eleventh in line of succession that January day was a certain Air Force general
called P. X. “Frag” Frederickson—a somewhat gung-ho individual who, if the
President had survived, would not have held his position of responsibility under
the new administration.
But at twelve noon on January 20,2001, he did hold that position, and at
12:00:46, as he sat at the command console in the windowless 767 approximately
one and a quarter kilometers above the city of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, he
knew that a mushroom cloud had appeared over Washington. He also knew, as he
stared at the flickering kaleidoscope of lights to the left of his seat and at
the information clicking on-screen beneath them, that he was now the
forty-fourth President, unelected, of the United States.
He did not need to launch into a complex series of button-tapping movements to
“find the key,” in other words tap out a sequence on the console that would
release the lock of a small safe nearby, then tap out another sequence that
would spring a drawer containing the authentication codes manual. The general
knew all the codes he needed to know off by heart, though he should not have
known even one of them. The general had made it his business to know the codes
and to keep up with the irregular changes. Although he had absolutely no idea
that such a group as vsesozhzhenie existed, he was in many ways their brother in
hatred.
An arctic smile played on his craggy face as he reached out with spatulate
fingers and swiftly keyed into the computer a set of high-priority sequential
commands. Thus, three minutes and twenty-nine seconds before the two secondary
bombs in Washington finished off the work of the first, the United States had
launched.
THE RETENTIVE MEMORY AND FIERCE HATRED of a fifty-six-year-old Air Force general
did not save the Western world. But on the other hand they certainly screwed
vsesozhzhenie.
Within three heartbeats of Frederickson’s keying in his last commands, the three
U.S. space stations had shifted orbit. Instead of being destroyed they were
crippled; even so they were still able to cripple the two Soviet stations. All
contact with both was then lost.
The events of the next hour or so need only be briefly told. Silos of varying
sizes across the length and breadth of the U.S., the continent of Europe and the
Arctic blasted open, letting loose a terrible melange of weaponry. Submarines
lurking in the oceans of the world shook almost in unison.
Within five minutes, towns, ports and defense installations in Eastern Europe
were devastated. Within fifteen minutes the ICBMs swept in over the Arctic
Circle, and entire cities in Russia itself began to wink out, to become smoking
heaps of radioactive ash. Military bases and missile sites in the Kol’skiy
Poluostrov—Kola Peninsula— Novaya Zemlya, Severnaya Zemlya,
Novosibirskyeostrova, Chukchi and Kamchatka, as well as those deep in the heart
of Eastern Europe, disappeared in a flash.
Too late, of course. Just seconds too late. If Frederickson’s strike had been
preemptive, it would have turned Marxist-Leninist ideology into a dead
philosophy, something to be yawned over in the history books.
But there were to be no history books, for even as Russia was disappearing under
soaring fireballs and vast mushroom clouds, so was Western Europe, so was the
Middle East, so was China.
And so, to all intents and purposes, was North America.
The commercial East Coast was obliterated by the retaliatory attack, as were the
industrial belts around the Great Lakes and the petrochemical and defense
manufacturing zones strung along the Louisiana coastline. The Southwest—most of
Arizona, New Mexico, west Texas—became a land of fire. Cities vanished in the
wink of an eye; new lakes were created; forests blazed. The area around Minot,
North Dakota, was devastated, as was the Cumberland Plateau that stretched
across Tennessee, and central Nebraska. Florida, southern Georgia, Alabama and
eastern Mississippi were hit by a rain of biological and chemical agents,
sub-fired from the Atlantic. Cheyenne Mountain, no longer considered a high
priority target, was hit once, just at the moment when a singular experiment was
taking place deep in its bowels.
But the most stupendous destruction of all took place on the West Coast. Here