Pinnacle Event

 

Begin Reading

Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

 

Thank you for buying this

St. Martin's Press ebook.

 

To receive special offers, bonus content,

and info on new releases and other great reads,

sign up for our newsletters.

 

Or visit us online at

us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

 

For email updates on the author, click
here
.

 

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify the publisher at:

us.macmillanusa.com/piracy
.

 

To those many government employees who keep us safe, secure, and free to exercise our liberties

 

Prologue

TUESDAY, AUGUST 9

INDIAN OCEAN

Alone in the water, below the gray rain clouds,
Octavius
crept forward at barely five knots. Had the captain still stood on her deck, scanning the horizons, he would have seen nothing but the waters of the Indian Ocean stretching away, empty under the low sky. Abandoned by her crew the night before, the ghost ship moved in a broad circular path, her death spiral. There was no one to hear the engine thumping below, the computer humming in the deckhouse, the flag of the Comoros snapping from the stern in the stiff breeze. Silently a stream of data moved up from the computer to the satellite dish and then into space. Images from the cameras, the readings from the engine room, automated pilot data, all shot the thirty-three thousand kilometers to the Thuraya satellite in encrypted packets that took a quarter second to travel that distance.

Data packets came down, as well. Automatically decrypted on arrival in the laptop in the deckhouse, the final message was brief. It was routed down a fiber optic cable to the device in the hold. The 512-bit code caused the device to activate the detonation sequence, beginning with an electrical charge to the high-intensity conventional explosive. That explosion caused a bright flash and sent a large, bullet-shaped package of highly enriched uranium shooting down a tube into a hole in the uranium mass.

The presence of the added uranium in the mass caused it to reach criticality.

The intense light and heat were instant and immeasurable.

The iron and steel that was MV
Octavius
vaporized first, as X-rays, gamma rays, and neutrons rushed out. Oranges, yellows, purples, greens, and a bright white leaped, twisted, churned, and fled the nuclei of the uranium like a mob let loose from imprisonment.

In less than a second, the surface water for a half a mile around underwent molecular transformation and some of it was ejected eight miles up as steam. The waters beyond the blast zone were sucked up and then thrown down, sending a small tsunami out in all directions. At the center of the eruption, a giant toadstool stood roiling, poisonous as the fungi it resembled. The sound waves traveled slower, for hundreds of kilometers, simultaneously deep, sharp, and growling.

In the complete silence of space, twelve hundred kilometers from the Thuraya satellite, another communications satellite was at work. The AEHF-2 rested in a geosynchronous orbit. The Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellite of the U.S. Space Command's 4th Space Operations Squadron picked up signals from American forces throughout the Indian Ocean area and nearby, from Bahrain, Bagram, and Brisbane. It converted their electronic packets into laser beams and shot them to its sister the AEHF-1, which then sent them down to Arizona.

The AEHF-2 was just a big router in the sky for the world's largest Internet provider, the Defense Information Systems Agency, but on the bottom of the American satellite sat a small dome, covering a series of specialized sensors. In the 1960s similar sensors had been so large that they had filled a satellite, which had been code named Vela. Although the sensors had officially been known by an ever-changing series of Pentagon acronyms, unofficially the original name Vela had stuck.

Any report related to a nuclear weapon being detonated, lost, or stolen moved across the Defense Department communications network with the highest precedence, knocking all other message traffic back in the cue. Such messages were tagged on the subject line: PINNACLE EVENT. When a message with that caption arrived at a command post, audio alarms sounded.

While the cloud was still rushing skyward from where the MV Octavius had been, the Vela sensors on the bottom of the AEHF-2 sent a series of data packets from space on a circuitous path to the Pentagon's National Military Command Center and seven other command centers. At one of them, on Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, the message packets caused a red light to begin spinning in the Operations Room of the Air Force Technical Applications Center. As the duty officers at AFTAC looked up, they heard a prerecorded female voice speaking slowly, calmly, as though she were informing them that the airport shuttle train doors were about to close.

“Attention, attention. There has been a Pinnacle Event. Repeat, Pinnacle.” The red light spun its beam across the room. “An atmospheric nuclear detonation has been detected. Repeat, nuclear detonation.”

 

1

MONDAY, AUGUST 15

GRINZING

VIENNA, AUSTRIA

Herman Strodmann rang the bell as he drove the first trolley of the day out of the little, end-of-the-line station at 0600. He loved driving the number 38 route because he could walk to work from his cottage, at the edge of the Vienna Woods, on the hill above the village of Grinzing. He walked by the house where Beethoven had written the Second Symphony. He thought of the 38 tram as a time machine, taking him in half an hour from the quaint, traditional wine
stubels
and
heurigers
of eighteenth-century Grinzing to the hectic modernity of downtown Vienna. He especially liked the first kilometer of the route, when the tram had its own railbed to the right of the road. On that stretch he did not have to share the street with cars.

There he could get the two-car trolley up to a decent speed. As he was doing just that, he noticed a blue BMW in his rear mirror.

The car was accelerating quickly up the Grinzinger Alle behind the tram. It was going to overtake him quickly, Strodmann thought. What was the rush so early in the morning? As the tram approached the corner of Hungerbergstrasse, the exclusive railbed ended and Strodmann guided the trolley on to the street. As he did, for a second he lost sight of the BMW. Then, suddenly, it was veering right in front of the tram, aiming into the Daringergasse. Herman Strodmann hit the brakes just as the trolley smashed into the BMW and rode up over it, crushing the passenger compartment.

In seconds, the BMW 525 erupted into an orange ball of flame shooting twenty-five feet in the air. The flame scorched the windows around the trolley driver's seat and leaped in the small, open side window, giving Herman Strodmann second-degree burns on his left arm. He quickly threw open all the doors for the few passengers to get out and then he leaped from the crippled tram. He could see that the flames instantly incinerated the man driving the BMW.

Karl Potgeiter had known when he bought the car that it was a younger man's vehicle. Although he was seventy-two, partially retired, and now working as a consultant to the UN's Vienna-based, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), he was fit and looked much younger than his years. A nuclear physicist, he was a South African citizen, but had lived in Austria for twenty-two years. Every weekday morning, he drove himself into Vienna for an early
Fr
ü
hst
ü
ck
, breakfast, at his favorite haunt, the Caf
é
Lantman next to the Burgtheater on the Ringstrasse.

That morning, his usual waitress, Maria, wondered where he was. She learned about the crash a few hours later. Word spread quickly as to why the 38 tram route was closed. Later, Maria would read that poor Dr. Potgeiter's body was burned beyond all recognition and was only identified by dental records. It did not help her calm down to see the picture of the flaming car dominating the front page of
Kronen Zeitung
the next day. Maria knew he had been such a nice man, such a good tipper. She also knew that it was such bad luck. There were so few fatal accidents with the trolleys.

HERZLIYA, ISRAEL

Dawid Steyn and his wife, Rachel, enjoyed living in Herzliya Pituah, near the beach. It was an expensive neighborhood, but the house was big enough for her mother to live with them and take care of the girls. It was also close to Israel's Silicon Valley. Rachel could drive to work at Google in ten minutes, including the time it took to drop Dawid off at the train station. For Dawid, the train ride into Tel Aviv gave him just enough time to scan
The Jerusalem Post
. He usually tried to get a seat on the upper level of the double-decker train that ran from Binyamina through Tel Aviv to Ashkelon. On the 0708 train, that was usually not a problem. If he waited for a later departure, the upper deck filled up before the train got to Herzliya, but Rachel was an early riser and Dawid had adjusted to her ways long ago, so making the early train was easy.

His eighteen-minute commute, from Herzliya, a town named after the father of Zionism to a train station named for the original Israeli military, the Haganah, reminded him every day of the origins of his adopted country. He and his father had moved to Israel after his mother died, when Dawid was ten. His mother had been Jewish, so Dawid gained Israeli citizenship automatically through the Right of Return. Now, with his father dead, Dawid Steyn carried on the family's international investment business from a small office in Tel Aviv. No one could tell from the Steyn office suite's modest size that the firm managed over two billion dollars in assets, and as of this week it was two and a half billion.

He looked up as the train stopped at Tel Aviv University, watching the students disembarking. They looked so young, but he reminded himself that it was almost fifteen years ago that he had graduated from that school. In less than a decade, his own girls could be riding this train to University, if Rachel's mother could ever let go of them.

At 0726 the big, red, double-decker train from Binyamina pulled into track three at Tel Aviv Haganah Station, from which Dawid would normally catch the line 16 Dan bus to his office near the beach promenade. He was among the last to get off the train, at the rear of the crowd making its way up the platform to the escalator, his head still in the
Post
as he walked. There was a push, then a shove. Startled, Dawid looked up as the man hit against him hard, sending him off the platform and on to Track 4 just as the express from Nahariya pulled into the station.