Gautam smiled at the thought. Smiled at the strange comfort he had learned to gather from the daily ritual at the mine, of standing next to the toilets and thinking about his father.
He walked to the side of the truck, picked up the small water bottle and took a sip. He leaned against the big black tire of the Caterpillar dump truck, waiting. Finally, he heard the rumble from the opening in the tunnel, the last dump truck of the day.
“Hey, Gautam, son of a bitch,” Blackmon yelled, a big smile on his face, from the passenger side of the vehicle. The big truck came to a stop and Blackmon opened the door.
“Jump down, you dumb motherfucker,” Gautam yelled, laughing at his best friend.
“Yeah, will you take care of me if I break my legs, asshole?” Blackmon said. He opened the door to the truck and reached for the ladder that would take him to the ground.
“I will take care of Rasha,” Gautam yelled.
“Hey, watch it,” Blackmon said as he climbed down the big steel ladder of the truck. “She probably couldn’t handle you, what with that enormous pecker.”
Gautam laughed, screwed the cap back on the water bottle. “Got any ciggies?” he asked.
“Where are yours?”
“Finished them.”
“You’re going to die from those,” Blackmon said. He climbed off the bottom of the ladder, looked up at the cab. “All set, Kalif!” he yelled to the driver, who was out of sight. As the Caterpillar rumbled down the gravel road toward the primary crusher, Blackmon took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, tossed it to Gautam. “There you go, Smokey the Bear.”
“Thanks,” said Gautam.
Gautam took a cigarette from the pack and handed it back to Blackmon. He puffed greedily and felt the familiar tug of the smoke filling his lungs.
As Gautam exhaled, his eye caught something interrupting the clear azure sky. He looked up. A small black object. He looked away, not registering the sight, then looked back as his mind processed the fact, unexpected and abnormal, that something was happening, that something was about to happen.
An object is dropping from the sky,
he thought to himself.
His eyes affixed to the object as it dropped from the sky and grew larger. He slowly raised his cigarette to his mouth and took another drag. Had the mine works not been so noisy, he would have heard the faint whistle of the bomb as it screamed through the afternoon sky.
Blackmon finally noticed that Gautam was silent, motionless, transfixed. He followed the trajectory of his friend’s stare, glancing up at the sky, at the approaching object, now plainly visible. It was a bomb, descending down upon them.
That was the last action, thought, the last moment the two friends shared. The bomb covered the final few thousand feet and was then above them. For the smallest part of a second, Gautam felt as if he could reach up and touch the object, catch it even. Had he lived, he would have remembered not feeling fear in that last second before the bomb hit.
Even though their eyes followed the bomb’s flight path, even though they stared at what would be the epicenter of the crater created by the nuclear device, Gautam’s and Blackmon’s minds did not even have the time to process the sensations that came next; the intense white heat, and blinding light that was created in that moment. The blast tore across the land and air and the two friends were immolated into vapor before their brains could process the awesome sight, the incredible pain, the ending of it all.
In point of fact, the bomb detonated ten feet above the ground, its sophisticated altimeter sensing the approaching terrain and sending an electronic signal to the trigger mechanism. The twenty-eight-kiloton charge was more than twice the power of the bomb dropped by the United States on Hiroshima in 1944.
The bomb immediately destroyed the small town of Karoo and everything in it; every human being, every building, truck, piece of mechanical equipment—everything. Its insatiable appetite for oxygen, created just milliseconds after the initial detonation, sucked air like a tremendous vacuum. The mine works collapsed as the air was sucked from the entrance to the mine shaft, crushing the structure in a violent instant.
In the seconds following the blast, oxygen fed the heat and soon a vast ball of fire ricocheted across the landscape in every direction, then jumped skyward. The mushroom cloud. What started in white and blue turned a painted red and orange as it cooled, still wildly hot but diminishing as the air above Karoo tempered the nuclear heat of the radioactive atoms.
In the minutes immediately following the detonation, the mushroom cloud climbed into the blue sky. A rainbow of color crossed black smoke. It stretched half a mile across and arose quickly as its interior hungered for air, which it sought by stretching up and out, the temperature diminishing with each passing moment, the cloud growing, until soon the cloud was at an apex, still held together by the flames, stretched wide and far, a stunning sight, had anyone been able to actually see it. But nobody saw the cloud. All 8,390 inhabitants of Karoo were dead.
And then the mushroom cloud’s edges started to tear apart and dissipate. The killer wind drifted aloft in the innocent sky, the destruction of the deserted area just beginning as the fallout settled into the ground, to lie there for a quarter millennium to come.
IN THE AIR ABOVE THE INDUS RIVER
KASHMIR
At the Indian Army Base in Leh, Sergeant Noree noticed a bright green spot on the radar screen in front of him. He reached out, tapped the screen with his right index finger, thinking there was a malfunction, but the spot would not go away.
“Lieutenant Ka’ash,” said Noree. “Come quickly.”
The watch officer, Lieutenant Rasher Ka’ash, walked from his desk and stood behind Noree, leaning in and looking for himself at the screen.
“Where is that?”
“South of here. Karoo, the village.”
“The mining town?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What is it?” asked Ka’ash.
“I don’t know. Technically, if the system is functioning properly, it’s telling me this is some sort of fingerprint event.”
“Fingerprint—”
“Electronic. A bomb. A big bomb. But it can’t be.”
“Why not?” asked Ka’ash.
“They don’t make bombs that big.”
“Check it out,” said Lieutenant Ka’ash. “Get a jet over there.”
Leh, more than fifty miles north of Karoo, was the closest military facility to the war front. The dispatch team at Leh was heavily involved in the fighting for Skardu, managing the early coordination of the battle and now spearheading the movement of troops into Skardu, working with the command operations center in Udhampur to coordinate. The temporary military hospital at the base had more than five hundred beds, twenty doctors, sixty nurses, and was already overcrowded. Leh also served as IAF’s primary rescue and reconnaissance point, running choppers to the front lines, where injured soldiers were picked up and shuttled back to the hospital.
Sergeant Noree studied his screen for a few seconds. When he saw an IAF jet heading back toward the base, he leaned forward, pressed the COMM link.
“Targa Six, this is Leh dispatch,” said Noree.
“Go, dispatch,” said a voice on Noree’s headset.
“Detour east,” said Noree into his headset. “I’m programming in the sequence. You’ll see it in two.”
“Got it,” said the pilot. “What am I looking for?”
“This is a visual recon,” answered Noree. “Just check it out.”
* * *
Inside the IAF Su-30MKI attack jet, the pilot punched in the new coordinates, heading across the cloudless sky at seven thousand feet, at more than one thousand miles per hour. The jet flew along the snowcapped peaks of the Ladakh Range heading south. The pilot banked and aimed the jet toward the ground in order to get a better view. He pushed the jet to 1,200 miles per hour, scorching across the deserted, rocky, green and white terrain of the Indus Valley.
The pilot flew toward the V-shaped canyon between Stakna Mountain and Shakti Mountain. For the first time, the pilot realized something was wrong. Between the mountains, as the plane came closer, he saw nothing but black. The pilot moved the throttle back, slowing the jet. Ahead, it was unmistakable now, the sky was black and rising like a wall, stopping at a horizontal line beneath the top of the mountains.
The jet flew past a last peak and into the open valley. He gasped.
“My God,” he whispered out loud when he could finally collect himself.
“What?” asked Noree over the headset.
The valley just beyond Stakna and Shakti was on fire. Where there should have been lush green and brown valley, the ground was a plain of low-flung flames and smoke as far as the eye could see. But most shocking of all was what floated above the burning plain, the signature mushroom cloud of an atomic blast. The cloud hung in the air as if in slow motion, a gargantuan cloud of dark gray, red, and black, the top of the cloud arched and round, the bottom a tornado that was connected by flames to the ground.
The pilot forced himself to look away from the mesmerizing sight. He stared at his navigation screen. Karoo was still more than a mile away.
Inside the jet’s cockpit, the heat sensor chirped. Instinctively, the pilot banked right, away from the scene.
“Targa Six, I repeat,” barked Noree. “What do you have?”
“You’re not going to believe this,” the pilot said quietly, still stunned. “I think they dropped a nuclear bomb. I’m putting it on video.”
The pilot flipped a switch on the dash of the jet. Circling, he again aimed the nose of the Su-30MKI at the mushroom cloud.
“Are you getting that?” the pilot asked.
“Keep filming. I’m patching it to New Delhi.”
TOP PUB
COOKTOWN HOTEL
COOKTOWN
The Cooktown Hotel was a rectangular, slightly dilapidated, tan clapboard building that looked like something out of the old West. It had a second-floor verandah that wrapped around the street-facing sides of the hotel and jutted over the sidewalk below. The hotel was centrally located, popular, but also a tad run-down, the rooms small and plain. There were better places to stay in Cooktown, better places to drink, and better places to eat. Still, it was an institution, a stone’s throw from the beach and the Coral Sea.
Inside the hotel’s restaurant, called the Top Pub, Jamil sat alone at a chipped and scratched brown Formica table. The restaurant’s dozen tables were half filled with tourists. The waitress walked from the kitchen to his table and placed a plate down in front of him. On it sat a pickle, some potato chips, and a thick sandwich on rye bread.
“There ya go,” she said. “Vegemite sandwich with a tomato, no onion.”
“Thank you,” said Jamil. He’d ordered the sandwich upon her recommendation. Jamil knew the Vegemite was without question the worst dish on the menu, yet he pretended to be oblivious. It was meant to be somewhat of an insult, an inside joke, a putover on the stupid Arab tourist.
Jamil smiled and politely examined the sandwich. He looked up at the bar a few tables away. The bar was empty except for a pair of college students, longish hair and tie-dye, one male and one female, who were chatting with the bartender, a short man with wildly unkempt, overgrown curly hair and a big handlebar mustache. The bartender had a thick Australian brogue and was engaged in conversation with the two college students. As he spoke, he kept looking over at him.
Jamil tried not to stare back at the bartender. He picked up the Vegemite sandwich and took a big bite. The taste was like an old sweaty sock; salty, a hint of seaweed or rotten meat; soggy but grainy; disgusting. Some people liked it, particularly if you’d grown up with it, as many Australians had, but a newcomer to Vegemite usually had a different reaction, primarily nausea. More than one customer over the years, upon trying Vegemite for the first time, had outright puked on their plate after taking a bite.
Of course, this is precisely why the waitress had recommended it. It’s why the bartender kept looking over. Jamil knew all this. But after growing up in a poor madrasa and sometimes going for days without food, then spending a year at Hezbollah’s Jaffna camps, eating whatever was fed to them by their sadistic al-Muqawama captains, he could eat anything. With a grin on his face, he powered down the sandwich, then licked the soupy brown Vegemite that spilled over onto his fingertips. He left the chips and the pickle on the plate.
“Lookie there, will you,” said the waitress, smiling at Jamil after he’d finished. “Would ya like another?”
“No, thanks. I’m stuffed. But my compliments to the chef.”
“Would you like your check?”
“I’m going to have a beer.”
“Foster’s? It’s very good.”
“Sounds good.”
Jamil nodded, laughing to himself. Even he knew Foster’s was considered piss water by Australians.
Jamil had spent the morning with Ahmed, driving to the village of Lakeland in the north. He left Ahmed at the Lakeland Downs Motel then doubled back to Cooktown. After arriving in Cooktown, he walked up and down the main street then down to the pier. After lunch, he’d get a hotel room somewhere, maybe right here or someplace slightly more run-down. The harder the environment, the worse the food, the more he felt himself sacrificing, the more proud Jamil became. If he didn’t need to occasionally make a phone call in private, Jamil would’ve been happy to sleep behind a tree. He was gaunt, but all muscle. After running IEDs across the Iranian border to Iraq the last four years, Australia was cake.
In Jamil’s backpack was more than a hundred thousand dollars Australian, and he had no problem spending it. He knew Aswan Fortuna was a billionaire. Being cheap was about self-abuse. It was about reliving the sacrifices others had made in the name of Hezbollah.
“Here you go,” said the waitress, sliding him a pint of beer. “One Foster’s, super large. Enjoy that for a bit, how ’bout.”
“Thank you.”
Jamil sipped the beer and stared at the rows of liquor bottles behind the bar. He listened to the two students and the bartender. They were describing the surfing off of Melbourne to the bartender and he was giving them directions to a local surfing spot he thought they would appreciate. Of course, Jamil wondered if he was fucking with them too. He had no doubt that if
he
asked for a decent surfing spot, within five minutes of getting in the water he’d get eaten by a shark.