|
We were less than five hundred feet off the runway and still coming in when it finally clicked. Hey! You can no longer land here!
In a series of automatic reactions I pushed the throttles open, the yoke back. I could feel the engines responding, building up speed, and developing thrust. Slowly the giant plane pulled away from the ground.
Moments later we were in a steep climb with all four engines blasting out smoke and thunder as much as the fuel management system would allow. We were in a race now, for our life. Still, it seemed futile to run. Where would we be able to run to, that would not likewise become an inferno? Would there be any safe place left in the world? Still, running for our life was the only thing we could do at the moment, in hope that there may be some flaw or rent in this tapestry of destruction that was about to unfold.
With the engines screaming at full power, I throttled back to conserve fuel.
Getting away was no small challenge. The announced target areas surrounded us. Two cities to the south were to be hit, and Everett in the North was targeted. To the West was the Bangor submarine base. It would likely get the largest warhead. Only a narrow path remained safe, slightly to the northwest, across the lower tip of Hood Canal, and from there over the mountains and out to sea.
Those were tense moments when it dawned on me that we were dead over ground zero. They had said that we had fifteen minutes. But what if they were wrong? Should I trust such a forecast, cut power, reduce our rate of climb to save fuel while wasting precious seconds? Which would matter most in the end, fuel or time?
I throttled down. I had to make the fuel last.
As I banked the plane towards the Olympic Mountains, I noticed a lake in the distance with a chalet at its shore. I wondered if this was one of those places Harry wanted us to see. He had spoken of lunches so big, almost impossible to eat, strawberry shortcakes smothered with whipped cream, desserts that were like a meal in themselves, served in an atmosphere of genuine hospitality. All would be but a memory within minutes. Whose memory? Who would be there to remember? The sunshine that still sparkled over the landscape, it would turn into the blackest of nights within minutes if the forecast would come true.
At the seminar they had spoken of overlapping fireballs, flooding the ground with temperatures hundreds of times hotter than the surface of the sun. Can anyone imagine what this does to a city? Oh God, how I wished I hadn't been at that damn seminar! They made it so clear that the Hiroshima bomb was no longer valid as a yardstick. Its fireball was so minute that it never touched the city at all. This won't happen again. We live in an era of the superlative, the huge, the outrageous! Our cities will become oceans of fire, so they told us, from which there is no escape.
Harry's children came to mind, and shoppers at the mall we had flown over, and people in swimming pools. None had a chance. They had shown a film at the seminar of a rather modest explosion by today's standards. That test blast had caused an entire island to be erased from the Pacific. The blast left a hole in the ocean floor, 175 feet deep and a mile wide. They said this had been a six-megaton blast over a solid rock. How infinitely more fragile than rock, are people? Those people had lied to us at the seminar by calling the game, nuclear war. It isn't war, by any measure. No one has a fighting chance in this computer automated extermination that is 'affectionately' accredited the name of war.
+ + +
Frank stood at the plate glass wall when the emergency broadcast began, holding Fiona in his arms. The high pitched sound caught everyone's attention. Then came the message, "This is not a test..."
Next Page
|| - page index -
|| - chapter index -
|| - Exit -
||
 |
Stories about
War
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
|
|
|