V: Fire Precautions
The Fire Brigade may not be able to reach you.
*
The Constable didn't see the mushroom cloud. He'd made for a shop's cellar the second he heard the siren. He had pushed people out of his way to get there. When it hit, he wet himself.
The Shopkeeper didn't see the mushroom cloud. He'd been down in the shelter since the siren went - his wife had frozen up, the silly bitch, but he'd got her into the shelter.
The County Controller didn't see the mushroom cloud. When the warning came in he thought of his grandchildren and burst into tears. When the bomb shook the very foundations of his basement bunker, he hit his head and passed out.
The Old Man and his Wife didn't see the mushroom cloud. They saw the flash, though. They never saw anything ever again.
*
As it happened, the fears of a 'four-minute warning' were unfounded. From detection to impact, the first missile to hit the UK took just over five and a half minutes. Airbursting near RAF Scampton, this burning cloud marks the start of the Russian attempt to neutralise Britain's bomber fleet through short - range submarine launched missile attacks. Although the EMP arising from such attacks plays havoc with air-traffic control and navigation, it is not enough to stop the V-Bombers. These crews have trained for thirty years so that these few moments are survivable. The Vulcans and Victors are already off the ground. They have their orders. The 'go' order (Britain's submarines are launching, too) was not issued by the Prime Minister - she will be dead within two minutes of the Scampton attack. In fact, two separate 'go' orders are relayed. The Deputy Prime Minister (already deep underground in CHANTICLEER) is a 'Nuclear Deputy' - he gives the order almost before the tearful radio operator finishes his dispatch. The Air Chief Marshall, steaming around an undisclosed location on HMY Britannia, gives the same order some thirty-five seconds later. This is academic however; by this point, flight suits have sprinted across tarmac and are checking their aircraft as if in fast-motion. Beneath the waves, the 'doomsday letter', handwritten by the PM, has already been opened with shaking hands. It consists simply of two words - 'Strike Back.'. We do.
No-one is quite sure what's going on with Her Majesty.
Communications across the UK are severely disrupted by the first bomb. And the second. And the third.
The panic, the vomit
The dust and the screaming
The big bombs hit the cities.
London gets ten.
Newcastle is 'spared' a direct hit - the megaton with its name on it undershoots, airbursting over a chip shop in Heddon, a few miles to the South-East. 45,000 people are killed instantly. 26,000 are severely wounded, and will die soon. Nearby, a smaller, 500kt device ground-bursts near Newcastle International Airport - the nearby Police Headquarters in Ponteland is put out of action.
There is barely a single unbroken window in the country. In Gateshead, a firestorm consumes everything it touches, finding endless fuel in flesh and bone. Even those sheltered beneath the inferno are suffocated as the flames suck the oxygen from even the smallest crevice. (When Gateshead Metro Station is unearthed some years from now, it resembles an Egyptian tomb - with 658 pharoahs lying in state). Within a half a mile of the Heddon blast, there is barely a trace of any buildings left. After this, houses are still so severely damaged as to be uninhabitable - the level of damage will eventually peter out until the first intact window since ground zero - in Morpeth, almost twenty miles away. We are now twenty seconds after the attack.
Very few people in the UK know that, for what it is worth, Polaris and the V-bombers do their job well. Some hit their targets after the Americans, some get there beforehand. Either way, the results are the same. For those Vulcans and Victors that avoid Soviet anti-air and the sheer force of their own weapons, it is a long flight homeward, haunted by the sheer certainty that everything that they know and love is dead. For one Victor pilot, it is too much - his aircraft is ploughed into the North Sea. Some planes manage to land, and others don't - without radio communication, it's merely a case of short straws as pilots pray their preallocated strip is not now a boiling lake.
The Central European front is now silent, save for the crackle of flames and the cries of young men - something of a ceasefire occurs, as there is no-one left to fight.
The final communique from the US to be picked up by the North East Region is the Lord's Prayer, broadcast on several frequencies. It does not reach 'amen'.
The North Eastern Region loses contact with the outside world.
By the time the powers-that-be have climbed up from under their tables, fallout is coming.
The Cadet was running home to his family - fuck this for a game of soldiers, he thought - at least he would have, if he could hear himself think over a million sirens.
Bang.
First to go was his hair - it caught fire. His scalp melted and his teeth burst. His clothes became his skin and his skin became his clothes, and then both slid off his bones.
A screaming skeleton, caught burning in mid-air, the Cadet's last words are unintelligible, for his tongue has burned out. Although all this has occured in a fraction of an instant, relief still registers in the boy's brain as the coup de grace comes - the blastwave bursting his smouldering scarecrow like a locomotive through a snowman. His remains float up to meet the mushroom cloud like a letter up a chimney. No-one will ever speak about, or think about the Cadet from now until the end of time.
This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons...