The bombs had flown. No one thought they would or even that they could, but they had done it none the less. One fateful day in mid-July hell on Earth had broke loose and no one even knew why. One terrorist had destroyed the world and he did it without a sound, perhaps even unknowingly. At 8:54 a man stepped out of a cab in downtown Moscow, carrying a somewhat slightly over sized briefcase in his hand. He strolled right by the chemical sniffing dog at the security entrance to the government building and down a flight of stairs to the �basement� of the building. He walked into a disused storage closet and set his briefcase down. He opened the latches on the case, pulled out a power plug and plugged it into the wall, then calmly walked out of the building. Two minutes latter the case imploded and everything within a six mile radius went dark. Minutes later Moscow went black.
It is amazing what magnetics will do to electrical devices. A magnetic pulse strong enough will even shut them down completely. Why kill a few people in the radius of a blast when instead you can shut down the power to a whole city? Who knows how many people could die in various situations throughout a city deprived of power. Plus, if terror is your game there are few things that will terrorize modern day people more than the loss of power to their city.
What the terrorist didn’t realize was that three miles beneath the building sat a long disused war bunker. Inside that bunker sat a long disused circuit, whose sole purpose in existence was to register large electro-magnetic pulses and fire extremely remote missiles at specific, predetermined targets. When the missiles flew, there was no calling them back. The first missile hit dead center on its target, Washington DC.
The president had been removed from the area, but not far enough. The vacuum from the blast sucked Marine One back into the heat and it was completely destroyed. At the time the Vice president was in Egypt attempting to develop trade relations with them. He was on a junket to Tut’s Tomb and was out of communications with the military. From there down the chain of command broke down. Pieces where missing, communications between the links that were left were spotty. The Internet, the great hope of the military, the thing they had counted upon to be uncollapsible, collapsed. The shear volume of data that was flowing on it; music, video, and voice, coupled with the surge as people attempted to get information about the attacks, caused the core backbone providers to tumble. The Internet was left in isolated chunks throughout the world.
Without communications, the local commanders where left to think for themselves. Many of them opted to wait for orders, but some didn’t. Several released their missiles at the targets they had been assigned; China, Russia, and North Korea where hit. Automatic systems and manual systems returned fire from these countries. North Korea’s fledgling nuclear program claimed targets on the west coast while Russia and China claimed targets throughout the country. The cycle continued for another volley of missiles. This time though the systems for nuclear warfare where failing and conventional weapons were fired as well. By the end of the exchange over twenty five nuclear warheads were exploded that day, more than anyone thought the Earth could take, and then a miracle began to occur. Something, no one had ever seen before. The Earth began to heal, but in a way no one could have ever dreamed of.
To say it was magic, would be something of a irony and a truth. What took man less than eighteen hours to destroy, the Earth began to repair in less than one. It started with the disappearance of the mushroom clouds and the radiation contaminated air. Things which should have taken years to disappear where gone before what was left of the media could get close enough to take video of it. The best pictures of the phenomena where taking by orbital satellites, but their pictures where not found for weeks afterward. The ground simply opened a fissure and the clouds were sucked in, not unlike the a vacuum cleaner being turned on in a smoky room.