America (22 page)

The girl, he thought. The boy may have permanent brain damage.

He pulled the girl from the ventilator and began artificial respiration. He glanced at his watch. The liquid crystal display read 10:58.

He got into the rhythm, working slowly and steadily, trying for about twelve breaths a minute. After a bit the sweat began dripping off his nose.

Okay, people, let's get the goddamn emergency generator going here. The boy will die in minutes if we don't get juice to his machine. I can do this for only one person.

“Help!” he shouted. Maybe a nurse will hear. “Damn it all to hell, somebody come help me or we're going to lose this kid!”

How long had it been? The boy's brain would begin to die if he didn't receive some oxygen soon.

Apollo Ice looked at his watch. The display still read 10:58. He couldn't believe his eyes. Two or three minutes had passed, at least. He didn't know that the E-bomb's electromagnetic pulse had toasted the watch too.

“Help me,” he shouted, unwilling to leave the girl. “Help me, for God's sake, somebody help me.”

*   *   *

Moving carefully along the unfamiliar dark hallways, looking for people in the light of burning drapes and smoldering carpet, Jake Grafton found he had his cell phone in his hand. He jabbed the button to turn it on, waited for several seconds for the small display to light up. It didn't. The thing was dead as a rock.

Before his eyes a wall burst into flame. Unless the firefighters got on it quickly, the entire building would soon be involved. Missile warheads were designed to set aluminum and steel warships ablaze—the effect of a direct hit on a large building with a high wood content by a warhead containing 750 pounds of high explosive was awe-inspiring.

Satisfied that he could do nothing here without protective clothing and breathing apparatus, Jake found a window with the glass blown out and leaned out to get some fresh air. Behind him were the sounds of flame consuming everything it could reach, yet over that he could hear another airplane.

When the dull boom of the explosion from the crash of an airliner several miles away reached him, Jake Grafton left the window and made his way along the hallway, opening doors and searching for victims. He shouted over the noise of the fire, the rush of air, and crackling as dry wall and plaster and wood and steel burst into flame.

“Anyone here? Sing out!”

He was coughing when he found someone, a man in civilian clothes on the floor of one room. He heard the groan and found him by feel. Something had fallen from the wall or mantel and knocked the man unconscious. He was coming to now, but Jake grabbed him by the armpits and dragged him off. If they stayed here without protective clothing or breathing apparatus, they were both going to be victims.

Out on the lawn he found other people who had somehow made their way from the building, the entire top story of which was now ablaze. He pulled the man across the drive and put him under a tree, well away from the building. The man was breathing, with a regular heartbeat, when Jake left him.

Jake walked directly away from the burning mansion, toward the Mall. The Washington Monument should have been prominently visible, lit by floodlights, the city alive with lights and the streets with cars, even at this hour. But not a single gleam of light was visible beyond the garish light from the fire behind him. The noise of the fire was the only relief from the silence. There were no fire sirens, no fire trucks, no police sirens, no traffic noise of any kind.

Several of the people behind him were sobbing. He could see shadowy figures running across the driveway and lawn near the south entrance to the building … and from here and there, shouts, calls, curses …

Jake heard another airplane, the engines howling. It swept over, apparently descending toward the river. It too crashed in a welter of fire and light, a glow that lit the horizon beyond the trees and buildings. Somewhere near Arlington National Cemetery, Jake thought.

Then he heard that unmistakable sound, a small turbojet engine traveling low and very fast, probably about five hundred knots.

“Another Tomahawk,” Toad said in a hoarse whisper. He came up behind Jake.

The missile seemed to cross from left to right, from east to west, directly over the Washington Monument or very near to it. It literally flew down the Mall, over the Capitol, over the Washington Monument, and over the Lincoln Memorial. And that route made sense. All three of those huge man-made objects would make excellent points for position updates as the missile began its final run-in to its target.

“Where is it going?” Toad muttered, speaking more to himself than to his boss.

“West,” Jake Grafton replied.

The stench and smoke brought him back to the here and now.

In the darkness the fire in the White House continued to burn. The fire had taken most of the upper stories on this side now. There were people in the driveways flaking out hoses, cursing about water pressure, issuing orders. But of fire trucks, he saw not a one.

“The whole thing is going to go,” Jake said under his breath.

Although he waited and waited, he heard no more Tomahawks.

*   *   *

Crossing the Capital Beltway westbound, the last Tomahawk fired that evening from USS
America
pitched up into a climb. Then it nosed over into its final dive.

The E-warhead in the nose of the missile detonated fifty feet above the roof of the main America On-Line technical facility in Reston, Virginia.

The terawatt of energy just five hundred picoseconds long generated by that warhead burned out every computer chip and switch in all of AOL's servers, routers, and computer banks, one of the largest collections of computer equipment on the planet. Fortunately much of the telephone network that fed this massive complex was fiber optic and unaffected by the energy jolt that passed through it. However, the miles of copper telephone wiring that led to and from the fiber-optic system acted like giant antennas, soaking up energy and frying every electronic switch for miles, switches that had not been zapped by the first E-warhead explosion over the Pentagon.

This warhead effectively destroyed a huge chunk of bandwidth throughout the world. The Internet wasn't dead, but it was severely crippled.

*   *   *

All over Washington, Metro trains coasted to a stop as electrical power ceased to flow. Even if power could have been quickly restored, the computers that directed the operation of the trains were toast. Elevators froze in whatever position they were in, trapping people by the hundreds; escalators stopped; the computers at banks, airlines, travel agencies, and in every hotel in the downtown area died instantly. Hotel doors that were controlled by computer chips could not be unlocked, preventing people from getting into hotel rooms. Every motor vehicle or ignition key that contained a computer chip was inoperable. Radio and television stations were turned off in midsyllable.

In five hundred trillionths of a second the heart of this major city of more than four million people had been reduced to an artifact, unable to sustain human life. Reston was similarly affected. All refrigerators, stoves, ovens, and food storage and preparation machinery, all public and private transportation, all electronic communications devices, all automatic teller machinery were kaput—everything.

From the White House, Jake Grafton and Toad Tarkington walked south on Fifteenth Street, across the Mall, toward the Fourteenth Street Bridge that spanned the Potomac. People were rushing in the other direction, toward the flaming White House, which was lighting up the dark city like a bonfire.

The rising moon was just bright enough to reveal the Washington Monument, which stood like a giant Stonehenge megalith against the darker night sky. Off to the south the fire in the wreckage of the Airbus that crashed at Anacostia was dying as the last of the jet fuel was consumed.

An old man stopped them on the Fourteenth Street Bridge. He got in front of them, forced them to stop and address him. Only then did he see their uniforms and looked relieved.

“It's my wife. She needs help. Won't you help me, please?”

The woman was sitting in the passenger seat of the nearest car, staring fixedly at nothing at all. Jake took her wrist, felt for her pulse. There was none.

“She's having a heart attack, I think,” the old man said. He was so nervous he trembled. The night wind ruffled his white hair. “Her defibrillator went off. There was this explosion right above us—right over our heads—and the car stopped dead. The engine just quit all of a sudden. Like bang! And she grabbed her chest. The damned defibrillator just whacked the hell out of her for a while, then it stopped.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Oh … when the lights went off. I've been talking to her, but she hasn't replied.”

“She's dead.”

“Dead?”

“Her heart has stopped.” Jake replaced the woman's wrist in her lap and closed her eyes. “The defibrillator isn't working. She's gone.”

“Dead?” His eyes widened. “My God, she can't be—”

“This happened what? An hour ago? Hour and a quarter?”

Despite himself, the old man nodded affirmatively. “What happened?” he demanded. “What went wrong?”

Jake Grafton didn't know what to say.

The old man thought about it, looked at the dark, silent city, letting it really sink in. Finally he said, “A plane crashed over there.” He pointed at Anacostia. “Big plane. Rolled over and dove into the ground. Boom. Just like that … I was telling my wife about it. You can still see some of the flames. No one fought the fire or rescued the people. Anyone who survived the crash and couldn't get away from the plane on his own hook was left to die. It's like no one cares.”

“Maybe no one could get there,” Jake Grafton said gently, trying to calm the man.

“Our car just up and quit on us. Like everybody else's. They all quit at once. Our Taurus never did that before.… We live in Bethesda and decided to drive down a while ago to see the city at night. Now … the lights in the city are off. All of them. My wife's dead. That plane crashed. It's like the world is coming to an end.”

“Yes.”

“This is America,” the man said, grasping Jake fiercely by the arm. “America!”

“Yes,” Jake Grafton said again. He used his left hand to gently pry the man's hand away from his arm, grasped and shook it.

Then Jake and Toad walked on across the bridge.

Callie was at the apartment in Rosslyn, across the river from Georgetown. He wondered if she was okay. There was no way to get in touch with her, of course, unless he walked home. Like the old man, he studied the dark, dead city. At least during the nineteenth century the people of Washington had lanterns, candles, and horses, then gaslight.

He stopped in the middle of the bridge and watched the dying flames from what must be the wreckage of the plane that crashed in Anacostia. Unlike gasoline engines in automobiles, which require an ignition pulse for every piston power stroke, jet engines are continuously on fire, so the electromagnetic pulse of the E-bomb warhead would not cause a flameout. It would play havoc with the fly-by-wire flight controls, however, and all the computers that control the airplane's other functions, for example, those that regulate fuel flow. The pilots of the sophisticated modern airliners, Jake Grafton knew, must have lost all control. In a way the vulnerability of the airplanes was a horrible irony: The more modern the jet airplane, the more computers were incorporated into the design to increase the efficiency and maintainability, the more vulnerable the design was to electromagnetic-pulse weapons.

There was a fire in Arlington National Cemetery and another south of the Pentagon. Both, Jake suspected, were crashed airplanes.

Kolnikov. The missing American, Leon Rothberg … they had done this. Presumably for money.

“Money,” Jake whispered to himself as he contemplated the dim reflections in the dark water. Or perhaps something else.

Toad broke into his musings. “Wait until the reporters find out the CIA trained those sons of bitches to steal a Russian sub,” Tarkington said. “Tomorrow morning, I figure. It'll be a feeding frenzy. They're going to rip the president a new asshole.”

Jake merely grunted. He was thinking of Callie. He wanted to go home, see her, hold her in his arms. He wasn't going to do that, though, not with that submarine out there. The pirates had fired two Flashlight warheads and had eight more in the launching tubes. And one more conventional explosive warhead—enough to create a great deal of havoc. No, he needed to go to the Pentagon.

Yet try as he might, he couldn't keep his mind on the submarine. As he walked through the darkness of a city under siege, he found himself thinking of his wife.

*   *   *

There were four of them, all Germans. Steeckt seemed to be the unofficial spokesman. Kolnikov was eating when they came into the control room and lined up in front of him. Two hours had passed since the missiles had been launched. They had hit their targets or crashed. The submarine was at fifteen hundred feet, so he wouldn't know until he could once again raise the communications mast and listen to a commercial radio station. That wouldn't be for hours. There were ships up there, and planes. Until then …

“We want to know what is going on, Captain. Why did you launch those missiles?”

“We are being paid. I explained all that.” Boldt, he noticed, turned away from his console to look at him.

“You launched one of those missiles at the White House.” It was a statement, not a question. Of course Rothberg had whispered to them.

“That is correct.” Kolnikov finished scraping his plate with a spoon and laid it on the maneuvering monitor. He turned to face them squarely and looked from face to face. Two of them lowered their eyes.

“You are goading the tiger. We did not bargain for this.”