“Madam President,” the man said again, and this time he pulled the headphones off his ears. “The Chinese.”
Steph let out a sigh and Manny stepped forward. “I think we’re done for the day,” he said. “Call off the simulation.”
“No,” the officer said, and there was something urgent and harsh in his voice that stilled the small movement that had started up in the room, something that kept the president’s attention, that left Manny waiting for more. “This isn’t part of the exercise,” he said. “They, uh, it’s going to be on the screen in a few seconds. Ma’am?”
“Well, spit it out.” Stephanie had stopped, but she looked bored. Most of the other men and women in the room had already started packing up again, and Manny realized nobody else seemed to see the look of fear on the officer’s face. He also realized that Alex was still sitting, a look of alarm on her face as a uniform whispered urgently in her ear.
Manny glanced up at the big bank of television screens and computer monitors that lined the wall. Most of the information was related to the simulation, but on the end, there were two large screens showing close to real-time satellite images of China, the information coming in with only a thirty-or forty-second delay. The country was split almost in half on the screens, with one showing the more densely populated portions of eastern China, Beijing a web of roads, the other screen displaying the western half of the country, a line indicating the upper borders, Kazakhstan and Mongolia.
And suddenly there was a glow of light. A burning dot on the upper-left-hand side of the western screen.
“Holy Jesus,” somebody said, and then a moment later Manny realized he was the one who said it.
“What the fuck was that?” The president was looking at the screen as well.
Everybody in the room was now staring at the map of China, looking at the bloom and fade of light near the northwest corner of the country. That is, everybody but the national security advisor. She was staring at the uniform who had been whispering in her ear. “Was that it?” Alex asked. She turned to look at the officer by the console. “Was it a missile? Whose was it? Are there any others in the air? Was it just the one?”
The officer, who had one of the earpieces on his headphones pressed back against his head, held his hand up to Alex, looked at the screen, and then nodded. “That’s it,” he said. “It wasn’t a missile.”
Manny realized he’d been drifting between watching Alex and the officer and looking at the burst of light fading back to darkness. “If it wasn’t a missile, what the fuck was it?”
The room had gone weirdly quiet, a sudden vacuum of sound in the wake of Manny’s question, and he knew he wasn’t the only person who jumped when the phone behind them rang. It was not just a phone that rang. It was the phone. He remembered as a kid when they showed the president picking up the hotline to the Russians in movies, how it was usually a red phone, sinister and there as the last resort before nuclear winter, but it wasn’t until he’d actually spent some time in the White House that he realized the phone was real. And the phone was ringing. There was no question that the person on the other end was going to be the Chinese general secretary, and it took only two rings before Steph stepped over to it, her hand on the receiver.
“Can somebody,” she said, barking out the words to the room as she prepared to pick up the phone, “tell me just what the fuck that was on the screen?”
“That,” said Manny, looking at the screen again, where the flare of light had already started to dissipate, “was a nuke.”
Xinjiang Province, China
For a moment he thought he was going to throw up, but he didn’t slow down. The truck had barely made it through the barricades, and even then he’d had to drive over two soldiers. The thought of the thump and the screams was enough to make him gag again, but no matter what happened, he wasn’t going to stop driving. He’d wanted to get to his sister and her family.