Dragon Fire

The Situation Room, The White House, Washington, DC

‘He could be bluffing,’ said Bloodworth.

‘If he’s not…’ said Alvin Jebb.

Bloodworth pulled up a map of Russia’s nuclear facilities and projected them onto a screen in the meeting room. ‘Let’s assume for a few minutes that we can do something. We could take out 12th Main Directorate offices here in Moscow with a conventional cruise missile strike. We could shut down the Tatishchevo launch base at 51°40′ N, 45°34′ E — again with a conventional strike. We could use tactical nuclear weapons against the Krasnoarmeyskoye storage facility south of Saratov, 51°12′ N, 46°02′ E. Only nuclear warheads would get into the ravined area which protects the bunkers. We would need tactical nuclear warheads against Malaya Sazanka, just south of Svobodnyl in the Far East, 51°15′ N, 128°1′ E. This is one of the older storage facilities, but it’s still active. Again, we would need a nuclear strike against Mozhaysk, which is the closest storage bunker to Moscow at 55°26′ N, 35°46′ E. The satellite photograph, here, shows the soccer field within the perimeter fence, indicating the size of the facility we would be destroying. We could get away with a conventional strike at Nizhnyaya Tura on both the storage facility at 58°37′ N, 59°45′ E and the nuclear weapons production plant there. We might have to be careful because Nizhnyaya Tura works together with Sverdlovsk-45, the biological weapons research facility, which could release something like smallpox into the air when a missile smashes into it.’ Bloodworth looked around the room. ‘That is just a fraction of what my computer has thrown up.’

‘We can’t do anything, you mean?’ said Hastings quietly.

‘If we knocked out all of that and twice as much again, he could still do more damage to America and our allies than we could absorb.’