And everybody on board would have been killed.
Nathan checked his watch; it showed the B-52 had been in the air eighteen hours and three minutes.
The Big Cigar had been thirty minutes short of its failsafe station when the attack order had been received. Nobody had believed that message. Nobody had wanted to believe it; not even when the authentication codes checked out.
Gorky and Dzerzhinsk as primaries.
Sverdlovsk as the secondary if ‘operational imperatives required’.
Operational imperatives!
In other words if Gorky and Dzerzhinsk no longer existed The Big Cigar was to fly another six hundred and thirty miles farther east across heavily defended enemy airspace — with the enemy knowing they were coming — and attack Sverdlovsk. The B-52 would have been shot down several times on the way to Gorky. Attempting to penetrate another hour-an-a-half deeper into the enemy’s air defence net would have been, well, suicidal.
The Big Cigar was rolling slowly, stopping.
The big Pratt and Whitney JT3D turbofans were spooling down, around Nathan the other crew members were unbuckling their straps. Nobody liked sitting in puddles of aviation fuel. They had actually trained for a situation like this; but it was not the same when one was actually soaked in AVGAS and every time one moved the vile liquid squelched and bubbled beneath one’s butt. The filthy stuff itched and burned where it touched flesh, the fumes stung and watered eyes, and after a while no man could suppress his gag reflexes. They had all thrown up, Nathan was lucky; he had got his face mask off first.
The B-52 lurched to a standstill.
In retrospect Nathan did not remember how he came to be staggering on the windswept, rainy concrete apron being led away from the circle of fire wagons hosing foam onto The Big Cigar’s steaming, hissing, hot engine nacelles and onto the ground all around the huge bomber.
He flung away his face mask and helmet, began to tear at his flying suit.
“Slow down, Lieutenant,” suggested a grinning black face. The other man’s eyes seemed unnaturally bright in the loom of the fire wagons’ blinking, spinning lights. “We’ll get that shit off you soon enough.”
Nathan staggered.
The black man, a Sergeant on the Pratt and Whitney JT3D maintenance crew caught him and steadied him as he began to retch uncontrollably. The retching went on long after he had emptied what little remained of his stomach’s contents onto the tarmac at his feet.
Chapter 21
The Tacoma born fifty-two year old fifteenth Governor of the State of Washington had been the first catholic Italian-American to be elected governor west of the Mississippi.
Democrat Albert Dean Rosellini had first made his mark when in 1939 he was returned to the State Senate for the 33rd District in Seattle. He had been the youngest member of that house at the time, and risen to be Democratic majority leader in the years before he stood for the Governorship. He was a man with a reputation for breaking moulds, for getting things done and for his somewhat unpolitical decisiveness. He had started his political career as a New Deal Democrat and he had never reneged on the deal. He was a man of and who belonged to his State, he had come up the hard way — nobody had paid his ticket through law school — and he had little or no time for the airy, pie in the sky largely empty rhetoric of the elite in the other Washington, located in their ivory towers in the far away District of Columbia. He brought the energy of an immigrant’s son, a natural winning charm, and a hard-headed pragmatism to everything he touched and consequently, he tended to get things done.
That had not always gone down well with all his constituents; no matter, reforming the budget of the State, upgrading its transportation system and improving the education of its children and young adults had taken precedence over winning over every conceivable naysayer. Rosellini had been the driving force behind bringing the 1962 World’s Fair to Seattle, and vigorously championed previously stalled grand infrastructure projects like the construction of the longest floating bridge in the World, which on completion sometime in 1963 would carry State Route 250 across Lake Washington connecting Seattle to Medina. First and foremost he dreamed of ending the cycles of boom and bust that had characterised Washington State’s history. His vision was built around taking advantage of the legacy industries and skilled workers drawn to the American North West before and during the Second World War, and to employ the existing pool of skilled workers and college educated graduates — pro-rata a much higher proportion of the general population than in many other states — to attract new, technology-based companies to the American North West.
FDR’s New Deal had funded the construction of the great hydro-electric dams across the Columbia River, including the giant Grand Coulee Dam completed in 1941. The virtually limitless cheap electric power generated by those dams had drawn gold, silver, copper, lead and latterly, bauxite smelters to Tacoma. Boeing had built the bombers that helped to win the European and the Pacific wars at the biggest aircraft production plants in the World in and around Seattle. At Tacoma and across Puget Sound at Bremerton and in the deep water creeks and anchorages around it the US Navy had built, refitted and based many of the ships that had won the war in the Pacific. One hundred and eighty miles east of the State Capital at Olympia, the vast Hanford Works — where America built its atomic bombs — sat in the fastnesses of the American North West, still a secret, closed enclave. Yet while the afterglow of the great boon of the old war industries still warmed the State’s coffers and acted as a magnet — albeit a waning one — drawing young, well-educated high achievers to Washington, Albert Rosellini had always understood that if the relative prosperity of the State was to continue, it needed more than wishful thinking to make it happen.
Basically, he had to make it happen.
Which was why he was not so much afraid, as livid when he returned to the State Capitol Building in Olympia, seventy-five miles — as near as anybody could guess — from ground zero of the air burst that had torn the guts out of the city of Seattle.
The military were talking about a two to three megaton weapon.
There had not been that much visible damage south of Renton, fifteen miles out but already the roads were clogged with survivors. The National Guard was trying to maintain some kind of order but it was hopeless. Half the population of Washington State lived within the metropolitan area of Seattle and half the city no longer existed.
How could those idiots in DC have allowed it to happen?
The northern horizon flickered with the immense conflagrations consuming the ruins and even as Governor Rosellini hurried inside the State Capitol Building he felt the wind veering north to south. In an hour or so the foul stench of a city burning would blow down the streets of Olympia carrying God alone knew what radioactive poisons.
Everything he had ever dreamed of now seemed like wanton hubris.
The grandeur of the building around him only heightened his sense of helplessness. Albert Rosellini’s predecessors had thought just as big, perhaps bigger than he did, but somewhat less hard-headedly. The State Capitol Building was a monument to their ambition, if not their means. The towering edifice housed the State Legislature and the Governor’s Office, and in its basement, until a few hours ago mostly forgotten, the office of Washington’s ‘Emergency Disaster Management and Civil Defence Commissioner’.