Arc Light (40 page)

Lambert could hear the muffled explosions and ripping automatic weapons fire even through the thick door to the main conference room in the otherwise quiet underground facility. He opened the door, and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness as he slipped into the room.

Identical scenes of combat played on the screens covering the walls as Lambert skirted the backs of the chairs at the table looking for a seat in the crowded room—late because of the crisis action meeting he had called on the Russian troop deployments toward the Pacific coast from the now cooling Russo-Chinese War. There were
no seats at the table, but a woman seated along the wall that Lambert vaguely recognized as a junior member of the U.N. mission in New York jumped up. “Take this seat, sir,” the woman whispered, and Lambert sat behind the director of the CIA as the woman moved to the standing-room-only end of the conference table behind the acting Secretary of State.

Lambert settled in to watch the jerky footage of fighting. The three letters ITN—International Television News—were printed in the lower right-hand corner of the four new rear-projection screens just built into the walls of the facility's briefing room, and a date and time stamp a couple of hours old was superimposed along the bottom of the picture. The raw video, Lambert assumed, must have been intercepted from satellite transmissions sent back by the network for editing, and it was not very informative, mainly just tracer rounds streaking back and forth through the dark hills of Korea interrupted occasionally by a brief burst of light. In the dimly lit room, however, the stunning clarity of the high-definition video displays and the gut-shaking audio of the room's new surround-sound processors that pumped twenty-four-inch subwoofers under the table were dramatic, apparently even for the military men, who had seen the real thing. Cups filled with coffee rattled against saucers on the table with each burst of an explosion's sound wave to reach the cameraman, whose camera shook when hit by the shock.

Suddenly, the scene went to a colorful pattern of vertical bars, and the speakers fell deathly silent. The test pattern was quickly replaced with an aerial shot in bright daylight. The horizon above the dark and distant landscape was hazy, the sky above fading quickly from purple to black, and the earth below distant and featureless. The sides of the screen were boxed, and data were crammed into the margins of the blue frame. Superimposed on the picture itself in the lower right-hand corner were the white digits of a clock, numbers flying by as the hundredths of a second rolled off.

“That's from a TR-1 just off the coast of North Korea,” General Starnes said into the stillness of the packed and stuffy room. “Roughly in the center of the picture on the ground should be the capital, Pyongyang.”

“It's kind of hard to pick anything out of that picture,” the President said as Lambert saw the count on the clock roll past 1:00:00 and start heading down.
One minute,
he thought.
Just in time.

“Oh, you'll see it, sir,” Starnes said.

“Greg, are you here?” the President called out in the semi-darkness.

“Yes, sir!”

“Are we ready to go with the cable giving them the ultimatum?”

“Yes, sir. It's drafted and will go to the North Korean delegation to the U.N. as soon as we confirm the success of the mission.”

“What did we decide on as the second target if the North Koreans don't agree to the cease-fire and withdrawal?” the head of the National Security Agency asked.

“Wonsan harbor,” General Thomas replied.

“Whew. There'll be some civilian casualties.”

“The South Koreans insisted,” the President answered. “Last night it seems the North Korean troops ran wild through Tongduchon just south of the DMZ. It began as just looting—VCRs, clothes, Western things—but it got wilder and wilder and they began raping and murdering the population. Reports are that we're talking thousands, maybe tens of thousands of civilians murdered. The North Koreans are shooting their own men today trying to restore order, but. . . ”

The President fell silent as the clock's counter fell under forty seconds. All eyes were glued to the screen.

“What kind of weapon are we using?” the director of the CIA asked.

“SRAM from a B-1B,” Starnes replied. “Three hundred and seventeen kiloton.”

“But you're sure nobody's going to be hurt?” the President asked.

“Only if they look at the fireball, sir. Otherwise, they shouldn't get much more than a tan.”

“We were going to use a sub-launched Tomahawk,” Admiral Dixon said, “but it's a sea-skimmer. We couldn't get up to the hundred-thousand-foot altitude set as the mission's minimum.”

“A little bit more of a demonstration than we wanted, eh?” Irv Waller joked—sounding filled with nervous energy—but drew no reply.

Twenty seconds. The sky was so placid, Lambert thought as the clarity of the screen's image, so much more striking in daylight than the pictures of night fighting had been, drew him into its grasp. “What's the altitude of your TR-1, Bill?” General Thomas asked.

Starnes squinted at the tiny numbers embedded in the box around the picture and said, “Seventy-four thousand.”

The sky high above was pitch black. Ten seconds, Lambert saw. Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. A single point of white light pierced the purple that divided earth from space. The light expanded at a brisk rate, quickly forming a perfect white sphere of ever increasing proportions high in the sky directly over the North Korean capital. Although its rate of expansion slowed, the orb of light still grew at unimaginable speed, opening a clean hole in the
high, thin layer of clouds above which it had burst.

The camera jerked as the cameraman in the cockpit of the reconnaissance plane zoomed in, the orb now filling the screen and showing the first faint tinges of yellow all about its otherwise pristine surface. They all watched as the yellow turned deeper and darker in color, showing the first signs of swirls and patterns like that seen in the violent displays from the surface of the sun. The orb suddenly slipped from view as the camera wobbled—first black space and then dark earth with a tiny white coastline separating it from the blue sea below. The camera's wobble continued for a moment longer before it settled and reacquired the now dissipating sphere.

“Shock wave,” was all General Starnes said to explain, and Lambert realized that it was the aircraft, not the camera, which was firmly mounted in the cockpit, that had been doing the rocking—the blast wave sending it from wingtip to wingtip.

“Can we get any audio?” the President asked.

“Well, from the pilot, yes, sir,” Starnes replied, nodding at the technician who stood in the corner of the room.

A moment later there burst into the room a distorted electronic whine of a woman's highly agitated voice saying, “That was one helluva ride, Sierra Foxtrot! Ho-o-ly-Moley! Lost two thousand feet.”

“Don't worry about it, Indigo Six,” the far clearer voice of another woman said. “You're all by your lonesome up there. You're not going to run into anybody.”

“The fireball appears to be breaking up now,” the pilot said.

“I've got video, five by five,” her controller replied. “Are you ready to tango?”

“Ready as I'm ever gonna be,” the pilot responded, her voice much calmer now. “I'm gonna put the hand-held in the twelve o'clock brackets now.”

The camera jerked and showed brief glimpses of the inside of the cockpit and then the helmeted head of the pilot, twisting around to fill half of the picture with the black lenses of her flight helmet and her black oxygen mask. After one final jerk of the camera and then some twisting of the pilot's gloved hands on either side as she obviously fastened screws, the pilot straightened in her seat. The camera now displayed a view of the top of the cockpit's dashboard as it pointed straight out the front windshield.

“How's the picture?” the pilot asked.

“Hey, it's a Kodak moment,” the flight controller replied. “You're clear to go.”

“Executing a ninety,” the pilot said, and the plane banked. The image was so stunningly clear in the room, which had just the day
before been upgraded to Pentagon and Situation Room standards of high-definition TV and surround sound, that Lambert felt himself grabbing for the arms of his chair as the angled horizon cut across the TR-1's windshield. When the plane righted itself, the windshield was filled with the now ragged but still enormous ball of smoke, the center of which quite clearly still burned in a glowing red ball.

“I'm heading in, feet dry, speed five six zero knots and climbing.” The whine of the engines were much louder and could now be heard clearly in the background.

“What the hell is she doing?” the President asked in a concerned voice.

“Air samples and an image strip over ground zero,” Starnes replied matter-of-factly.

“She looks like she's headed right at it,” the President said, agitated by the prospect of approaching the inferno, agitated as was Lambert by being taken along as the picture of the sphere grew larger.

“Well, sir, that's just what she's doing,” the air force general replied. “She's gonna go right through the heart of it.”

“You've gotta be kidding!” the President exclaimed as Lambert looked at the flames, which were growing darker and more diffuse. “Look, put a stop to this. Dial that woman up right now!”

“Sir,” Starnes replied as the door opened and the light from the corridor outside briefly lit the room, “they've got this thing timed. It'll be okay by the time she gets to it. She's in more danger from SAMs than from that fireball, although we've got air defense suppression going in under her: two flights of Wild Weasels, one on each coast, ready to hose the North Koreans down if they try to paint her on her transverse of the peninsula.”

“What about radiation?”

“She'll be through there so quick it won't be any worse than an X ray. We haven't had any opportunities like this with our own weapons' bursts since we stopped aboveground testing forty years ago.”

The President was staring at the awesome sight of the rapidly growing ball of thinning smoke, his mouth open in dread as he held the message handed to him by the navy lieutenant who still stood behind him. The sight of the man entering their little cocoon of sights and sounds broke through Lambert's almost hypnotic attraction to the show and he said, “Sir, do you want me to send the cable to the North Koreans now?”

The President was reading the message slip in the thin beam of light shone on it from the penlight of the lieutenant behind him. “No,” he said, breaking the spell of the others in the room as heads
turned to look his way. “The North Korean ambassador to the U.N. has contacted our delegation and is seeking a cease-fire. No terms were discussed, but I think we oughta hit them with our laundry list.”

“That was quick,” the head of the NSA chuckled.

“That's the beauty of modern science,” Marine General Fuller rasped with a chuckle, as all eyes were attracted back to the picture on the screen. “Better living through physics.” The first wispy layers of smoke shot by the windshield of the aircraft before the pilot and all in the room were plunged into the darkness—the heart of the inferno—only to burst just as quickly back out into the bright daylight beyond. The windshield now filled again with the beautiful summer day. The deep blue sea of the opposite shore was faintly visible in the distance ahead.

“Sierra Foxtrot, this is Indigo Six,” the pilot said, her voice calmer by far than Lambert felt he could have mustered at that moment. “All done. I'm through clean.”

“Congrats, Indigo Six. You bagged your first burst. I'll have the boys at Yokota waiting with a spray can and stencil to paint this one on when you get back.”

“Just get me home, Sierra Foxtrot. Just get me home.”

“Roger that, Indigo Six. Come to heading of one zero seven. Maintain present course and altitude. Over.”

“This is ABC Radio,” Melissa heard over the car stereo as she sped down the freeway, and on reflex she reached and turned up the volume. “It's official. North Korea announced today that it will pull back to its former positions along the Thirty-eighth Parallel and immediately cease all hostilities. This follows yesterday's detonation of a nuclear-tipped missile in the sky high above the North Korean capital of Pyongyang by U.S. Air Force bombers. No word yet as to what other terms have been agreed upon, but administration sources tell ABC News that the U.S. will insist upon a monitored dismantling of North Korean nuclear weapons facilities and a cap on both the size and deployment of North Korea's conventional forces. The reunification of North and South previously scheduled for the fall, however, appears to be on hold.”

Melissa applied the brakes as the taillights of the traffic ahead signaled another jam. “In domestic news, a spokesman for the Internal
Revenue Service in Philadelphia has just confirmed the imposition of a fifteen percent national sales tax to be levied by the Livingston Administration under federal emergency rules. The new tax, which would go into effect on July first, will be used initially to refinance the massive eighty-billion-dollar short-term note offering that is scheduled for next week to cover initial costs of both emergency federal disaster aid for the war sites and burgeoning military expenditures as the Defense Department has begun to purchase massive quantities of fuel and other supplies ranging from boots to bullets.”

Melissa pulled the car up to the bumper of a truck in line ahead of her and began to inch forward toward the bottleneck.