Critical Mass by Whitley Strieber
Outside the Hilton, Eddie Timmons was raising a match to Jenny Hilly’s cigarette, wishing she did not smoke, fascinated with her fingers and her lips, and thinking, She will see me naked; she will know my passion.
Mort Carmody lost eight thousand dollars on a single throw of the dice, and cursed craps patterning, and the first syllable of the word “bullshit” became his eternity.
As it took off, the little plane had wallowed from the weight that it carried, had fallen back, had struck its landing gear against a fence and caused the pilot to jam the throttle. There had been a moment when the ground raced up. Then had come the rattling sound of brush striking the fuselage, and the desperate kid had closed his eyes and pulled his stick into his gut.
He did not know that he had missed crashing by the width of a child’s finger.
So it is that the vastness of history rests in the details. A crewman fails to tighten a screw, the antenna of a reconnaissance plane blows loose, a signal revealing the position of Bull Halsey’s carriers fails to reach Admiral Yamamoto, the Japanese lose the Battle of Midway and therefore World War II. On the turn of a single screw. And why? Because the cry of a seagull made a homesick boy dream, for just a moment, of his childhood.
So it is here, on this night. Had another boy drawn the stick into his gut just an eighth of a second more slowly, a city would not have died.
History trembled with the shuddering of that airframe, sighed as the plane rose free and sailed off into the night.
Its course had been carefully calculated. It would approach Las Vegas from north-northwest at an altitude of five hundred feet, not running any lights. Until the pilot popped the nimble little craft up to nine hundred feet, it would not be detected by FAA radars at McCarran.
Military radars at Nellis did detect it, though, and Airman First Class John William Carr said into a microphone, “Bogey incoming altitude zero four hundred, speed one-thirty knots, proceeding west-southwest toward LV Strip.”
Ahead, the pilot could see his target, which was the Bellagio Hotel.
As he flew over the houses, the roofs, the pools, some lit and some not, he thought not at all of the lives within, not of the children with their toys and night-lights and unlived lives, nor of the happiness that was general in the place, like a song in the desert. He thought of the harlots in the evil towers and the alcoholic drinks that stupefied a man’s moral sense, and of the cruelty of the lies in the gaudy gambling halls, and saw steeples here and there. But his mind clung to his own home, to the sweet tropical evenings, when he had swung in the tamarind tree, and smelled the toasty smoke of his father’s water pipe coming up from below. He thought of the madrassa where he had been taught the Five Pillars and had memorized enough of the Quran to receive an honors. But he did not think of the moonglow that had illuminated Damascus a thousand years ago, in the innocence of Islam, nor of the softness of his mother’s hands. He did not think of Chrissie Powell, who stood now at her sleepless window, and heard the small plane come and pass, and thought it was some high roller coming into McCarran, and envied him the plane and the night.
He leaned out his mixture and increased throttle, then drew the stick back and began to gain altitude.
At Nellis, J. W. Carr instantly recognized this as what it was: this pilot was about to execute an attack in the form of an airburst at altitude. Carr hit the scramble horn, and Captain Michael Waldron leaped to his feet in the ready room, shouted, “Shee-ut,” and ran for the flight line.
The pilot in the small plane watched the Bellagio, tan in its lights, disappear as his nose went up. Dirty people were inside the hotel; he had walked through it and seen the strutting whores, listened to their filthy songs, watched the gamblers in the ringing dens.
All Las Vegas was dirty people in filthy dens. He stared through the windscreen now at the stars. Heaven above, dirty people below. A sacred moment.
Among the dirty people were Bruce and Caitlin Moore, who lived on West Katie Avenue—and her nickname was Katie; that was funny—who at this moment were making love. Their infant, Tara, slept in the co-sleeper beside them, the immeasurable sleep of the very young. Tara with her dusting of red hair and the infinity of love in her eyes had inspired them to make another child, and pleasure wracked them as a single wriggling spark of Bruce and all that he was found its way into Caitlin’s wet folds.
There was laughter, then, and the unnoticed hum of a plane passing low overhead, then disappearing.
Mike Waldron leaped into the cockpit of his F-15. Jimmy and Tuck were already running it up.
In among the folded limbs and warmth of the Moores, the new electricity stopped. Death came to the new person three seconds after life began.
From Nellis Boulevard to Rainbow Boulevard, Las Vegas was now burning. The Bellagio, at ground zero, had been transformed into a heap of lava gushing smoke. The rest of the Strip was an inferno—and, in fact, a firestorm like this had not been seen on earth. Not even Hiroshima and Nagasaki had known such destruction.
This was the most malicious single act in human history. One instant, life. The next, fire.
Most who died from the blast had no awareness. They were alive, then not. Many would remain entirely unrecorded. Some would be left as shadows in the ruins, on walls here and there that remained. Shadows raising their arms, shadows not.
All who had awareness saw the same thing: a sheet of white fire, like a gigantic lightning bolt slamming directly into your face. There was sometimes pain, but mostly not. Death came in the form of details: “my dinner is on fire”; “the slot has a short”; “the curtains are burning”; “my skin is gone”; “my throat, face, eyes, tongue hurts.” Only the first hundredth of a second of death would be recorded. Across the second hundredth of a second, the temperature of the body would rise from ninety-eight degrees to more than two thousand degrees. Destruction that violent carries with it no sensation at all.
Las Vegas is a busy city, busy at night, and there was traffic on all the highways, some leaving, some entering. Vehicles within the blast area were thrown like toys, some of them to altitudes of a hundred feet, their occupants screaming, confused, mostly blinded by the furious light, their eardrums shattered, feeling extreme, incomprehensible lurches, hearing nothing, their feet jamming their brakes.
From afar, the front wave of the blast appeared to be filled with sparks, each of which was a dying, confused person.
Beyond the blast zone, on all the highways coming into Las Vegas, on Interstate 15, on 95, on 595, there were long lines of stopped cars, and in the roads and on the roadsides, wandering in the fields, stumbling, falling, were the occupants. All who had been facing toward the city had been permanently flash-blinded. Many of them were on fire. Around them and onto them there fell more fire, in the form of burning ceilings, bodies, clothes, carpets, vehicles, sheets and mattresses, chairs, slot machines, tables, telephones, fans, bricks, roller-coaster rails and a train like a great smoking centipede full of strange, insectoid figures: the skeletons of the riders.
Hearing the tremendous noise of the disintegrating city, the blind uttered high, singing wails such as one hears when a forest in Java or Borneo is set alight and the apes catch fire.
They were not human now, not in the intricate depths of this much terror. The blind did not understand why they were blind. They did not understand their pain, did not know why they had been driving one moment and now were wandering in a field or along a roadside, some of them crawling now, feeling along, crying names: “Jenna! Jenna!” “Bill, where are you, Bill?” “God help me! God help me!” Their voices joined to the great roar of the collapsing buildings, the only sound that remained after the cracking blast had died away.
Half the city still lived, the half that had not been vaporized.
Wind blew toward the fire from all directions, setting up a banging of shutters, a hiss of trees, and the wail of eaves. A terrier called Mr. Pip was the first creature to be lifted by this new wind and carried toward the red center. Mr.
The blast-effect cloud rose into the sky, lazy, flickering with internal disruptions, supported by a roiling column of deep red. The flash that had blinded eighteen thousand and the gigantic crack that had deafened a hundred thousand more had left the city in darkness. Toward downtown, all that was visible was blackness—a huge, starless darkness shot through with suggestions of flame. All was chaos and surprise. There had been not the slightest warning. One second, one life, the next—this.
Captain Mike Waldron’s neck and left arm and shoulder tumbled through clear air. His plane, just sixty-three feet into its roll down the runway at Nellis, was burning and exploding, the rest of Mike Waldron stewing in the cockpit.
From out beyond Buffalo Drive and from the direction of Nellis, when you looked toward downtown you would see the shape of the blast-effect cloud, and you might understand that this was an atomic aftermath, that a nuclear bomb, and a substantial one, had been detonated here.
Farther away, fifteen or twenty miles, it was entirely obvious. From here, the cloud was clearly defined, a weltering horror in the light of the moon.
At Nellis, the flight line was on fire. The USAF Warfare Center struggled to get its communications back on track, but the building was burning and would need to be abandoned if fire crews did not come within minutes. They would not come, though, not within minutes or even hours, or at all. They would never come.
Just two emergency vehicles were operating, one with a full crew of six, the other with two. They worked the flight line, foaming burning airplanes. Inside Nellis’s hangars, most planes remained intact. The four training missions that had been under way when the detonation took place had all crashed in the desert, victims of failure due to the bomb’s electromagnetic pulse, which had destroyed even hardened electronic circuits over a 180-square-mile area centered on the blast, and damaged many more, much farther out, especially those of planes at higher altitudes.
At this hour, there had only been the two commercials incoming to McCarran, and none of the distant fliers were fatally damaged.
Aboard United 221 out of Seattle for Denver, the copilot was slowly recovering his vision. He did not know what he had seen—it had not appeared to be on the ground, though. He had perceived it as a flashbulb going off in his face. It had seemed as if it was inside the cockpit, and his initial reaction had been to declare an emergency.
Seven minutes later, there had been significant buffeting. The plane’s radios now crackled with pilot chatter, as everybody tried to figure out what it had been. There was amusement in some voices: “Looks like they’ve landed,” “I’m not reporting any UFO. . . .”
But then, on 221 and American 806 and Alaska 43, silence fell. There was too much light down there. Captain Baker of 221, who had been looking down when the flash took place and had not been affected by it, said into his radio, “Las Vegas is burning.”
In the parts of the Las Vegas metropolitan area that had not been destroyed, there were 73,000 private homes on fire and 2,613 businesses. There were 381,000 people with third-degree burns outside of the blast area itself. At that moment, sixteen thousand more of them were actively on fire, frantic beyond words, screaming, staggering down streets or running, torches all.
Inside the blast area, the outright death rate was 87 percent. The unfortunate few who remained alive were for the most part maintenance personnel in basement areas. They were either trapped in absolute darkness, screaming, feeling along the floors of rooms now tangled with broken machinery, or struggling to find their way using flashlights or emergency lighting. Many had received fatal radiation doses. Many were bleeding from cuts, had broken bones, burns, bruises, or were injured in other ways. None would survive.
Not even specialists who had thought carefully about the consequences of an atomic explosion in a modern city had understood what the vast amount of combustible material in such a place would mean.
The Dresden fire in 1945 had dragged people into it from five hundred yards away. But here, even fifteen minutes after the blast, the wind was rising to a howl in the eaves of houses outside of the blast zone, picking up larger and larger objects. Along streets and roads, struggling people, most of them already weak from shock and injuries, began tumbling toward the flames, in the dust, in the chaos.
All communications with the city had ended in an instant. Four thousand, three hundred, and eight telephone calls of various kinds were disconnected. All local radio and TV stations were instantly killed.
However, ham operators in outlying areas—such as Pahrump—were not thrown off the air. A ham, Gene Lerma, was operating his powerful station sixty miles from ground zero when the detonation occurred.
His wife and child were asleep, but Lerma’s wife leaped out of bed when she heard the great roar that filled the house, shattering windows and causing curtains and blinds to whip into the rooms. He, in his windowless studio, had been talking to a ham operator at McMurdo Station in the Antarctic when there was a voltage surge that popped Lerma’s circuit breakers and the whole building was shaken to its foundations.
“I think we just had an earthquake,” he said into the lifeless microphone. Then he was plunged into darkness. A moment later, his generator cut in and the emergency lights came back. His next thought was for his wife and baby, and Lerma jumped up and ran out of the studio.
His wife said, “What is happening?” She had their still-sleeping little girl in her arms.
“Stay here.” He moved out onto the front porch and down into the stony garden. There were great booms echoing from somewhere and he thought it was the sound of the earthquake spreading through the land. As he turned to go inside, though, he happened to glance in the direction of Las Vegas.
For a moment, he was confused. What was that thing, that great, glowing thing just rising above the flat line of the eastern horizon? He stared, trying to understand. Was it smoke? No, it was glowing internally. There were periodic flashes of lightning, too, forks of it dancing across the face of the monster. But it wasn’t a thunderstorm, not so close to the ground.
Then it rose up still higher. It took form. A jolt as if of electricity shot through him from head to toe, because he had just recognized that he was seeing the mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion in the process of forming.
For a moment, he thought, Dirty bomb, but as the gigantic cloud billowed into the sky, towering, huge, and so horribly fast, he knew that there was only one thing that could do this. An atomic weapon had been detonated over Vegas.
His baby, his wife—he thought to get them into the RV and head west. But no, that was a mistake; if Vegas had been hit, LA might be a mess, too. Angie came out onto the porch, still with the baby in her arms.
“Go back,” he said, then hurried up to her and put his arm around her waist, and drew her back into the house.
They’d lost windows in the living room and the bedroom. They would need to shelter in the studio. But he didn’t think that fallout would be a problem, because the prevailing winds would carry the cloud east. And any cloud from LA would be funneled out across the desert well south of here.
Their problem was not going to be fallout. It was going to be food and water and security. An atomic war had started, he thought, unless this was a terrorist incident.
He went into the bedroom and dragged the mattress off the bed and into the studio.
“What are you doing?”
He had to tell her. He sat her down and said gently, “There’s been a very large explosion in Vegas—”
“Atomic bomb?”
“I think so.”
“Radiation?”
“Not here, not yet. But we’re going to stay in the studio. The generators have gas for thirty days, so we’re safe enough.”
It was then that he returned to his radio station. He’d lost a number of his electronic systems but not his tough old radios. He powered up and was soon looking at
He began broadcasting in the 40 meter band and was soon talking to a ham operating out of Salt Lake City. He worked for news station KSL, and when they’d lost all contact with the West Coast he had gone to his nearby apartment and powered up.
Thus it was that an amateur operator made the broadcast that rocked the world: “I am talking to you from a town sixty miles west of Las Vegas. We are looking directly at what can only be described as a mushroom cloud. I cannot prove it, but it is my belief that Las Vegas has sustained a nuclear attack. I repeat, Las Vegas, Nevada, has been hit by an atomic or possibly hydrogen bomb. A large bomb. As I speak, I can see the cloud literally covering the whole western horizon.”
Then he wept.
11
RETREAT
Seventy-five miles east of Las Vegas, Ressman still struggled with his control problem. He called out over the blare of his engines, “I have to land this thing wherever it happens to be!”