Pinnacle Event

Prologue

Alone in the water, below the gray rain clouds, Octavius crept forward at barely five knots. Had the captain still stood on her deck, scanning the horizons, he would have seen nothing but the waters of the Indian Ocean stretching away, empty under the low sky. Abandoned by her crew the night before, the ghost ship moved in a broad circular path, her death spiral. There was no one to hear the engine thumping below, the computer humming in the deckhouse, the flag of the Comoros snapping from the stern in the stiff breeze. Silently a stream of data moved up from the computer to the satellite dish and then into space. Images from the cameras, the readings from the engine room, automated pilot data, all shot the thirty-three thousand kilometers to the Thuraya satellite in encrypted packets that took a quarter second to travel that distance.

Data packets came down, as well. Automatically decrypted on arrival in the laptop in the deckhouse, the final message was brief. It was routed down a fiber optic cable to the device in the hold. The 512-bit code caused the device to activate the detonation sequence, beginning with an electrical charge to the high-intensity conventional explosive. That explosion caused a bright flash and sent a large, bullet-shaped package of highly enriched uranium shooting down a tube into a hole in the uranium mass.

The presence of the added uranium in the mass caused it to reach criticality.

The intense light and heat were instant and immeasurable.

The iron and steel that was MV Octavius vaporized first, as X-rays, gamma rays, and neutrons rushed out. Oranges, yellows, purples, greens, and a bright white leaped, twisted, churned, and fled the nuclei of the uranium like a mob let loose from imprisonment.

In less than a second, the surface water for a half a mile around underwent molecular transformation and some of it was ejected eight miles up as steam. The waters beyond the blast zone were sucked up and then thrown down, sending a small tsunami out in all directions. At the center of the eruption, a giant toadstool stood roiling, poisonous as the fungi it resembled. The sound waves traveled slower, for hundreds of kilometers, simultaneously deep, sharp, and growling.

In the complete silence of space, twelve hundred kilometers from the Thuraya satellite, another communications satellite was at work. The AEHF-2 rested in a geosynchronous orbit. The Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellite of the U.S. Space Command’s 4th Space Operations Squadron picked up signals from American forces throughout the Indian Ocean area and nearby, from Bahrain, Bagram, and Brisbane. It converted their electronic packets into laser beams and shot them to its sister the AEHF-1, which then sent them down to Arizona.

The AEHF-2 was just a big router in the sky for the world’s largest Internet provider, the Defense Information Systems Agency, but on the bottom of the American satellite sat a small dome, covering a series of specialized sensors. In the 1960s similar sensors had been so large that they had filled a satellite, which had been code named Vela. Although the sensors had officially been known by an ever-changing series of Pentagon acronyms, unofficially the original name Vela had stuck.

Any report related to a nuclear weapon being detonated, lost, or stolen moved across the Defense Department communications network with the highest precedence, knocking all other message traffic back in the cue. Such messages were tagged on the subject line: PINNACLE EVENT. When a message with that caption arrived at a command post, audio alarms sounded.

While the cloud was still rushing skyward from where the MV Octavius had been, the Vela sensors on the bottom of the AEHF-2 sent a series of data packets from space on a circuitous path to the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center and seven other command centers. At one of them, on Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, the message packets caused a red light to begin spinning in the Operations Room of the Air Force Technical Applications Center. As the duty officers at AFTAC looked up, they heard a prerecorded female voice speaking slowly, calmly, as though she were informing them that the airport shuttle train doors were about to close.

“Attention, attention. There has been a Pinnacle Event. Repeat, Pinnacle.” The red light spun its beam across the room. “An atmospheric nuclear detonation has been detected. Repeat, nuclear detonation.”