The Trade of Queens

7/16

On the eighth floor of a department store just off Eighteenth Street NW in Washington, D.C., there was a locked janitor’s closet. Earlier that morning the police had been busy downstairs. A security guard had been found dead in a customer restroom, evidently the victim of an accidental heroin overdose. Nobody, in the ensuing fuss, had felt any need to fetch cleaning supplies from this particular closet, and so, nobody had discovered that the door was not only locked but the lock was jammed, so that the key wouldn’t turn.

Because nobody had visited the room, nobody had called a locksmith. And because the door remained locked, nobody had noticed the presence of an abandoned janitor’s trolley, its cylindrical plastic trash can weighted down by something heavy. Nor had anyone, in an attempt to move the trolley, discovered that its wheels were jammed as thoroughly as the lock on the door. And nobody had raised the lid on the trash can and, staring inside, recognized the olive-drab cylinder for what it was: a SADM—storable atomic demolition munition—in its field carrier, connected to a live detonation sequencer (its cover similarly glued shut), a very long way indeed from its designated storage cell in a bunker at the Pantex plant in West Texas.

The janitor’s store was approximately 450 meters—two blocks—away from Lafayette Square and, opposite it, the White House; and it was about ten meters above the roofline of that building.

The detonation sequencer was, at heart, little more than a countdown timer—a milspec timer, with a set of thumbwheels to enter the permissive action codes, and more thumbwheels to enter the countdown time and desired yield. Beneath the glued-down cover were additional test and fault lights and switches. From the timer emerged a fat cable that screwed onto a multi-pin socket on the outside of the bomb carrier. Inside the carrier nestled one of the smallest atomic bombs ever assembled, so compact that a strong man with a suitable backpack frame could actually carry it. But not for much longer.

Eleven-sixteen and twelve seconds, on the morning of July 16, 2003.

Stop all the clocks. All of them.

* * *

It was a regular summer day in Washington, D.C. Open-topped tourist buses carried their camera-snapping cargo around the sights on Capitol Hill—itself something of a misnomer, for the gentle slope of the Mall was anything but mountainous—past the reflecting pool, the Washington Monument, the museums and administrative buildings and white stone–clad porticoes of power. In hundreds of offices, stores, restaurants, and businesses around the center ordinary people were at work.

Like Nazma Hussein, aged twenty-six, daughter of Yemeni immigrants, married to Ali the cook, cleaning and setting out tables in the front of her family’s small lunch diner on K Street NW, worrying about her younger sister Ayesha who is having trouble at school: Papa wants her to come and work in the restaurant until he and Baba can find her a suitable husband, but Nazma thinks she can do better—

Like Ryan Baylor, aged twenty-three, a law student at GWU, hurrying along H Street to get to the Burns Law Library and swearing quietly under his breath—overslept, forgot to set his alarm, got a reading list as long as his arm and a hangover beating a brazen kettledrum counterpoint to the traffic noise as he wonders if those cans of Coors were really a good idea the evening before a test—

Like Ashanda Roe, aged twenty-eight, working a dead-end shelf-stacking job in a 7-Eleven on D Street NW, sweating as she tears open boxes of Depends and shoves them into position on an end galley, tossing the packaging into a rattly cage and whistling under her breath. She’s worrying because her son Darrick, who is only seven, is spending too much time with a bunch of no-good kids who hang out with—

Six thousand, two hundred and eighty-six other people, ordinary people, men and women and children, tourists and natives, illegal immigrants and blue bloods, homeless vagrants and ambassadors—

Stop all the clocks.

* * *

In the grand scheme of things, in the recondite world of nuclear war planning, a one-kiloton atomic bomb doesn’t sound like much. It’s less than a tenth the yield of the weapon that leveled the heart of Hiroshima, a two-hundredth the power of a single warhead from a Minuteman or Trident missile. But the destructive force of a nuclear weapon doesn’t correspond directly to its nominal yield; a bomb with ten times the explosive power doesn’t cause ten times as much destruction as a smaller one.

Oliver Hjorth’s first bomb detonated at twelve seconds past eleven-sixteen, on the eighth floor of a steel-framed concrete department store about a third of a mile from the White House.

Within a hundredth of a second, the department store building and everything else on its block vanished (along with fifty-seven staff and one hundred and fourteen shoppers), swallowed by a white-hot sphere of superheated gas and molten dust. The department store’s neighbors, out to a radius of a block, survived a fraction of a second longer, their stone and concrete facades scorching and beginning to smoke, until the expanding shock wave, air compressed and flash-heated to thousands of degrees, rammed into them like a runaway train.

Beyond the immediate neighborhood, the shock wave dissipated rapidly, reflecting off concrete and asphalt and thundering skywards in a bellowing roar that would, a little over a minute later, be audible in Baltimore. And beyond a couple of blocks’ radius, only the most unlucky bystanders—those standing where they were caught with a direct line of sight down Seventeenth Street or H Street—would be exposed to the heat pulse, their skin charring and their eyes burned out by the flash.

But within a third of a mile, the destruction was horrendous.

Nazma Hussein saw a flash out of the corner of her eye, like a reflection from the noonday sun, only more brilliant. Looking up, she glanced at the window: But it was nothing, and she looked back at the table she was laying out cutlery on, and deposited another fork on the place mat just as the shock wave arrived to throw a thousand glittering plate-glass knives through her face and abdomen.

Ryan saw a flash on the ground in front of him, and winced, closing his eyes as a wave of prickly heat washed over the back of his head and neck. He inhaled, his nostrils flaring. Flashes sparkled inside his eyelids as he smelled burning hair. His scalp ablaze, he drew breath to scream at the excruciating pain. But then the wind caught him with one hand, and the law library building with another, and clapped them together. And that was all he knew. A small mercy: He would not live to suffer the slow death of a thousand REMs that he had been exposed to, or the fourth-degree burns from the heat flash.

Ashanda was lucky. Working in the back of the store, she saw no flash of light, but heard a roar like a truck piling into the front of the building. The ground shook as the lights failed, and she fell to the floor, screaming in alarm. The rumbling went on for much too long, and she closed her eyes and prayed that it wasn’t an earthquake; but who in D.C. had ever imagined an earthquake striking here? As the vibration faded, she pulled herself to her knees, then up to her feet. People were moaning in the front of the shop, but without lights she might as well be blind. She began to fumble her way back to the stockroom door, still shaky, praying that Darrick was all right.

* * *

The White House, although originally built in the late eighteenth century, had been reconstructed in the mid-twentieth around a steel load-bearing frame. With stone walls and a steel skeleton, it was by no means as fragile as its age might suggest; but the Truman-era structure wasn’t designed to withstand a nuclear blast at close range, and in time of war the president was supposed to be elsewhere.

The White House survived the heat flash, but the shock wave took barely a second to surge down the street. By the time it hit the West Wing it was traveling at just over three hundred miles per hour, with an overpressure slightly over six pounds per square inch—funneled by the broad boulevard—and the force of a tornado.

BOY WONDER, the forty-third president of the United States, was chatting informally with his deputy chief of staff and special assistant (whose windowless office in the middle of the first floor of the West Wing was perhaps the most eavesdropper-proof location in the entire federal government) when the shock wave hit.

It would never be determined precisely why the president was visiting his campaign manager, chief political strategist, and senior advisor, rather than vice versa; it was perhaps a reflection of the importance of this secretive political operative to the administration. But the location of R’s lair, in the middle of a warren of offices on the first floor, meant that none of its occupants could have had any warning of the catastrophe. Perhaps the lights flickered and dimmed as the White House’s backup power supply kicked in, and perhaps they stared in annoyance at the dead phones in their hands; but before anyone had time to walk as far as the office door, the masonry, concrete, and stone of the West Wing was struck by a pile driver of compressed air. Just over six pounds per square inch sounds far less impressive than just under nine hundred pounds per square foot, but they are the same thing. Worse: The compressed air in the wave had to come from somewhere. As the shock wave passed, it left behind an evacuated zone, where the air pressure had dropped precipitously, swinging the strain on the building’s structure from positive pounds to negative. It was a lethal whiplash of pressure, five times worse than a direct strike by a tornado.

Had the West Wing been built of modern reinforced structural concrete it might have survived, albeit with severe damage. But it wasn’t, and the falling ceiling respected neither rank nor titles of nobility.

* * *

Eleven seconds later, the second bomb detonated. This one had been planted on the top floor of the Holocaust Museum on Fourteenth Street SW, just off Independence Avenue and two blocks away from the Mall.

Perhaps Earl Hjorth had meant to target Congress; if so, he’d been overoptimistic—situated over a mile away, the Capitol suffered external blast damage and many of its windows were blown in, but aside from shrapnel injuries, a number of flash fires ignited by the detonation, and severe damage to the outside of the dome, the Capitol was not seriously affected.

Not so the cluster of federal agencies around the Mall. FEMA and the FBI were both less than three thousand feet from ground zero; and pity the employees of the Department of Agriculture, across the road from the museum. More than eleven thousand people, mostly government employees and tourists, were directly affected by the second bomb, half of them killed by heat flash or shock wave as the rippling blast tore the heart out of the federal government.

And then there was the third bomb.

* * *

Eleven-sixteen and thirty-eight seconds. Two figures in desert fatigues bearing sergeant’s stripes—Kurt and Jurgen, who were in fact, by grace of his lordship Baron Griben ven Hjalmar, sergeants-at-arms of the post—appeared out of nowhere on the second floor of a car park adjacent to the Pentagon, one of them standing and the other sprawling atop a wheelbarrow that also contained an olive-drab cylinder.

“Scheisse,” said Jurgen, as Kurt swung his feet over the side of the barrow and stood up. Beneath the low concrete roof half the theft alarms of half the vehicles in the park were shrilling in an earsplitting cacophony that filled the head and threatened to overflow when he opened his mouth, a profoundly unnatural counterpoint to the low rumbling from outside.

“This way.” Kurt, eyes flickering side-to-side, pointed along a line of parked trucks and SUVs towards a bare concrete wall with a fire door. Jurgen swallowed bile, picked up the handles of the wheelbarrow, tried to ignore the nausea in his stomach. His feet lurched side-to-side as he shoved the heavy load towards the stairwell. “Two minutes.”

“Two? Okay.” Jurgen nodded. Everything was crystal clear, suffused with a luminosity of migraine. The Boss couldn’t be blamed for taking these little precautions, he could see that. “How about here—”

“No, we want a stairwell—”

“You! Freeze!” Jurgen stumbled. The guard who had just stepped out of the stairwell—Why is there a guard here?—had his M16 raised. “Identify yourselves! Sir!” The military courtesy didn’t in any way detract from the pointed message of the assault rifle. This wasn’t in the plan. Jurgen’s head pounded.

“What’s happening?” called Kurt.

“Full lockdown. Badges, now!” Another siren joined the clamoring car alarms—this one full-voiced and deep, the stentorian honking of a building alarm.

Kurt raised his left hand, then reached inside a trouser pocket. Time slowed to a crawl as he rolled sideways towards a parked F250. Jurgen dropped the barrow’s handles and broke right, diving for the opposite side of the row to take cover behind a Toyota compact. As he reached for his Glock, an earsplitting crackle of full-auto fire echoed from one end of the car park to the other. Grounded behind the Toyota, he rose to kneel, raised his pistol, and returned fire through the car’s windows—not aimed, but suppressive. He winced with each pull of the trigger as the reports rammed ice picks into his already aching head. He couldn’t be sure, but Kurt seemed to be shooting, too. Another hammer-drill burst of automatic fire, then the guard’s weapon fell silent.

“Kurt, wer ist—”

The harsh bang of another pistol shot was followed almost immediately by the irregular snap of rifle fire, and Kurt ducked, heart hammering and mouth dry. There’s more than one of them, he realized, icy horror settling into his belly. The plan was simple enough—he’d brought Kurt over, Kurt was to carry him back—but with him pinned down behind this automobile, there was no way that was going to work. He swallowed and rubbed his left sleeve against the car, trying to expose the temporary tattoo on his wrist. If world-walking twice in five minutes didn’t kill him, there was a good chance a three-floor fall would do the job, but the ticking nightmare in the barrow was an even more certain exit ticket.

“Ish’ vertrich nu!” He shouted, then stared at the knot on his wrist until it expanded into a white-hot pain between his eyes.

Falling. Into silence.

Behind him, ten meters up the aisle from where Jurgen’s bleeding body lay, twenty meters from the sentries crouched behind a Humvee, the thing in the wheelbarrow emitted a click, then a muffled bang, and finally a wisp of smoke that coiled towards the ceiling. The detonation sequencer had done its job, but this particular FADM had missed its last maintenance check due to a bookkeeping irregularity. The constant warm rain of neutrons from the high-purity plutonium pit had, over the years, degraded the detonators distributed around its shell of high explosives. Overdue for tear-down and reconstruction half a decade ago, the bomb failed to explode; instead, the long-term storable core began to burn, fizzing and smoldering inside its casing.

Not all the detonators had degraded. When the high explosive sphere finally blew seventy seconds later, it killed four marine guards as they advanced from truck to truck, closing in on the hostiles’ last known location. But the blast was unsequenced and asymmetric. Rather than imploding the weapon’s pit and triggering a fission chain reaction, it merely fragmented it and blasted chunks of hot plutonium shrapnel into the surrounding cars and concrete structure of the car park.

* * *

July 16, 2003, eleven o’clock and thirty minutes, local time; fighters roared, circling overhead. Beneath the leaden, smoldering skies the clocks had stopped, the telephone exchanges dead and muffled by the electromagnetic pulses. And though the survivors were stirring, shocky and dazed but helping one another shuffle away from the burning holes of the city in every direction—north, south, east, and west—nothing now would ever come to any good.

Stop all the clocks.