Devon Ford - The Fall

The ticker-tape read “Los Angeles Disaster,” and the picture showed something none of them would have ever wanted to see in their lives. It wasn’t the mushroom cloud image that everyone recognized from Hiroshima, but something so similar and exponentially worse that nobody spoke. The image was fleeting, and soon replaced by another scene; similar but different and appeared to be coming live from the window of a plane many miles from the explosion. Twice more the image switched.

“LA,” said Anderson. “San Francisco. Seattle. Vegas.”

Nobody could manage a word in response, until the grunting from the president abated. Johnson had released him and stood, walking straight up to Taylor’s face where he looked angrily into his eyes. Taylor vaguely recalled that Johnson came from Vegas, or California at least, but somewhere that the bombs had just fallen.

“Did we do this?” he snarled angrily in his commanding officer’s face.

“No,” Taylor said, his voice barely above a whisper, but even as he spoke the screen switched again to show another explosion, this one recent.

“Airburst,” Anderson said simply in the same hollow voice he had used before. Taylor looked at the screen, this time showing Portland and what appeared to be a recent nuclear detonation just above the Earth and directly over the city. The human casualties he calculated off the top of his head were already the single largest loss of life in the history of mankind. He turned to the president to explain, to plead with him to understand that this wasn’t their doing, but he was gone. Putting one boot in front of the other to follow, he felt a vibration, then it felt as though a gale were blowing through the house itself, then his world went white and blinked out in an instant.

The five missiles fired from the protruding hump of the nuclear-powered submarine shot straight upwards, then arced off in different directions as the submarine slipped back below the surface. The new design, as with the H-9 bombers, was as yet unseen by the rest of the world and had been developed in total secret at off-shore shipyards under cover to keep the prying eyes of the American satellites away. The shimmering, advanced camouflage skin of the sleek underwater killer had evaded the laughable efforts of the Americans as they sailed in circles effectively shouting to see if anyone answered. The crew of the submarine had simply stopped dead in the water and allowed themselves to sink slowly and then continue at a lower depth until well out of range of the shouts of their searchers.

It was the only one of its design, the Type 096A, and was effectively the prototype which had been put to work early. It could only carry a small payload of five missiles, and those were not the standard missiles the rest of the world expected. The payload was only four megatons, the same size as the ones currently dropping on the west coast of the United States, but with a twelve-thousand kilometer range the sub could safely pop up in the Atlantic, fire its ordnance, and slip away again.

Those five JL-4A SLBMs, or submarine-launched ballistic missiles, now streaked inland at six times the speed of sound. One headed for Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where over fifty thousand active service men and women were based. The remainder, instead of the tactical target selection of the first, streaked toward population centers. Streaked, with the exception of one which had an undetected malfunction in the solid fuel engine, making it splutter along at half its top speed.

Florida was the first to suffer the most recent attack in the devastating flurry of airburst nuclear weaponry, and most of the inhabitants of that spit of land never even had the opportunity to wake and know what killed them. As the Chinese submarine slipped away off the east coast, Florida had been wiped out inside of seven minutes. Had the malfunctioning missiles been aimed there, the course of the sudden and unannounced war would have been drastically altered.

Washington D.C., already on edge due to the presidential lockdown situation which had been ongoing for a few hours, had the added benefit that many people were still awake. Many were even still out, wrapped up against the cool air and held back behind police cordons with a view of the Capitol, and many couldn’t resist the pull of looking toward the sudden flash of bright light. Those who did were blinded instantly, as the worst and brightest firework display they would ever see erupted over the skies of the capital. After the flash came the heat; the intense, unfathomable heat which incinerated anyone close enough to the explosion like they were nothing but steam in a hurricane. With the flash, the heat, and the boiling cloud floating high above the seat of power for the country, came the shockwave. From a distance, it would look as though heavy smoke rolled out over the ground, but up close it would be the worst destruction and devastation ever dreamt possible by man.

Entire buildings, cars, buses, crowds of people; all of them were wiped out in an instant. Erased from the face of the earth like insignificant insects facing the might of a power they could never even begin to understand. The destruction was unimaginable, unending, and unstoppable. The White House ceased to exist, as did the capitol building. Almost two hundred and thirty years of political control erased in an instant.

Cal stopped talking to Louise when Jake was taking a turn at consoling her. He half listened to the young cop giving advice which he himself had never needed until very recently. He heard the words coming from a man he must have at least a decade on, and although he knew they were well intended, he also suspected they may sound hollow to others too.

High over their heads and thousands of miles to their north west, screaming south east at a little over eight thousand miles an hour, tore five ABMs, anti-ballistic missiles, fired in automatic response from a US base in Alaska. Because the distance of the launches was far shorter than expected, less than one hundred miles off the east coast, the Movement missiles devised for the mid-course intercepts were pointless to launch, instead they relied on the new system designed and tested in secret.

The Chinese weren’t the only world power to have unleashed new technology that night, and when the word was given to launch five of the thirty-six Seeker 6 missiles the United States had at their disposal, just about everyone held their breath. Testing had proven to be 100 percent effective, but they were on the back foot. The nukes detonated on the west coast weren’t missile-borne, but the signatures which set alarms screaming from the Atlantic near Florida were in play.

Lieutenant Colonel Andy Gilbert stood at ease as he watched the signatures on the big screen split apart and head in different directions.

“Acquire targets,” he called out to his control room, “prepare to fire five Seekers.”

“Targets acquired,” came a calm response, “fire on your mark.”

“Fire,” said Gilbert instantly with no trace of hesitation, feeling the facility shake with the combined force of five rockets capable of almost Mach-9 erupting into the sky far above them.

The threat had first come from the Soviet Union, and the facility he stood in was built as a direct response to that threat of mutually assured destruction. The United States had no desire to agree to be destroyed and, just as every other country in possession of nuclear warheads, began another arms race with more intensity than the space race to develop the most effective intercept missiles. These next generation missiles were designed with another purpose, rather than another tool in the box for two heavyweights to slug it out. The threat they feared more today was a short-range attack, or a nuclear or chemical or biological attack coming in by plane. The Seekers were designed to outrun everything known to fly, and instead of carrying a warhead, it relied on kinetic energy to displace the attack.