Piranha: Firing Point

The missile had been directed to pass three blocks west of the Hilton, sufficiently far that its windows would not shatter from the low-level sonic boom. Reaching MacH 1.2 again, the missile shot toward the Presidential Palace.

As the missile flew over the thirty-meter high whitewashed wall of the palace complex, it was a full twenty-three milliseconds behind schedule. Less than twenty percent fuel remained in the reinforced tanks of the missile’s belly, making the missile lighter, and as the throttle valves opened fully, the missile was able to speed up slightly, flying in at MacH 1.24. It sped toward an inner wall. As the missile flashed overhead, several black dogs below barely had time to begin to curl their lips, their heads just beginning to turn upward, the first growl emerging from their throats a tenth of a second later, which would prove to be forty-five milliseconds too late.

The outer ring of buildings flew under the fuselage next, the three rows of office buildings and housing facilities laid out in an ornate geometry. The central row came by next, the buildings dark with the sleeping staff members. Finally the inner ring of buildings slipped past, surrounding a beautiful open courtyard, arranged with several dozen fountains spurting water illuminated by spotlights. Exotic landscaping divided the open space into at least three dozen different conversational areas.

Ahead, unlit except by the wash of lights from the courtyard’s fountains, the Presidential Palace loomed.

The palace was a mere three stories tall, but was over a kilometer wide. The facade was made of Italian marble with carved pilasters, a columned entrance to a high rotunda leading up steps to ornate bronze carved doors.

In the north wing, on the third floor, the president’s living quarters overlooked the greenery of the courtyard and the majesty of the inner palace complex. The living quarters had soaring plateglass windows, framed by heavy curtains, fronted by a small tiled deck filled with outdoor furniture, potted trees, and a fair-sized swimming pool.

The nose cone of the Shining March missile impacted the thick bulletproof plate glass of the president’s bedroom suite. The glass blew outward toward the deck.

That was the signal to the fuse software to detonate the explosives. A charged capacitor sent out an intense electrical pulse, lighting the fuse blasting cap. The cap flared into incandescence, setting off the primary explosive train deep in the heart of the warhead.

In a few milliseconds the missile passed all the way into the cavernous bedroom, under the carved marble ceilings almost fifteen meters above the polished hardwood floor. By the time the tail fins — sheared off by the shattering glass of the window — disintegrated, the explosion train was half through detonating. The secondary explosive train temperature rose to that of a bonfire.

Three missile lengths into the room, the weapon still five meters from the sleeping president’s bed, the tertiary explosive train ignited. Still no trace of the interior heat was visible on the dark skin of the missile, though the tertiary explosives raised the temperature of the high-density molecular explosive to that of the surface of the sun.

At last the skin of the missile vaporized as the detonation blew outward from it. The warhead turned into a fireball of pure plasma energy, the atoms and molecules of what had been solid matter turning to liquid, then to vapor, then to gas. As the temperature rose to thermonuclear range, the atoms’ electrons spun off into space, leaving their nuclei in a high-energy glow. The plasma expanded outward, the radiant heat of it turning the flesh of the president immediately to superheated gas, an expanding cloud that blew away from the plasma ball at sonic velocity. His bones liquefied next, then vaporized, joining the plasma front as the volume of energy expanded, now encompassing the entire room. All that had been solid microseconds before had all become glowing photons and spheres of protons and neutrons, electron waves flashing out into the abyss.

In the 1,500 milliseconds before the second missile entered the presidential palace, the plasma expanded outward, the flame front ahead of it blowing the walls and ceiling of the surrounding rooms away, until the upper floor within one hundred meters of the presidential living quarters was completely eliminated, burned cleanly off in a black arc.

Missiles two, three, and four flew in next, their detonators going off more by timing than by impact, and the remainder of the palace grew more insubstantial with each hit. By the time missile four’s explosion had become nothing more than an orange mushroom cloud flaming and rising above the courtyard where the palace had once been, the first wave of Flicker fighters streaked overhead. Detaching their bombs, the fighters pulled hard to the right and left to avoid the missile explosions.