Critical Mass (12 page)

His wife and child were asleep, but Lerma’s wife leaped out of bed when she heard the great roar that filled the house, shattering windows and causing curtains and blinds to whip into the rooms. He, in his windowless studio, had been talking to a ham operator at McMurdo Station in the Antarctic when there was a voltage surge that popped Lerma’s circuit breakers and the whole building was shaken to its foundations.

“I think we just had an earthquake,” he said into the lifeless microphone. Then he was plunged into darkness. A moment later, his generator cut in and the emergency lights came back. His next thought was for his wife and baby, and Lerma jumped up and ran out of the studio.

His wife said, “What is happening?” She had their still-sleeping little girl in her arms.

“Stay here.” He moved out onto the front porch and down into the stony garden. There were great booms echoing from somewhere and he thought it was the sound of the earthquake spreading through the land. As he turned to go inside, though, he happened to glance in the direction of Las Vegas.

For a moment, he was confused. What was that thing, that great, glowing
thing
just rising above the flat line of the eastern horizon? He stared, trying to understand. Was it smoke? No, it was glowing internally. There were periodic flashes of lightning, too, forks of it dancing across the face of the monster. But it wasn’t a thunderstorm, not so close to the ground.

Then it rose up still higher. It took form. A jolt as if of electricity shot through him from head to toe, because he had just recognized that he was seeing the mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion in the process of forming.

For a moment, he thought,
Dirty bomb
, but as the gigantic cloud billowed
into the sky, towering, huge, and so horribly fast, he knew that there was only one thing that could do this. An atomic weapon had been detonated over Vegas.

His baby, his wife—he thought to get them into the RV and head west. But no, that was a mistake; if Vegas had been hit, LA might be a mess, too. Angie came out onto the porch, still with the baby in her arms.

“Go back,” he said, then hurried up to her and put his arm around her waist, and drew her back into the house.

They’d lost windows in the living room and the bedroom. They would need to shelter in the studio. But he didn’t think that fallout would be a problem, because the prevailing winds would carry the cloud east. And any cloud from LA would be funneled out across the desert well south of here.

Their problem was not going to be fallout. It was going to be food and water and security. An atomic war had started, he thought, unless this was a terrorist incident.

He went into the bedroom and dragged the mattress off the bed and into the studio.

“What are you doing?”

He had to tell her. He sat her down and said gently, “There’s been a very large explosion in Vegas—”

“Atomic bomb?”

“I think so.”

“Radiation?”

“Not here, not yet. But we’re going to stay in the studio. The generators have gas for thirty days, so we’re safe enough.”

It was then that he returned to his radio station. He’d lost a number of his electronic systems but not his tough old radios. He powered up and was soon looking at 150 watts output. A few adjustments enabled him to crank it up to the max the station allowed, 300 watts.

He began broadcasting in the 40 meter band and was soon talking to a ham operating out of Salt Lake City. He worked for news station KSL, and when they’d lost all contact with the West Coast he had gone to his nearby apartment and powered up.

Thus it was that an amateur operator made the broadcast that rocked the world: “I am talking to you from a town sixty miles west of Las Vegas. We are looking directly at what can only be described as a mushroom cloud. I
cannot prove it, but it is my belief that Las Vegas has sustained a nuclear attack. I repeat, Las Vegas, Nevada, has been hit by an atomic or possibly hydrogen bomb. A large bomb. As I speak, I can see the cloud literally covering the whole western horizon.”

Then he wept.

RETREAT

Seventy-five miles east of Las Vegas, Ressman still struggled with his control
problem. He called out over the blare of his engines, “I have to land this thing wherever it happens to be!”

Jim Deutsch said nothing. His misery was so great that he halfway hoped that the bastard would crash and kill them both. All Jim cared about now was getting to a phone. Any damn phone!

Then Ressman made a turn. “I see a light,” he shouted. “I see a light!”

Ahead, Jim saw it, too, the faint but unmistakable outline of a runway.

They came rocking and bouncing in on the strip of the Grand Canyon National Park Airport. Ressman laughed with relief; he threw his head back; he sucked great gulps of air. He said, “What happened to my plane?”

Jim heard him but didn’t bother to explain what the electromagnetic pulse that emanates from an atomic explosion does to electronic circuits. The hell with Ressman and his plane.

The Grand Canyon airport was quiet and dark, with a strong night wind coming in across the desert from the west.

“Is that the moon?” Ressman asked.

Deep in the western sky there was a curious light, a crescent. It was dim purple. “It must be,” Jim said.

“What happened out there?”

Too many years doing what he did had made Jim react automatically to questions with silence. Nabila had hated that about him, because habit had extended it far beyond the necessities of the job.

He could have told Ressman that his greedy stupidity had killed a great American city. He could have slugged the bastard, but he knew that would drop Ressman, and if he dropped this man, he was going to go further; he was going to kill him. His hands itched with the death in them. To be sure he wouldn’t use them, he jammed them into his pockets.

He could not yet see the cloud from here, but the color of that crescent moon told him that it was just below the horizon. They had about four hours before the prevailing winds brought its deadly radiation over this airport, not to mention all the people living in the region.

He had no iodine pills. He had nothing to save himself or anybody, nothing except his mind and what was in it: the knowledge of what had just happened, of the fact that it had been accomplished because crucial security forces were penetrated.

But the top level didn’t know this. The White House would call on every asset the country possessed, and some of those assets were going to be doing the wrong damn job. How deep was the penetration? How much more damage could it do? And worse, the biggest question of all: were there more bombs?

“Get a plane ready,” Jim told Ressman.

“Excuse me?”

Jim gestured toward the three light aircraft that were visible on the hangar apron. “Those guys are ready to roll, and they won’t have damaged electronics because they were below the horizon.”

“What?”

“Find the one with the best range. We’re going to take it.”

“But—they’re locked! I don’t have keys.”

Jim went to him, took him by the throat. “Be ready to fly in ten minutes.”

“It’s theft.”

“I’m commandeering the aircraft due to the fact that this is a national emergency.” He released Ressman. “Do it now.”

Jim went to the small, locked waiting area. He sprang the lock with a credit card. Inside, he found a phone. He lifted the receiver. If it didn’t work . . . but it did. He dialed CIA Operations in Washington, waited for
the computer, and input his personal code. A moment later, a young man’s voice said, “May I help you?”

“I have observed an atomic weapon detonate over Las Vegas, Nevada. The time was twenty-four zero one. That is midnight plus one minute local time.”

There was a silence. When the voice returned, it belonged to a scared boy. “We don’t have that.”

One of the many problems the intelligence community had was that its members were now younger than they had ever been. Due to cannibalization from outside employers, and the fast-growing contractor business, the median age of CIA officers had been dropping for years. Thus the young man’s crisis experience would be limited.

“I want you to tell me the procedures you will now carry out.”

“This is a drill?”

Jim remained silent. He didn’t care how agitated the kid became or what he thought he was involved in, as long as he did his duty correctly.

Jim was not surprised that the CIA didn’t have the information yet. One of the things that characterizes extraordinary destruction like this is that it conceals itself inside a circle of ruined communications systems. McCarran Airport would be off-line, probably permanently, Nellis AFB would be in chaos, and the local Homeland Security office would obviously be down. Probably there were no radio transmissions, no phones or cell phones, nothing at all getting out. Hams in outlying areas, maybe.

“A ten- to thirty-megaton atomic explosion has taken place above Las Vegas, Nevada. The probable agent is a plutonium bomb detonated at an altitude of five to seven hundred meters. It has caused extreme damage. They city is nonviable at this time. It is burning.”

“Please confirm your identity.”

Jim went through the classified identity routine. Then he added, “This needs to go upstairs right now, do you understand that, with my identity tagged intact all the way to the White House and the NSC. Do you know how to write up those tags?”

“Sir, I do not.”

Since the 1990s and the various failures that had resulted in the CIA blowing three capture and two assassination opportunities on Osama bin Laden, it had been possible for certain officers in sensitive situations that might require extremely fast response to move information on an expedited
basis—that is, if the lines of communication weren’t compromised, which this one certainly could be. Jim had to assume that whoever had been able to use the FBI to try to arrest him would also have made sure they had access to communications like this one. What he had to say, though, was beyond the need for secrecy.

“I want you to patch me in to the White House. Can you do that?”

“Yes, Sir. But, Sir, excuse me, shouldn’t you be reporting in the chain?”

Now it was time to play his ace, the new card that the disaster had put in his hand. “It could be that the president has only minutes to live unless he takes shelter, so do as you are told and do it now!”

A silence followed. Then clicking, a ring, and a voice: “Security.”

“I need to speak to Tom Logan. It’s a matter of critical national urgency. There is a time problem. I need immediate access.”

“Who’s speaking, please?”

Unbelievable. He contained himself. “I am a CIA officer. My name must be on your monitor.”

“I need to confirm your credentials, Sir.”

He had the chilling thought that he might be talking to a conspirator. They would want to get as close to the president as they could. Nevertheless, he repeated his identifiers. He waited. There was another click.

“Hello?” God, had they hung up?
Don’t do this, for the love of all that’s holy!

“Logan.”

The chief of staff, and thank you, God. “Mr. Logan, my name is James Deutsch. I am a Clandestine Operations contract officer operating under extreme deep cover within CONUS.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sir, this is the greatest national emergency in U.S. history. Within minutes, you will receive word that Las Vegas, Nevada, has taken a nuclear hit.”

There was a choked sound.

“You need to get POTUS in motion at once, but know this: there has been betrayal, probably for years, probably since Brewster Jennings in 2001. You are aware of that?”

“Of course I’m aware of it! But that’s—it’s solved. That was Ahmad Khan. State was ordered to leak Brewster Jennings to Pakistani intelligence, and Khan used the information so that he could smuggle nukes around Brewster’s operatives. It’s old news. Contained. Done with.”

“Okay, leave it. I know that our problem is in Customs and Borders at least, and I can identify one person of interest. There is also FBI involvement, but they may be acting on information with all good intentions. There must also be traitors, further up the chain of command, close to you guys. Understand that.
Must be
.”

“What are you saying here? Las Vegas—”

“Listen to me, God damn you!”

“All right! All right! It’s three in the morning; I had—I had an embassy staffer . . . uh, here. I have to get POTUS moving?”

“Las Vegas has sustained a gigantic nuclear strike. Largest bomb ever detonated over a city. You must move the president to safety, but you must know—
are you registering this now
?”

“I am!”

“All right. The bomb was transported in country due to sabotage of the border detection system and a penetration of our security apparatus.”

“How bad? How bad?”

“I have no way of knowing, but they were able to generate an arrest warrant that nearly got me taken out of the picture. It’s up to you guys to figure out who could have done that. Find the warrant and work from there.”

“My God. And you’re saying—what? How serious is this explosion again?”

“Las Vegas is on fire from one end to the other. And, Mr. Logan,
there are probably other bombs
.”

“You have knowledge of this detonation?”

“I’m here, on the scene! I saw the blast!”

“What I need to know is why this happened. Where was our interdiction program?”

Jim could only hope that the man was not actually this stupid. He was in shock and half-asleep and maybe on pills or drunk or whatever. It must take a lot to enable a man in his position to sleep. Jim tried to inject more control into his voice. Sound calm, authoritative. Seconds counted. “Get POTUS in motion. Activate the Emergency Response System. Federalize the National Guard and put it under the Continental Army Command.”

“Who are you, again?”

“My name is James Deutsch, and I am on my way to D.C. because I cannot communicate everything I know over phone lines. Not
any
lines anywhere in the federal system, especially yours.”