Act Of War. Don Pendleton

around the world. A holstered U.S. Army Colt .45 automatic pistol rested on his left hip, and a fully loaded M-16/M-203 combination assault rifle leaned against a nearby boulder. A fat 40 mm antipersonnel shell was tucked into the stubby grenade launcher.

      Just a few yards away from the U.S. Army sergeant a small canvas tent was perched on the crest of the small hillock, the flap tightly zippered closed to keep out the scorpions and desert spiders. The sergeant knew that for some unknown reason the creatures loved to hide inside boots, and if a man wasn’t careful pulling on his gear in the morning that would be a damn rude surprise.

      Draining the cup, Sergeant Bruce Helford debated pouring another and decided it could do no harm. He was up for the night anyway. So far this tour of duty had been a cakewalk, and he had encountered nothing more dangerous than a couple of lost tourists looking for a gas station and some drunk college kids trying to sneak onto the military base for a thrill. Idiots.

      Pretending to be a National Park ranger, Helford had forced a smile onto his face and helped the civilians on their way, then filed a report for taller fences. Whether anybody at the Pentagon ever read his reports about the incidents was unknown, but that was part of Army life. Besides, the sergeant knew that he was stationed here in the middle of nowhere purely as a precaution in the ancient military litany of being prepared for what an enemy could do, not for what they might do. There were a lot of heavy armament at the underground military base only a few dozen klicks away, and—

      With a shock Helford realized that he could clearly see the cup of coffee in his hand. Then cold shock hit his guts as a bright light blossomed on the distant horizon.

      Suddenly a low rumble steadily grew in volume and power until the ground began to shake. The campfire broke apart, startled birds took flight from the quivering Joshua trees and loose rocks tumbled free from the side of a low mesa.

      Casting the steel cup aside, Helford reached for the Geiger counter sitting on the trembling ground, when a hot wind blew across the campsite carrying a strange metallic taste. Then the Geiger counter started to click wildly, the needle swinging up into the red zone and staying there.

      Knowing he was already dead, the sergeant stood slowly, then broke into a sprint and charged to the tent. Diving inside, he snatched the military transponder hanging from the aluminum support pole, twisted the encoder to the proper setting and thumbed the transmit button.

      “Watchdog Four to base,” he said, his words becoming a shout as the rumbling noise mounted with increasing fury until it seemed to fill the world. “Watchdog Four to base! Code nine! Repeat, we have a code nine!”

      But if there was a reply, it could not be heard over the now deafening hurricane wind howling madly across the landscape. Sand and small stones peppered the flapping sides of the canvas tent, the hot wind stealing all sound from the air and increasing the bitter taste in the man’s mouth. Still shouting into the microphone, Helford flipped a safety cover and thumbed a red button to activate the emergency signal when the tent tore loose from the soil and flew away. Feeling stark naked, the sergeant raised a hand to protect his eyes from the terrible light searing the landscape. This was impossible! The hillock was much too far away from the armory. The distance had been checked, and rechecked, a dozen times by some of the best minds in America! There was no way that he should be able to actually see the glow, unless…

      In stentorian majesty, a dozen fireballs grew on the horizon, the lambent columns rising upward to form the classic mushroom shape, each overlapping the other into a vista of hell.

      Incredibly, the buffeting wind stopped, and the only sounds were the man’s ragged breathing and the nonstop clicking of the Geiger. He knew what that meant. The calm before the maelstrom. Just then, a ghastly prickly sensation began to stab needles into his body. The hard radiation had arrived.

      “Code nine!” the sergeant grimly shouted into the transponder, even though the radio was probably dead from the electromagnetic pulse of the multiple nuclear explosions. “Code nine! Nine!”

      Swelling rapidly, a tidal wave of debris rose from the burning ground, a roiling wall of destruction that swept across the tortured desert, shattering trees and tossing aside boulders.

      Doggedly determined to die performing his duty, Helford continued shouting a warning into the transponder until the airborne shock wave arrived. He was instantly crushed into bloody paste and blew apart in a red mist. A microsecond later the hillock broke into pieces. Then the heat wave arrived, the brutal thermal onslaught searing the ruined landscape into a hellish vista.

      Still expanding, the nuclear detonations continued growing in power and fury until the nightmarish conflagrations seemed like the end of the world….

       CHAPTER ONE

      “Take a seat, Hal,” the President of the United States said, gesturing. “We have a lot to cover and little time.” In the middle of the room, there was a battered old wooden desk, office furniture from some forgotten time, along with a few metal chairs. Set close by was an array of telephones and a cafeteria-style wheeled service cart carrying a steaming urn of what smelled like fresh coffee and a heaping pile of sandwiches and small pastries. None of the food had been touched. For security purposes, Hal Brognola, Justice Department liaison and director of the Sensitive Operations Group, based at Stony Man Farm, had agreed to meet the President in a remote, secure location.

      “Yes, sir.” Sitting, the big Fed noticed that an Air Force colonel stood to one side of the President, holding a small leather briefcase. It was handcuffed to his wrist. Brognola promptly dismissed the man. That was the Football, the remote-control device containing the launch code for America’s arsenal of nuclear missiles.

      As the President and Brognola got comfortable, the Secret Service agents who had accompanied the President remained standing, their hard eyes boring holes into the Justice Department man.

      “All right, here it is. At 0214 hrs this morning the entire nuclear stockpile of tactical nuclear bombs exploded at White Sands, New Mexico,” the President said, passing over a manila file colored a deep crimson.

      “Obviously not an accident,” Brognola stated, accepting the folder. On the front were stamped the words, Top Secret, but the color alone was enough identify the high-level security status of the file.

      “No, it was not an accident, nor a traitor or an enemy spy that infiltrated the laboratory.”

      “Are you sure, sir?”

      “Yes.”

      “Interesting.” Carefully pressing his thumb to the sensor pad of the small explosive device locking the folder, Brognola impatiently waited until he heard a beep, then he slid off the explosive charge and opened the folder. There were a lot of documents carrying the Top Secret notice, along with a bevy of high-altitude surveillance photographs carrying the NSA emblem. There was a lot of technical jargon that the big Fed skimmed, along with a summary from the Pentagon noting the nuke signatures. Brognola knew that every type of nuclear explosive in the world had a unique chemical signature to its blast, sort of like fingerprints, the composite metal carried trace elements of their origins. An expert looking at the spectrograph of a nuclear explosion could tell with absolute certainty which country had made the bomb. Once again, this was old technology, tried and true, proved a hundred times over.

      Scanning the summary, the big Fed slowly began to frown. He had expected to find one foreign nuke signature among the roll call of American bombs. But it wasn’t there. The White Sands base had not been hit with a nuke that set off a chain reaction among the arsenal of weapons in storage. The first blast had occurred deep underground. The side caverns built to absorb nuclear detonations had done their job and kept the explosions from reaching the surface. Unfortunately, there had been half a dozen tactical nukes being loaded onto some trucks to be shipped the Sixth carrier fleet in the Persian Gulf. Those blasts had to have been visible for miles. There was a small note on the side that a perimeter guard pretending to be a park ranger had called in the blast before going off the air. No remains had been found to date, but the search would continue. To everybody else in New Mexico the incident was being hushed up as an earthquake.

      Poor