A couple of seconds later, the reports reached the carrier.
Weathers raised the binoculars, focusing them on the shifting spotlight dancing over the deck of a white boat that—
Shit. Shit. Shit!
The attack on Truman still fresh in his mind, as well as the near miss on his own carrier, Weathers immediately ordered the sailors armed with shoulder-launched Stinger missiles to focus on the rogue boat.
The well-trained crew jumped into action, and within thirty seconds, four bright plumes rocketed away from Bush toward the Boston Whaler, now floating roughly a third of a mile away, its single outboard engine on fire after taking multiple hits from the Defender boat.
And that was the last thing he saw.
Inside the metallic case, a charge of conventional explosives fired a hollow uranium “bullet” down the barrel of the gun-type weapon, striking its cylindrical uranium target and achieving critical mass.
In microseconds, the exothermic reaction heated the air to incandescence as the fission event unleashed incomprehensible amounts of thermal energy into the surroundings, vaporizing the Boston Whaler, the Defender, and hundreds of thousands of gallons of seawater. The chain reaction created a fireball that reached almost eight hundred feet high, visible as far away as Richmond.
The airburst that followed a half second later propagated radially across the water toward Newport News with a pressure of more than two hundred pounds per square inch. The shockwave dropped to eighty psi five hundred feet from shore and down to twenty psi by the time it reached the shores of Christopher Newport Park at the western end of downtown Newport News.
The pressure wave crushed moored boats, surrounding warehouses, waterfront businesses, and parking garages. It slammed into the Newport Towers and River Park Towers apartment complexes just beyond Christopher Newport Park at fifteen psi, collapsing them. Dropping to five psi while propagating east toward West Avenue — roughly a thousand feet from the water — it shattered windows and tossed vehicles. It finally turned into a gust of very hot forty-mile-an-hour wind by the time it swept across Washington Avenue, almost a quarter mile from shore.
In the second that followed the blast, collapsing structures crushed more than three thousand souls living or working within the kill zone between the shore and West Avenue.
The blast released an enormous amount of heat into the atmosphere, reaching almost fifteen calories per cubic inch as it spread out in a circle from the blast site, igniting the shoreline of Newport News. Triggering fires and incinerating anyone who may have survived the initial airburst by the water, the heat wave dropped to five calories per cubic inch by West Avenue, inflicting third-degree burns on exposed skin.
At the same time, a radiation plume of five hundred rems rushed across Hampton Roads, contaminating the shoreline, finally falling to safe levels by the edge of Christopher Newport Park, near the collapsing apartment complexes.
To the west, the shockwave collided against Bush’s starboard at a pressure of eleven psi, pushing the carrier over almost six degrees to port while shattering all starboard-facing windows on the island superstructure. The deafening airburst swept across the largely empty flight deck; the aircraft from Carrier Air Wing 7 were at nearby NAS Oceana, their home when Bush was not deployed.
Radioactive debris, mixed with hundreds of thousands of gallons of seawater and sediment, surged skyward in a column of boiling gases and superhot particles. It reached a height of almost fifteen thousand feet, where the atmosphere fought back, flattening the shaft into the familiar mushroom cloud.
Luckily, the prevailing winds aloft carried the fallout over Chesapeake Bay and into the Atlantic Ocean, sparing the surrounding communities from a shower of radioactive debris.
Ibarra blinked as the horizon pulsated with white light before a deep rumble echoed across the bay, followed by the distant rising column of radioactive debris. Even from ten miles away, the blast was ominous.
“Dios mío,” mumbled Mario Mendoza, crossing himself.
Although Ibarra, as well as the rest of his crew, had known the nature of the mission and carried it out as ordered, the reality of having set off a nuclear device in a populated area had a sobering effect on all of them.
The Basque sailor had faced many challenges in his life, some at the hand of nature, like North Atlantic gales, and others at the hand of men, when he’d had to kill or be killed.
But this… this was… apocalyptic, surreal, like if the devil himself had reached from the lowest level of hell and pushed his fiery fist into the night sky over Newport News.
As he stared at the distant mushroom cloud pulsating with yellow and red atop the boiling stem, Javier Ibarra had the strange feeling that no amount of money would be enough to escape the manhunt that was sure to follow this Armageddon of his own creation.
And it was at this moment, as a light and warm breeze swept across Chesapeake Bay and into the Atlantic Ocean, that he realized that life as he knew it would never be the same again.
They sat in silence in the Situation Room staring at the high-definition images on the large TV screens as emergency crews from multiple counties descended onto Newport News, the sight reminiscent of the Truman incident a week before. Body bags once more lined the piers and also streets, as an army of rescue crews dug through the rubble of several flattened city blocks.
President Cord Macklin contemplated the ghostly feed with growing anger. Although the result of the blast could have been far worse had that boat been allowed to get closer to shore and to Bush, the scenes were nonetheless the stuff of nightmares.
And on top of dealing with this unprecedented disaster on the home front — and on his watch — the president also had to face the repercussions of this attack abroad. The latest damage report from Bush indicated that the carrier would not be heading out to sea in the foreseeable future.
Macklin had already made the single phone call that activated the massive government machine to provide every possible support to the navy town. Multiple local, state, and federal emergency response agencies under the coordination of the Department of Homeland Security had taken over warehouses just beyond the blast zone to set up a headquarters to deal with the disaster. Although radiation fallout had been contained over the water, crews still wore hazmat suits as a precaution. Working thirty-minute shifts inside the kill zone below 6th Street, they searched for survivors while helicopters flew nonstop carrying victims to hospitals in a five-state area.
It was a disaster on a scale unseen in America, but it was still only a small fraction of the damage that would have occurred had that Coast Guard Defender boat not stopped the rogue Boston Whaler when it did.
“And we now have a connection,” Hartwell Prost said, referring to the intelligence extracted from Prince Omar Al Saud by a CIA team operating out of a black ops site in Poland, where Cmdr. Jake Russo’s team had delivered the HVT after a brief stopover in Germany.
Macklin frowned. His first reaction after hearing the intel had been to get on the horn with President Xi Jiechi and confront him with the secret arrangement between the Saudi prince and General Deng Xiangsui. But Prost had talked him out of it, arguing that it was more valuable that the general didn’t know he had been made — for a time. Meanwhile, Prost was working with Secretary of State Brad Austin to go after the prince’s assets, as well as his supporters in Saudi Arabia, which included members of the royal family.