The Third World War: A Terrifying Novel of Global Conflict

69

'Confirmed, sir,' said Pierce, his voice barely a whisper but the sound carrying to everyone in the room.

'Warheads?'

'No way of telling.'

'Trajectory?'

'Not certain at present. The western seaboard,' said Pierce. 'Way beyond Hawaii.'

Jim West sat transfixed, staring at the screen in the White House situation room. His silence, lasting only a few seconds, was fathomless. Kozerski, Pierce, Newman, Campbell, Patton and others stood in a circle, but several feet behind him, giving him space to think. The screen flickered and picked up images of the missiles. It was unable to agree on data between radar and satellites, so the picture, jumping and blurred, was unsettled.

'Strike back,' ordered West.

'Launch,' said Pierce, shifting away, and issuing his instructions in a low voice. 'Malmstrom — five Minuteman 111s — yes. Toksong-gun, Dukchun, Kanggye, Mangyongdae and Kanggamchan.'

The screen divided. The pictures tracking the missiles remained unsteady. The cameras on the silos at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana, relayed images in clear colour.

'One hundred and five seconds,' said Pierce. 'Moving out of the boost phase.' He turned to West. 'We will not be attempting a boost-phase intercept. We have nothing in the area.'

To hit a missile in the boost phase, the interceptor missile needed to be within 150 miles of the launch site. Toksong-gun, embedded deep in a mountain range, was sixty miles from the nearest coastline, and no American-equipped warship was close.

The launch site was also only fifty miles from the Chinese border.

After the boost phase, the missile would take twenty-five minutes to reach its target. Satellite data from tracking the trajectories of the missiles was being deciphered and coordinated with information from long-range radars working out of the United States, Greenland and the United Kingdom. Computers were calculating the best early point to take out the missiles. If the first attempt failed, a second wave of missiles would be launched as a back-up.

The missile-defence technology had been debated and tested for more than three decades. It was still embryonic and it had never been used for real. The four missiles, travelling as if in a convoy, changed colour as they broke out of the earth's atmosphere. From silos in Alaska, sixteen interceptor missiles were launched against them.

'Decoys?' said West.

'We don't think there are any,' replied Pierce. 'They've thrown everything they've got at us.'

'Evacuations?'

'Rescue and health personnel are on standby,' said Patton. 'But they don't know what for.'

'Good,' said West. 'To evacuate would be to surrender.'

His attention turned back to the other screen, where a flare of light wrapped in smoke pouring from the ground indicated that the first Minuteman 111 was being launched. For a second it seemed to falter, hanging in the air, the flames lighting up the bleak, brown landscape around it. Then it picked up, becoming a speck trailed by a graceful arc of smoke. Three more Minuteman 111s launched, one after the other, their outer shells almost fifty years old but their software, engineering, guidance and fuel systems constantly updated and modernized. Never before had they been used to strike an enemy country.

'Thirty-three minutes,' said Pierce. 'These are single-vehicle with 5-kiloton warheads. Low yield, and only military targets.'

'Low yield,' repeated West, wondering if he was being too cautious again. Caution and compromise had brought things to where they were now. Each time, he had thought there was a way through, but each time his delay had escalated the risk.

'Tell the Chinese,' said West. He turned in his chair. 'Chris, straight through to their command and control. And the Russians.'

'Sir,' said Patton.

'Yes, Tom?'

'Six simultaneous suicide bombings.'

'Oh shit.'

'Baltimore. San Francisco. Denver. Elizabethtown, that's in Pennsylvania, Southampton on Long Island. Dallas… hold on.' West watched the missiles from Alaska reposition themselves towards the Taepodong-2s. 'This from Downing Street, sir. They have bombings in Piccadilly Circus, London, and Birmingham.'

'Smallpox?' asked West, as if a suicide bombing without the variola major virus would be fine — just an everyday event.

'Don't know yet — ' he listened to the incoming call. 'OK. Stand by. Mr President, we have an ID on the Times Square bomber. His working name is Hassan Muda. He escaped the Philippines with Ahmed Memed… OK, go on. Give me all of it,' said Patton. 'Get those pictures over here soonest. Yes. And Muda. Yes. Incontrovertible… Yes. No. It has to be something we can release to every government, every network, every… you got it. Good.'

Patton kept the line open, but concealed his voice from the caller. 'Ahmed Memed is in Beijing. He is under the protection of the Chairman of the Military Commission, Chen Jianxiong. He is inside Zhongnanhai. Muda is also the prime suspect in the mortar attacks on Mehta's house.'

'As soon as we've hit North Korea, I need to speak to Kozlov,' said West. 'What are the casualties, Tom?'

'Still coming in. Dallas, at least thirty dead. San Fransico, forty. Elizabethtown, three. Should know more in a couple of minutes.'

West's gaze fixated back on the screen, where the four North Korean missiles and the sixteen American ones were getting closer to each other.

'Kill vehicles primed,' said Pierce.

The image showed the small front end of the interceptor missiles breaking away from the rockets to seek out their targets. They would fly independently, guided by their own avionics, constantly updated by radar and satellite computer data. Their task was to identify the enemy warheads and destroy them.

'Three failures,' said Pierce. His tone was level, as if he did not expect the defence system to work perfectly. Three kill vehicles had failed to separate. The technology was still brand new, and at extreme temperatures, flying at five miles per second, this was one of the most common test problems.

'Thirteen left,' muttered West.

'What the—?' exclaimed Pierce, as four interceptor missiles veered off, away from the targets. He glanced down at West, but the President was absorbed in the screen. There was nothing he could do now. 'Back-up launched,' said Pierce.

'Strike one,' said Kozerski from the back of the room. The closest person to him was Lazaro Campbell and he slapped him on the back, looking round to see who else was joining in the brief celebration. Newman smiled. West didn't move. Patton, while missiles were heading towards American soil, was only interested in suicide bombings. 'Variola major detected in Elizabethtown,' he said. Kozerski and Campbell listened as if a knife had sliced through their euphoria.

Another interceptor knocked out a Taepodong-2. 'Strike two,' whispered Kozerski.

'Caroline… Tom Patton… Elizabethtown… Yes… Can you get there? Good. Let me know soonest. We'll alert the Harrisburg hospital, and we should assume it's in the other target areas.'

On the screen, two Taepodong-2 missiles remained in flight. 'A couple of minutes should give us a clear,' said Pierce.

'Any more launches?' said West.

'Negative, sir,' said Pierce. 'Third stage.' The main missile sections fell away, leaving the smaller third-stage solid-fuel rockets and the warheads moments away from re-entry into the earth's atmosphere. 'It's going to be close,' said the Defense Secretary.

'Oh my God,' said Kozerski.

All but two of the interceptor missiles veered off towards the now defunct second stage of the Taipodong-2s. Each of the four back-up missiles followed, taking a trajectory that would let them gain ground not on the incoming enemy missiles but on the interceptors.

'What's going on?' asked West.

'God knows,' said Pierce. He pressed his headset button. 'Can you correct it?… I know it's a guidance malfunction,' he shouted, 'but can you fix it?'

'Shit,' muttered Kozerski, as the kill vehicle of an interceptor broke away and destroyed another interceptor.

'They said it could never happen,' said Pierce, shaking his head.

There was complete silence in the room, no longer from concentration, nor from hope that things could ever get back to normal. It lasted well past the break in the line of defence. Someone should have spoken, but no one wanted to. The satellites and radar were confused because they were not meant to follow the missile as far as this. The picture jumped and skewed. The target coordinates flipped over like stock prices, as computers tried to calculate where the warheads might land. Patriot missiles were fired. One hit its target. One North Korean missile remained in flight.

Everyone stood aghast, helpless, staring at the screen, its data becoming meaningless. They were numb to what was happening.

The closer the warhead came to earth, the clearer the picture became. It changed from a spongy blue-grey mass around the outer atmosphere to images of high-rise buildings, the coastline. Highways emerged as distinct shapes. The name of the city appeared at the bottom of the screen, the district, the ground zero strike area, compiled by data from a new computer at a battle management control centre. A box screen showed a street map: the buildings, the day-time and night-time populations, the hospitals, the bunkers, the agencies, their contact numbers and their lines of control.

A yellow flare tore across the screen. Briefly it went to black. It came back with flakes of light appearing like jagged shards of heat searing up from the ground. They could see it was blindingly hot, bright and destructive, with a grey-black spiral surrounded by licking flames.

Slowly, second by second, the camera lenses were blocked out by a cloud.