Then came the words over the loudspeaker that stunned Briggs to his core.
“Launch detection,” the senior watch officer yelled. “I have a launch detection just off the coast of Baltimore. This is not a drill. I repeaT — this is not a drill.”
Briggs jumped to his feet, bolted from his office, and reached the side of the watch officer just as the lieutenant colonel yelled, “Strike thaT — I have two launch detections. I repeat, two launch detections — no, make that three — two off the coast of Baltimore, another off the coast of Vancouver, Canada.”
All eyes were now fixed on the large-screen video monitors in front of them, showing the high-speed radar track of three unknown projectiles.
Briggs let out a string of expletives and then asked, “Are those from subs?”
“They can’t be,” the watch officer replied. “SUBLANT hasn’t reported anything that close to the East Coast, and SUBPAC has been quiet for days,” he noted, referring to the navy’s submarine tracking systems in the Atlantic and Pacific, respectively.
“Then what the—?”
Briggs’s naval liaison suddenly burst into the CMOC from a side room. “Container ships,” he said breathlessly. “Someone’s firing missiles — probably Scuds — off the back of commercial container ships.”
“You’re absolutely sure these aren’t sub-launched?” Briggs pressed.
“Positive, sir,” Briggs’s deputy confirmed. “The speed, the trajectories — they’re all wrong for a sub launch, sir. Those appear to be Scud C ballistic missiles, and I agree, sir — they do seem to be coming off the back of commercial container ships or frigates, sir.”
It seemed impossible, Briggs thought, but unfortunately it wasn’t. As far back as the Rumsfeld Commission report to Congress in the 1990s on the emerging ballistic missile threat to the United States, the possibility of an attack like this had been growing. Years before, Iran had tested firing high-speed, short-range, single-stage, tactical ballistic missiles off of ships. So had the North Koreans. But after the Day of Devastation, the prospect of such an attack seemed so implausible that Briggs could barely believe what his top advisors — and his own eyes — were telling him.
“Look there,” his deputy insisted, pointing to the latest telemetry pouring into his computer monitor. “No question — those are Scuds.”
“Range?” Briggs demanded.
“About six hundred kilometers, sir,” the senior watch officer replied.
“Probable targets?”
“The computers are saying D.C. and Seattle, sir.”
“How long until impact?” Briggs asked, realizing how long it had been since the first Gulf War, the last time he’d been Scud hunting. “Five, six minutes?”
“No, sir,” said the watch officer, twenty years his junior. “Scud Cs only carry enough fuel for an eighty- to ninety-second burn. They’re going to hit in less than two minutes. Guaranteed.”
Briggs cursed again. This could not be happening. Not on his watch.
It had been a while since he had brushed up on the specifications of a Scud C ballistic missile. But one thing he knew for sure: they could carry quite a payload. So what were these two carrying — conventional high explosives or eighty-kiloton nuclear warheads? They were about to find out, and fast.
He immediately ordered his staff to alert the Pentagon, Homeland Security, and the Coast Guard and to get him an open line with the Secret Service. They were going to DefCon One. They were going to war, but with whom? He had no idea.
And then it happened again.
“Sir, we have another launch detection,” the watch officer shouted.
“Where?”
“Just off the Port of Newark, sir.”
“Probable target?”
“Manhattan.”
“Time to impact?”
“Sixty seconds, if that.”
Briggs and his team were in a state of shock. All of them knew the terrible truth, but none of them dared say it aloud. They could alert anyone and everyone, as many as they had time for. But that was all they could do. They had no ability to stop the missiles. The U.S. had no defenses against short-range ballistic missiles fired so close to her coastlines. They certainly didn’t have the capacity to evacuate Washington, New York, or Seattle, even if they’d had days, not seconds. These missiles were going to strike. Millions were going to die. And all they could do was watch.
“We have another launch detection,” the senior watch officer yelled. “I repeat, we have a fifth missile launch.”
Not again, Briggs thought. How was it possible? How many more were coming? And who was launching them in the first place?
“Where’s this one coming from?” Briggs demanded.
“About a hundred kilometers west-southwest of Long Beach, sir.”
“Probable target?”
“Everything in Southern California is probably in range, sir,” the officer replied.
It was a true statement, as far as it went. But Briggs knew instantly what NORAD’s supercomputers were going to tell him in another few seconds. The point of impact was going to be Staples Center. The Republican National Convention. Someone was gunning for the president of the United States.
And then Briggs noticed that the flight path of this fifth missile was radically different from the others. Rather than gaining altitude over Los Angeles in a classic ballistic arc, the missile was rapidly descending toward the water.
“That’s not a Scud,” he said as the missile leveled off.
As he stared, mesmerized, at the radar track, he could see the incoming projectile skimming the water, just eight to ten feet off the ocean’s surface and racing inland at twice the speed of sound.
“Then what is it?” the senior watch officer asked, looking on in horror.
“A death sentence,” Briggs said quietly.
The cold, hard truth was becoming clearer with each passing second. They were watching a highly coordinated decapitation strike, aimed at taking out the entire American government in a matter of minutes.
Sure enough, an instant later, the computers had it pegged. They were tracking a land attack cruise missile, most likely a Chinese- or North Korean — built model known as the “Sunburn.” The most lethal cruise missile in the world, the Sunburn was capable of carrying a two-hundred-kiloton nuclear warhead. And it was accurate to within ten feet.
Now there was no doubt for anyone in the room. Someone was targeting the president of the United States. And they didn’t just want to kill him. They wanted to annihilate him and his government.
12
“Mayday, Mayday. Vessel in distress. Over.”
Telecommunications Specialist of the Watch Carrie Sanders had been having a very quiet night. She was in her third year with the U.S. Coast Guard, serving in the tradition of her father and grandfather. It was her job to listen for distress calls and issue safety bulletins to boaters over the VHF radios from the Communications Center in the Guard’s mid-Atlantic regional headquarters. But it had been business as usual all evening, and she certainly hadn’t heard anything about what was transpiring at NORAD. In fact, she’d been so bored up to that moment, she had her feet up, was sipping her umpteenth Diet Coke of the night, was reading The Hunt for Red October yet again, and had been counting the hours until her shift was over and she could see her boyfriend, Tomas.