Red Hammer: Voodoo Plague Book 4 Read Online Free Page A

the Russian president died of a
mysterious ailment.  Alexie ensured there was no investigation into the cause
of death.  Within 24 hours of Putin’s death, Barinov seized control of the
Russian government and installed himself as the new President.  Within a week
he had removed all opposition through a series of assassinations and bribes. 
The last part of his plan was in motion.
    “Comrade President, the missiles are within one minute of
targets.  Operation Red Hammer is on schedule.”  Marshall Ludnikov, a staunch
supporter of Barinov, spoke from the chair immediately to the President’s
right.
    Alexie looked up at the Chinese made OLED screen that
covered an entire wall of the conference room.  The screen was divided into
five sections.  The left half was a real time satellite image of the United
States, zoomed so that an area stretching from West Virginia to Colorado was
all that was in frame.  The right half of the screen was spilt into four, equal
parts.  Each quarter was the view from the nose of an orbital launched, penetrator
missile carrying an 80 Kiloton nuclear warhead.  Newly developed, each missile
accelerated out of orbit, reaching near hyper-velocity speeds prior to impact. 
Tests had confirmed that each missile was capable of penetrating over 100 feet
of Earth, or up to 40 feet of hardened concrete.  Everyone in the room was
anxious to see the results of the fabulously expensive development effort that
Barinov had started over a decade ago.
    Two targets within the continental US were digitally circled
in red on the left hand screen.  Target 1 was a hardened bunker deep inside
Mount Weather in the West Virginia Mountains.  Well paid spies within the White
House staff had confirmed that this was where the US President and the
surviving members of Congress had fled.  Target 2 was Cheyenne Mountain in the
Rocky Mountain range in Colorado, where the Vice President and military
leadership from the Pentagon had taken refuge after the Chinese attacks.
     In each of the quarter screens that showed the view from
the missiles, a small digital timer blinked in the corner, counting down time
to impact.  The two upper screens read 00:00:10, ten seconds, the two lower
screens exactly one minute behind.  Alexie kept his eyes on the upper screens,
shifting to the real time satellite view when each of the missile’s video feeds
blanked out and their timers reached zero. 
    On the larger screen, two brilliant flashes suddenly
appeared, each within the red circles identifying the targets.  Huge plumes of
dust billowed into the atmosphere as the warheads detonated well below the
surface.  Thousands of cubic meters of rock was atomized by each bomb, simply
ceasing to exist.  Millions of tons of pulverized rock, steel and hardened
concrete blasted into the atmosphere, creating a two hundred foot deep crater
for the follow on missile to strike.
    Mount Weather and Cheyenne Mountain had both been
constructed at the height of the Cold War, but when they were built neither the
US nor the Soviet Union possessed the technology to build penetrator missiles. 
The two bunkers were intended to provide a survivable environment that could
withstand a direct surface strike from a Soviet ICBM.  Not a subterranean
detonation directly on top of them.  Mount Weather was breached and completely
destroyed by the first penetrator.  The second missile, when it arrived, wasn’t
needed.
    Cheyenne Mountain, carved out of solid rock, fared better
from the first strike.  Electricity was knocked out and numerous cave-ins
killed dozens of personnel, but the hard Colorado granite held.  Until the
second penetrator arrived.  The granite that had withstood the first penetrator
had cracked from the unimaginable force of the nuclear explosion.  The second
penetrator dove into the crater created by the first, impacting the fractured
rock and burrowing deep into the mountain before detonating.  Every living
thing within the bunker