An all-out counterattack had been launched.
Moscow and Leningrad were gone.
Several other Soviet cities had been destroyed, the names of which he could not even pronounce, let alone remember. The Eastern seaboard of U.S.A. was in rout and panic. The whole state of Florida had been declared a hospital area and casualties from the rest of the nation, which could be transported there, would be accepted. Texas and the Gulf States also had “hospital reception” areas. (Who in hell could reach Florida or Texas when we can’t even get to River City, Ted thought?)
There was no longer a place that could be called either Washington or the District of Columbia. An H-bomb hurled by submarine had exploded there.
Above all else, Ted learned, fear of new raids drove the millions into the winter, the oncoming dark, the universal chaos.
The radio air was hot with speculation. Obviously, the enemy had used only a small part—so far—of his plutonium bombs. Possibly the enemy had now exhausted his supply of hydrogen weapons. But perhaps a rain of them was scheduled to fall later. More likely, the foe had launched his attack prematurely, in order to keep the United States from taking the little further time needed to build an immense arsenal of H-bombs. This was a Soviet “preventive war,” many thought, undertaken with whatever the Russians had—a genocidal, eleventh-hour gamble.
But even if the enemy had managed to prepare only five H-bombs for their blitz, it was enough to panic those who survived. Planes, scouting cautiously, were beginning to report….
The District of Columbia was a white-hot saucer, deep-hammered in the land. The Potomac, and the tides, rolling back over the depression, were turning into mountain ranges of live steam. Where Philadelphia had been was a similar cauldron. Manhattan Island was gone-demolished, vaporized, pressed beneath the Hudson—and the sea was already cooling over much of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island and the Jersey marshes. That half of the “Golden Gate” which had supported San Francisco had also vanished: a peninsula with a city upon it. Los Angeles County was a bowl of white-hot gravel. Conditions like those in Green Prairie and River City prevailed only at a distance from the H-bombed cities, in suburbs and lesser metropolises, on perimeters circling for a hundred and fifty miles around each city.
Ted heard all that, and more—more than the mind could grasp.
The President was dead.