“Ed, we’re on the ground, we’re on the ground,” Clark was saying into his satellite phone, fifty yards away. “The barracks are gone, and there’s no opposition on the ground here. Doing our blasting now. Back to you soon. Out.”
“Well, shit,” Ed Foley said in his office, but the line was now dead.
“What?” It was an hour later in Beijing, and the sun was up. Marshal Luo, having just woken up after not enough sleep following the worst day he’d known since the Cultural Revolution, had a telephone thrust into his hands. “What is this?” he demanded of the phone.
“This is Major General Xun Qing-Nian at Xuanhua missile base. We are under attack here. There is a force of men on the ground over our heads trying to destroy our missiles. I require instructions!”
“Fight them off!” was the first idea Luo had.
“The defense battalion is dead, they do not respond. Comrade Minister, what do I do?”
“Are your missiles fueled and ready for launch?”
“Yes!”
Luo looked around his bedroom, but there was no one to advise him. His country’s most priceless assets were now about to be ripped from his control. His command wasn’t automatic. He actually thought first, but in the end, it wouldn’t matter how considered his decision was.
“Launch your missiles,” he told the distant general officer.
“Repeat your command,” Luo heard.
“Launch your missiles!” his voice boomed. “Launch your missiles NOW!”
“By your command,” the voice replied.
“Fuck,” Sergeant Connolly said. “This is some bloody door!” The first explosive block had done nothing more than scorch the paint. This time he attached a hollow-charge to the upper and lower hinges and backed off again. “This one will do it,” he promised as he trailed the wires back.
The crash that followed gave proof to his words. When next they looked in, the door was gone. It had been hurled inward, must have flown into the silo like a bat out of—
—”Bloody hell!” Connolly turned. “Run! RUN!”
Price and Patterson needed no encouragement. They ran for their lives. Connolly caught them reaching for his protective hood as he did so, not stopping until he was over a hundred yards away.
“The bloody missile’s fueled. The door ruptured the upper tank. It’s going to blow!”
“Shit! Team, this is Price, the missiles are fueled, I repeat the missiles are fueled. Get the fucking hell away from the silo!”
The proof of that came from Silo #8, off to Price’s south. The concrete structure that sat atop it surged into the air, and under it was a volcanic blast of fire and smoke. Silo #1, theirs, did the same, a gout of flame going sideways out of the open service door.
The infrared signature was impossible to miss. Over the equator, a DSP satellite focused in on the thermal bloom and cross-loaded the signal to Sunnyvale, California. From there it went to NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, dug into the sub-basement level of Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. “Launch! Possible launch at Xuanhua!” “What’s that?” asked CINC-NORAD.
“We got a bloom, a huge—two huge ones at Xuanhua,” the female captain announced. “Fuck, there’s another one.”
“Okay, Captain, settle down,” the four-star told her. “There’s a special op taking that base down right now. Settle down, girl.”
In the control bunker, men were turning keys. The general in command had never really expected to do this. Sure, it was a possibility, the thing he’d trained his entire career for, but, no, not this. No. Not a chance.
But someone was trying to destroy his command—and he did have his orders, and like the automaton he’d been trained to be, he gave the orders and turned his command key.
The Spetsnaz people were doing well. Four silos were now disabled. One of the Russian teams managed to crack the maintenance door on their first try. This team, General Kirillin’s own, sent its technical genius inside, and he found the missile’s guidance module and blew it apart with gunfire. It would take a week at least to fix this missile, and just to make sure that didn’t happen, he affixed an explosive charge to the stainless steel body and set the timer for fifteen minutes. “Done!” he called.
“Out!” Kirillin ordered. The lieutenant general, now feeling like a new cadet in parachute school, gathered his team and ran to the pickup point. As guilty as any man would be of mission focus, he looked around, surprised by the fire and flame to his north—
—but more surprised to see three silo covers moving. The nearest was only three hundred meters away, and there he saw one of his Spetsnaz troopers walk right to the suddenly open silo and toss something in—then he ran like a rabbit—
—because three seconds later, the hand grenade he’d tossed in exploded, and took the entire missile up with it. The Spetsnaz soldier disappeared in the fireball he’d caused, and would not be seen again—
—but then something worse happened. From exhaust vents set left and right of Silos #5 and #7 came two vertical fountains of solid white-yellow flame, and less than two seconds later appeared the blunt, black shape of a missile’s nosecone.
“Fuck,” breathed the Apache pilot coded CROOK Two. He was circling a kilometer away, and without any conscious thought at all, lowered his nose, twisted throttle, and pulled collective to jerk his attack helicopter at the rising missile.
“Got it,” the gunner called. He selected his 20-mm cannon and held down the trigger. The tracers blazed out like laser beams. The first set missed, but the gunner adjusted his LEAD and walked them into the missile’s upper half—
—the resulting explosion threw CROOK Two out of control, rolling it over on its back. The pilot threw his cyclic to the left, continuing the roll before he stopped it, barely, a quarter of the way through the second one, and then he saw the fireball rising, and the burning missile fuel falling back to the ground, atop Silo #9, and on all the men there who’d disabled that bird.
The last missile cleared its silo before the soldiers there could do much about it. Two tried to shoot at it with their personal weapons, but the flaming exhaust incinerated them in less time than it takes to pull a trigger. Another Apache swept in, having seen what crook Two had accomplished, but its rounds fell short, so rapidly the CSS-4 climbed into the air.
“Oh, fuck,” Clark heard in his radio earpiece. It was Ding’s voice. “Oh, fuck.”
John got back on his satellite phone.
“Yeah, how’s it going?” Ed Foley asked.
“One got off, one got away, man.”
“What?”
“You heard me. We killed all but one, but that one got off… going north, but leaning east some. Sorry, Ed. We tried.”
It took Foley a few seconds to gather his thought and reply. “Thanks, John. I guess I have some things to do here.”
“There’s another one,” the captain said.
CINC-NORAD was trying to play this one as cool as he could. Yes, there was a spec-op laid on to take this Chinese missile farm down, and so he expected to see some hot flashes on the screen, and okay, all of them so far had been on the ground.
“That should be all of them,” the general announced.
“Sir, this one’s moving. This one’s a launch.”
“Are you sure?”
“Look, sir, the bloom is moving off the site,” she said urgently. “Valid launch, valid launch—valid threat!” she concluded. “Oh, my God . . .”
“Oh, shit,” CINC-NORAD said. He took one breath and lifted the Gold Phone. No, first he’d call the NMCC.
The senior watch officer in the National Military Command Center was a Marine one-star named Sullivan. The NORAD phone didn’t ring very often.
“NMCC, Brigadier General Sullivan speaking.”
“This is CINC-NORAD. We have a valid launch, valid threat from Xuanhua missile base in China. I say again, we have a valid launch, valid threat from China. It’s angling east, coming to North America.”
“Fuck,” the Marine observed.
“Tell me about it.”
The procedures were all written down. His first call went to the White House military office.
Ryan was setting down to dinner with the family. An unusual night, he had nothing scheduled, no speeches to give, and that was good, because reporters always showed up and asked questions, and lately—
“Say that again?” Andrea Price-O’Day said into her sleeve microphone. “What?”
Then another Secret Service agent bashed into the room. “Marching Order!” he proclaimed. It was a code phrase often practiced but never spoken in reality.
“What?” Jack said, half a second before his wife could make the same sound.
“Mr. President, we have to get you and your family out of here,” Andrea said. “The Marines have the helicopters on the way.”
“What’s happening?”
“Sir, NORAD reports an inbound ballistic threat.”
“What? China?”
“That’s all I know. Let’s go, right now,” Andrea said forcefully.