Final impact

The impact of the shock wave hitting the ground was akin to the hammer of an old Norse god striking the earth. It set off a vibration that had the same effect as an earthquake as the energy waves spread outward. Near the blast center, with pressures at 200 psi, winds howled at up to two thousand kilometers an hour. These fell away with distance from the blast, but were still strong enough to demolish everything in their path out to ten kilometers.

At a certain point the structural integrity of some objects was such that they did not disintegrate, but rather became missiles, propelled through the air at great speed. Even small, seemingly insignificant objects became lethal at that velocity. But much larger items were also affected. A Tiger tank, for instance, stranded at the intersection of Landowa and Startowa streets for three days because of a lack of fuel, was suddenly on the move again, flying through the air at three hundred kilometers an hour.

Some of the missiles traveled faster than the blast wave, which lost energy as it sped away from ground zero. An SS colonel, standing on the steps of an apartment building on Dabroskiego Street, was killed when a helmet smashed into his head, popping it like a grape underfoot. The destruction did not discriminate. The innocent and the evil were burned, or crushed, or torn apart. Aryan supermen and residents of the Jewish ghetto all died, their ashes drawn up into the towering mushroom-shaped cloud that rose above the city.

D-DAY + 33. 5 JUNE 1944. 1849 HOURS.

MOSCOW.

The messenger arrived as Stalin was playing with his much-loved old gramophone, insisting that Molotov and the “gloomy demon” Lev Mekhlis, the political chief of the Red Army, entertain the room with a dance. Beria suspected that the supreme leader had been drinking wine diluted with mineral water for the past few hours. He seemed to be in much better shape than anyone save for Harriman and Clark-Kerr. He scratched the gramophone needle on the old record a couple of times, but Beria doubted whether he himself could have even picked up the disk without smashing it, so inebriated was he.

It wasn’t just that Stalin insisted everyone obliterate themselves at these awful parties. Beria also drank to numb his fear that the bomb would not work. There had been no time to test the device after Stalin had ordered that it be used a month ahead of schedule. If it didn’t work, there was no question that he would pay. He’d tried to convince Stalin that a test-firing was the only sensible course, but the Vozhd had removed his unlit Dunhill pipe and placed it carefully on his desk. That was always a grave warning sign. He had simply stared at Beria until the NKVD chief had started to babble, and double back on his own rhetoric. Of course, of course the general secretary is right. It will be done, and done immediately, and without fail, and…

Beria shuddered, and felt another spasm of explosive vomiting coming on. At least half of the Communist Party magnates in the room looked in even worse shape than he was. But nobody had passed out. As Khrushchev used to say when he was alive, those who fell asleep at Stalin’s table usually met a bad end. And so the debauch rolled on.

Stalin managed to get some scratchy old dance tune playing. Molotov and Mekhlis stumbled around in a grotesque parody of a waltz. The Allied ambassadors could not keep the horror from their faces.

And then, a Red Army messenger appeared at the door.

21

D-DAY + 35. 7 JUNE 1944. 1010 HOURS.

USS HILLARY CLINTON, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

“Sweet mother of God,” Kolhammer muttered.

He could hear Spruance’s labored breathing beside him. Unlike Kolhammer, he’d never seen an atomic blast, never trained for a nuclear war, and in a way his ignorance protected him.

“Looks like a mess,” he said.

“Yeah,” Kolhammer grunted. “A hell of a mess.”

They stood in front of the banked screens in the main room of the Clinton’s Intelligence Division. It looked like a smaller version of the ship’s Combat Information Center, though with space given over to desks, cubicles, and a large conference table at one end of the room. At least two dozen men and women worked feverishly at all of these stations, half of them on the data stream now coming out of Europe, while the others remained focused on the task force’s advanced surveillance elements as they closed with Yamamoto’s forces in the Marianas.

For the moment, however, Kolhammer and Spruance were fully engaged with developments on the other side of the world.