Time was accurate. The underground shelter hewn out of Mount Weather was a forty-three-year-old complex. Officially it had never existed and was referred to only as the Special Facility, operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The complex was tucked into a heavily wooded mountain ridge, and surrounded by a 3 metre high chain-link fence with six strands of barbed wire on top. Inside there were manicured lawns and buildings with antennas and microwave relay systems. The hard rock face was reinforced with 2.5 to 3 metre iron bolts. Underneath there was a giant disaster co-ordination complex, covering 18,500 square metres, with a blast-proof steel door at the tunnel entrance. Offices were reinforced with steel and concrete. Drinking water was kept in an underground pond. There was a massive computer network and a television and radio studio from which to address the nation, together with a hospital, a cafeteria supplied with enough food for several weeks, a power plant, and dormitories. The most senior administration officials carried special cards, ranking them in order of importance for evacuation. They included Cabinet Secretaries and the heads or seconds-in-command of government departments and agencies. Private quarters were set aside for the President, Cabinet Secretaries, and Supreme Court Justices. Officials would be checked for radiation and those exposed would be decontaminated with showers and medicated soap. Their clothes would be burnt. They would be issued with military overalls. Electric golf carts would ferry the injured to hospital.
At the same time, Congress could seek refuge at the West Virginian resort of Greenbriar in White Sulphur Springs. The bunker was codenamed Project Greek Island, built under the hotel complex and equipped like Mount Weather, but with less luxury, to enable Congress to function for sixty days after a nuclear attack. The aim was to ensure that democracy did not collapse and give way to a military dictatorship. There were 1,000 bunk beds in eighteen dormitories, with communal toilets and all the character of a penal institution.
`What they envisioned during the Cold War, and are probably envisioning today,' wrote Time, `is an America darkened not only by nuclear war but also by the imposition of martial law, food rationing, censorship, and the suspension of many civil liberties. It would be the end of society as we know it.'
While the government continued its no comment policy, previous plans on how American would salvage its heritage from nuclear holocaust were discussed. The original documents of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights were to be flown from the National Archives, seven blocks from the White House, to Mount Weather. If there was time other documents such as a Gutenberg Bible, the Gettysburg Address, and the papers of James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and George Mason would be taken there by truck. The National Gallery chose the works to save not by painting but by the size of the canvas. They included Leonardo da Vinci's Ginevra de' Benci, Raphael's Alba Madonna, and Rogier van der Weyden's St George and the Dragon, which was just the size of a post card. They were packed in lightweight metal containers where the humidity in the air was stabilized by bags of chemicals.
The Federal Reserve Board would make its own arrangements. It maintained a 13,000 square metre bunker with enough cash inside to bankroll a nuclear-blasted America. Wads of bills were stacked in polythene packets against a wall on wooden pallets which would be moved out by a fork-lift truck. Standard Oil's senior management was withdrawing to an emergency operating centre 100 metres underground, near Hudson, New York. Their job was to ensure a continuation of energy supplies. The Department of Agriculture had published a food-rationing programme, allowing survivors between 2,000 and 2,500 calories a day, including seven pints of milk and six eggs a week.
Government officials spoke the single code word FLASH to notify others that the operation had begun.
National Guard units had been called out in all American cities. The President had declared a national emergency. Some of the worst rioting was now breaking out in Washington itself as rumours spread after the television networks began to speculate whether the President, his Cabinet, and senior officials would be airlifted to the Mount Weather bunker. `We never discuss security arrangements for the President,' said a White House spokesman. The Marine Corps threw up a cordon around Capitol Hill and the White House. Like the enemy in Zhongnanhai, American leaders were travelling back and forth through a warren of underground tunnels and railways, too afraid to show their faces to their constituents. Members of Congress were reportedly preparing to go to the Greenbriar shelter, 400 kilometres away, built under a luxury hotel complex. `We can neither confirm nor deny whether this facility is still in use,' said a spokesman. One Marine was shot dead in the neck by a sniper in the crowd. A rocket-propelled grenade was fired over the head of the Marines into a window of a Congress building. Helicopters dispersed the crowd with tear gas. Troops moved in with water cannon and rubber bullets.
The spectre of a nuclear holocaust could not be kept from the public, fear of an imminent nuclear strike had swept through the United States, and ignorance about what to do was shared between officials and members of the public. All had families to protect, children to be accounted for, supplies to be bought. The National Guard, army, and Marines had taken over most city centres. Looting gangs controlled many other parts. Many people saw the countryside as a safer place to be and headed out in their cars: the roads became clogged and fights broke out. The public transport systems halted. Airlines abandoned their schedules and flew their aircraft south to Latin America or north to Canada. Newspapers put out extra editions with instructions on how to handle a nuclear holocaust. Television news stations, which were now devoting all their programming to the Dragonstrike crisis, speculated on the Chinese nuclear threat while their commercial breaks concentrated on packed foods and survival kits. A New York Times opinion poll found that 64 per cent of Americans believed the government did have defences against missile strikes. The Washington Post estimated that two million Americans could die and two hundred thousand could be injured from just two Chinese missiles. It drew comparisons with data compiled during the Soviet threat, when twenty million people would have been killed and five million injured. Each 550 kiloton bomb would destroy all people and buildings within a 5.6 kilometre radius. Fires would damage areas almost twice that size, where about half the population would be killed and half would be injured.
The CNN Beijing bureau, quoting Foreign Ministry sources, was the first to report that a Chinese Xia class submarine had been declared in the Pacific. The announcement interrupted a discussion about Mount Weather to point out that the helicopter flight time from Washington to the shelter was about twenty minutes. The submarine's missiles could strike ten to fifteen minutes after launch.