Ashanda was lucky. Working in the back of the store, she saw no flash of light, but heard a roar like a truck piling into the front of the building. The ground shook as the lights failed, and she fell to the floor, screaming in alarm. The rumbling went on for much too long, and she closed her eyes and prayed that it wasn't an earthquake; but who in D.C. had ever imagined an earthquake striking here? As the vibration faded, she pulled herself to her knees, then up to her feet. People were moaning in the front of the shop, but without lights she might as well be blind. She began to fumble her way back to the stockroom door, still shaky, praying that Darrick was all right.
The White House, although originally built in the late eighteenth century, had been reconstructed in the mid-twentieth around a steel load-bearing frame. With stone walls and a steel skeleton, it was by no means as fragile as its age might suggest; but the Truman-era structure wasn't designed to withstand a nuclear blast at close range, and in time of war the president was supposed to be elsewhere.
The White House survived the heat flash, but the shock wave took barely a second to surge down the street. By the time it hit the West Wing it was traveling at just over three hundred miles per hour, with an overpressure slightly over six pounds per square inch—funneled by the broad boulevard—and the force of a tornado.
BOY WONDER, the forty-third president of the United States, was chatting informally with his deputy chief of staff and special assistant (whose windowless office in the middle of the first floor of the West Wing was perhaps the most eavesdropper-proof location in the entire federal government) when the shock wave hit.
It would never be determined precisely why the president was visiting his campaign manager, chief political strategist, and senior advisor, rather than vice versa; it was perhaps a reflection of the importance of this secretive political operative to the administration. But the location of R's lair, in the middle of a warren of offices on the first floor, meant that none of its occupants could have had any warning of the catastrophe. Perhaps the lights flickered and dimmed as the White House's backup power supply kicked in, and perhaps they stared in annoyance at the dead phones in their hands; but before anyone had time to walk as far as the office door, the masonry, concrete, and stone of the West Wing was struck by a pile driver of compressed air. Just over six pounds per square inch sounds far less impressive than just under nine hundred pounds per square foot, but they are the same thing. Worse: The compressed air in the wave had to come from somewhere. As the shock wave passed, it left behind an evacuated zone, where the air pressure had dropped precipitously, swinging the strain on the building's structure from positive pounds to negative. It was a lethal whiplash of pressure, five times worse than a direct strike by a tornado.
Had the West Wing been built of modern reinforced structural concrete it might have survived, albeit with severe damage. But it wasn't, and the falling ceiling respected neither rank nor titles of nobility.
Eleven seconds later, the second bomb detonated. This one had been planted on the top floor of the Holocaust Museum on Fourteenth Street SW, just off Independence Avenue and two blocks away from the Mall.
Perhaps Earl Hjorth had meant to target Congress; if so, he'd been overoptimistic—situated over a mile away, the Capitol suffered external blast damage and many of its windows were blown in, but aside from shrapnel injuries, a number of flash fires ignited by the detonation, and severe damage to the outside of the dome, the Capitol was not seriously affected.
Not so the cluster of federal agencies around the Mall. FEMA and the FBI were both less than three thousand feet from ground zero; and pity the employees of the Department of Agriculture, across the road from the museum. More than eleven thousand people, mostly government employees and tourists, were directly affected by the second bomb, half of them killed by heat flash or shock wave as the rippling blast tore the heart out of the federal government.
And then there was the third bomb.
Eleven-sixteen and thirty-eight seconds. Two figures in desert fatigues bearing sergeant's stripes—Kurt and Jurgen, who were in fact, by grace of his lordship Baron Griben ven Hjalmar, sergeantsat-arms of the post—appeared out of nowhere on the second floor of a car park adjacent to the Pentagon, one of them standing and the other sprawling atop a wheelbarrow that also contained an olive-drab cylinder.
"Scheisse,"
said Jurgen, as Kurt swung his feet over the side of the barrow and stood up. Beneath the low concrete roof half the theft alarms of half the vehicles in the park were shrilling in an earsplitting cacophony that filled the head and threatened to overflow when he opened his mouth, a profoundly unnatural counterpoint to the low rumbling from outside.
"This way." Kurt, eyes flickering side-to-side, pointed along a line of parked trucks and SUVs towards a bare concrete wall with a fire door. Jurgen swallowed bile, picked up the handles of the wheelbarrow, tried to ignore the nausea in his stomach. His feet lurched side-to-side as he shoved the heavy load towards the stairwell. "Two
minutes."
"Two? Okay." Jurgen nodded. Everything was crystal clear, suffused with a luminosity of migraine. The Boss couldn't be blamed for taking these little precautions, he could see that. "How about here—"
"No, we want a stairwell—"
"You! Freeze!" Jurgen stumbled. The guard who had just stepped out of the stairwell—Why
is there a guard here?—had
his M16 raised. "Identify yourselves! Sir!" The military courtesy didn't in any way detract from the pointed message of the assault rifle. This wasn't in the plan. Jurgen's head pounded.
"What's happening?" called Kurt.
"Full lockdown. Badges,
now!"
Another siren joined the clamoring car alarms—this one full-voiced and deep, the stentorian honking of a building alarm.
Kurt raised his left hand, then reached inside a trouser pocket. Time slowed to a crawl as he rolled sideways towards a parked F250. Jurgen dropped the barrow's handles and broke right, diving for the opposite side of the row to take cover behind a Toyota compact. As he reached for his Glock, an earsplitting crackle of full-auto fire echoed from one end of the car park to the other. Grounded behind the Toyota, he rose to kneel, raised his pistol, and returned fire through the car's windows—not aimed, but suppressive. He winced with each pull of the trigger as the reports rammed ice picks into his already aching head. He couldn't be sure, but Kurt seemed to be shooting, too. Another hammer-drill burst of automatic fire, then the guard's weapon fell silent.
"Kurt, wer ist—"
The harsh bang of another pistol shot was followed almost immediately by the irregular snap of rifle fire, and Kurt ducked, heart hammering and mouth dry.
There's more than one of them,
he realized, icy horror settling into his belly. The plan was simple enough—he'd brought Kurt over, Kurt was to carry him back—but with him pinned down behind this automobile, there was no way that was going to work. He swallowed and rubbed his left sleeve against the car, trying to expose the temporary tattoo on his wrist. If world-walking twice in five minutes didn't kill him, there was a good chance a three-floor fall would do the job, but the ticking nightmare in the barrow was an even more certain exit ticket.