Day of Wrath

Thirty seconds passed before another voice, this one older and calmer, sounded in his headset. “Colonel Thorn? This is Brigadier General Dodson. Let me make sure I’ve got this straight: We’re looking at the detonation of a 150-kiloton Soviet-era warhead in roughly twelve minutes, right?”

“Yes, sir.” Thorn could see streetlights glowing against the dark earth below. The aircraft was over Washington’s fastgrowing southeastern Maryland suburbs now.

“Then here are the parameters we’re facing,” Dodson continued.

“Assuming optimum burst height, we can expect the following …”

Thorn listened to the general’s grim statistics in silence. They paralleled his own rough mental calculations. Lethal radiation exposure up to one and a half miles from the detonation point.

A shock wave strong enough to tear most houses apart out to four and a half miles, and to shatter glass nine miles away. And a thermal pulse hot enough to cause second-and thirddegree burns to anyone caught outdoors over an area eleven miles in diameter.

He grimaced. The optimum burst height for a warhead of this size was around two thousand feet. Pushing the aircraft up to nearly fifteen thousand would help reduce the damage when the bomb went off — but it was still going to be ugly. Very ugly.

Thorn waited until the general finished giving him the bad news. “So, then what do you suggest, sir?”

“We can’t have this damned thing going off over land,” the other man stated firmly.

“agreed.”

“Then we’re down to just one option, Colonel,” Dodson said.

“You’ll have to fly it south over Chesapeake Bay.”

Thorn nodded to himself. Then he stopped suddenly, remembering the maps he’d studied of the Washington area. “Sir, that means the bomb’s going to detonate—”

“Six miles away from the Par River Naval Air Warfare Center,” the general finished. “I know, Colonel. But we’re getting a warning through to them right now. We couldn’t possibly alert any civilians anywhere else in time. So we’re just going to have to ride this one out.”

“Jesus,” Thorn said softly.

“I don’t like it either, Colonel,” Dodson agreed. “But it’s the best we can do. So you just concentrate on keeping that plane in the air long enough to give us a chance to put the alert out to everyone we can.”

“Yes, sir.” Thorn refocused his attention on the controls in front of him. The detonation countdown flickered through 00:09:00.

Crisis Operations Center, Pentagon Brigadier General Andrew Jackson Dodson, U.S. Air Force, tore his gaze away from the clock. They had a little less than six minutes left. He swung around toward the short, balding Navy captain at his right.

“What’s the word from Par River, Frank?”

“The sirens just went off, sir. I’ve got the duty officer on the phone now. He understands the situation. Everybody’s heading for the shelters.”

“What about their equipment?” Dodson asked. Par River was the U.S. Navy’s premier test center for new aircraft.

“We’re going to lose some planes, sir,” the Navy captain admitted.

“It’s not a combat base. The hangars aren’t hardened.”

“Understood.” Dodson nodded. That was going to hurt. But it was still better to lose hardware — even expensive hardware — than lives.

The Air Force general turned toward one-of his other officers, a Marine lieutenant colonel. “What about civilian air traffic, Jim? Anything inbound?”

“No, sir,” the Marine answered. “Washington ARTCC is rerouting everything well north or south. Not that there’s much in the air right now.”

“What about shipping traffic?” the general asked. The Chesapeake Bay intercoastal waterway was one of the busiest shipping lanes in the U.S. “I’ve checked with both Baltimore and Norfolk. There’s nothing in the danger zone.”

Dodson nodded again. Thank God for small favors, he thought. This early in the morning there wasn’t much stirring along the eastern seaboard.

“General,” another aide said suddenly, motioning to the secure phone in his hand. “The White House is on the line. They ant to know if they should evacuate the President.”

“Negative. There’s no time.” Dodson frowned. Somebody over at the White House wasn’t thinking straight. He checked the clock again.

Four minutes left. They’d barely have been able to get a chopper airborne before the bomb went off.

“Shit,” the Marine lieutenant colonel said suddenly.

Dodson swung around. “what?”

“We just got a call from Norfolk, sir. There’s a Spruance-class destroyer en route to Baltimore for a goodwill visit— DD987, O’ Bannon.”

The general swore suddenly. “Where is she exactly?” He followed the Marine officer’s pointing finger to a large digital map of the Chesapeake Bay region and paled. “Christ almighty … get a flash warning off to her! Now!”