Their vastly improved range meant that they could fly undetected for almost the range of any Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile, or ICBM, and fly home again, meaning that the carrier was even now still in international waters. The US military were obviously aware that a Chinese carrier group were heading for their waters, but the nominal warning had been given that they were heading around the southern part of the continent to eventually visit the Chinese-built port in Cuba. No doubt the strength of the escort they would receive would be a huge show of strength, but that was never going to happen. Their eastern seaboard operations were another matter, and Grant suspected that he knew more about them than even the captain of the carrier he was on.
“I’m going up,” he told his aides in Mandarin, a language he had surprisingly taken to with ease, and followed the young sailor assigned to them as a guide. They climbed the ladders to the glass circle of the flight control deck, high above the tarmac below, and watched in awe as the sleek birds rose from the depths. Preflight checks were quick, far quicker than he had experienced in his own flying career, and he even smiled as, one by one, the four H-9s took off from the ski ramp beside the prow of the ship and dropped slightly before powering away almost vertically to reach the thin air on the edge of space.
Friday 11:46 p.m. – Washington, D.C.
“Sir! Major!” Johnson’s voice said over the squad radio, full of uncharacteristic panic.
“On my way,” Taylor answered, nodding to his captain and senior sergeant to follow him as he set off for the president’s suite at a run. Bursting through the ornate double doors, Taylor saw Johnson fighting to control the president on the thick rug as the other soldier lay unconscious and bleeding next to a heavy bust of a man who had held the same office in the past. The president himself was raging, fighting against Johnson’s grip like a wounded bull, and all the time shouting abuse and curses at them.
“SIR!” barked Taylor, trying and failing to gain the attention of the man. Johnson was no small man, nor was he unaccustomed to fighting, but the intensity in the struggles of the President made him sweat and suck in breath just to hold him down.
“You sons of bitches,” he bawled, his words contorted by the plush pile of the rug his face was pushed into. “You fucking traitors. You’ve destroyed our country!”
This made Taylor stop. They had hardly destroyed their country, hell they had barely destroyed anything but a handful of buildings at worst, but the tears in the eyes of the man told him that this was something worse.
“Sir,” Anderson said behind him, his voice so deathly hollow and subdued that Taylor dreaded turning around to look at him. He did, and followed the outstretched finger of his second-in-command to the TV screen and the unbelievable picture it showed.
The ticker-tape read “Los Angeles Disaster,” and the picture showed something none of them would have ever wanted to see in their lives. It wasn’t the mushroom cloud image that everyone recognized from Hiroshima, but something so similar and exponentially worse that nobody spoke. The image was fleeting, and soon replaced by another scene; similar but different and appeared to be coming live from the window of a plane many miles from the explosion. Twice more the image switched.
“LA,” said Anderson. “San Francisco. Seattle. Vegas.”
Nobody could manage a word in response, until the grunting from the president abated. Johnson had released him and stood, walking straight up to Taylor’s face where he looked angrily into his eyes. Taylor vaguely recalled that Johnson came from Vegas, or California at least, but somewhere that the bombs had just fallen.
“Did we do this?” he snarled angrily in his commanding officer’s face.
“No,” Taylor said, his voice barely above a whisper, but even as he spoke the screen switched again to show another explosion, this one recent.
“Airburst,” Anderson said simply in the same hollow voice he had used before. Taylor looked at the screen, this time showing Portland and what appeared to be a recent nuclear detonation just above the Earth and directly over the city. The human casualties he calculated off the top of his head were already the single largest loss of life in the history of mankind. He turned to the president to explain, to plead with him to understand that this wasn’t their doing, but he was gone. Putting one boot in front of the other to follow, he felt a vibration, then it felt as though a gale were blowing through the house itself, then his world went white and blinked out in an instant.
The five missiles fired from the protruding hump of the nuclear-powered submarine shot straight upwards, then arced off in different directions as the submarine slipped back below the surface. The new design, as with the H-9 bombers, was as yet unseen by the rest of the world and had been developed in total secret at off-shore shipyards under cover to keep the prying eyes of the American satellites away. The shimmering, advanced camouflage skin of the sleek underwater killer had evaded the laughable efforts of the Americans as they sailed in circles effectively shouting to see if anyone answered. The crew of the submarine had simply stopped dead in the water and allowed themselves to sink slowly and then continue at a lower depth until well out of range of the shouts of their searchers.
It was the only one of its design, the Type 096A, and was effectively the prototype which had been put to work early. It could only carry a small payload of five missiles, and those were not the standard missiles the rest of the world expected. The payload was only four megatons, the same size as the ones currently dropping on the west coast of the United States, but with a twelve-thousand kilometer range the sub could safely pop up in the Atlantic, fire its ordnance, and slip away again.
Those five JL-4A SLBMs, or submarine-launched ballistic missiles, now streaked inland at six times the speed of sound. One headed for Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where over fifty thousand active service men and women were based. The remainder, instead of the tactical target selection of the first, streaked toward population centers. Streaked, with the exception of one which had an undetected malfunction in the solid fuel engine, making it splutter along at half its top speed.
Florida was the first to suffer the most recent attack in the devastating flurry of airburst nuclear weaponry, and most of the inhabitants of that spit of land never even had the opportunity to wake and know what killed them. As the Chinese submarine slipped away off the east coast, Florida had been wiped out inside of seven minutes. Had the malfunctioning missiles been aimed there, the course of the sudden and unannounced war would have been drastically altered.
Washington D.C., already on edge due to the presidential lockdown situation which had been ongoing for a few hours, had the added benefit that many people were still awake. Many were even still out, wrapped up against the cool air and held back behind police cordons with a view of the Capitol, and many couldn’t resist the pull of looking toward the sudden flash of bright light. Those who did were blinded instantly, as the worst and brightest firework display they would ever see erupted over the skies of the capital. After the flash came the heat; the intense, unfathomable heat which incinerated anyone close enough to the explosion like they were nothing but steam in a hurricane. With the flash, the heat, and the boiling cloud floating high above the seat of power for the country, came the shockwave. From a distance, it would look as though heavy smoke rolled out over the ground, but up close it would be the worst destruction and devastation ever dreamt possible by man.