Apartments and office buildings began collapsing from the shock waves and the intense heat. All but one hospital was incinerated or destroyed beyond recognition. And then the Lincoln Tunnel imploded. A billion gallons of the Hudson River — now superheated by the thermonuclear blasT — surged into Chelsea, annihilated Penn Station, and boiled everything and everyone south of Broadway.
Seattle was next in line, mere seconds after Manhattan.
The missile seemed to emerge out of nowhere. Launched from a ship several hundred miles off the Canadian coastline, it quickly arced over Victoria, over Port Angeles and Olympic National Park, on a direct trajectory into the center of the city.
Ground zero was Pike Place Market, and when the fifty-kiloton nuclear warhead detonated, it instantly and completely vaporized anything and everything for miles in all directions. The Space Needle. The aquarium and the science center. Amazon.com’s headquarters. Safeco Field. And every Starbucks in between. All of it was gone in the snap of a finger.
None of the city’s twenty-one state-of-the-art air raid sirens went off. They had originally been installed in the early 1950s during the Cold War. They’d been cosmetically upgraded in 2006 at a cost of $91,000. But they’d been useless. No one in the mayor’s office or the police department or the fire department knew the missile was coming. No one knew the threat that was inbound. Thus no one had activated the sirens. But even if someone had, would anyone in Seattle have known what to do or where to go? Would there have been any time to seek shelter? No one was left to ask the questions, for now the air raid sirens and the city they were designed to protect were gone entirely.
Untold thousands lay dead and dying. More would join them soon. Indeed, the death toll in Seattle alone would soar into the hundreds of thousands within hours. An enormous mushroom cloud, crackling with toxic radioactive dust, now formed over the city. Those not blinded by the initial blast could see the lethal, glowing plume from miles away. It was certainly seen on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, just ten miles away, and as the killer winds began to blow, death and destruction soon followed. It was only a matter of time. There would be no escape, and no place to hide.
Surely first responders would emerge from surrounding states and communities, eager to help in any way they possibly could. But how would they get into the hot zones? How would they communicate? Where would they take the dead? Where would they take the dying? The power grid went down instantly. All communications went dark. The electromagnetic pulse set off by the warhead’s detonation had fried all electronic circuitry for miles. The electrical systems of most motor vehicles in Seattle — from fire trucks and ambulances to police cars and military Humvees, not to mention most helicopters and fixed-wing aircrafT — were immobilized completely or, at the very least, severely damaged. Most cell phones, pagers, PDAs, TVs, and radios were rendered useless as well, as were even the backup power systems in hospitals and other emergency facilities throughout the blast radius.
The same was true in Washington, D.C., and New York. No amount of emergency planning had prepared anyone for something of this scale. Raging fires and radioactive winds were killing everyone in their paths, yet fleeing for safety was difficult if not impossible. Shock paralyzed millions. The lack of electricity paralyzed millions more, as did the inability to communicate. What had just happened? What was coming next? Where could one go to be safe? And how in the world should one get there?
And then the City of Angels became the City of Demons.
Jackie Sanchez picked up the secure phone on the console in front of her and took the priority-one call from General Briggs at NORAD. She could barely believe what he was telling her, but she had no time to argue. They had a minute, if that, to get the president to safety.
She slammed down the phone and quickly shouted a series of coded commands into her wrist-mounted microphone. Her team reacted instantly, just as they’d been trained. She wasn’t sure if it really mattered. Perhaps all their efforts would be in vain. Maybe they wouldn’t save any lives. But they had to do it anyway. They had to try. They had taken an oath, and they would be faithful to the end.
On the bank of surveillance monitors in front of her, she saw a dozen of her best agents — guns drawn — suddenly rush the convention stage, surround the president, grab him by the arms, and literally carry him away, his feet barely touching the ground. Sanchez then bolted out of the command post and met the president’s protective detail backstage and ordered them downstairs, into the makeshift bunker.
“Go, go, go,” she yelled as they raced the president down one corridor after another, into a heavily guarded stairwell, and down five flights, eventually bursting into the basement, where all the convention center’s HVAC systems were housed. They turned one corner and then another, ducking pipes and ducts along the way. A moment later, they raced the president into a large storage freezer, slammed the door shut behind them, and worked feverishly to put him in a protective suit, gloves, and mask, pre-positioned there by the army’s nuclear, biological, and chemical fast-reaction team.
That done, Sanchez and her agents began to suit up themselves. But just then, Sanchez felt the ground shake violently beneath her feet. She could hear the deafening blast. She could suddenly feel the scorching heat. She had enough time to realize that her best efforts to protect the president had failed, that it was over, and then, sure enough, it was.
14
The waves lapped gently, rhythmically, upon the shore.
A full, majestic moon hung over the Atlantic and a balmy breeze swept in off the water, carrying with it the distant cries of seagulls and the horn of a freighter veering a bit too close to the shore. The mood was festive, and everyone was drinking champagne and eating chilled shrimp as the vice president’s small but loyal staff huddled in the living room of the gorgeous summerhouse on a six-million-dollar stretch of exquisite beachfront property, just outside of Jacksonville in a community called Ponte Vedra.
They had gathered to watch the president’s third, final, and most important address to a Republican convention. They had gathered to see how James MacPherson’s daring new policy would play before the country, and the world. But suddenly, they saw nothing on the vice president’s new plasma screen but snow.
Bobby Caulfield, the VP’s twenty-three-year-old personal aide, quickly grabbed the remote and switched from FOX to CNN. The picture was out there as well. His fellow staffers groaned. Caulfield switched to MSNBC. Nothing. Next he flipped through each of the broadcast networks, but they, too, all seemed to be knocked off the air.
“What in the world…,” he muttered to himself as he clicked his way through nearly two hundred cable channels in the next sixty seconds. He found some still functioning. A food channel here. A travel channel there. An exercise show or two. But none of the networks carrying the president’s address at the Republican convention was working, and he could feel the small crowd of senior staffers turning on him, as though somehow this were his fault.