Wrath & Righteousnes Episodes 01 to 05 (84 page)

He looked down at his watch. 4:50
P.M.
Less than two minutes to go.

Standing, he turned and ran for the stairwell. He had drilled it many times, and he knew exactly where to go.

He ran down the hallway, turned right down another hallway and across the Portola porch. Down a flight of stairs, a short hallway. He came to the double doors. He glanced again at his watch as he ran. Fifty seconds to go.

He pushed on the door.

It didn’t move.

He pushed again, and started calling.

The door was locked.

Someone had panicked. They hadn’t waited. The door was shut tight.

He banged the door with his fist, then turned and started running. Up the stairs, on the other side of the hallway, was another set of stairs, another bunker access door.

He started up the stairs, reached the top, and then saw the bright flash of light.

The stairwell collapsed in a fury of white heat and smoke.

But General Brighton felt none of it.

He was already dead.

* * *

Over the landscape of downtown Washington, D.C., the bright light flashed across the sky as the second sun appeared.

The fireball over Washington, D.C., was a horrifying sight, a boiling mushroom cloud capped with a crescent of white from condensation and heat. The fireball was white in the center, with orange and red tints at the rim. Below the fireball, a thick column of fiery dust and smoke reached down to the ground, a solid pillar of fire that seemed to support the fireball like a golf ball on a tee.

There was no time to react, no time even to look up.

The initial destruction of heat was almost instantaneous.

A burst of supersonic pressure moved across the ground, demolishing everything into cinder and smoke. A doughnut ring of debris rolled outward from the center of the explosion. The fireball illuminated the day much brighter than the sun, creating devilish shadows that danced in front of the expanding ring of debris.

The first indication on the ground was a two-second blast of white light and heat. Then the fireball rolled upward through the sky, more than a thousand feet wide. Ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit at the center, the thermal radiation burst outward at the speed of light, burning everything it touched almost instantly. Clothes, flesh, hair, wood, asphalt, paper, shingles, plastic, steel—everything turned to ash underneath the rolling cloud. Then, like thunder after lightning, a high-pressure blast wave followed the burst of radiation by a second or two. It moved across the ground, creating a ring of enormous overpressure at the front of the blast while tornado-force winds rushed in to fill the vacuum behind. Steel buildings blew apart as if they were made of paper and sticks; houses fell over and burst into flames; high-rise hotels blew to pieces. Oak trees snapped at ground level and vanished into ash, smoke, and heat. The sand on the beach along the river was instantly baked into glass, leaving human shadows etched in the glassy formations where children had been playing. Water in the Chesapeake Bay boiled and rose in clouds of radiated steam, then fell almost instantly back to earth as contaminated rain. Ash, dust, and dirt were pulled thirty thousand feet into the air and sucked into the rolling fireball in the upper atmosphere. The fallout blew northeast, toward the city of Baltimore and the suburbs on the outskirts of Washington, D.C.

As the fireball rose, it grew dark, a horrible red and purplish hue. Below it, there was nothing but black ash and baked earth.

The fireball began to dissipate.

Across the city, the devastation spread for miles in a near-perfect ring. Two miles under the detonation, there was nothing but blackness and smoke, a circle of smooth ash and nearly perfect level ground. Here and there, a steel rod or square of cement protruded from the smoothed-over debris, but that was all. Three miles from the center, a few steel structures remained, the framework of once-mighty office buildings and grand hotels. Here, the sidewalks were baked into ash and the hulks of burned-out cars were tossed on their sides. Four miles from the epicenter, at Bolling Air Force Base, the presidential fleet of helicopters had been burned in their hangars, melted like wax. Cars and buses had been lifted, blown into pieces, and scattered through the air. The devastation grew less intense with each passing mile, but it was seven miles out before there could be found a green blade of grass.

A few minutes after the explosion, the fireball rose into the atmosphere and normal daylight returned.

Then the sounds and smells of human suffering began to drift through the air.

Captain Samuel Brighton sat in the gunner’s seat, looking out on the nighttime desert as it passed below. Bono sat opposite him. They were the only two men in the helicopter, except for the pilots, who were sitting in the cockpit in front. The cabin doors of the HH-60 helicopter were pinned back, and the cool night wind gusted though the open cabin. The pilots were talking to each other, using the helicopter intercom. Sam and Bono sat in silence. They wore their combat fatigues, and underneath their seats were four tan-and-brown canvas bags. All of their gear had been stuffed inside them. They held their Kevlar
^®
helmets in their hands.

“Where we going?” Sam asked Bono. He had to yell above the roar of the engines and blades to be heard.

Bono shrugged, and then leaned closer to Sam’s ear. “We’re picking up a charter flight down in Basra. Someone’s going to meet us. That’s really all I know.”

“Come on, come on, I think you know more than that.”

Bono shook his head. “Really, that’s all the colonel would tell me for now.”

Sam sat back, satisfied. “We’re going to be Cherokees, baby!” He slapped Bono on the knee. “The best of the best. The razor tip of the spear!”

Bono leaned closer to him so he didn’t have to yell quite so loud. “I thought that Deltas were the best.”

“Yeah, well, that’s before we were invited to join the Cherokees.”

“You realize, of course, that we’re so good we won’t even be able to tell anyone what we do. There’ll be no pride or ego. We won’t be able to say anything. The Cherokees are so highly classified; we can’t even confirm our code word. We can’t brag. We can’t talk. And when we hear the cover story they provide us, I bet we’ll see that the girls will not be impressed.”

Sam deflated a little, and then brightened up again. “When it’s over, we can tell them.”

Bono smiled and nodded.

Sam peered at the moonlit night passing by. Reflecting the moon, the desert looked like a huge, silver ocean, the dunes enormous waves that were frozen at their crest. “Why do you think they chose us?” Sam asked after a while.

Bono was sucking on a lollipop, and he pulled it from his mouth. “They chose me,” he yelled, “because I’m fluent in Arabic. That, and I could pass for any of the locals, thanks to my mother, you know. They chose you because you’re a combat stud. Best leader in the unit. Since the day that I got here, that’s how I felt. After what you did for that girl—”

There was a sudden motion from the front of the cockpit, and both men looked forward. One of the pilots was shaking. The other one had lifted both arms to the sky. He seemed to cry out in anguish, and the helicopter wobbled up on its side. The two soldiers glanced at the pilots, and then looked at each other. “What’s going on?” Sam asked.

Bono shook his head.

The helicopter suddenly dropped toward the desert, flared aggressively, then set down hard on the rocks and bounced until it came to a stop. The engines kept going, but both pilots stared ahead. One of them wiped his Nomex
^®
glove across his face. The other one bowed his head. They seemed to have forgotten about the two combat soldiers in the back completely.

Bono watched, shaking his head in confusion. “Might be engine trouble,” he said.

Sam had been on helicopters when they’d had engine trouble before. This wasn’t an engine problem. This was something else.

“Hey, what’s going on?” he shouted to the pilot nearest him.

Both of them ignored him. Either that or they didn’t hear.

“I’ll find out,” Bono said. He undid his harness and crawled forward. “What’s happening?” he asked.

Both of the pilots were crying. Bono’s face showed confusion and fear. Sam watched him carefully, a sickness rising inside him. The copilot rolled the throttles back so he could talk to Bono without yelling. Bono listened, and then seemed to crumple as if someone had punched him in the gut.

He looked up to ask another question, but the pilot shook his head.

Bono hunched his shoulders, looked away, and then pushed himself backward across the cabin floor. Even in the dim light, Sam could see that his face was pale. “What is it?” Sam demanded.

“Oh, geez,” Bono muttered.

Sam felt a rising sense of dread. “Tell me!” he demanded.

Bono took his hand. “There was a nuclear detonation. They said that D.C. is gone. They think a quarter of a million people are dead. The president, all his cabinet, the Congress, the Supreme Court, everyone, all the city, everything is gone.”

Sam sat back. He
didn’t
believe it. Not at first. Then he thought of his father in the White House. His mother and brothers lived not too far from there. “No,” he muttered weakly. “Bono, you
have
to be wrong.”

“Everything,” Bono stammered. He didn’t look at Sam anymore. “Everything—everybody—our government gone—” Then he stopped suddenly. How could he be so stupid? How could he have forgotten?

He turned back to Sam. “I’m sorry, Sam—your family—”

Sam angrily shook his head. “It can’t be!” he almost shouted. Bono just stared at him.

Sam saw the anguish in his expression and it finally sunk in. He took a slow breath and held it, then unbuckled his lap belt and leaned over, falling out of the helicopter onto the cool desert sand.

After the explosion, Ammon wrestled the car to the shoulder and replaced the alternator, the starter, fuses and the battery with the one his father had placed in their grounded Faraday boxes in the car’s trunk, following the very specific written instructions his father left within each box. The battery was stored dry, and Ammon carefully poured the sulfuric acid into the battery. He positioned the battery charger’s solar panels and waited several long hours until the battery was full.

After the battery was charged, Ammon kept driving, his eyes tearing, his hands trembling on the wheel. Luke was sitting in the backseat, holding his face on his palms. Sara looked straight ahead. She seemed not to react at all.

The radio announcer cut back and forth from one special report to another. Everyone knew precious little about the situation in Washington, D.C., and the reports from across the rest of the nation were incalculably bad.

There had been no communication with the president. Was he dead or alive? Congress had been in session at the time of the detonation, and most of them were certainly gone. The reports of destruction throughout the capital were simply unbelievable. There was little left inside the Beltway. Two hundred thousand, perhaps a million, who knew how many were dead?

The U.S. government had not yet responded to an Al Jazeera report that five American cities would be destroyed, one city hit with a nuclear bomb every day for the next five days. Across America, there was panic in many city streets. The grocery stores had been raided within a few hours, leaving their shelves empty. The freeways were crammed with hordes of panicked masses fleeing all the major cities. Fuel was being hoarded, the pipelines and fuel tanks that fed each major city running dry within hours. Most places still had electricity, but in order to conserve the suddenly limited reserve of energy resources, all of the power plants had been ordered to cut back their output, leaving brownouts and blackouts across almost every state.

The reports went on and on: riots in New York City, rumors of an impending nuclear attack on Los Angeles, news of thousands of people trampled or run over in the streets as millions tried to flee.

Within hours, order had been replaced by chaos. The sense of invincibility that had permeated the nation for more than two hundred years had been replaced by an utter sense of pandemonium and chaos.

All in one afternoon. After a single attack.

The reporters kept on talking. All of the airports had been closed. No civilian air traffic was allowed to take off, and all airliners already in the air had been diverted away from the major cities to alternate landing airports. The roads leading out of New York City were completely impassable now; more than four hundred accidents had been reported on the New Jersey Turnpike alone. Hundreds of thousands could be seen walking in Seattle, Chicago and Dallas. There was pandemonium, armed men stealing people’s vehicles, siphoning the fuel right out of their gas tanks. There were shootings in Nashville, looting in Manhattan, fires reported in downtown Chicago. The Secretary of Interior was the highest ranking government official to be identified. He broadcast a desperate call for order from some unknown location, but he had not been seen on television. There were false reports of foreign terrorists taking hostages in downtown Miami . . . .

Ammon listened, shaking his head in despair. He drove west, away from the city, away from their home. West. Toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. Toward what, he did not know.

The anchorman suddenly cut to another reporter: a military pilot had reported flying directly over the White House, or at least he thought it was the White House, or where the White House used to be . . . .

Sara moaned in anguish as she listened to the reporter’s voice. Ammon reached for her hand and held it painfully tight. “Remember, Mom, there’s the underground Situation Room. He would be safe down there. He’s all right, I promise,” he squeezed her hand again, trying to sound convincing.

But Sara knew it wasn’t true.

She knew that he was gone.

She had lost her husband, the only man she had ever loved, the light of her life for the past twenty-five years, the man who had brought her more joy than any person had a right to ask. The father of her children, the Polaris in her life, the man who had held her, loved her and kissed the tears from her eyes.