The Threat

WWMCCS, the Worldwide Military Command and Control System, was a late-sixties-era forerunner of the Internet. Dan knew it as a secure data exchange system that had linked the Pentagon to the old Strategic Air Command and the rest of the country’s military headquarters. It kept tabs on every unit in the defense establishment; you could use it to access or generate operational plans, to communicate and pass orders, supposedly even during a nuclear war — though that had never been tested, of course. The Global Command and Control System had replaced it years before. But Harlowe’s fingers flew over the grubby, worn black keys of the Honeywell Datanet 8 like an accordionist playing a polka. Roald, seeing them, came out of her cubicle. “What are you doing with that thing?”

“Accessing the NORAD mainframe. If they haven’t gone to distributed processing.”

“Can’t you use Geeks? I’ve never even seen that thing turned on before.”

“Do they have fallout models on GCCS, Captain? I don’t think they do.”

The answer must have been no, because Roald went back to her cubicle. She returned with a worn ledger bound in green cloth that she said her predecessor had left in the desk.

Harlowe punched in the personal ID, project code, and password ballpointed inside the front cover. An old-fashioned amber-on-black screen swam up.

She muttered, “I used to be a RECA puke. Residual Capabilities Assessment. Meaning what we’d have left after a nuclear strike. They axed the specialty after the Wall came down. But I think the templates are still on the system … and here we are.”

Engineered long before Windows, the little screen, phosphors etched with the ghosts of decades, pulsated the color of orange marmalade. Harlowe palmed a trackball, hunted through special-function keys. Pressed one. Then banged it, cursing. The screen blanked, then came up again with a menu. She trackballed RADFO and banged the key again. “Can you get me a wind speed and direction?” she said over her shoulder as they waited some more.

One of the desk officers came back with the local weather printout.

Leaning over her shoulder, noticing her perfume, Dan saw an outline. No detail to speak of. Just an amber-glowing drawing, angular and stylized. A flickering square tipped on its side, with a crooked Y laid over it.

“District of Columbia. The Y is the intersection of the Potomac and the Anacostia. Ever work with FM 3–3?” Harlowe asked him.

“What’s that?”

“Fallout prediction. I thought you might have, when you guys got hit on Horn.”

“We used radiological tables, but they weren’t computerized.”

“Well, this is the same, only faster. When it works,” Harlowe said to the screen. “Assume the point of release is over National Airport. Surface wind’s southeasterly at ten knots. Wimmick’s used a modified Gaussian plume equation to generate the footprint. It’ll show you the hazard zones, normalized dosage rates, a lot of info, depending on how deep in the program you want to get. But remember, I haven’t thought about this stuff for years. After the cold war, it just dropped off the radar.”

“It might be coming back on,” Dan told her. “But that’s for a fission burst, right? The materials and decay rates are going to be different for a radiological dispersal.”

“Not a problem. I just select the smallest possible weapon yield and change this fission product table.”

“What about the point location?” Lynch said. “They can dump this stuff out anywhere, right?”

Dan told them he didn’t think they were limited to a dumping or spraying scenario. “If these people are part of the group that bombed Cole and Horn, they don’t mind suiciding. They can get wind data as easily as we can. They’ll position themselves, if they’re driving the plane, upwind of the city. What Marty’s giving us is the footprint; they can orient it any way they want.”

Harlowe said, “What have you got on the source?”

“Cesium-137, finely powdered.”

“And how much?”

Dan got on the phone to room 303.

Alvarado answered after five rings. “I’m on the other line with him now,” he said.

“With who?”

“The security director at Laguna Verde.”

“Good. That’s real good, Luis! What’s he say?”

“Just hold on.” The rapid clatter of Spanish. Alvarado sounded angry. Then a staccato series of phrases. Dan realized he was counting down, or up.

“He still won’t say.”

“Fuck.”

“Said he’d lose his job. I said okay, he didn’t have to tell me shit. I’d start counting up from ten kilos. All he had to do was listen. He just stopped me. At eighty kilos.”

“Holy shit,” Harlowe muttered. “And it’s 137?”

“It’s cesium?” Dan asked Alvarado.

“Cesio radioactivo. That’s what he said. Eighty kilos — without the lead packaging.”

Harlowe sucked air, looking at the screen. Then started typing again.

She coded the powder as base surge, the finely milled earth and dust thrown up by a near-ground blast. She hit the Enter key. The distant mainframe, under some mountain in Colorado, cogitated for several seconds.