James Smythe - The Testimony

I’m sorry, he said, it’s been a confusing few days, I’m trying to work it all out. He held out his hand. Simon Dabnall, he said, Member of Parliament. No, sorry, ex-Member of Parliament. Piers Anderson, I said, ex-soldier. Ex? he asked, and I said, Yeah; I think I’ve just quit.

Ally Weyland, lawyer, Edinburgh

I went to the loo, and when I got back I had a missed call on my mobile from my aunt. She answered when I called her back but she was in floods of tears, gasping back the air as she said Hello. She didn’t even reel off her phone number like she usually did, so I just hung up, because… Well, you know. I think I knew what it meant. Funny thing was, she didn’t even try to call back after that.

Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City

Our numbers were down. Not viewers, staff. We were running the station on six of us, and one of the runners was starting to look vile, going yellow. I was alright, running off adrenaline. I had the constitution for it, one of those immune systems that kicks in when it’s important and doesn’t let up until I tell it to. We were reporting on what we could, and one of the few production staff said that they were jumping ship, heading to St Thomas’. Everybody seems to have gone there, she said, it’s on the internet. We should go. I told her that I didn’t want to, but she was persuasive, and… Other people have said this since: that the air changed, and it felt like we were heading toward an end. I could have just abandoned it all, gone out of the door and not looked back.

Actually, that’s a lie. I would always have looked back.

Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

I went back home, cleaned my face off, made myself some breakfast – I didn’t even know what time it was, but it was light by that point – and I sat at the kitchen table and wrote a letter to Leonard. It was a habit that I had, something I did when people died. I don’t know how many times you had to do something for it to become a habit, but this one covered my mother and my father, some old friends, so Leonard got the same treatment. I don’t remember the letter now, but it was mostly just how much I missed him. I wrote something about how I assumed that he wouldn’t need me to tell him about the last few days, because he’ll have been watching them, but I didn’t know if I believed that, or if it was just something that I wrote to myself, instead, to make me feel better. I signed it and sealed it and put it in the cardboard box I kept in the closet, along with the other letters, and then made myself a coffee.

Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City

It’s when you’re about to give up that everything comes together for you. I had a call from… I forget his name, the guy who took over as Chief of Staff from Brubaker. That place was, for a day, like a revolving door, one name out, another one in. He called the studio and the intern answered, and he whistled at me as I was talking about how empty Times Square was. I went to dead air but the call was worth it. They – we – were about to launch something at somebody. That’s what they told me, that’s what I knew.

Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia

Sam called me for the last time, told me that they had started the launch sequence. It’s not with the press yet, he said, but it will be. Jesus, I said, are you alright? No, he told me, no, I’m not alright. I keep looking at everything and I feel so responsible, Ed. Is there anything I can do? I asked, and he said no, that he’d be in touch when this was all over. That was the last time I spoke to him.

Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC

I didn’t hear the launch; I doubt that anybody outside of North Dakota did. Those things made a lot of smoke, but they were only as loud as a plane, and once they were in the air, you’d never know that they weren’t just another commercial airliner, or crop-duster, slipping into the background of the sky. The missiles before, the first strikes on Tehran, they had been child’s play. We named them after television show characters because it made it lighter for us, easier to process a codename that sounded innocuous, gentle. They would hurt, but they weren’t harbingers. The big launch, the one that signalled the end of the twelve-hour warning period, was a Minuteman IV-C, the third iteration of a missile designed to hit five locations over a spread of miles, with full control of five MIRV warheads, each with a yield of just under 425 kilotons. It could travel just over 8,000 miles, and was leaving the US to head to Iran, where it would strike God-knows-what and God-knows-where. I only knew about the launch because Ed Meany called me seconds before it happened, asked me if there was anything to worry about. He still didn’t know that I was off the grid, so he thought I might know more than him. I didn’t. Olivia – Livvy, my wife – was already by the front door with the bags packed when I got back there. I gave her a handful of the pills from Meany, told her to take them – she wasn’t ill, but there was nothing to say that she wouldn’t end up dying on me, something I couldn’t deal with – and we left. I threw my cell-phone in the river as we drove, because if it was going to get worse, if it was all going to end, I didn’t want to know any sooner than when it all did.

Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia

All we could do was wait. We had to sit and wait as it flew through the air, watch the trajectory on a little screen, dotted lines instead of video.

I thought, as we all waited – I had nothing to do with the launch, you understand, but we were all departments of a whole – I thought, I’m sure we can come up with faster ways of making these things travel. You know, that was when I thought I’d still be doing R and D when this was all over.

Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City

We couldn’t find a single correspondent still working, either on the ground in Washington or wherever the missile might have left from. I held off, because I didn’t know what to say. We didn’t even know where it had been launched toward; the Vice President’s threat had been aimed at Iran, but encompassed a large amount of the Middle East. I don’t think he was picky. Something was going to happen; that was about the best that I could offer. I put it out on the air, because I was told to, because there was no fucking chance of rumour control that day.

Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC

I heard a rumour, months after this was all done, months and months, that the VP’s wife had passed away an hour before the first missile was launched. She was only in her fifties, and there was no cause of death; that was the rumour, and it put her squarely in the Unexplained Deaths pile. She definitely died of something, we know that, because they had a shared funeral; but we didn’t know exactly when. The rumour was, as I say, an hour before he launched the missiles. We think that’s what tipped him over the edge; grief and religion and sudden, incomparable power apparently don’t go well together. He had made the threat, and it was probably only that all along, but it forced him to follow through.

Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston

We had the radio on, and they announced that we had launched something. We’re getting unsubstantiated, currently unverified reports, they said, and they didn’t have evidence, just White House staffers unhappy and leaking whatever they could. They didn’t say where it launched from, when it launched, where it was even headed – I mean, we knew , but we didn’t know – but it didn’t sound like a mistake, or like it would turn out to be bad information. I don’t know why, but I was sure that the best thing we could do was pull the RV over to the side of the road and watch the sky in case we saw it. I didn’t know whether I wanted it to be flying or not, or whether I wanted it to hit or not. There’s a line between patriotic and idiotic, and I didn’t know where it lay. Even if it was a biological agent released by terrorists that was tearing through us, it wasn’t the fault of any other country, not directly. After a while of standing there I called Ally on her cell. We’re at the airport, she said, We’re still waiting to see if any planes are flying today. They won’t be, I told her, and I told her about the nukes, and told her to get back home. You’re safe there, I said, and this could get worse. Could? she asked. She was being sarcastic.