would the Arabs do that?’

‘Again according to the Americans, because that would provide the Arab world with the opportunity to arise as the new world leaders, to bring the word of Mohammed to the godless East, and the far-too Christian West.’

‘And now?’ Baratov asked. ‘What will the Americans do about the bomb that detonated in Texas?’

‘Nothing,’ The Russian President said, with a smile of relief. ‘At least, no military action, though we will certainly have to make financial and other reparations – it was, after all, a Russian weapon. That, I have assured the President, we will be more than happy to do.’

Hammersmith, London

Fifty-three minutes after he’d received the call from Richter, and thirty-eight minutes after the dictionary program had delivered the results of its worldwide language search, Baker leaned back from the screen of his computer. ‘Well, I’ll be buggered,’ he muttered.

He had just tried yet again to log on to the Krutaya mainframe, and the word he had tried this time from the printout in front of him produced results. The screen display showed two lines of text, but only one of them was comprehensible to Baker. The first line read, in English, ‘Welcome, Prophet. I await your commands.’