“I can hear you,” Clarence said, his voice also choked with sobs. “You are really something else. Nobody ever been as tough as you.”
“Sorry about those Toby jokes,” Perry said. “Truth be told, I was just jealous of you and Margo. I wanted to beat the shit out of something, and you were there.”
“I know,” Clarence said. “It’s nothing.”
“Don’t fuck it up with her,” Perry said. “I hope you know what you’ve got.”
“I do,” Clarence said. “Trust me, I do.”
“Cool,” Perry said. “Uh… how long do I have?”
Murray’s voice. “About fifteen seconds.”
“No shit?” Perry said. “That’s kind of fucked up.”
A pause. More coughing.
“Margo?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you for saving my life.”
B61 MAKES BINGO
The order came through.
Captain Paul Ward asked them to repeat it.
They did.
Paul said nothing.
His weapons officer, Lieutenant Colonel Maegan “Mae” Breakall, sat right behind him. She was one the few female crew members of an F-15E, and she’d achieved that position by being a team player and never questioning an order.
While Paul sat speechless, Mae also asked them to repeat it.
They did so, this time with a bit more force.
Captain Paul Ward then did something he hadn’t done in his entire military career—he refused to obey.
No sir.
No sir, I will not drop a ten-kiloton B61 nuclear warhead on the Motor City.
Fifteen seconds later, air force general Luis Monroe came on the line. As if that weren’t enough, President John Gutierrez joined in as well. One hell of a conference call.
Monroe explained, quite calmly, considering the situation, that if Paul and Mae disobeyed a direct order, it was an act of treason. Gutierrez added some motivation of his own—if Captain Paul Ward did not drop the bomb, like right fucking now, he would be directly responsible for a disease spreading across the United States of America, a disease that could potentially destroy the country, its people, and if they were really unlucky, the entire human race.
Paul and Mae had no idea how much of this was true, but then again, it wasn’t their job to question orders. Their job was to follow orders, from any commanding officer—and when those orders came first-person from the air force’s top man and the commander in chief, it was impossible to disobey.
Paul pulled back on the yoke, bringing the F-15E to fifteen thousand feet. As he did, the rest of his squadron kicked in the afterburners and headed out. The radio filled with chatter: the Ospreys, Black Hawks, A-10s, F-15s and every other aircraft turned away from downtown Detroit and flew at maximum speed.
Paul and Mae were alone.
About to drop a nuke on America.
Mae fought back tears as she entered information into the computer.
A B61 Model 4 tactical nuclear warhead is a kiloton-range weapon with a “dial-a-yield” feature. Dial-a-yield allows aircraft crews to change the B61’s output while in midflight. As ordered, Mae set in a yield of ten kilotons. She set the detonation point at one thousand feet, armed the weapon, then told Paul that it was ready to fire.
He flipped open the covering plate on the nuke trigger. He thought of his three sons back at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho, wondered how many sons like them were down there in Detroit, how many daughters, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces and cousins. And dogs. How many dogs were down there?
His finger gripped the trigger. His hand felt weak. He hoped that maybe, just maybe, he’d have an unexpected stroke and lose the ability to squeeze it.
Mae said, “Do it, Paul.”
He squeezed.
He didn’t have a stroke.
The trigger clicked home.
The twelve-foot-long B61 rocket fired, launching away from the F-15E at 750 miles per hour. As the bomb streaked toward the target, Paul went full throttle and shot away from Detroit at supersonic speed.
The seven-hundred-pound B61 dropped toward the city. The guidance computer tracked a signal emitting from near the corner of Franklin and Riopelle. The B61 wouldn’t actually hit the ground, but if it had, it would have landed only twenty feet away from the satphone in Perry Dawsey’s hand.
At twelve hundred feet, a gas generator fired, ejecting a twenty-four-foot nylon/Kevlar-29 ribbon parachute. In just three seconds, the B61 slowed from 750 miles an hour to 35.
It drifted down until it hit eleven hundred feet, where barometric pressure activated a firing mechanism that began a nuclear chain reaction.
Detonation.
In a millionth of a second, a fireball formed and heated the air to 18,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit, nearly twice as hot as the surface of the sun. This heat radiated outward at the speed of light, expanding and dissipating. Dissipating being a relative term, however, as the heat caused instant first-degree burns as far as two miles away. The closer to the detonation, the worse the burns. Inside a quarter mile of the blast, flesh simply vaporized.
Every spore within a mile of the detonation point died instantly. Those between one and two miles out lived for as long as two seconds before they burned up in infinitesimally small puffs of smoke. The five-mile-per-hour wind had carried some lucky spores as far as two and a half miles away—those took almost five seconds to cook, but they cooked just the same.
The plasma ball was really the whole point of the nuke, to create instant, scorching temperatures that would kill every spore, and it worked like a charm.
The rest of the nuke’s effects were a bit of unavoidable overkill.
The Renaissance Center stood less than a mile from the detonation point. Star-hot heat radiated down, turning metal, glass and plastic into boiling liquid. Some of these liquids evaporated instantly, but the building didn’t have time to completely melt and burn.
The shock wave came next.
The explosion’s power pushed the air around it outward in a pressure wave moving at 780 miles an hour, just a touch over the speed of sound and twice the speed of an F-5 tornado, the most powerful wind force on Earth. The wave smashed into the melting glass, metal and plastic of the RenCen, thirty-five pounds per square inch of overpressure splashing the molten liquid away in a giant wave and shattering the still-solid parts like a sledgehammer slamming through a toothpick house.
The RenCen’s main tower had seventy-three stories, the four surrounding towers thirty-nine stories each. Less than three seconds after detonation, all of it was gone.
The shock wave rolled out at the speed of sound, losing energy as it moved. It shattered Comerica Park, home of the Tigers, ripping the concrete stands to pieces and hurling chunks of them for miles. In the days that followed, three seats from Section 219, half melted but still bolted to their concrete footings, would be found in the parking lot of Big Sammy’s Bar in Westland, twenty miles away. The curved white roof of Ford Field, home of the Detroit Lions, caved in like an eggshell stomped by a fat man.
A mile outward from the detonation point, the pressure wave smashed any building smaller than ten stories, broken pieces flying farther outward in a lethal, hurricane-class shrapnel cloud of brick and wood and metal and glass.
That same pressure wave picked up cars and flung them like Matchbox toys, spinning them through crumbling buildings, each Ford or Toyota or Chrysler its own whirling missile of death. As far as a mile away, the blast knocked burning cars onto their sides and roofs.
Detroit wasn’t the only city to feel the effects. Across the river the fireball scorched most of Windsor. The shock wave tore through the city, leveling houses as far as a mile from the shoreline.