“Holy shit!” the Air Force sergeant monitoring the nuclear attack warning console muttered, his stomach dropping. In the old days he would have picked up a phone. Now he hit three buttons and confirmed three separate pop-ups sending a FLASH priority message to the National Military Command Center in the bowels of the Pentagon. Then he picked up the phone as sirens went off in the normally quiet room in Sunnyvale California.
The wonder of military communications and computers meant that the President of the United States got word that a probable nuclear attack had occurred on Central Florida a whole thirty seconds before Fox broke the news.
“I know we can’t say who did it, yet,” the President said calmly. He was at Camp David for the weekend but most of his senior staff was on the phone already. “But I’ll make three guesses and only two of them count.”
“Mr. President, let’s not jump to conclusions,” his national security advisor said. She was a specialist in nuclear strategy and had been doing makee-learnee on terrorism ever since the attacks of September 11, 2001. And this didn’t fit the profile of a terrorist attack. “First of all, nobody thinks that they have access to nuclear weapons of this sort. Radiological bombs, maybe. But this appears to be a nuclear weapon. However, the target makes no sense for a terrorist. It has been located precisely as being on the grounds of the University of Central Florida. Why waste a nuclear weapon on a university when they could use it on New York or Washington or L.A. or Atlanta?”
“I gotta go with the NSA on this one, Mister President,” the secretary of defense said. “This doesn’t feel like an attack. What’s the chance it could have been some sort of accident?”
“I don’t know that much about UCF,” the NSA admitted. She had once been the dean of a major college but for the last few years she’d been holding down the national security advisor’s desk in the middle of a war. Her stated ambition after leaving government service was to become the commissioner of the National Football League. “But I don’t think they’re doing anything in the nuclear program, I’m pretty sure I’d remember that. And you just don’t get accidents with weapons. They’re hard enough to get to go off at all.”
“So we’re in a holding pattern?” the President asked.
“Yes, sir,” the secretary of defense answered.
“We need to get a statement out, fast,” the chief of staff said. “Especially if we’re pretty sure it wasn’t a terrorist attack.”
“Have one made up,” the President said. “I’m going to go take a nap. I figure this is gonna be a long one.”
“Okay, Crichton, what do you have?”
The battalion headquarters of Second Battalion was collocated in the armory with Charlie Company. At the moment the Battalion, which should have had a staff sergeant and two specialists as a nuclear, biological and chemical weapons team, was without any of the three. Crichton had for the last year been the only trained NBC specialist in the entire battalion. He reflected, somewhat bitterly, that while he’d been holding down the work of a staff sergeant, a sergeant and six other privates it hadn’t been reflected in a promotion.
“None of my instruments are reading any increase in background radiation here, sir,” the specialist temporized. The meeting of the battalion staff and company commanders was taking place in the battalion meeting room, a small room with a large table and its walls lined with unit insignias, awards and trophies. The question hit him as he walked through the door. Crichton had been told only two minutes before to “shag your ass over to battalion and report to the sergeant major.” At the time he’d been prepping his survey teams.
Radiological survey teams were taken from within standard companies and sent out to find where the radiation was from a nuclear attack. It was one of the many scenarios that the Army kept in its playbook but rarely paid much attention to. The privates and one sergeant for the company’s team had been chosen months before and should have trained in the interim. But there were always more important things to do or train on, especially on a deployment. So he was having to brief them at the same time as he was trying to read all his instruments, prepare a NUCREP that was probably going to be read by the Joint Chiefs and make sense of the readings, none of which, in fact, made sense.
He knew all the officers in the room and, frankly, didn’t like them very much. The battalion operations officer, a major, stayed on active duty as much as possible because his other job was as a school teacher, elementary level, and soccer coach. As a major he made three times as much as a civilian. He could run anybody in the battalion into the ground but the only reason he managed to keep his head above water in his present post was his S-3 sergeant, whose civilian job was operations manager for a large tool and die distributor. The battalion executive officer was a small town cop. Nice guy and, give him credit, in good shape despite the Twinkies but not the brightest brick in the load. How he made major was a huge question. The battalion commander was a good manager and a decent leader but if you asked him to “think outside the box” he’d get a box and stand outside of it while he thought. And there was nothing, so far, that fit in any box Crichton could imagine.
“The thing is, sir, this doesn’t look like a nuke at all, Colonel,” he admitted.
“Looked one hell of a lot like one where I was standing,” the XO replied, his brow crinkling. “Big flash, mushroom cloud, hell of a bang. Nuke.”
“No radiation and no EMP, sir,” Crichton said, shaking his head.
“No EMP?” the battalion commander said. “Are you sure?”
“What…” the Charlie Company commander said, then shook his head. “I know I’m supposed to know this, damnit, but I don’t. What in the hell is… what was it you said?”
“EMP, sir,” Crichton replied. “Electromagnetic pulse. Basically, a nuke makes like a giant magnetic generator along with everything else.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. “I called my mom to tell her I was okay and not to worry. Didn’t think about it…”
“That’s okay,” the battalion commander said. “Everybody did the same thing.”
“Yes, sir,” Crichton replied. “But I meant I didn’t think about it until I hung up. Nuke that size, sir, the EMP should have shut down every electronic device in East Orlando. I mean everything that wasn’t shielded. Phones, computers, cars. But everything works. Ergo, it was not a nuke.”
“Look, Crichton, I got a call, a personal call, from the Chief of Staff,” the battalion commander said. “I mean the Army Chief of Staff. There’s a NEST team on the way to check this out, but he wants data now. What do I tell him?”
Crichton cringed at that. The Chief of Staff was going to tell whatever he said to somebody even higher up. Probably the President. If he got it wrong…
“Right now this… event is not consonant with a nuclear attack, sir,” the specialist said, firmly. “There is no evidence of EMP or radiation. Nor…” He paused and then squared his shoulders. “Nor does it appear to be an asteroid strike.”
“A what?” the operations officer asked.
“Look,” Crichton said, thinking fast. “Sir, you ever see a movie called Armageddon? Or Asteroid?”