The Seventh Angel (28 page)

Sheldon shook his head. “People get crazy when they’re really scared. They hurt each other. They hurt themselves.”

“
The government should have known this would happen,” Ann said. “They shouldn’t have sent out the warnings. They knew people would lose their minds. This is their fault.”

Sheldon exhaled loudly. “Come on, Ann. You’re going to think the worst of them no matter
what
they do. You know you are. That’s how your brain is wired.”

He unzipped his travel bag and began fishing through the contents with his hand. “If the government had kept this quiet, you’d be screaming for blood right now. You’d be sitting next to me, talking about the
conspiracy of silence
and
the people’s right to know
. You’d be telling me that the people should have been warned.”

Sheldon pulled out his cell phone and flipped it open. “No offense, Ann, but you get a lot of mileage out of not liking people. You know that, don’t you?”

Before Ann could answer, he punched a string of numbers and hoisted the phone to his ear.

Ann started to slip in a comeback, but she stopped herself. What was the point? The best she could hope for would be to piss off Sheldon, the one person who seemed to be able to put up with her.

She let her eyes wander around the terminal. People were still gathered around the televisions, staring up at the curved glass screens for a glimpse of the chaos on the other side of the ocean.

Her eyes lit on a huge electronic monitor showing arrivals and departures in Japanese and English. She let her gaze slide down the list of departing flights, pretending for a second that one of them might list an outbound flight to Planet Z-X-55. She was ready to get off this planet.

With a flicker of shifting letters and numbers, the information on the monitor was updated. Times and gate numbers reshuffled themselves as various airlines adjusted their schedules.

Every flight to the United States was now listed as ‘Canceled.’

WHITE HOUSE

PRESIDENTIAL EMERGENCY OPERATIONS CENTER

WASHINGTON, DC

SATURDAY; 02 MARCH

7:17 PM EST

The national security advisor cleared his throat. “Ah … Mr. President?”

The president didn’t answer. The Single Integrated Operational Plan lay untouched on the briefing table in front of him. The thick binder was still open to Section Orange: “
RETALIATORY NUCLEAR STRIKE OPTIONS
.
”

Of all the documents Frank Chandler had been shown, trained on, or briefed about, this was the one he’d least expected to ever need. He understood its purpose. He knew that it had been created specifically for the kind of situation they were in now, but he’d never really believed that this moment would arrive.

And yet … somehow … it had come.

Gregory Brenthoven cleared his throat again. “Mr. President, we
have
to respond.”

The president raised a hand for silence. He couldn’t seem to think properly.

His eyes drifted down to the SIOP. The open section of the document was divided into numbered subheadings:

6.2-A
Counterforce Responses

6.2-B
Countervalue Responses

6.2-C
Punitive Responses

Counter
force
referred to the targeting of missile silos and military sites, to destroy the enemy’s ability to make war.
Counter
value
meant attacks against cities and the killing of the general civilian populace, to break the enemy’s national will. And
punitive
responses were designed as punishment: in essence, “spanking” an enemy nation with nuclear weapons.

The terms were so sterile, so scrubbed of emotional cues, that they invited the reader to ignore their grisly implications. There was no hint that selecting any of the proffered choices might condemn millions of human beings to death.

The president absently grasped the tab marked
6.2-C
, and flipped the binder open to the section on “
Punitive Responses
.” Again he encountered three subdivisions:

6.2-C.1 Punitive Responses (Disproportionate)

6.2-C.2 Punitive Responses (Proportionate)

6.2-C.3 Punitive Responses (Minimal)

He selected the third tab, and thumbed the pages to “
Punitive Responses (Minimal)
.” He read the opening paragraphs.

Again, the words were almost mind-numbingly banal. If this had been a routine government document, the president might have chalked up the monotonous writing to the self-importance of the bureaucratic mindset. But such cumbersome sentence construction and oblique word-choice probably had not occurred by accident.

In the nineteen-eighties, a political satirist had referred to the SIOP as ‘
The Cookbook for Ending the World
.’ That little slice of dark humor hadn’t gone over well in the corridors of military power, but—with all social and political niceties stripped away—that’s exactly what the SIOP was. It was the instruction manual for ultimate genocide. Every paragraph in the fat metal binder was monstrous, in both intent and in consequence. Every neatly-numbered option lead to incalculable human atrocity.

The military officers and government officials responsible for wordsmithing the plan had understood that. And they had known that some president might one day have to sit where Francis Benjamin Chandler was sitting right now, and issue orders that would kill massive numbers of people.

So they had buried the ugly truths behind tediously flat phrases, perhaps in the hopes of granting their president a sufficient amount of emotional distance to make decisions that no human being is equipped to make.

If that had really been their intent, it had worked, at least in part. President Chandler found that the semiotically-neutral language of nuclear warfare made it possible for him to consider courses of action that would have been unthinkable if they had been couched in more accurate terms. If he’d been required to utter words like
slaughter
,
massacre
, or
incinerate
, he could not have forced them out of his mouth.

The drafters of the Single Integrated Operational Plan had foreseen that particular hurdle, and they’d built a corrective mechanism directly into the document. Each nuclear strike option had been assigned a so-called
brevity code
, consisting of a single word paired with a numeral. By referring to an attack plan or a target list by its brevity code, the president and the National Command Authority could discuss options and give orders, while avoiding the kinds of words that trigger mental shutdown and emotional overload.

The brevity code for attacking suspected nuclear weapons facilities in Iran was
Typhoon Three
. The code for hitting every power plant and electrical distribution facility in North Korea was
Castle Eight
. The code for total destruction of every city in China was
Zebra Two
. And the brevity code for unrestricted thermonuclear war—the end of the world—was
Angel Seven
.

It was the supreme euphemism: the extermination of all human life, concealed behind a hopeful-sounding word and a randomly-selected numeral.

The president slammed the heavy binder shut with a great deal more force than he’d intended.

Angel Seven.

The code phrase stuck in his brain. Einstein had named it
World War III
. The bible called it
Armageddon
. The Vikings had known it as
Raganarøkr
, the
Twilight of the Gods
. But the Single Integrated Operational Plan called it
Angel Seven
.

He shoved the binder away from him. The answer, if there was one, was not hidden in the pages of the Cookbook for Ending the World.

He rubbed his eyes, took a breath, and looked up at the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “General Gilmore, keep us at DEFCON 1. Have STRATCOM and NMCC prepare a list of prioritized recommendations. Make sure your personal recommendations are on the top of the stack.”

He turned to his national security advisor. “Of course you’re right, Greg. We
have
to respond. We cannot spend the rest of our lives squatting in bunkers and waiting for Zhukov to drop the other shoe. I want a full strategy meeting in the Sit Room in two hours. Defense, Security, and State.”

He pointed at the geographic display screen, where the red arc of the Russian weapon still burned. “Whatever we do, our number one priority must be to destroy that missile submarine. We got lucky the first time. Zhukov only fired one missile. We threw everything we had at it, but we still didn’t get all the warheads. What happens if Zhukov launches
ten
missiles?”

The president stood up and pushed his chair back from the table. “We’ve got a maniac out there with a nuclear arsenal, and he’s already shown that he’s not afraid to use it. This is not going to end until
we
end it.”

He lowered his voice. “Or until that crazy bastard ends it for us.”

OPERATIONS COMMAND POST #3

OUTSIDE PETROPAVLOVSK-KAMCHATSKI, RUSSIA

SUNDAY; 03 MARCH

1441 hours (2:41 PM)

TIME ZONE +12 ‘MIKE’

Sergiei Mikhailovich Zhukov, president of the newly-independent nation of Kamchatka and future premiere of the soon-to-be-restored Soviet Empire, rifled through the sheaf of news reports that his staff had downloaded from the Internet. The American press was so helpful—freely spreading information that Zhukov’s enemies should be keeping to themselves.

He flipped a page and smiled at a printed news photograph of smashed shop windows and battered-looking looters in handcuffs. There was pandemonium in the western states, especially California. The freeways were jammed. Businesses were in turmoil. Petrol stations were extorting ten dollars a gallon for gasoline, and bottled water and canned food were rapidly vanishing into the pockets of a burgeoning black market. Police and emergency services were being overwhelmed by a population that was rushing to escape the next barrage of nuclear warheads.

The missile launch had occurred less than three hours ago, and already opponents of the American president were criticizing their leader’s handling of the crisis. The bolder of them were calling for Chandler’s resignation, with a small but vocal minority demanding impeachment. One of the man’s more famous detractors had publicly announced that it was time for the Farm Boy President to go back to the farm. The media carried every second of the escalating controversy, and splashed it across newspapers, television screens, and Internet websites.

Such were the benefits of their so-called
free press
. The American news industry was not the voice of the common people as that country’s founding fathers had intended. It had become a self-important money-hungry conglomerate, peddling the worst sort of sensationalist garbage to the unknowing masses. And the people didn’t realize that things should be any different, because this filth-slinging gossip machine was all they’d ever seen.

Zhukov dropped the stack of reports on his desk. For all its shortcomings, the American media was becoming his best ally in this fight, exactly as he had planned.

Lenin had once written that one man with a gun can control 100 men without one. Well, the gun was in the hands of Sergiei Mikhailovich Zhukov now. And he was depending on the American news industry to tell the world exactly how lethal that gun was, and—more importantly—where it was pointed.

WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

WASHINGTON, DC

SATURDAY; 02 MARCH

9:45 PM EST

White House Chief of Staff Veronica Doyle, took her seat to the left of the president’s chair. She leaned close to her boss. “Sir, I think we’re ready to begin.”