secretive nature of the Russian power structure, much could be done with those
who hated Pritisch as much as they hated the West.
And much was done in the final quarter of the year 2000. Plans were devised.
Preparations made. Secret orders given and carried out. A state of readiness was
achieved.
All culminated in the long-range remote-controlled detonation, by a small group
of spetsnaz—special forces—of the three Washington bombs.
THE PLAN of the obzhigateli was, briefly, as follows: once Washington was out,
the three main U.S. space stations were the primary targets. These would be
destroyed by particle beam weapons from a variety of killer satellites directed
by the two central Soviet space stations. A minute at most.
The U.S. and the NATO countries would then have to rely on the rather more
antiquated sky- and ground-based early warning systems still in operation as
backup to the extremely sophisticated SDI “loop.” First priority, then, was the
huge 767 Fortress flying in a figure-of-eight pattern above the American
Midwest, the DEW Line “golf balls” stretched across the Arctic landscape from
Alaska through Canada and across to Greenland, and the new NORAD bunkers
situated beneath the dusty terrain of New Mexico—the old NORAD complex, deep
within Cheyenne Mountain in the Rockies, had been taken more than a decade
previously by a curious and obscurely funded government controlled “energy”
department, which also ramrodded a number of other locations to be found—or, it
was profoundly to be hoped, not to be found—in the continental U.S. and
elsewhere. Once these and four key communications facilities in Europe and
Turkey had been taken out—the Deluge.
Although “terrible fire” was made up of ideological purists who planned for
Armageddon, even they did not wish for total destruction. There were to be
degrees of conflagration. Although certain places, mainly in North America,
Europe, the Middle East and China, were to be made practically uninhabitable for
generations, other locales—in America and Europe—were not to receive a
full-scale “dirty” missiling. There had to be something to inherit when the
obzhigateli emerged from their bunkers.
Once the human command chain had been wiped out and early warning systems
rendered inoperable, nuclear forces targets were next in line: ICBM and IRB
sites, storage areas, sub bases. After that came the conventional military
targets: supply depots, naval bases, air defense installations, marshaling
yards, military storage facilities. From there it was logical to move to
civilian and industrial targets: factories, petroleum refineries, ports, civil
airfields, electronics industrial bases, nuclear reactors, areas where coal was
mined and steel manufactured, power stations and grid centers, important cities.
Some cities were to be wiped off the map, others neutralized by the latest
“squeezed” enhanced-radiation weapons, now capable of delivering a very “clean”
and short-term packet to within, quite literally, meters of their targets.
Certain areas were to be drenched with chemicals.
ON THE FACE OF IT, all seemed simple enough.
But from the start, things went drastically wrong.
The vsesozhzhenie had been aware that whatever happened, a large degree of
“knee-jerk” retaliation against the USSR was unavoidable. They assumed, however,
that by decapitating the U.S. power and command structure at a stroke,
retaliation would be minimal. They knew that once the President was dead, the
Vice President would take over; if he died, the Speaker of the House of
Representatives would then be in command. And so on down a designated chain of
civilian successors numbering—or so it was thought—possibly a dozen. After these
had been eliminated, the U.S. would be akin to a chicken with its head cut off.
Unfortunately for the Russians, their intelligence was fatally out of date. Even
as far back as the 1970s, command of the U.S. could pass to as many as sixteen
civilian successors, as well as a number of top military advisers. This figure
had been upped to twenty-five civilian successors during the Latin American
crisis of the early 1990s, and the number of military advisers had been raised,
as well. Further, it had been decided that one-third of this group could never
be within one hundred miles of the President at any given time. Thus,
decapitation was virtually impossible.
Not that this made much difference in the long run since, as it happened, the