Surviving an ejection through a helicopter’s rotors would be especially difficult, so the Ka-50’s solution was to blow off the rotors before ejecting, giving the pilot a high chance of surviving a direct hit. In an Apache, on the other hand, if the young pilots were hit while in flight, they simply had to wait it out until the end. Absent low-altitude support and cover, the tank games did not display much of a disparity in relative damage rates.
Time flew by, and before they knew it six months had passed. In that time, ocean levels worldwide continued to rise, swamping the coasts and turning Shanghai, New York, and Tokyo into water cities. Most children in these areas moved farther inland, and the remainder adapted themselves to the liquid life, rafting between skyscrapers and preserving some semblance of life in these formerly bustling metropolises. In Antarctica, meanwhile, the climate continued to warm up, even during the long night, bringing mild, early-winter weather and average temperatures above −10°C. The continent’s temperate weather only served to further underscore its crucial nature.
Negotiations for dividing up Antarctica were set to begin, and the key bargaining chip for every country was its performance in the war games, a fact that motivated all children to redouble their efforts. Fresh troops were constantly arriving in Antarctica, swelling the scale of the games, and the fires of war continued their march across the continent.
The United States, on the other hand, was mired in disappointment and dejection, despite being the instigator of the games. Because high-tech weapons were no threat in the hands of children, the country had not dominated the games in the way its children had hoped, and the multipolar shape of the games worried them ahead of the upcoming Antarctica Talks.
One last event, the ICBM fight, was about to begin, and it was on this that the American children were pinning their final hopes.
“Are you kidding? It’s really heading our way?” Marshal Zavyalova asked the advisor.
“That’s what the radar warning center says. I doubt they’re mistaken.”
“Maybe it’ll change trajectory?” President Ilyukhin ventured.
“Not a chance. The warhead’s in the terminal guidance phase, in an unpowered free fall. It’s coming in like a stone.”
In the command center, everyone in Russian High Command was concentrating on the first ICBM fight with the US. The American children had fired an ICBM from their own territory, ten thousand kilometers away, directly at the Russian command center, a serious violation of the game’s rules. Both sides had set their target areas in advance, and Russia had provided a target zone more than a hundred kilometers distant. There shouldn’t have been any mistake.
“What are you afraid of? At least it’s not a nuclear warhead,” Ilyukhin said.
“A conventional warhead is frightening enough. It’s a Minuteman III. Those were deployed in the 1980s, I think. They can carry three tons of conventional high-explosive warheads. If it lands within two hundred meters we’ll be destroyed!” Zavyalova said.
“And what if it lands right on our heads? We’d be dead even if it wasn’t carrying anything!” a colonel advisor said.
Zavyalova said, “It’s not out of the question. The Minuteman is one of the most accurate ICBMs there are. Hundred-meter precision.”
They heard a low wailing in the air, as if a keen blade were rending the sky in two. “It’s coming!” someone shouted, and everyone held their breath, skin crawling, waiting for the coming impact.
There was a dull thud outside and a gentle tremor in the ground. They poured outside and saw a shower of dirt falling back to the ground about half a kilometer away. Ilyukhin, Zavyalova, and the others jumped into vehicles and hurried over to it. A crowd of soldiers were digging into a crater with shovels, hoes, and a backhoe.
“The warhead apparently released a small drag chute at around ten thousand meters, so it didn’t burrow too deep,” an air force colonel said.
Half an hour later, the bottom part of the buried ICBM’s warhead was exposed, a metal sphere 2.3 meters in diameter with three scorches on the perimeter from blasting bolts. The children inserted a drill rod into a gap they found, and were able to pry apart the metal shell. In wonder they stared at the cornucopia of boxes, all shapes and sizes, lying in a dampening cushion. Then, very carefully, they opened one. Inside were small foil-wrapped objects containing lumps of a brown substance.
“Explosives!” warned one kid.
Zavyalova picked up one of the “explosives” and looked it over. She gave it a sniff, then bit a piece. “Chocolate,” she said.
They opened other boxes, which held not just chocolate but cigars as well. As the other kids were divvying up the chocolate, Ilyukhin took out a fat cigar and lit it, but he’d only taken a few puffs before it blew up in a ball of streamers, and the kids burst out laughing at him standing there stunned with a cigar butt hanging from his lips.
He spat out the cigar butt, and said, “Three days from now, it’ll be our turn to fire on the American kids’ command center.”
“I’ve got a bad premonition,” Specs said during a meeting in the Chinese command center.
“Agreed. We ought to move our command center immediately,” Lü Gang said.
“Is that really necessary?” Huahua asked.
“The American kids attacked the Russian command center in the ICBM game, violating the principle that bases were untouchable. Our base might be hit as a target, and that warhead might contain more than just chocolate and cigars.”
Specs said, “My premonition goes deeper than that. I’ve got a feeling there’s going to be a sudden change in the situation.”
Out the window of the command center, the first white of dawn had appeared on the horizon. The long Antarctic night was coming to an end.
From the desolate plains of northwestern Russia close to the Arctic Circle, a range-extended SS-25 Sickle whooshed into the air from a multifunction missile launcher and crossed the globe in the space of forty minutes. When it reached the sky over Antarctica, the warhead came down in a smooth parabola and hit a patch of snow inside the American base, just 280 meters from the command center. After the launch, American NMD and TMD fired six antiballistic missiles to intercept. The children watched on their screens in breathless anticipation as two glowing dots smacked almost exactly into each other. But each was a letdown, since the intercepting missiles’ suborbital trajectories through the atmosphere passed by each other separated by dozens of meters.
After a moment of shock, the American children went about digging out the warhead, and discovered that what the Russian children had rocketed to them from twenty thousand kilometers away was a copious amount of vodka in shock-resistant bottles, and a pretty box with a note saying it was a gift for Davey. Inside was a Russian doll, and inside that one another one, ten in all, each of them with an uncannily accurate representation of Davey’s face. The outermost was laughing, but farther in the expressions grew less happy and more worried, until the last thumb-sized one had Davey mouth open, bawling.
Enraged, Davey threw the dolls into the snow and seized General Scott with one hand and General Harvey, who was in charge of strategic missile defense, with the other. “You are both relieved of duty! You idiots. You guaranteed that NMD and TMD would work. You—” He broke off and turned to Scott. “Didn’t you say they put us into a strongbox? And you—” He turned to Harvey and shouted, “Where the hell were your prizewinning prodigies? Are they any better than a pack of online hackers?”