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Into the Looking Glass

Baen Books

Chapter One

The golfers at Fairways Country Club had only a moment to experience the bright flash and heat when the fireball engulfed them. The two young men on University Boulevard selling "top name brand stereos" that they "couldn't return or their boss would kill them" didn't even have that long. The fireball spread in every direction, a white ball of expanding plasma, crisping the numerous suburban communities that had spread out around the university, homes, families, dogs, children. The plasma wavefront created a tremendous shockwave of air that blasted like a tornado outwards, destroying everything in its path. The shockwave spread to the south as far as U.S. 50 where early morning shoppers were blinded and covered with flaming debris. It enveloped the speeders on the Greenway, tossing cars up to a half a mile in the clear air. It spread to the north almost to the town of Oviedo,erased the venerable community of Goldenrod, spread as far as Semoran Boulevard to the west and out to Lake Pickett to the east. The rumble of the detonation was felt as far away as Tampa, Cocoa and Ocala and the ascending mushroom cloud, roiling with purple and green light in the early morning air, was visible as far away as Miami. Flaming debris dropped into Park Avenue in Winter Park, setting the ancient oaks along that pleasant drive briefly ablaze and crushed the vestibule of St. Paul's Church.

Troopers in the motor pool of Charlie Company, Second Battalion, 53rd Brigade, Florida Army National Guard, who were pulling post deployment maintenance on their Humvee and Hemet trucks, looked up at the flash and cringed. Those that remembered their training dropped to the ground and put their arms over their heads. Others ran into the antiquated armory, seeking shelter in the steel cages that secured their gear when they were at their civilian jobs or, as seemed much more common these days, deployed to the Balkans or Ashkanistan or Iraq.

Specialist Bob Crichton was compiling loss lists in his cubicle when he noticed the rumble. The unit had returned only a week before from a year-long deployment in Iraq and everyone seemed to have "combat lossed" their protective masks. Unit protective garments were at less than thirty percent of proper inventory. It was stupid. Everybody knew that sooner or later the riffs were going to hit them with a WMD attack, chemical, radiological or even nuclear now that Pakistan was giving the Saudis of, all people, nukes. But nobody liked protective garments or masks and they "lost" them as fast as they could. Convoy ambush? Damn, the riffs must have grabbed my mask. Firefight? Where'd that protective garment go?

He looked up to where his diploma from the U.S. Army Chemical Corps Advanced Training Course hung and saw the glass shatter even before it fell off the wall. He blinked his eyes twice and then dove under the metal desk and clamped his hands over his ears, opening his mouth to equalize the pressure, just before the air-pressure shockwave hit. Even over the sound of the explosion, which seemed to envelope the whole world, he heard the sound of the big windows in the armory crashing to the floor of the parade hall. There was a sound of tearing metal, probably one of the old girders that held up the roof of the parade hall, then relative silence except for a distant screaming. He waited a moment, catching creaking from the old building but figuring it was as safe as it was going to get, then climbed out from under his desk and headed for the company commander's office.

The first sergeant and the operations sergeant were just pulling themselves out from under their own desks when Crichton burst through the door without knocking, normally a cardinal offense but he figured this was as good a time as any to ignore the directive.

"Nobody goes outside for at least thirty minutes, Top," he said, bouncing from one foot to the other in the doorway. "And I need my survey teams, that's Ramage, Guptill, Casey, Garcia and Lambert. And as soon as it's clear I need a platoon to start filling sandbags for the Humvees-"

"Slow down," the first sergeant said, sitting down in his chair and then standing up to brush crumbs from the drop ceiling off of it. The first sergeant was tall and lanky. Up until the last year he'd been the chief investigator for the Lake County Sheriff's Department. When they got deployed, ignoring the Soldiers and Sailors' Act, he'd given the sheriff his okay to appoint his deputy to the job. So when they got back he took a cut in pay and went back to work as a sergeant. Give him a crime scene and he knew where he was at. He even was pretty good at recovering the company from a mortar attack or a convoy ambush. He was one of the best guys in the world at training his troops to sniff out hidden explosives, weapons and other prohibited materials-he thought of it as shaking down a dealer's house. But nuclear attacks were a new one for him and it was taking him a minute to get his bearings.

"I can't slow down," Crichton replied. "I need to set up a radiological station before anybody can go outside even after the first thirty minutes."

"What's with the thirty minutes?" Staff Sergeant Wolf asked. The operations sergeant was medium height and well over what the Army considered acceptable weight for his height. And it wasn't muscle, like the CO's driver who was a fricking tank, it was fat. But he was pretty sharp. Not unflappable, he was clearly taking even more time to adjust than the first sergeant, but smart. When he wasn't in one third-world shit hole or another he was a manager of a Kinkos.

"Falling debris," Crichton asked. "We don't know it's a nuke. It probably was but it could have been an asteroid hit. They throw chunks of burning rock into the stratosphere and they take a while to come down."

"Top?" Crichton heard from behind him. The chemical specialist turned around and saw that the mortar platoon sergeant had come up behind him while he was talking. The platoon sergeant, a staff sergeant who was a delivery manager for UPS when he was home, showed a physique developed from years of throwing often quite heavy boxes through the air. It was running to fat now that he worked behind a desk ten months out of the year, but he still was a big guy you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley.

"Get Crichton his survey teams," the first sergeant said, looking at the suddenly irrelevant papers on his desk. "Send Sergeant Burell around to get everybody inside until the all clear sounds. Then get with the rest of the platoon sergeants in the Swamp. Wolf, head over to battalion, see what's up."

"Where's the CO?" Crichton asked, looking at the closed door at the back of the room.

"At breakfast with the platoon leaders and the battalion commander," the first sergeant answered, dryly. "We can handle this until they get back. Go."

* * * FLASH is the highest priority communication in the military directory, superceding even Operational Immediate. Satellites in orbit noted the explosion and computers on the ground automatically categorized it as a nuclear explosion.

"Holy shit!" the Air Force sergeant monitoring the nuclear attack warning console muttered, his stomach dropping. In the old days he would have picked up a phone. Now he hit three buttons and confirmed three separate pop-ups sending a FLASH priority message to the National Military Command Center in the bowels of the Pentagon. Then he picked up the phone as sirens went off in the normally quiet room in Sunnyvale California.

* * *

The wonder of military communications and computers meant that the President of the United States got word that a probable nuclear attack had occurred on Central Florida a whole thirty seconds before Fox broke the news.

"I know we can't say who did it, yet," the President said calmly. He was at Camp David for the weekend but most of his senior staff was on the phone already. "But I'll make three guesses and only two of them count."

"Mr. President, let's not jump to conclusions," his national security advisor said. She was a specialist in nuclear strategy and had been doing makee-learnee on terrorism ever since the attacks of September 11, 2001. And this didn't fit the profile of a terrorist attack. "First of all, nobody thinks that they have access to nuclear weapons of this sort. Radiological bombs, maybe. But this appears to be a nuclear weapon. However, the target makes no sense for a terrorist. It has been located precisely as being on the grounds of the University of Central Florida. Why waste a nuclear weapon on a university when they could use it on New York or Washington or L.A. or Atlanta?"

"I gotta go with the NSA on this one, Mister President," the secretary of defense said. "This doesn't feel like an attack. What's the chance it could have been some sort of accident?"

"I don't know that much about UCF," the NSA admitted. She had once been the dean of a major college but for the last few years she'd been holding down the national security advisor's desk in the middle of a war. Her stated ambition after leaving government service was to become the commissioner of the National Football League. "But I don't think they're doing anything in the nuclear program, I'm pretty sure I'd remember that. And you just don't get accidents with weapons. They're hard enough to get to go off at all."

"So we're in a holding pattern?" the President asked.

"Yes, sir," the secretary of defense answered.

"We need to get a statement out, fast," the chief of staff said. "Especially if we're pretty sure it wasn't a terrorist attack."

"Have one made up," the President said. "I'm going to go take a nap. I figure this is gonna be a long one."

* * *

"Okay, Crichton, what do you have?"

The battalion headquarters of Second Battalion was collocated in the armory with Charlie Company. At the moment the Battalion, which should have had a staff sergeant and two specialists as a nuclear, biological and chemical weapons team, was without any of the three. Crichton had for the last year been the only trained NBC specialist in the entire battalion. He reflected, somewhat bitterly, that while he'd been holding down the work of a staff sergeant, a sergeant and six other privates it hadn't been reflected in a promotion.

"None of my instruments are reading any increase in background radiation here, sir," the specialist temporized. The meeting of the battalion staff and company commanders was taking place in the battalion meeting room, a small room with a large table and its walls lined with unit insignias, awards and trophies. The question hit him as he walked through the door. Crichton had been told only two minutes before to "shag your ass over to battalion and report to the sergeant major." At the time he'd been prepping his survey teams.

Radiological survey teams were taken from within standard companies and sent out to find where the radiation was from a nuclear attack. It was one of the many scenarios that the Army kept in its playbook but rarely paid much attention to. The privates and one sergeant for the company's team had been chosen months before and should have trained in the interim. But there were always more important things to do or train on, especially on a deployment. So he was having to brief them at the same time as he was trying to read all his instruments, prepare a NUCREP that was probably going to be read by the Joint Chiefs and make sense of the readings, none of which, in fact, made sense.

He knew all the officers in the room and, frankly, didn't like them very much. The battalion operations officer, a major, stayed on active duty as much as possible because his other job was as a school teacher, elementary level, and soccer coach. As a major he made three times as much as a civilian. He could run anybody in the battalion into the ground but the only reason he managed to keep his head above water in his present post was his S-3 sergeant, whose civilian job was operations manager for a large tool and die distributor. The battalion executive officer was a small town cop. Nice guy and, give him credit, in good shape despite the Twinkies but not the brightest brick in the load. How he made major was a huge question. The battalion commander was a good manager and a decent leader but if you asked him to "think outside the box" he'd get a box and stand outside of it while he thought. And there was nothing, so far, that fit in any box Crichton could imagine.

"The thing is, sir, this doesn't look like a nuke at all, Colonel," he admitted.

"Looked one hell of a lot like one where I was standing," the XO replied, his brow crinkling. "Big flash, mushroom cloud, hell of a bang. Nuke."

"No radiation and no EMP, sir," Crichton said, shaking his head.

"No EMP?" the battalion commander said. "Are you sure?"

"What ..." the Charlie Company commander said, then shook his head. "I know I'm supposed to know this, damnit, but I don't. What in the hell is ... what was it you said?"

"EMP, sir," Crichton replied. "Electromagnetic pulse. Basically, a nuke makes like a giant magnetic generator along with everything else." He reached in his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. "I called my mom to tell her I was okay and not to worry. Didn't think about it ..."

"That's okay," the battalion commander said. "Everybody did the same thing."

"Yes, sir," Crichton replied. "But I meant I didn't think about it until I hung up. Nuke that size, sir, the EMP should have shut down every electronic device in East Orlando. I mean everything that wasn't shielded. Phones, computers, cars. But everything works. Ergo, it was not a nuke."

"Look, Crichton, I got a call, a personal call, from the Chief of Staff," the battalion commander said. "I mean the Army Chief of Staff. There's a NEST team on the way to check this out, but he wants data now. What do I tell him?"

Crichton cringed at that. The Chief of Staff was going to tell whatever he said to somebody even higher up. Probably the President. If he got it wrong ...

"Right now this ... event is not consonant with a nuclear attack, sir," the specialist said, firmly. "There is no evidence of EMP or radiation. Nor ..." He paused and then squared his shoulders. "Nor does it appear to be an asteroid strike."

"A what?" the operations officer asked.

"Look," Crichton said, thinking fast. "Sir, you ever see a movie called Armageddon? Or Asteroid?"

"That's science fiction, right?" the major scoffed. "I don't watch that sort of stuff."

"An asteroid probably wiped out the dinosaurs, sir," Crichton explained, trying not to sound as if he was speaking to a child. "It's not science fiction, it could happen at any time."

"But we'd get warning, right?" the XO asked. "There's some sort of a group that watches for that sort of thing. They thought one was headed this way a couple of years ago ..."

"No, sir, we wouldn't," Crichton said, shaking his head. "Not unless we were extremely lucky. Spacewatch can only scan about ten percent of the sky. An asteroid can come in from anywhere. But, again, there's no evidence that it's an asteroid strike. Asteroids will pick up debris, lots of it and big debris when you get a fireball like this, described as this one was which was that it seemed to be at ground level. Chondritic meteors can do an airburst, that's probably what happened in Tunguska ..."

"They teach this in NBC school?" the operations officer asked.

"No, sir, but there have been recognized impacts in the last ten years; this is real information," the chemical specialist said. "Do you want it?"

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Into the Looking Glass by John Ringo Copyright ©2005 by John Ringo. Excerpted by permission.
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