“Airburst? How can they pull off an airburst?”
“Bridgestone’s trail led to a movie company that rigged up a copter and we’ve just observed it landing at a hospital in Manhattan. They could be transferring the nuke now, sir.”
“What do you need, Bill?”
“Opinions, sir. Do we shoot it down or do something else? I’m afraid we may only have a few minutes, if that much.”
“Got it. Bill. I’m switching you to the Sitch Room. Ray and I will hustle down. Meanwhile, our military guys and nuke experts are there. Start without me.”
The President put the phone on hold.
Ray picked up the other phone and ordered the call directed to the Situation Room, nine floors below. When he hung up, he asked the President, “Why did you choose not to tell him that his wife might be involved in the hostage scenario?”
“Do we know that for sure? He’s the point man for this administration in what, God forbid, could turn out to be the greatest mass murder in history. I need him focused on saving millions. If we find out that she is in danger, we’ll tell him what we know, but not rumors.”
“Yes, sir. One last thing, sir.”
“Yes.”
“We don’t know if the station bomb isn’t a failed suitcase device. It may blow. I recommend you prepare for that possibility.”
“How do you prepare for something like that?”
“Prayer?” Ray Reynolds said as he went off to put his staff and their minions on alert.
The President sat for a moment, the enormity of what could be going on settling in his mind. He looked at the picture of his daughter, Marie, on his desk. That nuke was still out there… the one they knew of. There could be more. He reached into his drawer and retrieved a folder. The breaking of the band that sealed the folder revealed in red letters across the face “Jesus Factor.” Mitchell spent the next three minutes uninterrupted as he read what only one of his predecessors had even seen.
On the 69th parallel, in the Aleutian Islands, there was a DEW line early tracking station. In its four-foot, concrete-walled installation was a circa 1969 IBM Systems 360 — 65 computer. It was hooked up to two radio-telescope dishes located out on the frozen tundra. Their sole purpose was to track to within a meter the true distance to the sun from the Earth at every second of the day for every day in the 35 years since it went online. Two Air Force techs at the Defense Early Warning facility checked on it every eight hours. They didn’t know why or for what reason they did this. The computer was hooked up to NORAD. There, at the North American Aerospace Defense Command, was a single unmanned console. The commander of the watch had sealed orders on how to operate the console if a call from the President ever came.
There was no need to authenticate the voice on the other end. The watch commander knew that this was the President’s personal line to NORAD.
“Yes sir,” he said crisply as he answered a phone that hadn’t rung since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
“Commander of the watch, this is the Commander in Chief. Under National Command Authority, rule 10, I hereby authorize you to go to console 20–01 and place in these coordinates.” Mitchell was reading from a hand-typed sheet within the folder. He then scanned a map and found America in quadrant A1. “A1. Repeat, Alpha 1.”
“Copy and confirm coordinates. Alpha One, sir.”
“Confirmed, watch commander.”
The 42-year old colonel on watch broke the seal that held the plastic case over the old teletype-styled keyboard that was older than him. He opened his sealed orders, which still held the old name for NORAD, North American Air Defense Command, and followed directions.
In green dotted type on the round Multipurpose CRT in front of him was the simple computer query “Sector?: ___” He typed in A then 1. The keyboard actually clunked with each depression. A second later, a new line emerged. It simply read, “Fair to 16:00 EST Rain From 16:01 to 4:32 EST.”
He then dutifully read the “weather report” to the Commander in Chief.
The President wrote the information on his pad. He then called in his Nat Sec Advisor and formally initiated Archangel, a comprehensive, interagency directive that effectively put all the assets of government on what the military would call Def Con 1. Archangel specifically did not call for the military to change its defense condition. Against a domestic terrorism event, the military had little usefulness other than their traditional disaster roles. Archangel put the government on alert and put first responders on highest priority. It also authorized the release of N, B, and C countermeasures to be disseminated below the supervisory levels of federal and local response agencies in order to react more quickly to nuclear, biological, or chemical attacks in major urban areas. Archangel gave the government a prayer of a chance to stop or at least respond quickly enough to save some human life.
As he looked up at the TV in the Oval Office, he saw what millions of Americans were watching: the round edifice of Madison Square Garden rotating under the lens of the news helicopter circling above the Penn Station/Madison Square Garden complex, the thousands of flashing lights surrounding the Garden, and the thousands of flashing lights when the news channels cut to the other big story, the theater hostages.
It suddenly hit him. They created these preliminary events to get all of our first responders in one place, under the nuke. This would allow them to wipe out the city’s essential services in one kiloton of fire and destruction.
He taped the folder as he murmured to himself, “God, don’t let Hiccock be too late.”
Peter entered Kronos’ OEOB “office,” which looked like a broom closet — which it had been since the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, nee Old Executive Office Building, was built adjacent the West Wing in 1877. In this case, though, the broom closet was stuffed with computers, racks, and plasma displays.
“Kronos, how are you man?” Peter said.
“I’m cool. What’cha got?”
“Do you have my copy of the book here?”
“Better than that; it’s already scanned and searchable. All the formulas are inputted into our seven Crays across the SCIAD network.”
Peter handed him a memory stick. “Here’s what was in Ensiling’s Viennese safety deposit box. It’s a modifier to the aspect spectrum formulas.”
As he spoke, Kronos called up those formula fragments.
“Now here’s the tricky part. We have to move from eight-bit depth to 24-bit in order to achieve the same accuracy as…” Peter was speaking slowly so that he could impress the enormity of the task on Kronos.
“Done,” Kronos said.
“Whoa, I guess with seven Crays lashed together, nothing is tricky.”
“What’s the range for F over the value of X?”
“Let’s see; based on Ensiling’s notes, F is 3.14 times 10 to the 23rd power…”
As they updated the programs with Ensiling’s decoded formulas the two brainiacs bonded across mathematics that were four decades apart.
The gun smoke in the theater was causing the stage Fresnels to make cones of colored light. This made an eerie backdrop to the pandemonium in the audience. Janice had her arms wire-tied to a chair in the last row of the theater. A man was videotaping her as another wielded a scarab. He was speaking in half-English, half-Farsi. Janice knew he was threatening to cut her head off to whomever the tape was intended. The sheer terror of her predicament made her shiver, but she didn’t bow. She resisted their attempts to manhandle her. That earned her a slap across the face. She snapped her face back immediately with a defiant look that needed no translation into Farsi. It was the only means of defiance she had left.