Origins: The Reich (28 page)

“
Have you gone
completely mad?” Colonel Azire demanded of Terrance as he helped the handcuffed man to his feet.  “Ordering an unprovoked military strike on a sovereign nation. My country; you must be stark raving mad.”

“Protecting the interests of all humanity is an act of patriotism, not lunacy,” Terrance answered without turning around.

“You know what, I don’t even care about your motives or mental state,” Azire countered.  “Fancy connections within my government or not, you’re going to hang for this and I will lobby hard to be the one who kicks the stool out from under your feet.”

In response, Terrance stood there with a look of indifference upon his face.  Seeing he was getting nowhere with the NSA operative, Colonel Azire looked toward his other captive.  The supposed alien met Azire’s eyes for a brief moment and then slowly and with purpose directed his vision down toward Terrance’s hands cuffed behind his back.  Azire followed the line of sight until he saw the fingers of those shackled hands tapping and twitching against the palm of his hand.

Azire found the nervous tapping of Terrance’s fingers at odds with the serene look upon his face.  His next spoken words were equally calm.  “After everything you’ve seen, how can you stand there ready to hang me instead of shooting him?  The threat we face is bigger than you, me, even your nation and mine.  It’s a global threat that must be removed.  How could you with a clear conscience stop an attack of conventional weapons that would have eliminated that threat?”

“I see no new threat,” Azire declared.  “You Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, any of you have the ability to end the world at a moment’s notice with your nuclear weapons.  From my perspective, this is just another player wielding the same ghastly power over the world.  Other than a display of their weapon’s power to establish yet another state of mutual annihilation, this new player shows no signs of wanting to use the weapon.  Why then are you taking such reckless actions?”

“Control,” Terrance admitted.  “The Russians, the Chinese, we control them with money, trade agreements, even assassinations.  There are any number of tools at our disposal to keep their actions aligned with our interests.”

Terrance motioned his head toward the communications officer.  “These creatures controlling the pyramid weapon; we have nothing, no leverage.  They are beyond our ability to control, and that is unacceptable.”

“The alternative you chose then was to start a war with this country and its allies?  That has to be equally unacceptable,” the alien declared.

Terrance let a sly grin touch the corners of his mouth while allowing his twitching fingertips to come to rest.  He then looked directly at the alien as if they were the only two in the room.  “They would never have known what caused the destruction of the pyramid and Sphinx without you betraying my plan of action.”

“But we do know,” Azire interrupted.  “We have you, your men, your orders, and your illegal incursion into our airspace with intent to drop bombs on us.  The world will know all about this.”

Terrance closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them once more to look at Colonel Azire with an almost apologetic stare.  “Yes, the damage to public perception is already done.  That means I have nothing to lose by destroying this site with the only means left to me now.”

Colonel Azire found his eyes dancing from side to side as he struggled to comprehend the implications of that last statement.  He suddenly felt like a sucker punch hit him square in the stomach when he enunciated the conclusion he reached.  “You’re going to nuke.  Your fingers; somehow you sent a message to initiate a nuclear strike.”

“I had no wish to harm anyone, least of all myself, but safeguarding the planet for the next generation now requires it.  Even killing a million people here in Cairo serves the greater good of humanity,” Terrance declared.  “As of right now, I’d say we have less than twenty minutes.  I suggest you make peace with your god as I have already done.”

Colonel Azire looked to the alien standing before him for help.  If they truly were extraterrestrials with advanced technology, they just might have a way to intercept an inbound ballistic missile.  Any hope in that being the case vanished the moment his gaze fell upon the individual sporting a look of complete panic.  Now out of options, Azire reached for his cell phone and quickly dialed the only individual who had any chance of helping them now.

**********

All hell broke loose the moment the warning claxon began blaring its screeching wail.  This was no drill, and the nuclear silo beneath the hardened soil of Minot, North Dakota came alive with activity.

“Major, we just received an order for immediate launch.”

“Very well, verify the order and target with launch control center, and begin validating the launch code attached to the order,” the commanding officer responded without hesitation.  It was not Major Houston’s job to debate the wisdom of his orders.  He and his men were there to execute orders when given, no matter how appalling the implications were of following such orders.

“Negative, this order is not coming from launch control. It’s coming through the National Security Agency channel and the target is Cairo, Egypt.  What should we do?”

“Let me see the whole message,” Major Houston ordered and soon had a printed transcript placed in his hands.  The original transmission had come from a bio-comm unit, a device implanted in each of the twelve NSA executive committee members.

The major took a moment to marvel at the lengths that some men were willing to go to in order to serve their country.  Major Houston had sacrificed many aspects of his personal life to live in an underground nuclear silo facility, but he never subjected his body to mutilation.  These NSA executive types though, they thought nothing of having wiring and tiny mechanical devices laced into their nervous systems to allow communication, even while in captivity.

The original message had been tapped out in Morse code:

Taken captive by hostiles in Cairo, Egypt. Stop

Transponders and comms compromised to the Egyptian military.  Stop

They have everything. Stop

Proceed with final solution.  Stop

Execute now, now, now.  Stop

The rest of the message was targeting coordinates and authorization codes.

Major Houston drew a deep breath and then gave his orders.  “Lock down this silo from the other nine.  Sever all communications with launch control center and strategic missile command.  Then begin the launch order authentication protocol.”

“Sir, we can’t launch without presidential approval.  We just…we can’t.”

“We’ve had presidential approval since the moment President Truman signed the establishing documents of the NSA.  We are NSA operatives first and Air Force Officers second.  All of us in this silo are bound by that originating presidential order above all others, even when it comes to this.  Understood?”

“Yes sir,” the terrified young man responded.  “Beginning launch protocols.”

In the southern
New Mexico desert not far outside of El Paso, the men gathered: scientists, politicians and uniformed military officers.  This particular stretch of desolate sand was named Jornada del Muerto, Voyage of the Dead, and Tonwen could see why.  The air force’s missile test range was normally only home to scorpions, fire ants, rattlesnakes, and not much else.  On this day, however, the terrain featured something new.

Located five and a half miles away from Tonwen and the other’s position rose a one-hundred foot tower of steel struts mounted on concrete footings.  On top of the tower sat a simple oak platform.  The ‘gadget’ had been winched up onto that simple platform two days earlier for a not so simple experiment.

It was a bomb, a big one.  So big, in fact that, it would very likely be the most dreadful weapon the human race had ever devised.  The men of science working on the project knew this, and in order to make themselves feel better about their work they referred to it as ‘the gadget’; it was enough for some at least.

At its heart, the gadget was a ball of plutonium, which was a metal that did not exist in nature, but was created as a byproduct in nuclear piles.  The ball weighed ten pounds and contained every ounce of plutonium known to exist in the world.  Some estimated the ten pound ball to be worth nearly a billion dollars, and they were about to destroy it.  If it worked, the gadget would be worth every penny.

It was estimated that defeating the Empire of Japan using conventional means would cost nearly a million American service men their lives and completely bankrupt the national treasury.  The fanatically loyal Japanese forces were expected to give resistance down to the very last man in brutal fighting ranging from island to island and house to house.   If the gadget worked, they could bring Japan to its knees and the war would be over with almost no American casualties. No one could put a price tag on the value of that outcome.

Trinity was the official codename for this test and its countdown began at nine past five with streaks of gold starting to appear in the eastern sky.  When the countdown reached zero, thirty-two detonators on the surface of the plutonium ball would go off simultaneously.  This would create such powerful inward pressure on the plutonium that it would compress and grow impossibly dense before going critical.  At that point, no one except Tonwen knew what would happen next.

Many of the scientists participated in a betting pool, a dollar a ticket, on the force of the explosion measured in equivalent tons of TNT.  Some bet as little as three hundred tons.  Others went as high as fifty thousand tons, but the official forecast was that an explosive force equal to twenty thousand tons of TNT would be created by that little ten pound ball of plutonium.

A few of the theoretical physicists still nursed concerns about the predicted explosion.  According to their calculations, there would be three atoms not consumed by the initial detonation.  They genuinely feared these loose particles might cause a cascade effect that would ignite the atmosphere of the entire planet.

Tonwen remembered reading in school that Novi scientists back home, and way, way back in the day, voiced similar concerns when they first tested atomic weapons.  The fact that Novus was still in existence when Tonwen’s parents decided to have their child gave him confidence that the Earth would not end this day.

Everyone gathered to view the test near a bunker named S-10000, which also served as the control room for the experiment.  Most chose to stand outside the concrete structure believing an explosion over five miles away posed no threat to them. 

Tonwen was always the picture of dispassionate calm, but today his emotions oscillated between the extremes of hope and fear.  If the bomb was a dud, the Americans would have spent two billion dollars for nothing and in all probability scrap the project.  Then who would conduct the costly research needed to develop weapons powerful enough for the Novi crew to destroy the Alpha still eking out an existence on Mars?

If the bomb was not a dud, then Tonwen will have purposely violated every principal he held dear concerning non-interference with another civilization’s Neo Scale developmental path.  Handing over designs for a weapon of phenomenal destructive power for a single nation to wield over the rest of the planet certainly qualified as a violation of the Council’s directive.  Their actions now were a tremendous risk, but the alternative was even more intolerable.

A green Verey rocket shot into the sky startling Tonwen back to the moment.

“Five minute warning,” the countdown officer shouted.

In these final days of the Manhattan Project, Tonwen felt it strange that security had grown so lax.  In the beginning, the ultra-secret project was so thoroughly hidden that an entire city built in Tennessee as a production site did not even show up on any maps.  In fact, many companies hired to deliver supplies at first refused the lucrative contracts because the destination did not exist.  The project was secretive in the extreme thanks to the planning and protection of Hastelloy’s FBI.

Now, security was uncharacteristically haphazard in Tonwen’s opinion.  Santa Fe, the nearest town to Los Alamos Air Force base, was crawling with well-dressed FBI agents.  They strutted around town in their tweed jackets and neckties.  Compared to the locals who wore blue jeans and cowboy hats, the agents stuck out like a diamond ring nestled among a pile of coal.  It was almost as if Hastelloy wanted word to get out that something big was happening in New Mexico; lord knows their Soviet allies were desperate to learn anything about the project.

Another rocket went off.  “One minute.”

Tonwen looked around to see most of the visitors were putting on sunglasses even though it was still the dark of early morning.  He knew those sunglasses would do next to nothing to protect their eyes as he lowered the visor of a welding helmet over his face and gazed toward the test site.

A gong chimed which seemed tremendously out of place in a desert, “Ten seconds.” 

In that instant, Tonwen suffered an impulse to start running away.  It was a ludicrous notion; how far could he get in ten seconds?  Then before he knew it, the gadget went off.

First there was an awesome flash, impossibly bright and many times stronger than the sun at midday.  Then an eerie dome of fire seemed to come out of the ground.  With terrifying speed, it grew monstrously high in the sky.  It reached the level of the mountains and continued rising and rapidly dwarfed the peaks.

“Jesus…” he heard test director Bainbridge whisper.

The dome morphed into a square.  The light was still brighter than noonday and the distant mountains were illuminated to the point Tonwen could see every fold, crevice, and stone without shadow.

Then the shape changed again.  A pillar appeared below and seemed to push miles into the sky like a mighty fist.  The cloud of boiling fire above the pillar spread like an umbrella until the whole thing looked like a mushroom seven miles tall.  The colors in the cloud were hellish orange, purple and green.

Soon after, Tonwen and the other observers were hit by a wave of heat so intense it was as if the devil himself focused the ovens of hell on them.  At the same moment, the crack of doom reached their ears, but that was only the beginning.  A roar like supernatural thunder rolled over the desert, drowning out all other sound, and rolled on impossibly sustained until Tonwen wondered if this truly was the sound made at the end of the world.  At last, it faded away and the mushroom cloud began to disperse.

“It worked,” Tonwen declared to General Groves who oversaw the project for the military. 
And the world is still here though it is forever changed
, he failed to add.

“Now we’re all sons of bitches,” test director Bainbridge uttered in complete dismay.

Tonwen could think of no proper retort other than to quote from a Hindu scripture he found quite appropriate in that moment.  “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”