Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon

“Only two Block IVs left,” Weps said.

“They’re cheap,” Captain Blandy observed. “Come on, baby!”

Number Two also exploded behind the target, the TV picture showed.

“Three-two-one-now!”

So did Number Three.

“Oh, shit, oh, my God!” Gregory exclaimed. That caused heads to snap around.

“What?” Blandy demanded.

The IR seekers, they’re going for the centroid of the infrared source, and that’s behind the inbound.”

“What?” Ryan asked, his stomach in an instant knot.

“The brightest part of the target is behind the target. The missiles are going for that! Oh, fuck!” Dr. Gregory explained.

“Five away… Six away… both got off clean,” the voice to the right announced again.

The inbound was over Frederick, Maryland, now, doing twelve thousand knots…

“That’s it, we’re out of Block IVs.”

“Light up the Block IIIs,” Blandy ordered at once.

The next two interceptors did the same as the first two, coming within mere feet of the target, but exploding just behind it, and the inbound was traveling faster than the burn rate of explosive in the Standard-2-ER missile warheads. The lethal fragments couldn’t catch up-

“Firing Seven! Clean.” Gettysburg shook yet again.

“That one’s a radar homer,” Blandy said, clenching his fist before his chest.

Five and Six performed exactly as the four preceding them, missing by mere yards, but a miss in this case was as good as a mile.

Another shudder.

“Eight! Clean!”

“We have to get it before it gets to five or six thousand feet. That’s optimal burst height,” Gregory said.

“At that range, I can engage it with my five-inch forward,” Blandy said, some fear in his voice now.

For his part, Ryan wondered why he wasn’t shaking. Death had reached its cold hand out for him more than once… the Mall in London … his own home … Red October … some nameless hill in Colombia. Someday it would touch him. Was this the day? He took a last drag on the smoke and stabbed it out in the aluminum ashtray.

“Okay, here comes seven-five-four-three-two-one-now!”

“Miss! Fuck!”

“Nine away-Ten away, both clean! We’re out of missiles,” the distant chief called out. “This is it, guys.”

The inbound crossed over the D.C. Beltway, Interstate Highway 695, now at an altitude of less than twenty thousand feet, streaking across the night sky like a meteor, and so some people thought it was, pointing and calling out to those nearby. If they continued to look at it until detonation, their eyes would explode, and they would then die blind…

“Eight missed! Missed by a cunt hair!” a voice announced angrily. Clear on the TV, the puff of the explosion appeared mere inches from the target.

“Two more to go,” the Weapons Officer told them.

Aloft, the forward port-side SPG-62 radar was pouring out X-band radiation at the target. The rising SM-2 missile, its rocket motor still burning, homed in on the reflected signal, focusing, closing, seeing the source of the reflected energy that drew it as a moth to a flame, a kamikaze robot the size of a small car, going at nearly two thousand miles per hour, seeking an object going six times faster… two miles … one mile… a thousand yards… five hundred, one hun-

— On the TV screen the RV meteor changed to a shower of sparks and fire-

“Yeah!” twenty voices called as one.

The TV camera followed the descending sparks. The adjacent radar display showed them falling within the city of Washington.

“You’re going to want to get people to collect those fragments. Some of them are going to be plutonium. Not real healthy to handle,” Gregory said, leaning against a stanchion. “Looked like a skin-skin kill. Oh, God, how did 1 fuck up my programming like that?” he wondered aloud.

“I wouldn’t sweat it too bad, Dr. Gregory,” Senior Chief Leek observed. “Your code also helped the last one home in more efficient-like. I think I might want to buy you a beer, fella.”

As usual, the news didn’t get back quickly to the place where it had actually started. Having given the launch order, Defense Minister Luo had little clue what to do next. Clearly, he couldn’t go back to sleep. America might well answer his action with a nuclear strike of its own, and therefore his first rational thought was that it might be a good idea for him to get the hell out of Beijing. He rose, made normal use of his bathroom, and splashed water on his face, but then again his mind hit a brick wall. What to do? The one name he knew to call was Zhang Han Sen. Once connected, he spoke very quickly indeed.

“You did- what happened, Luo?” the senior Minister Without Portfolio asked with genuine alarm.

“Someone-Russians or Americans, I’m not sure which-struck at our missile base at Xuanhua, attempting to destroy our nuclear deterrent. I ordered the base commander to fire them off, of course,” Luo told his associate minister, in a voice that was both defiant and defensive. “We agreed on this in our last meeting, did we not?”

“Luo, yes, we discussed the possibility. But you fired them without consulting with us?” Zhang demanded. Such decisions were always collegial, never unilateral.

“What choice did I have, Zhang?” Marshal Luo asked in reply. “Had I hesitated a moment, there would have been none left to fire.”

“I see,” the voice on the phone said. “What is happening now?”

“The missiles are flying. The first should hit their first targets, Moscow and Leningrad, in about ten minutes. I had no choice, Zhang. I could not allow them to disarm us completely.”

Zhang could have sworn and screamed at the man, but there was no point in that. What had happened had happened, and there was no sense expending intellectual or emotional energy on something he could not alter. “Very well. We need to meet. I will assemble the Politburo. Come to the Council of Ministers Building at once. Will the Americans or Russians retaliate?”

“They cannot strike back in kind. They have no nuclear missiles. An attack by bombers would take some hours,” Luo advised, trying to make it sound like good news.

At his end of the connection, Zhang felt a chill in his stomach that rivaled liquid helium. As with many things in life, this one-contemplated theoretically in a comfortable conference room-was something very different now that it had turned into a most uncomfortable reality. And yet-was it? It was a thing too difficult to believe. It was too unreal. There were no outward signs-you’d at least expect thunder and lightning outside the windows to accompany news like this, even a major earthquake, but it was merely early morning, not yet seven o’clock. Could this be real?

Zhang padded across his bedroom, switched on his television, and turned it to CNN-it had been turned off for most of the country, but not here, of course. His English skills were insufficient to translate the rapid-fire words coming over the screen now. They were showing Washington, D.C., with a camera evidently atop the CNN building there-wherever that was, he had not the faintest idea. It was a black American speaking. The camera showed him standing atop a building, microphone in hand like black plastic ice cream, speaking very, very rapidly-so much so that Zhang was catching only one word in three, and looking off to the camera’s left with wide, frightened eyes.

So, he knows what is coming there, doesn’t he? Zhang thought, then wondered if he would see the destruction of the American capital via American news television. That, he thought, would have some entertainment value.