At six hundred meters off the ground, four radar antennae in Gori’s nose determined that it had reached the optimum height for discharge. Bridge-wire detonators fired every panel of the “soccer ball” trigger simultaneously, producing such powerful inward pressure on the plutonium core that it was squeezed into a supercritical condition.

Three effects manifested themselves immediately: blast, heat, and radiation. There was also an electromagnetic pulse, but it had a negligible effect in the primitive environment. Such systems as might have been affected, like those on the Tupolev, had been hardened to withstand the effect.

In the first few milliseconds energy was released in the form of high-intensity X-rays. The steel egg vaporized, and the X-rays expanded into the air above the parkland. Unfortunately for every living organism within the city and its surroundings, the air was not “transparent” to the X-rays, and so their energy was unable to freely propagate. The atmosphere began to heat up, and a ball of expanding plasma formed. Milliseconds after the initial explosion, its temperature could be measured in millions of degrees.

A few milliseconds later, by the time the fireball had grown to about thirty meters in width, it had cooled considerably-to three hundred thousand degrees Celsius, or about fifty times the surface temperature of the sun.

At ground zero the soil boiled and exploded, vaporized, and added its mass to the expanding plasma. So, too, every atom of organic and inorganic mater in the small park. Trees, grass, iron benches, granite flagstones, human beings, birds, insects, everything: it all fueled the atomic furnace. Even a kilometer away, solid stone buildings liquefied as the thermal shock swept over them. Lodz was crowded, and sixty-five thousand souls were consumed by the superhot plasma sphere, but the true destructiveness of Gori was still to be unleashed. A gamma ray pulse and neutron bath added their lethal effects to the light and heat of the small sun that bloomed over the city.

The air surrounding the fireball was massively compressed, then pushed outward. Unlike even the largest chemical explosions, the nuclear blast created a very wide shock wave still thick enough to entirely surround the city’s small buildings, crushing them from all sides. The medieval core of Lodz was entirely pulverized.

The impact of the shock wave hitting the ground was akin to the hammer of an old Norse god striking the earth. It set off a vibration that had the same effect as an earthquake as the energy waves spread outward. Near the blast center, with pressures at 200 psi, winds howled at up to two thousand kilometers an hour. These fell away with distance from the blast, but were still strong enough to demolish everything in their path out to ten kilometers.

At a certain point the structural integrity of some objects was such that they did not disintegrate, but rather became missiles, propelled through the air at great speed. Even small, seemingly insignificant objects became lethal at that velocity. But much larger items were also affected. A Tiger tank, for instance, stranded at the intersection of Landowa and Startowa streets for three days because of a lack of fuel, was suddenly on the move again, flying through the air at three hundred kilometers an hour.

Some of the missiles traveled faster than the blast wave, which lost energy as it sped away from ground zero. An SS colonel, standing on the steps of an apartment building on Dabroskiego Street, was killed when a helmet smashed into his head, popping it like a grape underfoot. The destruction did not discriminate. The innocent and the evil were burned, or crushed, or torn apart. Aryan supermen and residents of the Jewish ghetto all died, their ashes drawn up into the towering mushroom-shaped cloud that rose above the city.

The messenger arrived as Stalin was playing with his much-loved old gramophone, insisting that Molotov and the “gloomy demon” Lev Mekhlis, the political chief of the Red Army, entertain the room with a dance. Beria suspected that the supreme leader had been drinking wine diluted with mineral water for the past few hours. He seemed to be in much better shape than anyone save for Harriman and Clark-Kerr. He scratched the gramophone needle on the old record a couple of times, but Beria doubted whether he himself could have even picked up the disk without smashing it, so inebriated was he.

It wasn’t just that Stalin insisted everyone obliterate themselves at these awful parties. Beria also drank to numb his fear that the bomb would not work. There had been no time to test the device after Stalin had ordered that it be used a month ahead of schedule. If it didn’t work, there was no question that he would pay. He’d tried to convince Stalin that a test-firing was the only sensible course, but the Vozhd had removed his unlit Dunhill pipe and placed it carefully on his desk. That was always a grave warning sign. He had simply stared at Beria until the NKVD chief had started to babble, and double back on his own rhetoric. Of course, of course the general secretary is right. It will be done, and done immediately, and without fail, and…

Beria shuddered, and felt another spasm of explosive vomiting coming on. At least half of the Communist Party magnates in the room looked in even worse shape than he was. But nobody had passed out. As Khrushchev used to say when he was alive, those who fell asleep at Stalin’s table usually met a bad end. And so the debauch rolled on.

Stalin managed to get some scratchy old dance tune playing. Molotov and Mekhlis stumbled around in a grotesque parody of a waltz. The Allied ambassadors could not keep the horror from their faces.

And then, a Red Army messenger appeared at the door.

“Sweet mother of God,” Kolhammer muttered.

He could hear Spruance’s labored breathing beside him. Unlike Kolhammer, he’d never seen an atomic blast, never trained for a nuclear war, and in a way his ignorance protected him.

“Looks like a mess,” he said.

“Yeah,” Kolhammer grunted. “A hell of a mess.”

They stood in front of the banked screens in the main room of the Clinton’s Intelligence Division. It looked like a smaller version of the ship’s Combat Information Center, though with space given over to desks, cubicles, and a large conference table at one end of the room. At least two dozen men and women worked feverishly at all of these stations, half of them on the data stream now coming out of Europe, while the others remained focused on the task force’s advanced surveillance elements as they closed with Yamamoto’s forces in the Marianas.

For the moment, however, Kolhammer and Spruance were fully engaged with developments on the other side of the world.

The Soviets had restricted all access to the ruins of Lodz, ostensibly because of the danger of radiation poisoning, although they had been more than accommodating when it came to requests from London and Washington for briefings on the atomic raid. While the Red Army liaison officers who flew into England especially for these meetings would not discuss details of the USSR’s atomic program, they were more than happy to provide reams of evidence from Poland about the destructive power unleashed by the workers’ state.

“I guess the message is clear enough,” Spruance muttered as footage restarted on the main screen, showing a superfire that had destroyed even more of Lodz than the initial blast.