Dzerzhinsk, Gorky’s smaller western neighbour abutting against its eastern suburbs was the place where the Soviet empire manufactured many of its vilest chemical weapons. His briefing notes informed him that the manufacture of these abominations went back to 1941; and that since the Great Patriotic War the production of lewisite, yperite, prussic acid and phosgene had been centralised in the so-called Kaprolactam Organic Glass Factory at Dzerzhinsk.
The crew’s briefing folder had described the products of the Kaprolactam Organic Glass Factory in graphic detail. Lewisite was an organoarsenic compound which acted as a skin vesicant (a blistering agent) and lung irritant (causing victims to drown in their own destroyed lung tissue). Yperite was good old-fashioned mustard gas, albeit now produced in several particularly vicious and agonising variants. Prussic acid as any moderately informed school child knows is hydrogen cyanide; fatal in relatively small doses in minutes, and in doses of over 3000 parts per million within seconds. Phosgene was the gas commonly used alongside basic formulations of yperite in the trenches of World War I.
The Big Cigar had had to alter course and bomb four minutes late to clear the mushroom cloud of a large airburst over the northern suburbs of Gorky. The first of the B-52’s Mark 39 bombs, each with a W39 3.8 megaton thermonuclear warhead had been primed so as to explode at two thousand feet approximately over the centre of the city.
At the Initial Point of the bomb run First Lieutenant Nathan Zabriski, The Big Cigar’s navigator and bombardier, had walked through the failsafe protocols with the bomber’s pilot and co-pilot. Once the detonation sequence of the Mark 39 was programmed, there were three fail safes. The final fail safe was a simple ready-safe switch. Flicking the switch on each weapon had churned Nathan Zabriski’s guts. Notwithstanding, he had done his duty with painstaking, exhaustively practised competence.
Twenty-four seconds after the first Mark 39 dropped from The Big Cigar’s bomb bay the second had detached and fallen towards an ignition point high above the Central Administrative Block of the Kaprolactam Organic Glass Factory. No matter how much Zabriski wished good riddance to that foul factory he could not help but think of the imminent death of over two hundred thousand, mostly innocent, Russians living within the boundaries of the closed city of Dzerzhinsk.
“Thirty seconds to Gorky airburst!”
“I’m painting bandits rising at vector one-seven-five!” The electronic warfare office sitting in the claustrophobic mid section of the bomber behind Nathan Zabriski called calmly. “Two. No, cancel that. Four bogeys rising through level three zero. Range five-seven miles. Closing at,” he hesitated, “five miles per minute.”
Nathan did the math.
There was no way the bandits could engage The Big Cigar before both W39 warheads detonated. Whatever happened, he would know that he had done his duty. It was like a bad dream.
“Twenty seconds to Gorky air burst!”
“Missile lock!” The Electronic Warfare Officer’s voice was unemotional.
“Where did that come from, Elmer?” The pilot asked, his Texan drawl insouciant despite the clicking and hissing of the intercom.
The EWO checked his consoles.
“The goddam light just came on!” He complained. “Must be one of the bogeys I’m painting…”
While Nathan Zabriski’s mind only incidentally registered the fact that he and his comrades were probably about to die; he was distracted by other, more mundane considerations. Every big bomb which exploded in the atmosphere generated a highly destructive electromagnet pulse. The Big Cigar’s systems were as hardened as the American tax payer’s hard-earned cash could make them but even so, not a great deal was going to be fully functional in the unlikely event they got home. The B-52 was going to be in the maintenance hangar for weeks, perhaps months having practically every circuit, relay, connection, box, screen and gizmo ripped out and replaced. If, that was, they got home…
As if to emphasise the point his air-to-air repeater showing the surrounding airspace suddenly greyed out.
“Five seconds to Gorky air burst on my mark!”
Given that Nathan did not believe The Big Cigar was yet outside the notional ‘kill circle’ of the Gorky bomb worrying about the state of the bomber’s electronics suite was probably somewhat academic.
“FIVE! FOUR! THREE!”
He took one last gasp of air.
His oxygen mask chafed his face.
“TWO!”
The moment when he killed hundreds of thousands of people he had never met was NOW!
“ONE!”
“Shit!” Muttered the EWO.
His display screens had just died.
“Where were the bandits when that thing went off?” Inquired the pilot laconically.
“Right on top of it, skipper!”
Then blast wave hit The Big Cigar.
Chapter 3
It was purely by chance that Carl Drinkwater was the duty Burroughs NSCAC — Network Systems Communications Analyst Consultant — that night. Technically, he managed the Burroughs Corporation Systems Integration (Peterson Air Force Base) Network Implementation and Testing Team and very rarely experienced the visceral, febrile, frankly erotic, joy of actually getting up close and dirty to the business end of the vastly expensive state of the art, unbelievably cutting edge computers at the heart of NORAD’s day to day operations. Normally, his deputy, Solomon Kaufmann, would step up to the plate if their ‘A’ Team had a man down but Solomon’s father had died two days ago and Max Calman’s — the duty analyst’s — wife had been rushed into hospital that afternoon. Lena Calman was expecting twins pretty much about now, which meant that Carl Drinkwater was the guy holding the ball on the night the World went mad.
If the World had waited another year or two NORAD’s — the North American Aerospace Defence Command’s — purpose-built nuclear bunker under nearby Cheyenne Mountain would have been fully operational. But globally that was not going to make much difference tonight; it just meant that Carl Drinkwater’s personal chances of surviving Armageddon were somewhat reduced. The basement of the building in which he was working might provide minimal protection from a conventional bombing attack but if the Air Base was targeted by a nuke, well…
Nevertheless, what rational mind could not marvel at the peerless technological wizardry, and untold scientific treasure which had been brought together to create the control room around which the man from the Burroughs Corporation now prowled like a tiger protecting his cubs?
Carl Drinkwater was a balding, bespectacled man who had fallen in love with electronics in his teens. Having served as a humble radar man on destroyers in the Pacific War under the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 — more generally known as the ‘GI Bill’ — he had gone back to college between 1946 and 1948. College had been Caltech, the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena, where later he had joked, among fellow believers, that he had found ‘God’. Carl Drinkwater’s bespoke ‘God’ was not affiliated to any particular religion or existential belief system, Carl’s ‘God’ was firmly anchored in the miracles of the physical universe in which the immutable laws of pure mathematics, physics, chemistry and ‘coding’ algorithms would one day explain everything. It was at Caltech that he had encountered most of the friends, colleagues and competitors within the brotherhood of brilliant minds and hard-headed, far-seeing military visionaries which had created and under-pinned the ongoing development of the SAGE system, around which the aerial defence of the North American continent had been set, quite literally, in stone.