"John Ringo - Into the Looking Glas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ringo John)

the suddenly irrelevant papers on his desk. "Send Sergeant Burell
around to get everybody inside until the all clear sounds. Then get with
the rest of the platoon sergeants in the Swamp. Wolf, head over to
battalion, see what's up."
"Where's the CO?" Crichton asked, looking at the closed door at
the back of the room.
"At breakfast with the platoon leaders and the battalion
commander," the first sergeant answered, dryly. "We can handle this
until they get back. Go."
***
FLASH is the highest priority communication in the military
directory, superceding even Operational Immediate. Satellites in orbit
noted the explosion and computers on the ground automatically
categorized it as a nuclear explosion.
"Holy shit!" the Air Force sergeant monitoring the nuclear attack
warning console muttered, his stomach dropping. In the old days he
would have picked up a phone. Now he hit three buttons and
confirmed three separate pop-ups sending a FLASH priority message
to the National Military Command Center in the bowels of the
Pentagon. Then he picked up the phone as sirens went off in the
normally quiet room in Sunnyvale California.
***
The wonder of military communications and computers meant that
the President of the United States got word that a probable nuclear
attack had occurred on Central Florida a whole thirty seconds before
Fox broke the news.
"I know we can't say who did it, yet," the President said calmly. He
was at Camp David for the weekend but most of his senior staff was
on the phone already. "But I'll make three guesses and only two of
them count."
"Mr. President, let's not jump to conclusions," his national security
advisor said. She was a specialist in nuclear strategy and had been
doing makee-learnee on terrorism ever since the attacks of September
11, 2001. And this didn't fit the profile of a terrorist attack. "First of all,
nobody thinks that they have access to nuclear weapons of this sort.
Radiological bombs, maybe. But this appears to be a nuclear weapon.
However, the target makes no sense for a terrorist. It has been located
precisely as being on the grounds of the University of Central Florida.
Why waste a nuclear weapon on a university when they could use it on
New York or Washington or L.A. or Atlanta?"
"I gotta go with the NSA on this one, Mister President," the
secretary of defense said. "This doesn't feel like an attack. What's the
chance it could have been some sort of accident?"
"I don't know that much about UCF," the NSA admitted. She had
once been the dean of a major college but for the last few years she'd
been holding down the national security advisor's desk in the middle of
a war. Her stated ambition after leaving government service was to
become the commissioner of the National Football League. "But I don't
think they're doing anything in the nuclear program, I'm pretty sure I'd
remember that. And you just don't get accidents with weapons.