He decided that he had been angry long enough.
He snatched up the phone: “This is NSCAC,” he growled, “connect me to the duty NSCAC at CC-ONE-TWO.”
CC-02 was the Air Defence Centre at McChord Air Force Base less than forty miles from the first of the two airbursts in the Seattle area. McChord was ‘live’ but off line and without its real time update NORAD’s coverage of the north-west was dangerously threadbare.
“Is that you Carl?” Inquired the harassed voice at the other end of the secure land line.
“Yeah, it’s a long story.” Solomon Kaufmann, Carl’s deputy was out of town, his father having passed away in Albuquerque a couple of days ago; and Carl’s senior network analyst, Max Calman’s wife was about to produce twins. “You’ll hear about it sooner or later.” He got straight down to business. “Are you still in one piece up there?”
“No local damage,” the man in Washington State reported. “We think the second airburst shorted out half the state and started god knows how many secondary explosions and fires across the switching network. A couple of the ADC generators shorted out at the same time but we should be back on line in a few minutes. The controllers are working in manual mode so we’re fully operational but you won’t be seeing what we’re seeing or uploading anything from us in real time for a while. So far we’ve plotted an airburst across the border in the Fraser Valley, one in the vicinity of Dabob Bay, that’s way west of Seattle and north-west of Bremerton, and another east of Seattle at Sammanish. That last one will have done a lot of damage in the city itself; we’re locating ground zero as ten to fifteen nautical miles from the Central Seattle waterfront. The blast will almost certainly have taken out Bellevue…”
Carl Drinkwater was not intimately acquainted with the layout of the suburbs of Seattle. Right now he did not care. If he was still alive in the morning the Air Force was going to be looking to put somebody’s arse in a sling because significant pieces of the SAGE jigsaw were not talking to each other. His head would be the first on the block because he was the guy standing in front of them; not the traitors who had cut corners building the telecommunications infrastructure of the continental networks.
“Oh, shit!” This from the man at McChord Field.
“What?” Drinkwater demanded.
“You seeing what I’m seeing, Carl?”
Carl Drinkwater’s head jerked up and he looked at the ‘battle board’.
Two more ICBMs were tracking towards landfall in Nebraska and warnings were automatically being re-sent to Grand Island, Norfolk, Freemont, Columbus, Omaha and Sioux City, Iowa. The ‘battle board’ was already painting Omaha and Grand Island as the most likely targets. Omaha made perfect sense, Offutt Air Force Base; the Headquarters of Strategic Air Command was nearby. But Grand Island?
Another track appeared on the displays.
And suddenly disappeared somewhere over northern Alberta.
“Another Ghost?” Somebody complained.
The incoming bombers had to be jamming across the spectrum as well as dropping chaff to fog to the radars. SAGE ought to be able to compensate for that but then parts of the network were too impaired, too compromised by EMPs, and up around Seattle there would be physical damage to power and phone lines, and several radar stations were off line.
Drinkwater told his counterpart at McChord Air Force Base about the ‘ghost’ ICBM track.
“I saw that, too,” the other man declared. “Maybe, it burned up during re-entry?”
Or it just malfunctioned.
Drinkwater killed the connection.
And watched the tracks of the two incoming ICBMs inexorably zeroing in on the cities on the Nebraskan plain.
Okay, so the Soviets had not shot themselves dry just yet…
Chapter 7
When the lights went out the man and the woman had reached for each other and fucked on the hall floor. They had both known they would end up fucking that night the moment Judy had joined the stranger at the bar down the street from the Mount Baker Theatre. However, neither had imagined that their initial coupling would be so primal or so frantic; in the darkness the man had pulled down Judy’s panties, she had fumbled at his belt and fly; and he had taken her fast and hard. It was over in seconds, not minutes.
‘Sorry, I must have hurt you,’ Sam Brenckmann gasped. He was ashamed of himself. He had treated her like a piece of meat and that was so wrong. ‘I don’t know what…’
Judy sucked in a breath.
And giggled.
She had crossed her ankles behind his back and was clinging to him so hard he could not have withdrawn from her even in the unlikely event he had wanted to. She moaned, enjoying him big inside her a little longer before she decided the floor was very hard and cold.
‘It is cold in the basement,’ she had sighed. ‘Let’s do this again upstairs. In the bedroom.’
They had gathered up the quilts that Judy had discarded at the foot of the stairs and groped their way to the big first floor front room in the near stygian darkness. They had thrown their clothes in heaps on the floor and dived beneath the sheets.
Their second love-making was a slower, greedier affair which had started lazily and built towards a frenzied, loud climax. The man had pumped maniacally at the end and then they had collapsed in each other’s arms.
Afterwards they had waited.
Neither had the least inclination to move.
“I’m not a slut,” Judy announced in the blackness.
Sam said nothing.
“But I was going to do this someday, sometime…”
“Why?” He asked. She had curled in the crook of his right arm, pressing every part of herself that she possibly could against his skin, flesh to flesh in hot, febrile yearning.
“All my life I’ve done the right thing. All it ever got me was a bad marriage, and a crappy job in a dead end town. And now the World has gone crazy.”
Okay, he saw a kind of skewed logic in that.
“So, if it wasn’t me it would have been somebody else?”
“Maybe. But it was you.”
One day he would write a great song, a ballad, about tonight.
He guessed there would be a lot of ballads and elegies written and sung about the end of the World. Always assuming somebody survived to tell the tale.
“You looked kind of lost,” Judy went on. “And cute.”
Nobody had called Sam ‘cute’ since he was five years old.
“We ought to go down to your basement,” he decided. “If there’s another big bang near here we’d be…”
“Screwed?” Judy laughed.
That was when he kissed her for the first time.
Chapter 8
First Lieutenant Nathan Zabriski, the navigator and bombardier of the B-52 The Big Cigar of the 525th Bombardment Squadron of the 4136th Strategic Wing, did not need to inform the rest of the crew that the aircraft had flown north of the Arctic Circle in the last few minutes. In addition to the failure of most of the elements of the bomber’s electronics suite, the cabin heaters were barely taking the edge off the bitter cold. The instruments showed over sixty degrees of frost outside as The Big Cigar cruised towards her polar rendezvous with the waiting KC-135 tankers still an hour’s flying time distant.