It was as if the sun were suddenly overhead and the clouds were gone — the light was as bright as high noon on a perfectly clear day. It lasted only a fraction of a second, but it flash-blinded everyone on the EB-52’s upper crew deck. “Jesus!” Carter cried out. “What in hell… I can’t see! Nancy, I can’t see!”
“Me either,” Cheshire said. “I can see the panel, but I can’t read the—”
Just then an incredible rumbling, like the sound of an approaching freight train, could be heard throughout the bomber and the EB-52 heeled sharply over to the right. It seemed to be skidding, its nose pointed one way but flying in a different direction. Carter had no choice-because he was blinded, he didn’t dare touch the controls to compensate for fear of sending the bomber into a spiral. With no visual references, flying by feel was deadly. “Nancy!” he shouted. “Don’t touch the controls!”
“I … won’t…
The turbulence continued for a few more seconds. It took all of Carter’s and Cheshire’s willpower to stay off the controls. They were all praying that the bomber’s natural stability would keep it upright until the turbulence passed. When he felt it was safe enough to move around the crew compartment, Carter clicked on the interphone: it was dead. “Station check!” Carter shouted at the top of his lungs. “Is everyone on? Report!”
“Offense is okay,” Scott shouted back.
“Defense checks,” Tork shouted in reply.
“Paul! Alicia!” Carter shouted. “Get up here and help us!”
Scott and Kellerman went upstairs. “Everything is out downstairs, and I mean out—not faulted, but dead. We got some of that light down there, but we’re okay.” He saw Carter with his hand off the single sidestick controller — he was afraid to touch the controls while he was blind, for fear of putting the plane into a dive or spiral. Scott saw that they were still in the clouds — it was imperative to reactivate the flight instruments before they crashed. “We’re in the soup, Kel. What do I do first?”
“Check the controls,” Carter said. “I can’t see a damned thing, and I think the flight-control system is out.”
“Defense is flash-blinded too,” Kellerman said after checking Tork and Pereira. “I don’t think it’s too bad.”
Scott shined a penlight at the electronic flight-information-system screens and digital engine readouts. “Everything is dead,” he said over the roar of the engines. “EFIS is completely out.”
“It sounds like the engines are still running,” Carter said. He tried moving the electronic throttles. “I don’t seem to have control of them— they must be in analog override. Check the standby gauges.”
Scott checked the standby instruments, a row of conventional mechanical engine- and flight-information gauges. “Okay, Kel, it looks like you got a compressor stall on number eight, but I’ll leave it for now. All the other engines look normal. The standby artificial horizon is dead. The altimeter reads nine thousand feet, the vertical velocity indicator says you’re in a three-hundred-foot-per-minute descent, and the turn indicator says you’re in a very slight right turn into th~e dead engine.”
“Not too bad — we have a few minutes to get everything running again,” Carter said. “Alicia, open the emergency checklist.”
With Kellerman reading the checklists and Scott monitoring the aircraft, Carter and Cheshire reactivated the engine-driven generators, reactivated the flight-control system and autopilot, and managed to get the standby flight instrument and backup mechanically actuated throttles to respond.
“What the hell happened to us?” Cheshire asked.
“The SS-21,” Pereira replied. “When the Scorpion hit it, it must’ve cooked off at least part of the nuclear warhead. It obviously wasn’t a full yield — I don’t think we’d be flying now if it was — and it was far enough away that it didn’t do any real harm.”
“But the electromagnetic pulse killed all our electronics that had antennas exposed to the outside,” Wendy Tork added. “None of our experimental avionics are hardened against EMP — the only stuff that’s hardened is the older flight-control system. The analog devices and mechanical systems aren’t affected by EMP.”
“That must mean… shit, that must mean electronic stuff is out all over the entire region,” Kellerman said. “All those troops out there, their radios, the telephone system, thousands of things — it must be like the turn of the century down there.
“Well, I think it’s going to be a real quiet flight out of here, then,” Kelvin Carter said. “It’s a pretty good way to stop a war, too — everything on the battlefield with the exception of a rifle uses electronics, and the EMP would have fried most of it. We’ll have to navigate visually. The bases of the clouds were about four thousand feet, and if I’m not mistaken we can fly all the way to Norway at four thousand feet and not hit any terrain.
“And as soon as we’re out of range of the EMP effect, we can use the survival radios to contact someone,” Tork said. “I just tried one, and it looks like it survived the EMP effects. I should be able to hook it into an external antenna and talk to someone on the ground.”
The rest of the three-hour-long flight was made in virtual silence. They knew what they had done, and the crew realized what might have happened. It was far too terrible for words.
Epilogue
“I never thought I’d be thankful for a nuclear detonation,” General Dominikas Palcikas said with a wry smile, “but this is an exception.”
He and his executive officer were sitting in the Minister of Defense’s office in the Parliament Building. Normally the Minister of Defense’s office was at the Breda Palace, which housed the residence of Lithuanian president Gintarus Kapocius and the offices of the executive branch of government. But in the current nationwide power emergency, necessary government functions had been consolidated into one building to save energy. Palcikas had to smile at the bank of no less than ten old-style field telephones piled up on the Minister of Defense’s desk — because the effects of an electromagnetic pulse can last several days, they had been forced to use the crank-type telephone to communicate within the building. After three days, however, the effects of the low-yield nuclear blast over northern Byelorussia had subsided, and portable radios were being used until the main phone circuits could be rebuilt.
The Minister of Defense, Dr. Algimantas Virkutis, a sixty-nine-year-old full-time physician as well as civilian administrator of the Lithuanian Self-Defense Force, was doing a very unpolitical task — he was busily examining Palcikas’ wounded leg. “I must agree with you, Dominikas,” Virkutis said. “They used to say an army runs on its stomach — these days I believe an army runs on electronics and microchips. The blast over Byelorussia stopped everyone in their tracks very effectively. You tried walking on that leg yet?”
Palcikas nodded his head but wore a pained expression as he replied, “Yes, but it hurts like hell …”
“I told you not to walk on it, General,” Virkutis admonished. He gave the leg a friendly little slap, which predictably caused Palcikas to grimace in pain. “Jesus, Dominikas, when are you ever going to listen? You’ll extend your recuperation a week for every hour you put pressure on that leg. Follow me?”
“Yes, Minister.”
“And I told you to call me Algy here in the office. You still don’t listen.” He stripped off a layer of dressings and examined the wound, causing another surge of pain.
Palcikas was ready to cold-cock the old fart.