Thanks to LongLiveOurKing, The DeathlyRider2287, Ridersofrowan, CajunBear73, and OechsnerC for their reviews and commentary.
=O=
Chapter 39: Central Sancutary Threshold
Chongqing Underground Complex
Sichuan Province, Joint Government of the Pacific
As the nerve center for the aerospace defense of the Mainland Joint Government, the energies of the Chongqing Underground Complex had been completely consumed by the ongoing crisis. Phones rang incessantly as personnel grappled with the vast scale of the strategic war that could come at any time.
On the Big Board, across tract of airspace stretching from Central Asia to the Yellow Sea, vast numbers of Pacifican SAM batteries and hundreds of interceptors mingled with upwards of a hundred nuclear bombers on airborne alert, scores of bombers returning from missions over India, and nearly a thousand tactical aircraft flying top cover over the vast armies arrayed on the Soviet and Indian borders. On the other side of those borders were arrayed the equally vast forces of Soviet Long-Range Aviation and the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, ready to strike at the drop of a hat and as such, under constant surveillance.
Nobody was shooting at each other at the strategic level, but the Complex was still overwhelmed with the endless work that ensured it stayed that way. Lest SAMs shoot down their own aircraft, SAM batteries and interceptors had to be kept informed of each other, friendly bomber tracks, preplanned ingress and egress routes, and friendly tactical aircraft. Soviet force dispositions had to be monitored, analyzed, and countered.
And the realities of war had added newer, less familiar tasks to the list. Monitoring Soviet space-based nuclear weapons platforms, counting nuclear flashes over India, and tactical warning of incoming nuclear rockets for the Army - all had emerged as essential functions of the Complex.
"We have a launch! Assam!"
"General alert!" The duty officer ordered. An operator grabbed the phone, and began whispering urgently into it. Even thirty seconds of warning of FROG nuclear artillery rockets allowed soldiers to jump into foxholes, tanks to turn their thick frontal armor towards predicted blasts, helicopters to duck over hills, and aircraft to gain altitude – all lifesavers on the nuclear battlefield. Dug-in-troops had survived closer to nuclear blasts than anyone had imagined possible – although combat efficiency had suffered much more than hoped.
"Three launches. Looks like Scuds! Plume's huge!"
"Broaden alert to zone B1." The duty officer glanced at the screen . "Alert SAMs." For the Nike-Hercules SAM sites, an extra minute of prep time (and knowing where to look for incoming) greatly improved the chances of shooting down a nuclear missile.
"Diamond 14, this is Longhouse. Missile launch Bullseye 150/100. You are cleared to engage."
"Four launches. Definitely not FROG. Probable Scud."
More dots blinked to life.
"Six launches. Last two are really big plumes. Possible SS-4 MRBM."
"Strategic weapons. Zone C alert."
"Seventeen launches total. Eight SS-4s, nine Scuds."
The room fell silent as the missiles climbed to altitude.
"Sir, they're on PAR-2. Tracking... Surviving Scuds are targeted on Mangkang, CB Charlie, CB Delta, and Linzhi – two Scuds each except for CB Charlie, targeted by one. Two SS-4s each are targeted on Lhasa, Naqu, and Chengguan. One SS-4 is targeted on Jiegu. One SS-4 appears to have failed in flight."
"Alert the Nike battery at Lhasa." Well within Scud range of the Indian border, and home to a quarter of a million people, Lhasa was defended by a Nike battery.
The duty officer winced. Unless the MRBMs failed, Naqu and Chengguan were goners. He had no assets with which to defend them. "And get the Nike battery at Jieju."
"Sir… Jiegu doesn't have a Nike battery. Just a few Hawks." The technician pointed at the screen.
"That can't be right. It's SASCOM headquarters."
"Sir, Jiegu is out of Scud range, and has decent air defense coverage. You'd be an idiot to waste a Nike battery there." The technician shrugged.
"SAC bases in Qinghai have Nike-Zeus batteries!"
"That's because SAC bases are strategic targets, sir, in range of strategic weapons. SASCOM headquarters was not considered vital in a strategic nuclear war."
The duty officer swore. For years, critics had lambasted the Pacifican convention of arbitrarily dividing nuclear weapons platforms into tactical and strategic based on range, saying that it limited the imaginations of military planners and that it would bear little relation to how nuclear weapons would actually be used. Those critics sounded downright prophetic now.
=O=
Across the rooftops of Jiegu, the air raid siren blared with banal noise, sending the town's fifty thousand inhabitants scurrying for cover.
Stoick ran into his operations center, Heather hot on his heels. A staff officer flagged him down. "Sir, Longhouse just came in! They've confirmed two SS-4s each headed to Lhasa, Naqu, and Chengguan, and nine Scuds targeted on tactical and strategic targets. One SS-4 is headed here." He paused fearfully. "Impact in four minutes."
Stoick nodded. "They're trying to cut us off from the Himalayas."
Heather tilted her head. "It would take some luck for four megatons to destroy rail lines – although radioactive rockslides could be a problem."
"But no luck at all to blow us all to kingdom come!" He leapt into action. "Get everyone in this building into the ops room and the basement corridor, and turn away aircraft on approach!"
Located in the basement of the big reinforced concrete headquarters building, the Ops Room (and the adjacent offices) were probably a good bet for survival… if the two-megaton warhead, say, missed by five kilometers.
"But we need to continue to operate throughout the strike, especially if we survive…" Someone protested.
"Start transferring control to our backup command post!" Stoick ordered. "They'll take over from here!"
Phones went to the ears of a dozen staff officers as they sought to bring their counterparts up to date.
Heather flung the big steel doors open. "EVERYONE INSIDE!"
"Have gas and electricity supplies been disconnected?" Stoick asked.
"Yes, sir. Attack procedures are being implemented city-wide."
"Tell the Hawk operators to abandon their posts! They don't stand a chance of hitting the damned thing!" Stoick shouted.
A small river of staff ran down the corridor and into the ops center, squeezing between plotting tables and office chairs.
"Okay, that's it! Everyone else in the corridor!" Heather closed the door behind her, waded through the pandemonium that had engulfed the operations center, and ducked into Stoick's office. "Wouldn't a smaller room be sturdier than a big one?" She glanced at the big support beams running across the concrete ceiling of the ops center, dreading the results of a collapse.
Stoick bid his second-in-command a final farewell over the phone, and slammed the phone back down on the receiver. "To be honest, lass, at this point, I'm more concerned with keeping up morale. Everyone already knows what to do, more or less."
Heather chuckled. "You think it'll hit?"
Stoick shrugged. "It's out of our hands now."
Heather sighed, pushed two chairs against the wall, and lay down on the carpet under them. Stoick sat down in his chair, and poured himself a cup of coffee from a thermos. "A pity." Heather pondered the events that had landed her in her current predicament. "You know, Stoick, I never really thought I'd go out like this."
Stoick added cream to his coffee. "Oh?"
Heather took a deep breath. "I didn't grow up in Portland. I grew up in Tianjin. Japanese-occupied Tianjin, in fact. And, like you said… I was a shooter in State Intelligence, not an analyst."
Stoick tried to look nonchalant. "Your… errands made that pretty obvious, yes."
Heather rubbed the back of her head. "What I'm trying to say is that I've lived with violence all my life. I tried not to think about it, but I always thought I would go down in a fight, you know? Guns blazing, bad guys closing in, all that jazz."
She chuckled. "And one day you wake up and start thinking about what you want to do with your life. Get married, settle down, have kids, that sort of thing? So I tried to track to analysis. And then I found out that I was stuck." Heather fought to find the words to express herself. "Nothing drastic, but just enough to distract. Little habits and worries that you keep around. Limited skillsets. Missing the adrenaline. And the damned agency just kept convincing me to go back to shoot at things, and the world keeps throwing things at me for me to shoot at."
She laughed. "I thought I'd never get out of the business. Then I finally got a job that didn't involve direct action… for all of twelve months. And then, boom! But well, at least I'm not dying in a gunfight."
Stoick chuckled. "Lass, you're talking to a tired old general who hasn't been a civilian in thirty years. My wife left me for her career, and my son left me for his. I'm the last person you should be asking for advice."
A tear rolled down Heather's cheek. "At least you got to have a kid. He's fine, by the way. I've been checking. I know you didn't want to know until after, but well… I'm far more concerned with keeping up morale at this point."
Stoick chuckled, and took another sip of his coffee. This is good coffee.
It wasn't, but there was no point saying otherwise.
Stoick felt a shudder reberverate through his bones as the solid concrete floor rippled, seeming to rise and fall like the deck of a heaving ship. Groundshock.
The lights went out, and plaster fell from the ceiling in chunks as Stoick dove under his desk. Airfields get groundbursts…
Stoick closed his eyes as he waited for the blast wave.
=O=
"Fury 21, this is Longhouse. Stand by for nuclear battle damage assessment."
Hiccup nodded. "Copy that, Longhouse. We are ready to execute."
While Toothless had not been kitted out for battle damage assessment missions, the magnetic tape recorder could hold a few simple radar pictures, and Hiccup was confident that he could give a basic description of nuclear battle damage, even on an unfamiliar target. One of the anticipated tasks of Blackbirds fitted with reconnaissance suites, after all, had been damage assessments of Soviet infrastructure, industrial plants, and population centers following Pacifican nuclear strikes – all the better to know whether a particular target needed a follow-on nuking.
"Proceed to Bullseye 005/200."
Hiccup turned pale. "Longhouse, say again. Is the target Jiegu?"
"Affirmative, Fury 21. Assessment area is Jiegu town and adjacent command and control, airfield, industrial, rail, and road facilities. Initiation of two-point-three-megaton thermonuclear weapon recorded…"
Hiccup wordlessly jotted down the details even as his mouth went bone-dry and tears welled in his eyes.
Mission. Objective areas. Flight plan.
There was so much he had wanted to tell his father. So much he had wanted to say. So much that should have been said.
But talking led to shouting, so he had kept his mouth shut. And now, just as it seemed he might have gotten the chance to patch things up with Dad… the bastards had taken it away.
What had they been arguing about, anyway? It had been stuff, important stuff, stuff he would never forget, and probably couldn't forgive. It had mattered. It still mattered. What he made me go through, what I had to shape myself into...
But even as his skin pricked at the thought, his stomach felt... empty.
The last time he had seen him, Dad had grown his beard longer. He'd let himself go a little, and Hiccup had never seen his dad in a service uniform that sweaty, but he'd recognized his father the moment he saw him.
Mission. Objective areas. Flight plan. His hands were filling in the worksheet, but all he was seeing was his father, over and over.
He preferred the thin beard Dad had worn when he was still wearing oxygen masks and flying fighter jets.
He hadn't had enough time.
Hiccup had never quite been able to learn how to make the stuffed fish-loaf in the family tradition, and Dad had never bothered to write down the recipe. He hadn't quite gotten the hang of steaming a chicken taste quite like Dad– not that he'd had many opportunities to cook a meal for more than one person…
There had never been enough time.
"Hiccup. Stay with me." Astrid was talking now. She had overheard, hadn't she? Heck, she was probably filling in a backup worksheet in case he couldn't pull through.
He didn't blame her. He'd have done the exact same thing in her position. "Astrid, I've got this. I can do my job."
"Hiccup…"
"Fury 21, proceed to target area. Mission is critical."
Of course it was. The National Command Authority needed to decide whether, or how to retaliate – possibly within the next fifteen minutes. Blind, unlimited retaliation was just asking for a limited nuclear war to spiral uncontrollably into doomsday.
Limited. It was still limited, wasn't it? They wouldn't be asking for a damage assessment otherwise.
"Astrid, proceed on bearing two seven zero. Descend to fifty thousand feet. Prepare to cut throttle on my mark."
"Hiccup… there's still a chance your dad might be alive down there. Jiegu's hilly. If the Soviets hit the next valley over, the ridge might have shielded him from the blast. Their missiles are accurate to two klicks, remember?"
More, depending on the breaks.
"Hiccup, we are five minutes from the target area. If you need me, Hiccup, I'm here for you." Astrid winced.
What Hiccup really needed now was a hug – a hug Astrid desperately wanted to give.
But they were stuck in bulky pressure suits, strapped tightly to ejection seats, separated from each other by a wall of instrument displays and weapons system controls, and fighting a nuclear war.
"You're not alone." She added. "You'll never be alone again."
Hiccup said nothing. "Radar on. Mapping mode. I can do my job, Astrid."
"I know, Hiccup. I know." Astrid held her tongue.
"Curtains up." He snapped. It wasn't really necessary, but he wanted to see it for himself.
Astrid complied. The view took her breath away.
Ahead, a vast mushroom cap, twenty kilometers tall and just as wide, drifted lazily in the howling winds of the stratosphere.
It looked so… small.
The human mind, optimized to comprehend human-sized things moving at human-capable speeds on the human-useful distances on the African savanna, simply failed when it tried to think about things too big, too small, or too far away. Two-kilometer cliffs didn't look much bigger than one-kilometer cliffs. Satellites arcing across the heavens at seven kilometers per second didn't feel much faster than birds soaring through the sky. And a twenty-kilometer tall mushroom cloud didn't look much bigger than a ten-kilometer tall mushroom cloud.
Hiccup turned on the telescopic camera. Nothing could be seen through the dust.
"Close throttle." Toothless quieted down almost mournfully, cutting speed to Mach 2.6.
A grainy radar picture appeared on Hiccup's display. The ragged edges of a nuclear crater, the outlines of a town, of a river, of valleys, of a runway, the crystal-clear lines of metal railroad tracks, highway embankments, and boxy concrete buildings…
Hiccup was crying. Astrid didn't say anything.
She didn't know what to say.
He laughed, and for a moment, Astrid thought he had lost it.
"Longhouse, this is Fury 21. Jiegu is short one mountaintop! Miss distance from runway six kilometers! They missed! They missed! Oh, god, dad, please be okay! Please be okay!"
Astrid laughed. If SASCOM had any sort of command bunker or fortified blockhouse, it would have had even odds of riding out the strike.
"Fury 21, please report status."
"Okay. Runway intact. Urban blowdown… heavy. Medium-to-heavy damage to residential areas. Medium damage to aluminum plant. Rails and highways completely intact, bridge intact…"
Hiccup was on the verge of crying with joy even as he described the probable deaths of tens of thousands of his fellow countrymen. Why did it seem that one life mattered so much more than thousands of others? How much could family count for? How much should family count for?
Hiccup didn't care. Dad had even odds of still being alive, and that was good enough for him.
"…fallout... Fallout extremely heavy. Anticipate high… no, total radiation casualties." Thick, choking clouds of dust had obscured vast swathes of his radar picture, and the lines and crags of landslides dotted the valley.
A two-megaton groundburst on a mountain. All the fallout, but with none of it trapped in a crater, and all of it starting from up high, ready to be scattered by gravity and the four winds.
Hiccup inhaled sharply. This was not going to be good for any survivors.
"Solid copy, Fury 21. Proceed to patrol box nine, and maintain combat air patrol over northern Myanmar."
Astrid took Toothless into the sharpest bank she could. Hiccup needed to see the wreckage with his own eyes. "Hiccup, look right."
Hiccup stared into the gloomy maelstrom of dust and smoke beneath the shadow of a gargantuan mushroom, and reached for the radio.
"SASCOM headquarters, this is Fury 21. Come in."
"SASCOM headquarters, this is Fury 21. Come in."
Hiccup repeated his broadcast. His radiation meter beeped in alarm, and Toothless banked away.
Hiccup said very little as they headed back out east.
"Sorry we couldn't stay, Hiccup."
"What? Oh, no, no, Astrid, it's just that… the odds are still fifty-fifty that Dad won't be coming back." Hiccup whispered.
She smiled gently, hoping some of the warmth would get to Hiccup. She thought of reassuring him – that as SASCOM chief, and a big-boned one to boot, his dad would probably survive three weeks without food. But she knew that wouldn't help.
She knew it from experience.
"The road to Jiegu lies through New Delhi." She smiled. "The sooner we get this war over, the sooner the authorities can dig your dad out of the rubble."
Hiccup nodded. "Right. Right. I'll get to work…"
"And Hiccup… I'm here for you. I'll always be here for you, Hiccup."
=O=
Eight hundred kilometers away, ten more thermonuclear mushroom clouds rose over MRBM and Scud launch sites as F-111s screamed away.
Far below, the villagers of Assam looked to the greying, thunder-filled skies, and prayed that they would be the last warheads of the day.
It was not to be.