John Ringo - Into the Looking Glas

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INTO THE LOOKING GLASS

John Ringo

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events

portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

resemblance to real people or incidents is purely

coincidental.

book or portions thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-7434-9880-1

Cover Art David Mattingly

First Hardcover printing, June 2005

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

DEDICATION

To Doc Travis, one hell of a physicist, without whom this book

would have made exactly no sense.

Author's Comment

There are a few deliberate mistakes in the physics in this book (for

reasons of security) and I'm sure there are some that are undeliberate.

All mistaakes, intentional or unintentional, should be laid upon my

doorstep.

CHAPTER ONE

The explosion, later categorized as in the near equivalent of 60

kilotons of TNT and centered on the University of Central Florida,

occurred at 9:28 a.m. on a Saturday in early March, a calm spring day

in Orlando when the sky was clear and the air was cool and, for

Florida, reasonably dry. It occurred entirely without warning and while

it originated at the university the effects were felt far outside its grounds.

The golfers at Fairways Country Club had only a moment to

experience the bright flash and heat when the fireball engulfed them.

The two young men on University Boulevard selling "top name brand

stereos" that they "couldn't return or their boss would kill them" didn't

even have that long. The fireball spread in every direction, a white ball

of expanding plasma, crisping the numerous suburban communities that

had spread out around the university, homes, families, dogs, children.

The plasma wavefront created a tremendous shockwave of air that

blasted like a tornado outwards, destroying everything in its path. The

shockwave spread to the south as far as U.S. 50 where early morning

shoppers were blinded and covered with flaming debris. It enveloped

the speeders on the Greenway, tossing cars up to a half a mile in the

clear air. It spread to the north almost to the town of Oviedo, erased

the venerable community of Goldenrod, spread as far as Semoran

Boulevard to the west and out to Lake Pickett to the east. The rumble

of the detonation was felt as far away as Tampa, Cocoa and Ocala and

the ascending mushroom cloud, roiling with purple and green light in the

early morning air, was visible as far away as Miami. Flaming debris

dropped into Park Avenue in Winter Park, setting the ancient oaks

along that pleasant drive briefly ablaze and crushed the vestibule of St.

Paul's Church.

Troopers in the motor pool of Charlie Company, Second Battalion,

53rd Brigade, Florida Army National Guard, who were pulling post

deployment maintenance on their Humvee and Hemet trucks, looked

up at the flash and cringed. Those that remembered their training

dropped to the ground and put their arms over their heads. Others ran

into the antiquated armory, seeking shelter in the steel cages that

secured their gear when they were at their civilian jobs or, as seemed

much more common these days, deployed to the Balkans or

Ashkanistan or Iraq.

Specialist Bob Crichton was compiling loss lists in his cubicle when

he noticed the rumble. The unit had returned only a week before from a

year-long deployment in Iraq and everyone seemed to have "combat

lossed" their protective masks. Unit protective garments were at less

than thirty percent of proper inventory. It was stupid. Everybody knew

that sooner or later the riffs were going to hit them with a WMD attack,

chemical, radiological or even nuclear now that Pakistan was giving the

Saudis of, all people, nukes. But nobody liked protective garments or

masks and they "lost" them as fast as they could. Convoy ambush?

Damn, the riffs must have grabbed my mask. Firefight? Where'd that

protective garment go?

He looked up to where his diploma from the U.S. Army Chemical

Corps Advanced Training Course hung and saw the glass shatter even

before it fell off the wall. He blinked his eyes twice and then dove under

the metal desk and clamped his hands over his ears, opening his mouth

to equalize the pressure, just before the air-pressure shockwave hit.

Even over the sound of the explosion, which seemed to envelope the

whole world, he heard the sound of the big windows in the armory

crashing to the floor of the parade hall. There was a sound of tearing

metal, probably one of the old girders that held up the roof of the

parade hall, then relative silence except for a distant screaming. He

waited a moment, catching creaking from the old building but figuring it

was as safe as it was going to get, then climbed out from under his desk

and headed for the company commander's office.

The first sergeant and the operations sergeant were just pulling

themselves out from under their own desks when Crichton burst

through the door without knocking, normally a cardinal offense but he

figured this was as good a time as any to ignore the directive.

"Nobody goes outside for at least thirty minutes, Top," he said,

bouncing from one foot to the other in the doorway. "And I need my

survey teams, that's Ramage, Guptill, Casey, Garcia and Lambert. And

as soon as it's clear I need a platoon to start filling sandbags for the

Humvees-"

"Slow down," the first sergeant said, sitting down in his chair and

then standing up to brush crumbs from the drop ceiling off of it. The

first sergeant was tall and lanky. Up until the last year he'd been the

chief investigator for the Lake County Sheriff's Department. When they

got deployed, ignoring the Soldiers and Sailors' Act, he'd given the

sheriff his okay to appoint his deputy to the job. So when they got back

he took a cut in pay and went back to work as a sergeant. Give him a

crime scene and he knew where he was at. He even was pretty good at

recovering the company from a mortar attack or a convoy ambush. He

was one of the best guys in the world at training his troops to sniff out

hidden explosives, weapons and other prohibited materials-he thought

of it as shaking down a dealer's house. But nuclear attacks were a new

one for him and it was taking him a minute to get his bearings.

"I can't slow down," Crichton replied. "I need to set up a

radiological station before anybody can go outside even after the first

thirty minutes."

"What's with the thirty minutes?" Staff Sergeant Wolf asked. The

operations sergeant was medium height and well over what the Army

considered acceptable weight for his height. And it wasn't muscle, like

the CO's driver who was a fricking tank, it was fat. But he was pretty

sharp. Not unflappable, he was clearly taking even more time to adjust

than the first sergeant, but smart. When he wasn't in one third-world

shit hole or another he was a manager of a Kinkos.

"Falling debris," Crichton asked. "We don't know it's a nuke. It

probably was but it could have been an asteroid hit. They throw chunks

of burning rock into the stratosphere and they take a while to come

down."

"Top?" Crichton heard from behind him. The chemical specialist

turned around and saw that the mortar platoon sergeant had come up

behind him while he was talking. The platoon sergeant, a staff sergeant

who was a delivery manager for UPS when he was home, showed a

physique developed from years of throwing often quite heavy boxes

through the air. It was running to fat now that he worked behind a desk

ten months out of the year, but he still was a big guy you wouldn't want

to meet in a dark alley.

"Get Crichton his survey teams," the first sergeant said, looking at

the suddenly irrelevant papers on his desk. "Send Sergeant Burell

around to get everybody inside until the all clear sounds. Then get with

the rest of the platoon sergeants in the Swamp. Wolf, head over to

battalion, see what's up."

"Where's the CO?" Crichton asked, looking at the closed door at

the back of the room.

"At breakfast with the platoon leaders and the battalion

commander," the first sergeant answered, dryly. "We can handle this

until they get back. Go."

* * *

FLASH is the highest priority communication in the military

directory, superceding even Operational Immediate. Satellites in orbit

noted the explosion and computers on the ground automatically

categorized it as a nuclear explosion.

"Holy shit!" the Air Force sergeant monitoring the nuclear attack

warning console muttered, his stomach dropping. In the old days he

would have picked up a phone. Now he hit three buttons and

confirmed three separate pop-ups sending a FLASH priority message

to the National Military Command Center in the bowels of the

Pentagon. Then he picked up the phone as sirens went off in the

normally quiet room in Sunnyvale California.

* * *

The wonder of military communications and computers meant that

the President of the United States got word that a probable nuclear

attack had occurred on Central Florida a whole thirty seconds before

Fox broke the news.

"I know we can't say who did it, yet," the President said calmly. He

was at Camp David for the weekend but most of his senior staff was

on the phone already. "But I'll make three guesses and only two of

them count."

"Mr. President, let's not jump to conclusions," his national security

advisor said. She was a specialist in nuclear strategy and had been

doing makee-learnee on terrorism ever since the attacks of September

11, 2001. And this didn't fit the profile of a terrorist attack. "First of all,

nobody thinks that they have access to nuclear weapons of this sort.

Radiological bombs, maybe. But this appears to be a nuclear weapon.

However, the target makes no sense for a terrorist. It has been located

precisely as being on the grounds of the University of Central Florida.

Why waste a nuclear weapon on a university when they could use it on

New York or Washington or L.A. or Atlanta?"

"I gotta go with the NSA on this one, Mister President," the

secretary of defense said. "This doesn't feel like an attack. What's the

chance it could have been some sort of accident?"

"I don't know that much about UCF," the NSA admitted. She had

once been the dean of a major college but for the last few years she'd

been holding down the national security advisor's desk in the middle of

a war. Her stated ambition after leaving government service was to

become the commissioner of the National Football League. "But I don't

think they're doing anything in the nuclear program, I'm pretty sure I'd

remember that. And you just don't get accidents with weapons.

They're hard enough to get to go off at all."

"So we're in a holding pattern?" the President asked.

"Yes, sir," the secretary of defense answered.

"We need to get a statement out, fast," the chief of staff said.

"Especially if we're pretty sure it wasn't a terrorist attack."

"Have one made up," the President said. "I'm going to go take a

nap. I figure this is gonna be a long one."

* * *

"Okay, Crichton, what do you have?"

The battalion headquarters of Second Battalion was collocated in

the armory with Charlie Company. At the moment the Battalion, which

should have had a staff sergeant and two specialists as a nuclear,

biological and chemical weapons team, was without any of the three.

Crichton had for the last year been the only trained NBC specialist in

the entire battalion. He reflected, somewhat bitterly, that while he'd

been holding down the work of a staff sergeant, a sergeant and six

other privates it hadn't been reflected in a promotion.

"None of my instruments are reading any increase in background

radiation here, sir," the specialist temporized. The meeting of the

battalion staff and company commanders was taking place in the

battalion meeting room, a small room with a large table and its walls

lined with unit insignias, awards and trophies. The question hit him as he

walked through the door. Crichton had been told only two minutes

before to "shag your ass over to battalion and report to the sergeant

major." At the time he'd been prepping his survey teams.

Radiological survey teams were taken from within standard

companies and sent out to find where the radiation was from a nuclear

attack. It was one of the many scenarios that the Army kept in its

playbook but rarely paid much attention to. The privates and one

sergeant for the company's team had been chosen months before and

should have trained in the interim. But there were always more

important things to do or train on, especially on a deployment. So he

was having to brief them at the same time as he was trying to read all

his instruments, prepare a NUCREP that was probably going to be

read by the Joint Chiefs and make sense of the readings, none of

which, in fact, made sense.

He knew all the officers in the room and, frankly, didn't like them

very much. The battalion operations officer, a major, stayed on active

duty as much as possible because his other job was as a school

teacher, elementary level, and soccer coach. As a major he made three

times as much as a civilian. He could run anybody in the battalion into

the ground but the only reason he managed to keep his head above

water in his present post was his S-3 sergeant, whose civilian job was

operations manager for a large tool and die distributor. The battalion

executive officer was a small town cop. Nice guy and, give him credit,

in good shape despite the Twinkies but not the brightest brick in the

load. How he made major was a huge question. The battalion

commander was a good manager and a decent leader but if you asked

him to "think outside the box" he'd get a box and stand outside of it

while he thought. And there was nothing, so far, that fit in any box

Crichton could imagine.

"The thing is, sir, this doesn't look like a nuke at all, Colonel," he

admitted.

"Looked one hell of a lot like one where I was standing," the XO

replied, his brow crinkling. "Big flash, mushroom cloud, hell of a bang.

Nuke."

"No radiation and no EMP, sir," Crichton said, shaking his head.

"No EMP?" the battalion commander said. "Are you sure?"

"What . . ." the Charlie Company commander said, then shook his

head. "I know I'm supposed to know this, damnit, but I don't. What in

the hell is . . . what was it you said?"

"EMP, sir," Crichton replied. "Electromagnetic pulse. Basically, a

nuke makes like a giant magnetic generator along with everything else."

He reached in his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. "I called my mom

to tell her I was okay and not to worry. Didn't think about it . . ."

"That's okay," the battalion commander said. "Everybody did the

same thing."

"Yes, sir," Crichton replied. "But I meant I didn't think about it until

I hung up. Nuke that size, sir, the EMP should have shut down every

electronic device in East Orlando. I mean everything that wasn't

shielded. Phones, computers, cars. But everything works. Ergo, it was

not a nuke."

"Look, Crichton, I got a call, a personal call, from the Chief of

Staff," the battalion commander said. "I mean the Army Chief of Staff.

There's a NEST team on the way to check this out, but he wants data

now. What do I tell him?"

Crichton cringed at that. The Chief of Staff was going to tell

whatever he said to somebody even higher up. Probably the President.

If he got it wrong . . .

"Right now this . . . event is not consonant with a nuclear attack,

sir," the specialist said, firmly. "There is no evidence of EMP or

radiation. Nor . . ." He paused and then squared his shoulders. "Nor

does it appear to be an asteroid strike."

"A what?" the operations officer asked.

"Look," Crichton said, thinking fast. "Sir, you ever see a movie

called Armageddon? Or Asteroid?"

"That's science fiction, right?" the major scoffed. "I don't watch that

sort of stuff."

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INTOTHELOOKINGGLASSJohnRingoThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.Copyright©2005byJohnRingoAllrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproducethisbookorportionsthereofinanyform.ABaenBooksOriginalBaenPubli...

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