James BeauSeigneur - In His Image James

Hansen and Kruszkegin continued to exchange small talk for a while as their breakfast was served, and then Hansen attempted to elicit some information. "You seem worried," Hansen said. He was lying. Kruszkegin's face showed no emotion at all except possibly enjoyment of his breakfast. Hansen had said it solely to observe Kruszkegin's response.

"Not at all," he answered.

Hansen tried a different tact: "You don't have any more idea what's going on than I do, do you?" But Kruszkegin only smiled and continued chewing. Hansen tried a few more times, but to no avail. Kruszkegin just continued eating his breakfast.

"I thought you were on a diet," Hansen said, in frustration. "Why the hell did you even accept my invitation to breakfast if you weren't going to talk?"

Kruszkegin put down his fork. "Because," he began, "one day I will want you to come to breakfast as my guest and / will be the one asking all the questions."

"When that happens," Hansen responded, "I shall endeavor to be as tight-lipped as you."

"I'm sure you will be," Kruszkegin said. "And then I will notify my government that we met but that I was unable to learn anything new, just as you shall do today."

Hansen gave a brief chuckle and went back to his nearly untouched breakfast. A few moments later, however, the gravity of the current situation resurfaced and Hansen began to push the food around on his plate rather than eat it.

"You look worried," Kruszkegin said, echoing Hansen's earlier statement.

"I am," Hansen answered. "Yuri, things have changed. I can't tell what's going on in Russia anymore. The men in power are unpredictable. Men like Yeltzin and Gorbachev would never have taken chances like these men have. I just don't know what we can expect from them."

Kruszkegin stopped eating and unlike before, it was obvious he was not thinking about his food. Hansen had struck a nerve. In truth, Kruszkegin was as concerned as Hansen, probably more so. Still, he offered no comment.

After breakfast Hansen and Kruszkegin left for their separate missions. When Kruszkegin arrived at the Mission of the Russian Federation on 67th Avenue, his personal secretary handed him a message.

"It came while you were at breakfast," she reported.

Kruszkegin looked at the note. It was from his nephew at the Ministry of Defense. The message was simple but unusual. "Uncle Yuri," it began. That was unusual in itself: in the past his nephew had always addressed his correspondence, "Dear Mr. Ambassador." Kruszkegin did not pause long to notice the informality, though; his mind was on the message that followed. "Say your prayers" it said.

Kruszkegin went to his office and locked the door. Sitting at his desk he took out a Cuban cigar and lit it. He thought about the brief message from his nephew and looked at it again. "Say your prayers."

It was a joke; that is, it had been a joke four years earlier when he had helped young Yuri, his namesake, get the position on Khromchenkov's staff. "What shall I say," his nephew had asked him at that time, "to warn you, should we ever decide to launch a major nuclear attack?"

Kruszkegin remembered his response: "Just tell me to say my prayers."

Russia (3:36 p.m. Moscow/Israel, 8:36 a.m. New York)

The heavy German-made cover slid quickly back from the underground silo, clearing the way for the missile inside. At eighty-seven locations scattered around the Russian Federation, the same foreboding sound of metal against metal was followed by the release of mooring clamps, and then by the roar of rocket engines firing. Slowly the missiles rose from their tranquil catacombs, hidden at first by the white clouds of exhaust which rose around them. Emerging above the banks of smoke, the missiles crept heavenward, picking up speed as they continued in their course. Their targets were not limited to Israel alone. In truth, Israel had now become insignificant. Khromchenkov's plan for restoring Russia to world prominence was to control the world's oil supply. With this launch it would no longer be necessary to use Israel for a staging ground to take control of Egypt's and Saudi Arabia's oil fields. Now that would be accomplished with one stroke. Israel needed to be taught a lesson and so six warheads had been targeted at its cities. But the hundreds of other warheads, as many as sixteen MRVed warheads in each missile, were targeted at every major city in every oil-rich country in the Middle East. Throughout Russia the military was put in readiness for the invasion to follow.

West of St. Petersburg a farmer ceased his work in confused wonder as the ground shook and the roar of engines reached his ears. Turning, he saw the sun briefly eclipsed by a rising missile which cast a shadow over him and his efforts. At the Cathedral of St. Basil in Moscow a wedding party looked skyward toward six rising plumes of exhaust. On a bridge in Irkutsk, children watching a puppet show were startled as the puppeteer suddenly ceased his craft to stare at the foreboding display in the sky. In Yekaterinburg, at a 10 kilometer race, skaters and spectators alike stopped in silent terror as the sun reflected off the hulls of four missiles speeding skyward. Throughout Russia similar scenes were played out.

Eighteen and a half seconds into their course, at a point approximately two miles into the air, as people in cities, towns, and farms around the country watched… the unexplainable happened.

At the core of each of the multiple warheads carried by the missiles, in an area so infinitesimally small, an incomprehensibly immense burst of energy was released. In less than a hundredth of a millionth of a second the temperature of the warheads rose to over a hundred million degrees Kelvin – five times hotter than the core of the sun – creating a fireball which expanded outward at several million miles per hour. Instantly everything within two to four miles of the blasts was vaporized: not just the farmer, but the tools with which he had worked; not just the wedding party, but the cathedral from which they had come; not just the children and the puppeteer, but the bridge on which they stood; not just the skaters and spectators, but the frozen river on which they had raced. Even the air itself was incinerated. For eight to fifteen miles around each of the exploding warheads, what was not vaporized burst instantly into flame.

As the fireballs expanded they drove before them superheated shockwaves of expanding air. Reflecting off of the ground they had not vaporized, the secondary shockwaves of the blasts fused with the initial shockwaves and propagated along the ground to create Mach fronts of unbelievable pressure. Buildings, homes, trees, and everything that had not already been destroyed were sheared from the surface of the earth and carried along at thousands of miles per hour. The death toll in the first fifteen seconds alone was over thirty million.

The huge fireballs, having expanded to as much as six miles in diameter, now rose skyward, pulling everything around them inward and upward like huge chimneys. Hundreds of billions of cubic meters of smoke and toxic gases created by the fires, together with all that had been blown outward by the blasts, was now drawn back to the center and carried aloft at five hundred miles per hour into scores of mammoth irradiated mushroom clouds of debris which would rain deadly fallout for thousands of miles around.

Tel Aviv (5:20 p.m. Israel)

The unsecured black phone rang and Lieutenant Colonel Michael White answered according to standard operating procedure, simply stating the last four digits of the phone number. The voice on the phone was that of the Israeli Prime Minister calling from his recently-liberated office in the Knesset. "Congratulations," he said. "Not one missile left Russian air space. All Israel owes you their life and their freedom."