Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon

“Out!” Kirillin ordered. The lieutenant general, now feeling like a new cadet in parachute school, gathered his team and ran to the pickup point. As guilty as any man would be of mission focus, he looked around, surprised by the fire and flame to his north-

— but more surprised to see three silo covers moving. The nearest was only three hundred meters away, and there he saw one of his Spetsnaz troopers walk right to the suddenly open silo and toss something in-then he ran like a rabbit-

— because three seconds later, the hand grenade he’d tossed in exploded, and took the entire missile up with it. The Spetsnaz soldier disappeared in the fireball he’d caused, and would not be seen again-

— but then something worse happened. From exhaust vents set left and right of Silos #5 and #7 came two vertical fountains of solid white-yellow flame, and less than two seconds later appeared the blunt, black shape of a missile’s nosecone.

Fuck,” breathed the Apache pilot coded CROOK Two. He was circling a kilometer away, and without any conscious thought at all, lowered his nose, twisted throttle, and pulled collective to jerk his attack helicopter at the rising missile.

“Got it,” the gunner called. He selected his 20-mm cannon and held down the trigger. The tracers blazed out like laser beams. The first set missed, but the gunner adjusted his lead and walked them into the missile’s upper half-

— the resulting explosion threw CROOK Two out of control, rolling it over on its back. The pilot threw his cyclic to the left, continuing the roll before he stopped it, barely, a quarter of the way through the second one, and then he saw the fireball rising, and the burning missile fuel falling back to the ground, atop Silo #9, and on all the men there who’d disabled that bird.

The last missile cleared its silo before the soldiers there could do much about it. Two tried to shoot at it with their personal weapons, but the flaming exhaust incinerated them in less time than it takes to pull a trigger. Another Apache swept in, having seen what CROOK Two had accomplished, but its rounds fell short, so rapidly the CSS-4 climbed into the air.

Oh, fuck,” Clark heard in his radio earpiece. It was Ding’s voice. ”Oh, fuck.”

John got back on his satellite phone.

“Yeah, how’s it going?” Ed Foley asked.

“One got off, one got away, man.”

“What?”

“You heard me. We killed all but one, but that one got off… going north, but leaning east some. Sorry, Ed. We tried.”

It took Foley a few seconds to gather his thoughts and reply. “Thanks, John. I guess I have some things to do here.”

There’s another one,” the captain said.

CINC-NORAD was trying to play this one as cool as he could. Yes, there was a spec-op laid on to take this Chinese missile farm down, and so he expected to see some hot flashes on the screen, and okay, all of them so far had been on the ground.

“That should be all of them,” the general announced.

“Sir, this one’s moving. This one’s a launch.”

“Are you sure?”

“Look, sir, the bloom is moving off the site,” she said urgently. “Valid launch, valid launch-valid threat!” she concluded. “Oh, my God…”

“Oh, shit,” CINC-NORAD said. He took one breath and lifted the Gold Phone. No, first he’d call the NMCC.

The senior watch officer in the National Military Command Center was a Marine one-star named Sullivan. The NORAD phone didn’t ring very often.

“NMCC, Brigadier General Sullivan speaking.”

“This is CINC-NORAD. We have a valid launch, valid threat from Xuanhua missile base in China. I say again, we have a valid launch, valid threat from China. It’s angling east, coming to North America.”

“Fuck,” the Marine observed.

“Tell me about it.”

The procedures were all written down. His first call went to the White House military office.

Ryan was sitting down to dinner with the family. An unusual night, he had nothing scheduled, no speeches to give, and that was good, because reporters always showed up and asked questions, and lately-

“Say that again?” Andrea Price-O’Day said into her sleeve microphone. “What?”

Then another Secret Service agent bashed into the room. “Marching Order!” he proclaimed. It was a code phrase often practiced but never spoken in reality.

“What?” Jack said, half a second before his wife could make the same sound.

“Mr. President, we have to get you and your family out of here,” Andrea said. “The Marines have the helicopters on the way.”

“What’s happening?”

“Sir, NORAD reports an inbound ballistic threat”

“What? China?”

“That’s all I know. Let’s go, right now,” Andrea said forcefully.

“Jack,” Cathy said in alarm.

“Okay, Andrea.” The President turned. “Time to go, honey. Right now.”

“But-what’s happening?”

He got her to her feet first, and walked to the door. The corridor was full of agents. Trenton Kelly was holding Kyle Daniel-the lionesses were nowhere in sight-and the principal agents for all the other kids were there. In a moment, they saw that there was not enough room in the elevator. The Ryan family rode. The agents mainly ran down the wide, white marble steps to the ground level.

“Wait!” another agent called, holding his left hand up. His pistol was in his right hand, and none of them had seen that very often. They halted as commanded-even the President doesn’t often argue with a person holding a gun.

Ryan was thinking as fast as he knew how: “Andrea, where do I go?”

“You go to KNEECAP. Vice President Jackson will join you there. The family goes to Air Force One.”

At Andrews Air Force base, just outside Washington, the pilots of First Heli, the USAF 1st Helicopter Squadron, were sprinting to their Bell Hueys. Each had an assignment, and each knew where his Principal was, because the security detail of each was reporting in constantly. Their job was to collect the cabinet members and spirit them away from Washington to preselected places of supposed safety. Their choppers were off the ground in less than three minutes, scattering off to different preselected pickup points.

Jack, what is this?” It took a lot to make his wife afraid, but this one had done it.

“Honey, we have a report that a ballistic missile is flying toward America, and the safest place for us to be is in the air. So, they’re getting you and the kids to Air Force One. Robby and I will be on KNEECAP. Okay?”

“Okay? Okay? What is this?” “It’s bad, but that’s all I know.”

On the Aleutian island of Shemya, the huge Cobra Dane radar scanned the sky to the north and west. It frequently detected satellites, which mainly fly lower than ICBM warheads, but the computer that analyzed the tracks of everything that came into the system’s view categorized this contact as exactly what it was, too high to be a low-orbit satellite, and too slow to be a launch vehicle.

“What’s the track?” a major asked a sergeant.

“Computer says East Coast of the United States. In a few minutes we’ll know more… for now, somewhere between Buffalo and Atlanta.” That information was relayed automatically to NORAD and the Pentagon.

The entire structure of the United States military went into hyperdrive, one segment at a time, as the information reached it. That included USS Gettysburg, alongside the pier in the Washington Navy Yard.

Captain Blandy was in his in-port cabin when the growler phone went off. “Captain speaking… go to general quarters, Mr. Gibson,” he ordered, far more calmly than he felt.