Piranha: Firing Point

Twenty Cultural Revolution bombs tumbled into the black and orange fireball of the palace, all of them detonating into white-hot fury in the already hellish conflagration.

The initial twenty-five seconds of the Shanghai attack had vaporized the primary target, and the second wave of Flicker fighters pulled up and turned away to their secondary targets.

Two minutes after the first missile’s detonation, there was a black carbonized crater, fully thirty meters deep, where the palace, courtyard, and inner circle of palace complex buildings had once proudly stood. The center row of buildings was little more than piles of rubble, bricks and marble and electrical wire, mournful fingers of steel-reinforcement rods sticking into the fiery night, melted glass resolidifying in ugly pools at the bases of the rubble. The outer ring of buildings, the few that were still standing, were in flames, fire pouring from the windows and rooftops. The two circles of walls, built to hold off terrorists and truck bombers, had crumbled but for a few uneven remnants.

In the city, 125 other Shining March cruise missiles had hit their targets. The 100 Flicker fighters sent in as backup had added to the chaos, making the previous century’s destruction of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Tehran, and Cairo seem minor by comparison. The Hilton hotel was blown to its foundation, the only thing recognizable the three-meter-tall red block letter H lying on top of what once had been a glass elevator, the glass shattered, half molten and black. Nothing was left of the Sword of Wong except granite dust, lying in a pile at the site.

Cargo ships were burning in the harbor, and one supertanker laden with crude oil exploded in a kilometer-wide fireball, the shock wave of it blasting through a city where almost five hundred shock waves had already passed.

No building taller than three stories stood. There was not a recognizable car left in the city, all the iron and steel and rubber that wasn’t crushed having burned in the city’s massive fires. Not a single tree or blade of grass within tens of kilometers was left.

And not a single person within twenty kilometers of the Presidential Palace survived. Those in the circle inside ninety kilometers walked through burning streets, their clothes sooty, their eyes glazed, tears streaming down their cheeks. A father stumbled through the gutted streets, silently crying, carrying two young daughters, their legs as thin as twigs, their pajamas burned off in sections. Both children were dead, the small one’s face burned off, the other’s intact with her small eyes staring unblinkingly into space. Capturing the scene was the lens of a Satellite News Network camera, the images transmitted to the backpack of the sooty-faced cameraman, from the antenna on the backpack to” a transmission van a kilometer away, and from there to the SNN orbiting communications satellite, relayed from there to SNN’s network news center in Denver, Colorado, and from there to television and Writepad receivers all over the globe.

Two in the morning on a Monday in Shanghai was two o’clock in the afternoon on Sunday, November 3, on the U.S. East Coast, week ten of the season of the National Football League. The quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys took the snap in the shotgun formation, pulled his arm back, and fired off a bullet-trajectory pass to wide receiver Kevin McConkey in the Redskins’ end zone. The football was spiraling through the air when the screen flashed, fading into the face of a reporter.

The legend at the bottom of the screen read: breaking news — white china firebombed. The image of the reporter vanished, replaced by the scene of the crying father holding two dead and burned children in a Shanghai street.

“We interrupt this program to bring you breaking news from Shanghai, White China, where only minutes ago an incendiary bomb attack leveled the city. These images, courtesy of the Satellite News Network, show the incredible carnage as—”

In front of the widescreen television. National Security Adviser Stephen Cogster clanked his beer bottle on the coffee table and pulled his satellite phone from his belt. He punched a single button on it before lifting it to his ear.

“Code seven, NSA for number one. Get her on the phone now. I repeat, code seven.”

It took less than ten seconds for her voice to come through the phone. And when it did, the voice of President Jaisal Warner was furious.