Shock and confusion reigned as the blips took form. Screens filled with satellite images, trajectories, possible targets, probable origins, and weapon descriptions.

Calls were made, procedures followed.

The President was eventually interrupted in the middle of an interview.

Chapter 86

While Officer Sandra Peele called for a pickup, Frank Ancelotti eyed her up. For a cop, she was pretty cute, and just his type.

He told her as much.

“You’ve heard your rights,” she said. “Anything else you say will be taken as evidence.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” he moaned. “All this for a fridge.”

She cocked her head. “What?”

“Yeah, a fridge. Some dumbass parks in the chief’s spot with a fridge in the back, then leaves the car there. I’m the guy who’s gonna get beat because of this. The guy parks there without even asking.”

She looked at the white utility vehicle suspiciously. A fridge?

“I’ll show you,” he offered, making a move to the van door, but she brought the Taser back up to point at him and he stopped.

Minutes later, backup arrived and he was safely in the back of a squad car. She and another officer approached the van from the rear.

“A fridge, apparently,” she explained.

New York was always on some form of alert; it just never publically displayed it unless it was absolutely necessary. As for the van, it was suspicious, but the last thing she wanted was to cordon off Broadway without at least having a look first. There were plenty of unmarked vehicles parked in back alleys, and people did sometimes move fridges around in New York. It was acceptable that the driver may have left it in the van rather than taken it with him.

She peered through the broken window and saw the tarpaulin. She agreed it did look like a normal fridge. Using her baton, she reached in and carefully lifted the cover until it slid completely from the object.

That’s no fridge, she thought. And in the split second when she realised what it was, she didn’t even have time to scream.

Nanoseconds after Sandra Peele died, the Lafayette Grill was flattened. The alley between Franklin Street and White Street, Broadway, and all of Manhattan beyond would have ceased to be in the blink of an eye, had any eyes not been vaporised instantly to witness it.

The shockwave rippled across the Hudson, pulling boats from their moorings and flipping passenger ferries over like leaves in the wind. A flat-bottomed boat rode the expanding sphere of energy, flying high into the air before disintegrating in the heat.

The Statue of Liberty was whipped-up from its pedestal, leaving just the toes behind, which quickly melted. The statue itself buckled and broke apart in mid-air, what little remained raining down onto Hudson Bay and sinking into the water.

Manhattan was completely flattened. Everything above ground level had either been ripped apart, melted or if it was small enough been blown so far into the sky that it would be deposited in a debris field over one hundred miles in diameter.

For five miles in each direction from the Lafayette Grill, from Newark in the west to Queens in the east and as far north as the Bronx, not a single human survived the explosion above ground. Underground, several thousand people survived in the parts of the New York Subway system that hadn’t collapsed or been filled with water from the river. With no lighting, fresh air or indeed any understanding of what had happened, most perished where their trains had come to a stop, in the vain hope that someone would come looking for them. The few who braved the cave-ins and flooded tunnels to reach the surface faced a bleak few days. Within a week the last survivor of ground zero, who had been in the Subway thirty metres from the epicentre of the blast, suddenly collapsed and died of internal bleeding.

He had managed to travel more than twenty miles from Manhattan by foot when he started seeing people walking in the opposite direction, towards New York, looking just as bad as he did.

Chapter 87

The President of the United States of America had been advised on the best course of action. Several hundred targets were being tracked by the SDN, which thank God was still helping defend the Nation.

Alongside New York, which had been the first, both Chicago and Los Angeles had been wiped from the map.

It wasn’t even possible to know for sure how many had died, but even the most conservative of estimates put the total at two million. The most pessimistic of reports suggested nearly ten times that figure.

Russia was probably responsible, no doubt in cahoots with China; as he sat near his military chiefs in the Presidential cavalcade barging its way through the heavy DC traffic, a dozen more blips appeared on the car’s SDN display.

They were attacking from the western seaboard. Smaller tactical weapons, heading for military installations along the West Coast.

The United States of America was about to fall.

Nuclear weapons had always been a deterrent. There was no genuinely effective counter measure. The only defence was offence.

He stared at the screen and clenched his fists till the knuckles were white. He remembered what one Senator had once told him, when he had been starting out in his political career; ‘in a nuclear war, the only winning move is not to play.’ He had no idea where the saying had come from, but he wasn’t prepared to simply stand by and watch the Russians and Chinese destroy his country with impunity. That was what had differentiated him from that Senator. Some people were born to lead; when it was time to make a hard decision, they had the backbone to act. That was why he had been elected.

That was why he was still, halfway through his second term, the President of the United States of America.

And that was why without hesitation and with full, devastating force, he gave the order to retaliate, starting with the Chinese warships out in the Pacific.

Chapter 88

Captain Tan Ling Kai had barely ten minutes to react. He reached the bridge of the DDG Hangzhou seconds after the alarm had sounded, and by then a second satellite had confirmed that they were under attack.

This was most unexpected. They were still in international waters, and had made no ultimatum to the United States. This was meant to be a show of strength and nothing more.

And yet the nature of the threat came in loud and clear from the communications officer. The Captain digested the information. He told himself that it was merely the swell of the Pacific and not nerves and weak knees that made him need to hold on to the computer console in front of him.

The first threat was from six incoming cruise missiles, Tomahawks. A defensive salvo of surface-to-air missiles from the Hangzhou’s vertical launch system dispatched the first five, with the sea-whizz turrets finishing off the sixth in a long burst of fire as it closed in, well within sight of the crew on the bridge. No sooner had the sound of the explosion reached them than reports of more incoming targets came through, this time double that of the first wave.

This was a sustained attack with only one aim: sink the Chinese fleet.

He made up his mind of what to do.

His second-in-command by his side, he pushed his hand down on an incredulous weapons officer’s shoulder. “We shall launch a counter-attack.”

At this distance their cruise missiles were at the limits of their effective range, but he entered the confirmation codes nonetheless and waited for approval from Beijing.

Approval from Beijing, along with confirmed targets, arrived as the sea-whizz were obliterating the last of the second wave of incoming missiles. This time, they had been within one kilometre of the Hangzhou, and five had slipped through the longer range surface-to-air missile defences.