Surrounded as it was by the crushing mass of the Aswan High Dam, the initial burst of radiation could not escape and so began to rapidly heat the encasing medium to tens of millions of degrees, vaporising everything within the expanding sphere of gas. Growing towards its maximum size, the fireball cooled rapidly, until it no longer possessed the heat to transform solid mass into gaseous residue. Having disintegrated the wall, though, it did have more than enough thermal power to flash-boil the waters of the dam. With nowhere to easily dissipate, the blast front transferred much of its energy into a shockwave that sped outwards from ground zero, imitating the effect of an earth-shattering quake. It struck the smaller, original dam wall a little further downstream like a hammer of the gods. A few thousand people who lived in the small settlements around the dams died instantly in the explosion, leaving nobody on the ground to witness what happened as the Nile was set free.

High above, however, Molenz had a perfect view and whispered a prayer, asking forgiveness for what he had done. As the immediate effects of the explosion cleared, a mountainous wall of hot, irradiated water was unleashed on the valley below. A giant, boiling wave, over a hundred metres high, began its journey to the sea; it roared out of the huge lake, punched through the mushroom cloud that rose inexorably over the void where one of the great engineering marvels of the world had stood just a few seconds earlier. He could hear nothing in the cockpit, over the roar of the Eagle’s twin engines, but the pilot imagined that hearing that monstrous wall of angry, super-hot white water rushing towards you would have to sound something like sticking your head inside the F-15’s afterburner.

He watched the progress of the wave for as long as he could, saw it sweep over Luxor like a giant ocean dumper rolling over a child’s toy at the beach, before something even more terrible caught his eye. The rising of a new sun, hours before dawn, far off to the north.

Where Cairo had once stood.

The tremor in Admiral James Ritchie’s hand was obvious as he read from the briefing note. He managed to keep his voice steady, though – wouldn’t do to be caught pissing his pants in a roomful of civilians.

‘Casualties from the immediate effects of the first strike are estimated at eighty-five million,’ he said. ‘Further casualties from the breaching of the Aswan dams may double that.’

The dozen men and women arrayed around the grand oak table in the Governor’s dining room were ashen-faced. And some of them were visibly shaking. Governor Lingle had tears in her eyes. The room was crowded and hot, partly because of the amount of audiovisual equipment that had been brought in to effect the videoconference with Anchorage and Olympia, the Washington state capital.

The surviving civilian authorities of the United States of America were in shock. Perhaps even more traumatised than they had been by the Disappearance. Ritchie wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it had something to do with the completely inexplicable nature of that event. Perhaps they were all still in a sort of denial. Everyone in this room, however, everyone involved in the conference, had grown up with the spectre of nuclear war lurking at the edge of their consciousness. It was not merely explicable, it was familiar.

‘Indirect deaths, in the short term, from radiation poisoning and injuries, are estimated by our modelling to climb as high as another thirty million over the next month.’ He heard somebody curse softly but continued on. ‘Medium-term fatalities, from the collapse of governing and societal systems, may double or triple that again. There may be unquantifiable effects, further afield. Millions of bodies and radioactive debris have been flushed out of the Nile Delta and into the Mediterranean, for instance, where they will contaminate the environment and enter the marine food chain.’

A woman sitting by Governor Lingle covered her mouth and ran from the room.

Jed Culver, who had been standing near the door, waiting to speak, yanked it open to let her through. He was sweating profusely and appeared blotchy and unwell.

‘General Franks reports that coordinated attacks on US forces in the area have ceased,’ said Ritchie. ‘Iraqi forces are requesting ceasefires or surrendering en masse. Iranian forces are withdrawing. Further, there seems to be no evidence of any national command authority in either country having survived the Israeli strike. In the areas of Iraq still under our nominal control as part of Operation Katie, local Iraqi government leaders have requested humanitarian aid. We have had similar requests from the surviving civilian leadership in both Syria and Egypt. Iran has also requested our assistance.’

He paused as a Republican state senator from Alaska swore loudly and colourfully.

‘Uncoordinated attacks by non state actors continue off the coast of Lebanon and in Afghanistan. General Musharraf survived yet another assassination attempt this morning in the aftermath of the attacks. He informed me personally that Pakistan has now gone to full readiness to retaliate against anyone – Israel, India, anyone – who even remotely threatens his country,’ he went on.

Ritchie let his hand drop and looked around the room, taking in the cameras beaming his image across the Pacific to Olympia and Anchorage as well.

‘I have no national command authority to whom I can turn for orders,’ he said. ‘Our own nuclear deterrent is effectively useless without said authority. I can give orders to fire all day and night long, but the commanders of our ballistic-missile subs will not follow them without Presidential authority. That is why we originally scheduled this meeting. I believe that if we had such an authority, if we had a President and even the semblance of an emergency government, that this… holocaust could have been avoided.’

He had spoken the word without forethought, but having done so, did not regret it.

‘This is not your fault,’ he added, with a mounting and voluble anger that seemed to imply just the opposite. ‘You have all had a hell of a time dealing with the impossible demands of our own emergency. But I promise you, if you cannot come to some sort of working arrangement, if you do not leave this room tonight with a plan to immediately rebuild some basic form of national government, then what happened today will happen again and again and again until the only evidence that civilisation ever arose on this planet will be its radioactive ruins.’

And with that, he turned and stormed out of the room.