Timeline 102762 Main 01 Operation Anadyr by James Philip

Author:James Philip [Philip, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B00O6Z08DO
Published: 2014-10-27T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

22:28 Hours EST (03:48 Hours GMT)

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Walter Brenckmann discovered later that the 1.2 megaton warhead of the Soviet ICBM – probably targeted on central Boston – had overshot its target by as many as ten miles to air burst at one thousand five hundred feet above the town of Quincy. Quincy was the birthplace of two former American Presidents, John Adams and John Quincy Adams, a city in its own right but for over half-a-century a feeder commuter suburb of the Boston metropolitan area to its north along the curve of Quincy Bay where it merged into Boston Bay. Ninety-nine percent of its population of over seventy thousand souls died in the first second after the explosion, the few survivors who’d got down to their basements and cellars in time, died in the next few seconds, burned and crushed in the ruins. Momentarily the annihilating fifty million degree bloom of the airburst consumed Weymouth to the south, its thermal pulse flashing across and firing the southern suburbs of the great city to the north like the blowtorch of the gods. The firestorm scoured the surface of the Bay of all life for several miles out to sea before the tsunami shockwave of blast overpressure smashed into the southern suburbs and the port of Boston.

The flash turned night to day eleven-and-a-half nautical miles away in Cambridge as Walter Brenckmann bundled his complaining wife, Joanne, through the basement door and followed her down the flight of steps into the concrete sanctuary beneath the old house. The room had been the kids’ playground in the New England winters of their childhood; latterly it had become the family utility room. Washing machine, tumble dryer, a big Westinghouse larder fridge stood against one wall. Against another wall was a work bench with tools lying untidily on its top, a chair Walter had been attempting to repair perched atop it amid wood scrapings. The old, threadbare living room sofa they’d replaced upstairs three years ago sat in the middle of the cold room. It was bitterly cold because they didn’t bother turning on the heating now the kids were gone.

“What was that?” Joanne asked as the lights flickered.

Her husband didn’t reply as he calmly searched his toolbox for a torch.

The lights flickered again and then all was dark.

“Walter?”

“The electro-magnetic pulse of a big bomb trips the nearest transformers, after that the local grid shorts out,” her husband explained, gently, patiently. He switched on the torch, pointed it at Joanne’s feet, then towards the sofa. “We ought to sit down and wait.”

“Wait for what, Walter?”

The end of the world.

What he actually said was: “To see if the power comes back on, sweetheart.”

Together they settled on the sofa and drew the blankets they’d snatched from the airing cupboard on their way down to the bottom of the house around themselves.

Joanne leaned against her husband.

“Are you as scared as I am, honey?”

I’m so scared I’m surprised I haven’t evacuated my bowels!

“Naw,” Walter Brenckmann drawled, “we’ve done what we can do, sweetheart.

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