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Chapter 30

Pentagon, Washington, D.C.

Sunday

8:00 p.m. Eastern Time


“So, wait a minute. You mean that six nukes could be enough to shut down the planet?” Lieutenant Colonel Frank Alvarez said it as if he didn’t believe the words coming out of his own mouth. “Is that what you are saying, Dr. Grayson?”

“No, that isn’t what I’m saying.” Frank watched as the man spoke to them through the secure video system connecting the Pentagon, the NSA in Utah, the Missiles and Space Intelligence Center in Alabama, and A1C Shannon and two new Space Force officers from Tampa. The original team members had all been on the move and had yet to have time to get back to the Task Force headquarters in Tampa to meet the new players. Other than the brief introductions in the beginning of the secure video conference, Tampa had stayed on mute.

“That is not what I said at all, Colonel Alvarez,” Grayson insisted.

“Okay then, I’m confused. Please, rephrase what you just told us from the top, if you don’t mind.” Frank looked around the conference table at Mac and Kenny and could tell they were somewhat bewildered, but they managed to maintain decent poker faces.

“Well, six nukes, even if these were of the megaton class—and they aren’t—wouldn’t do much damage from a global perspective if they were detonated from the ground. People always think nukes will blow up the planet—based on Hollywood movies, I suspect. They always get it wrong. Oh, please don’t get me wrong here—from a city-sized perspective, yes, absolutely millions could die if they are detonated in a metropolis like New York City, Paris, London, Tokyo, and so forth. That would be very bad.” Grayson continued to explain as he turned a monitor on his desk so the classified VTC camera could pick it up. “You can see the damage areas marked here if all six were detonated on the North American continent.”

The monitor had a slide of North America with six red dots spread across it; from the continent level, they were barely perceptible. Grayson zoomed in on the screen to the city level, where a centimeter represented about five kilometers. From that perspective, the damage would be significant and the red dots became large red circles.

“New York City, for example, would be gone,” Dr. Grayson explained. “But only that.”

“A nuke that size would destroy a city. That’s bad enough,” Frank said. He’d been working proliferation of weapons of mass destruction for most of his career and he had been trained on what size bombs could do what damage. But he’d never really focused on a global perspective. He’d always assumed that if somebody stole a nuke, they would use it for terrorism and blow up a city for show and posturing or to just be an asshole of epic proportion. That’s just how terrorists and warlords worked—assholes. They wanted to punch the big bully, the “great Satan,” or whatever other evil king of the hill right in the nose and they didn’t give a shit about all the moms, dads, sons, and daughters that got killed in the process. Assholes. Of epic proportion.

“Yes, major damage citywide, many deaths, but—and here is the catch—in only six cities or so. That is a very small-minded, yesterday type of thinking. The global pandemic invasions and rampant cyberattacks show us that there is a new breed of evil mind out there. There are bad guys thinking in terms of global manipulation, stock market collapses, national currency devaluations, election outcome management, population control, and yes, maybe even global domination. Sounds like a spy movie, but it has become reality. Just what if that is the kind of mindset we are dealing with here?”

“What if?” Thompson shrugged. “He’s wearing an eyepatch and petting his cat somewhere.”

“Where’s Mike Myers when we need him?” Mac added. Frank did his best not to glare at the two of them. He did think the comments were funny, even though he was pretty sure Major Thompson wasn’t old enough to know who Austin Powers or Ernst Blofeld were.

“Mike Myers—ha! I get that reference. And, unfortunately, what if you are not that far from wrong, Chief? You see, well, I was considering what six nuclear warheads could really do if they were put to an optimally devastating use on as large a scale as possible. That is when I realized these might not be old-school terrorists we’re dealing with here. No, not at all. These might be the global currency devaluation, election-rigging, pandemic-invading nut jobs of conspiracy theory websites. But not conspiracy and practically doable. By thinking along those lines, well, that is when I started really focusing on what they would do with six nukes rather than who or where they are or what. The current evidence we have tells us they aren’t typical terrorists.”

“How so, Doc?” Alvarez asked, although he was beginning to come to similar conclusions himself based on how the operation had gone. Somebody had really thought this through. Somebody had really covered his or her or their tracks. Somebody out there was really smart, well funded, and surrounded by very very competent and loyal people. Frank was thinking much more loyal than the type that would dump a backpack full of ballots into a ballot box while the cameras were watching, smiling all the while and waving to fans. No, this was the type of loyalty that would take a bullet in the head for a cause. A very bad and dangerous cause. These weren’t dumb kids doing stupid things and thinking they were changing the world. These were people planning to do something horrific and dangerous and would change the world in a very bad, bad way. This shit scared the hell out of Frank and he knew it had to be stopped. Somehow.

“Well, if they are typical, why did they only grab the warheads and go? Why was there no message or anyone claiming credit? Because I think these guys are smarter and better prepared than that. They have a plan.”

“What plan, Doc?” Mac asked.

“To blackout most of the world.”

“What?”

“What if the nukes were detonated at altitude—let’s say an altitude of thirty kilometers or so, could be higher—and what if they were strategically placed around the globe before detonation at said altitude? One model I have run suggests a detonation in the U.S., somewhere over Kentucky, perhaps, one over Moscow, one over Beijing, one over maybe Paris, maybe New Delhi, and maybe somewhere in the Middle East or on the west coast of the U.S. The electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, impact on the power grids and communication networks would be devastating. Probably far, far more people would die from the long-term infrastructure impact than would from detonations in cities on the ground. Also, the radiation problem wouldn’t be as bad either. There would be very little fallout and it would be widely dispersed in the upper atmosphere fairly quickly.”

“That makes perfect sense, Kevin.” Frank didn’t recognize the female voice. But from Grayson’s reaction on the video screen, he did. As the secure video conferencing software put the speaker’s video up, he could see Major Dugan and a woman looking to be somewhere in her late forties with long, straight black hair, wearing black-rimmed glasses, a black Mötley Crüe T-shirt, and a light green cardigan. The video system labeled her as MSIC: DR. CASTLEBAUM. “They’d need a way to get them all airborne, though.”

“Yes, Amy, that is the one thing I have yet to figure out. Airplanes wouldn’t get them high enough. They’d need to get them on rockets or missiles to get them up there.”

“They’re not going to put them up on rockets or missiles, as you say. That would be too costly,” Dr. Castlebaum said. “Besides, you’d have to launch six different rockets from six different locations to do that. What you could do is just drop them from space.”

“Say again? Drop them from space?” Chief McKagan said from across the table from Frank.

“Seriously?” Thompson muttered under his breath.

“How would they get them there? They should have just kept them on the missile and launched that thing if that was what they wanted to do,” Mac added.

“Well, not really, Mac. Listen to what the doc has to say. She’s got this figured out, I think,” Dugan said and nodded back to Amy. Frank watched and noted there was a bit of familiarity between them. He’d have to get the backstory from the Sapper later. But Frank had checked the in-service guys out and they all were good men. He either had served with them or served with someone who had. He trusted them. He trusted Mac, Kenny, and Casey. And Major Casey Dugan seemed to trust this Dr. Castlebaum, so he would give her the benefit of the doubt for the time being.

“Yes, right.” Castelbaum took her glasses off with her right hand and pointed with them as she started again. “If they had launched the Topol-M it would have required major reprogramming, and even then, I don’t think they could have gotten the kind of coverage that Kevin is talking about. At least from a rocket science perspective it would be difficult, if not impossible, for that one missile without serious modifications and testing. With hypersonic glide bodies you could spread them apart, but not globally. At least I don’t think you could. Kevin?”

“Correct.” Grayson nodded. “While one Topol-M with multiple reentry vehicles could cover several areas, it would only be on a single continent, according to all the data we have available on those systems. But, Amy, we got that data from MSIC, so I trust your assessment.”

“Right. Uh, yes, that’s what my assessment suggests anyway. Plus, as good as these bad guys might be, hacking and launching a stolen Topol-M would still be quite a feat. I think it would be easier to steal the warheads and use them,” Amy said. She put her glasses back on and tapped at a computer keyboard briefly and then looked back toward the screen or wherever the camera was located. “If you could get the nukes into orbit to about four hundred kilometers’ altitude, then you could deorbit them to wherever you wanted to put them on the globe as you passed by. It’s a little more complicated than that, but not significantly so. I was thinking of hitting targets and the accuracy needed confused me because that would be harder to pull off. But hearing what Dr. Grayson is telling us about using the bombs for EMP and just getting them to hit targets of sort of state-sized locations at thirty kilometers’ altitude or higher, well now, that is very, very doable. It absolutely could be done.”

“Alright, so they blast out the lights and some radios and stuff. How bad could it really be?” Thompson asked.

“Kevin, you want to answer that one?” Amy asked.

“I’ll take it,” he said. “So, we actually ran a study on this a few years back. We used the supercomputer here to run a simulation of such a global scale event. At the time we simulated solar flares and even some nuclear detonations. I also have read one JASON study where they looked at this. All of it so classified nobody ever read it, really.”

“Sounds useful.” Amy laughed.

“I have to agree,” Mac said. “If you have access to that study, please send it to us. My CO probably would like to see it.”

“These simulations and studies took into account as many variables as possible to make them as accurate as possible. The study cost over sixteen million dollars and took about sixteen months to complete. The results were fairly clear. A well-placed single EMP event over North America from either a nuclear airburst or a CME would blow out a large portion of our power grid. There would be blackouts for weeks, months, and maybe even years because of the loss of power transformers, switches, and other susceptible items that are replaceable but with limited reserves. Think about the transformers alone. There would be many tens of millions of those potentially damaged by one EMP blast. At any given time, the U.S. has about fifty to one hundred thousand replacement parts.”

“Can’t we make new ones?” Frank asked.

“Yes, but, the backorder times on them is something like six months. It could be years before they were all replaced. It was suggested in the report that leaving parts of the old grid derelict and standing up a new one might be easier,” Grayson said. “These six well-placed nukes could put large parts of the world back in the dark for a long time to come. Maybe even indefinitely.”

“Not to mention all the dead internet systems, cars, and other infrastructure items.” McKagan shook his head knowingly. “Jesus, could this really be what they are planning?”

“I don’t know the exact hows, or for that matter even the exact whats, this ‘they’ of yours is planning,” Amy said, “but a very general ‘what’ was drawn out and worked out in some fairly good detail on the notes from Phillip Watkins that Major Dugan sent me. There is a detailed analysis of using a rocket launch vehicle that I’ll bet a dime to a donut is a Russian rocket that’s meeting up with a vehicle already in orbit at about four hundred kilometers. Then, later on in those notes are calculations for deorbit burns of much smaller payloads. This fits our scenario perfectly.”

“A Russian rocket?” Frank asked.

“Yeah, the burn times and thrust requirements for the launch calculations you found suggests specific Russian-made rocket motors for both the first and second stages. The numbers used are pretty much a fingerprint for exact rocket motors. The problem is, several rockets around the world use those motors,” Amy explained.

“Yeah, but are the Russians the only ones that make them?” Frank asked.

“Not even that generic,” she replied. “They are made by a specific Russian rocket company…let’s see,” she said, checking her notes. “Energomash made them for the Energia Zenit rocket family. Variations of that motor are used for other rockets including the Atlas V, which uses the RD-180.”

“Wait a minute,” Mac interrupted. “The Atlas V is an American rocket made down there in Decatur, Alabama, by you, right? It uses a Russian engine?”

“Don’t get me started on that fiasco,” Amy commented.

“Where in Russia are these things made, Dr. Castlebaum?” Frank asked.

“Call me Amy. They come from Ukraine…um, let me see, I wrote it down in case I forgot it. Yuzhnoye Design Bureau, in Dnipro.”

“How many of these can there be?” Major Thompson asked.

“And how many are unaccounted for?” Mac added.

“That’s not my realm of expertise,” Amy replied. “I’m the reverse engineer rocket person, not the current inventories person. But there has to be plenty of them still around.”

“I’ll start a search on that now,” Grayson said.

“As soon as Dr. Banks checks in, I’ll ask her to look into it as well,” Frank said. Ginny had stayed awake about as long as humanly possible. She had been going in and out on Frank earlier during a conversation. He told her to get some rest. They were in D.C. near her actual home, so he told her that he thought she should go home while she had the chance and get some rest in her actual bed and not a cot or hotel room.

“I can ping my colleagues at DTRA,” Mac said. “Somebody there might have some insight.”

“Great, Mac. Let me know if you find out anything. You, too, Dr. Grayson.” Frank waited to see if anybody else had anything new. They didn’t. “Dr. Castlebaum, this is great work. Can you and Major Dugan get that summarized for me in a briefable package ASAP?”

“We’ll do it, Colonel.” Dugan replied. “And you never told us what you got out of the two assailants and the driver up there.”

“Not a peep, Casey. Not a damned word,” Frank replied. “Completely tight lipped. You probably beat more noise out of the driver than we’ve managed to get from him since the doctor cleared him for questioning.”

“Unfortunate.”

“Maybe you should’ve hit him harder, Case,” Thompson suggested.

“Next time.” Dugan smiled.

“Toby is at FBI HQ across the river running their fingerprints and facial patterns through all the known criminal and terror and international law enforcement networks. Hopefully, he’ll get something. Anybody have anything else?”

“No, sir.”

“Nope.”

“Negative.”

“Alright then, stay in touch. If anybody comes up with something new, call immediately.”


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