But now Sanders sat bolt upright at her console and pressed her headphones tightly against her ears to get all of the incoming transmission.
“Vessel in distress, this is the U.S. Coast Guard Sector Baltimore, channel one-six,” Sanders said calmly and professionally into her radio, though her heart was racing. “Vessel in distress, I repeat, this is Coast Guard Sector Baltimore, channel one-six. What is your position and nature of distress?”
“U.S. Coast Guard, this is the captain of the Panamanian container ship Double Dolphin…. GPS system not working… other electronics have failed…. Last known position was twenty-three miles east-southeast of Port Baltimore… inbound for Seagirt Marine Terminal…. Over.”
“Vessel in distress. Coast Guard Sector Baltimore. Roger that, Captain. Understand you are twenty-three miles east-southeast of Port Baltimore, on approach to SMT. Over.”
“Affirm, that’s affirmative, Coast Guard…. We’ve got… strange… here. Over.”
“Request you say again your last, Captain. What is the nature of your distress? Over.”
The next transmission from the Panamanian freighter was even more garbled and virtually indecipherable. Sanders ran a diagnostics check of her equipment, but all her systems were working well.
“Vessel in distress, this is Coast Guard Sector Baltimore. You are broken and unreadable. Need you to speak more clearly. Over.”
But again the transmission was clouded by static.
“Vessel in distress, this is Coast Guard Sector Baltimore on channel one-six — please repeat last transmission.”
“Roger that, Coast Guard…. I repeat, this is the captain of the Double Dolphin. We’ve got something really strange going on out here.”
“Roger that, Captain,” Sanders said. “Please explain.”
“Yeah, well, Coast Guard… I’m not sure…. The thing is…”
Sanders took a deep breath. She couldn’t let herself sound flustered. But she needed more information and she needed it quickly.
“What is the nature of your distress, Captain?” she asked again.
“I’m looking at a Liberian-flagged container ship…. It’s about a half mile off my port side, and I think…”
“You think what, Captain?”
“I think some kind of rocket just fired off its bow — and not just one, but two — one after the other.”
Sanders was speechless. Had she heard the man right? How could she have?
“Double Dolphin, this is Coast Guard Sector Baltimore; come again?”
“I’m telling you, Coast Guard, I think these guys have just fired some kind of rocket…. My crew and I saw a flash of lighT — like an explosion — on the bow…. Then we saw something explode off the deck and shoot up into the sky. It had a long flame beneath it, like when you see the space shuttle take off, but not that big…. I can still see the contrail — we all can. A few minutes later, it happened again. What’s going on?”
Sanders had no idea.
“Double Dolphin, this is Coast Guard Sector Baltimore, can you describe the ship in question?”
As the captain replied, Sanders scribbled notes as fast as she could. It was a commercial container ship, at least a thousand feet long, with Liberian registration, a black hull, and massive white letters LSC painted on the side. For the last twenty minutes or so, it had been dead in the water, the captain said. That’s how the Double Dolphin had come upon it out of nowhere. But now the freighter was reengaging its engines and seemed to be preparing to head back out to sea.
“What do you want me to do?” the captain asked, his voice betraying his fear.
“Nothing; just sit tight, shut down your engines, and stay close to your radio,” Sanders instructed. “I’ll be right back to you. Over.”
Sanders quickly reviewed her notes and tried to process what she was hearing. She hadn’t been alerted of any rocket or missile tests in the area. To her knowledge, there had never been any rocket or missile test in the area. And even if some secret test had been planned — a missile defense test, for example — how could it possibly involve a container ship flagged from Liberia? It made no sense, and that’s what worried her. All she knew for certain was that she had to pass this up the chain of command immediately.
She picked up the red phone on her console and speed-dialed the command duty officer at the operations center on the other side of the building. The CDO also served as the search-and-rescue mission controller for the area. He could not only dispatch Coast Guard choppers and cutters but pull in resources from the Patuxent Naval Air Station and the Maryland State Police if need be.
The CDO picked up the call on the first ring.
“Ops, this is the Comm Center,” Sanders said, trying desperately to keep her voice steady and her facts in order. “I just got a distress call you need to hear.”
But it was already too late.
13
Without warning, the capital of the United States was obliterated.
At precisely 9:12 p.m. Eastern, in a millisecond of time, in a blinding flash of light, the White House simply ceased to exist, as did everything and everyone else for miles in every direction.
No sooner had the first missile detonated in Lafayette Park than temperatures soared into the millions of degrees. The firestorm and blast wave that followed consumed everything in its path. Gone was the Treasury building, and with it the headquarters of the United States Secret Service. Gone was the FBI building, and the National Archives, and the Supreme Court, and the U.S. Capitol and all of its surrounding buildings. Wiped away was every monument, every museum, every restaurant, every hotel, every hospital, every library and landmark of any kind, every sign of civilization. Every building was just gone, and every soul as well.
Across the Potomac River, the Pentagon shuddered violently from the blast wave and then began to partially collapse. What remained standing was utterly ablaze, as was every structure not flattened for as far as the eye could see.
Howling, scorching winds soon began sweeping lethal radioactivity through the city’s northeast quadrant and into Maryland, surging through Prince George’s County and Anne Arundel County, as if they were following 295 to the north and Routes 50 and 214 to the east, through Capitol Heights and Lanham and Bowie toward Crofton and Annapolis. Soon more than five thousand square miles of Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia were contaminated with deadly levels of radioactivity. And the nightmare had only just begun.
Moments after the first missile hit D.C., a second missile struck the CIA building at Langley directly, its superheated fireball and cataclysmic blast wave obliterating the nation’s premier intelligence headquarters in the tree-lined suburbs of northern Virginia and vaporizing every home and office building, every church and mall for mile after mile in every direction. Those poor, unfortunate souls who didn’t die instantly suddenly found themselves blinded and burning and unable to move. Some would hang on for hours. Some would endure for days or even weeks. But there was no hope of survival. Nor was there any hope of rescue or evacuation.
The vast majority of those who didn’t die immediately sustained third-degree burns over most if not all of their bodies. People’s eardrums were blown out. Their hands and feet were blistered and bleeding. And they would continue to suffer horribly, until they eventually succumbed to the most excruciatingly painful deaths imaginable; there was absolutely nothing they or anyone else could do about it.
Manhattan took the next hit.
The Scud C hit the heart of Times Square, and it, too, carried a nuclear warhead. The effect was as ghastly as it was instantaneous. The detonation eradicated every life-form in a half-mile radius within a fraction of a second. Every building from the theater district and the New York Times Building to Grand Central station and beyond was vaporized in the blink of an eye, just as experts had long predicted and military commanders had long feared. Even buildings miles away from the epicenter were flattened by the blast wave. The firestorm ignited by the detonation spread at speeds upwards of six hundred miles an hour, and every borough was suddenly a raging, radioactive inferno that would blaze for weeks, if not months.