Arc Light (22 page)

After the station to which she had been tuned went off the air, she had scanned the radio dial for other stations but, where moments earlier there had been the usual plethora of stations in the Valley, now there were none, just the EBS hum. She was driving with one white-knuckled hand on the wheel to weave in and out among the swelling traffic on the highway. She settled into the middle lane at eighty miles per hour, slow compared to the Porsches and Mercedes from L. A. that blazed by in the left lane, and cringed as the reckless idiots raced up from behind, swerving around and then cutting back in front of her in their desperate flight from the city. She had to watch all sides of the car and press her one free hand to the small of her aching back. It had gotten so bad she seriously considered stopping to go to the bathroom on the side of the road, but still dared not risk it.

The radio suddenly went quiet save for popping sounds like those preceding an old phonograph record—and then a woman's voice: “Attention all news agencies. Attention all news agencies. This is the Federal Emergency Management Agency National Warning Center. Emergency. Emergency. An Attack Warning has been declared. Repeat. An Attack Warning has been declared.”

The radio fell silent, and Melissa began to shiver uncontrollably. She jumped when the EBS hum returned.
That's it?
she thought angrily, and began to cry, but forced herself to stop by grinding her teeth painfully. She had to keep her eyes clear for the road.

“David, David, David,” she whispered nervously, then thought,
Why am I having to do this alone?
“Nobody we
know
is in the Reserves!” she said out loud. “You said you'd quit!”
You promised. If you had kept your promise . . .

Her heart leapt as a huge truck raced up close behind her, then static burst from the car's stereo speakers. She looked in terror into the rearview mirror, expecting to see the impending collision with the oncoming headlamps, and the light forced her to jam her eyes shut. She slapped at the mirror to deflect its glare from her face and looked out the passenger window. It was as if the sun had risen, the overpass under which she had passed casting a shadow across the highway several hundred feet in front of her car.

But it was not like daylight at all. The color was all wrong. And the landscaped grounds of the office park to her right were bathed in chalky white light, shaded darkly on one side and brightly lit on the other. The sky was pitch-black, but the patchy clouds shown luminescent. The light flared again, and then again, each time a light with the intensity of a strobe. The intense light of each new glare faded slowly. She counted nine altogether. Nine strobes, nine suns.

As the light began to dim, she waited for the end. On and on she drove, night enveloping the highway and its travelers once more. The lights high above the parking lot of the shopping center she passed flickered back on, their automatic switches fooled briefly by the man-made dawn. She looked back through the rearview mirror several more times and saw nothing now but a glow over the horizon and a strange reddish tint to the clouds above, as if they were on fire. She was tempted to join the many drivers who had pulled over to the side of the road and were gazing back toward the city, back toward March Air Force Base, but decided against it.

There had not been any sound other than the scratching of the static on the radio now emitting its steady hum again. No sound, no wind, no fire. Nothing. Just nine small suns, lit up on the earth.

Melissa looked down at the speedometer—
105 miles per hour
—and eased off the accelerator. She worried briefly about
David, her questions about him and his whereabouts ever more critical now. Suddenly she realized that her feet were drenched and cold. Her water had broken, and a whole new dimension to her problems arose. There was another sharp jab of pain to her midsection. Her mind cleared, and she began to look now for an exit, for a town, any town. Back and forth her eyes went from the exit signs to the night sky in front and to the sides, looking for a hospital, looking up at the stars and waiting for one to move, to explode.

The small windows of the Delta jet alit with brilliant light that bathed the first class cabin and all its passengers with a glow so white it washed out all the other colors. Soldiers slapped and clawed at the shades, which came down one by one, returning the cabin to its semidarkness just as David Chandler heard a hissing sound from the cockpit in front that sounded like a rattlesnake but was punctuated by snapping noises: the uncontrolled discharge of electricity. He leaned out into the aisle and saw the light from the sparks flashing underneath the cockpit door just as it burst open and a whooshing sound accompanied the sight of a man shooting long bursts of white powder onto the sparks from the instrument console just inside the door. Acrid tendrils of smoke reached Chandler's nose and made his eyes water like smelling salts.

The plane began to buffet steadily and with growing intensity. As the shaking and vibrations rapidly grew, the Delta flight crewman fighting the fire in front fell to the floor onto the flat of his back, shooting one long uncontrolled burst of powder into the air down the aisle into the cabin, dousing several of the soldiers seated there. Chandler's insides grew unsettled as the seat belt and seat transmitted the vibrations into his body. A buzzer sounded loudly from the cockpit, its insistent tone matching the intensity of the pilot and copilot, whose hands could be seen through the smoke locked on their respective control wheels. The aircraft itself began to groan, and all of the sudden it felt as if they had driven off a cliff. They were dropping.

Chandler felt his heart skip as the jet nosed over and the descent grew more and more rapid. The turbulence increased and a whine just like in the movies began to grow. The sensation of falling nearly lifted his limbs into the air as blood rushed to his head sickeningly. Through his popping ears he could hear the plane's engines
roaring now at what must have been maximum power, but it no longer seemed enough to keep the plane airborne. Oxygen masks dropped from the overhead compartments, and Chandler released his painful grip on the armrests long enough to put his on, thankful for the fresh air it dispensed.

Slowly, ever so slowly, Chandler felt the pressure increase on the seat of his pants as the plane pulled out of its descent, returning with another rush of Gs, this one downward, to straight and level flight. Almost as quickly as it had begun, the noise and turbulence ended, and all was quiet again. All, that is, except the storm of thoughts that raged in his head. It was only then that he realized how terrified he had been, and he let go of the armrests and straightened his cramping fingers.

The penetrator from the first warhead struck the loose accumulation of soil at the base of the mountain. Traveling at 17,000 miles per hour and hardened for penetration, it burrowed to a depth of almost 100 meters before the trailing warhead caught up with it and detonated.

The blast wave from the twenty-five megaton warhead threw the entire
NORAD
complex three feet to one side, knocking all the personnel who were standing to the floor in a heap. Ankles were broken as feet slid from their shoes. Bodies were bruised and cut. One man died and three were seriously injured as their heads and necks struck sharp edges of tables or railings. The vibrations immediately caused nausea for the seventeen hundred American and Canadian airmen, shaking their bodies as they lay on the metal floor and rattling the screams that erupted from their chests. The crashing sounds of glass and clanging sounds of metal panels falling from twisted consoles were almost lost against the tremendous rumble of the intense, man-made earthquake. The noise was so great that General Wilson was spared from hearing the screams of his men and women as he rose up from beneath the overturned chair.

Six seconds after the first detonation, the second penetrator and warhead streaked down toward the ground. The tremendous updraft from the first explosion caused both to glance off the top of the granite mountain and tumble. The unusual stresses on the fusing system resulted in a fuse abort, and the warhead skittered along the side of the mountain until it embedded itself into an outcropping, spewing
its poisonous nuclear materials down the mountainside below.

The third penetrator and warhead followed three seconds behind, crashing squarely into the side of the mountain. The tremendous speed of the dense penetrator melted the granite and dug over twenty meters into the mountain before the warhead following it into the hole exploded.

The shock waves threw the buildings of the underground complex completely off their spring supports and caused the structural failure of several. Hundreds of the huge metal bolts in the cavern's ceiling were sheared in two, and a 400-ton slab of granite was cleaved from the ceiling of the chamber along a preexisting fault and fell to crush one of the complex's buildings and part of a second. The emergency lights of the complex failed now, as hundreds died in a darkness lit only by the exploding sparks of freely discharging power lines. The high frequency vibration of the chamber's atmosphere was perceived by the human ears as an earsplitting screech. Wilson involuntarily clamped his hands over the pain in his ears.

The fourth penetrator/warhead package also struck the mountain squarely after a respite of only four seconds. The heat of the warhead's detonation vaporized a cavity inside the mountain that opened into the entrance tunnel leading down to the complex at a point inside the blast doors. The expanding gases of the vaporized granite shot down the channel and into the main chamber of the complex. The wave of superheated gases created a blast wall that surged through the chamber at five times the speed of sound. Everything in its path was obliterated by a blast force inside the enclosed chamber more powerful than any force ever before created by man. In an instant the cavern was pressurized to over 1 million pounds per square inch, far in excess of the thirty PSI that the human body can tolerate. The effect was the instantaneous death by burning and crushing of all life in the complex, mammal and bacteria alike.

Only after seeking out every nook and cranny of the main chamber and tunnel did the blast wave from the nuclear fire that still burned deep inside the mountain's granite press back against the two main blast doors at the tunnel entrance with its full force. First one and then the other door burst outward, flying out of the tunnel into the inferno outside on the crest of a 10,000-degree jet of gas. The sixty-ton doors tumbled end over end and landed in great crashes several hundred meters down the mountainside. Just as they came to rest, the first of the remaining four incoming warheads detonated, their wasted energy further reducing the jagged crag that had been Cheyenne Mountain.

Stuart felt the sickening jolt of the first of the warheads through his back and the soles of his feet. An alarm went off as the low-level Doppler Ground Radar network surrounding the Launch Control Facility at the surface detected motion in the Outer Security Zone. As the rumbling began, the lights went out and were replaced by the red emergency lights from the center's batteries. The security alarm ceased sounding abruptly as the console went dead.

Jolt after jolt punctuated the nearly constant vibration that Stuart felt through every point of his chair. Some jolts were strong, others brief and distant.

Stuart's eyes were closed, and he mentally estimated the distance of each detonation.
Six hundred feet,
he thought.
The center was hardened to two hundred PSI. Two hundred PSI
—a sharp jolt caused Stuart to jump, and he began to quiver—
two hundred PSI,
he concentrated,
means it can take . . . it can take five hundred . . . five hundred kilotons at six hundred feet. Or, it could . . . it could take a direct hit by a thirty-five-kiloton warhead.
Stuart tried to fill his mind with conscious thought as he rode out the storm, fending off the involuntary thoughts that raged like barbarians outside the walls erected to protect his sanity.

A strong jolt wrenched his stomach and chest, and he cringed against what was coming. The screech of ripping metal started what he thought would be the end. There was a crash, but the end did not come.
Close,
Stuart thought as he grew strangely detached, loosing his imagination to speculate how much more powerful the blast that would kill them would be. Another even stronger jolt passed through the center and his constantly shaken body. The center groaned, but no more sounds of metallic ripping could be heard. Stuart felt the sweat pour down his face and realized it had grown hot in their underground capsule.

Sparks lit the center from behind Stuart's head.

“Electrical fire!” Langford yelled, barely audible above the rumble, as he unhooked his chair restraints and ran out of sight behind Stuart.

Stuart unhooked himself as the reek of noxious smoke filled his nostrils. He stood up just in time to be thrown to his knees by another shock, his legs just moving from beneath him despite their solid traction a moment before. He could feel the gradual settling motions of the capsule's suspension system as it completed the dampening of the latest blast wave.

His knees hurt as he looked up to see Langford sitting on the floor squirting powder in great bursts from the extinguisher into the electrical panel by the access tunnel. The fire was dying down, so Stuart climbed back up into his chair, coughing, and strapped himself in again.

Another shock wave hit the center, and Stuart heard a clatter.

“Shit!” Langford shouted, picking the fire extinguisher and himself up off the floor and getting to his chair. Several more waves rumbled through the center, but none was as strong as the earlier ones. A few seconds after the last jolt, all fell quiet. The center rocked slowly on its suspension until all was still, all was dark save the blinking red light on the emergency power console.