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 . . . People died fully conscious, in terrible pain. . . . The government . . . ordered them not to discuss what had happened, and their medical histories were falsified. Doctors wrote that they had "damage to the peripheral nervous system."
MATT BIVENS, ASSOCIATED PRESS, 1993
At an altitude of 412 nautical miles above the capital of Russia, a KH-13 satellite's imaging cameras zero in on the city below. It is night and Moscow lies under a winter storm. But the KH-13's infrared images are bright and clear. They are stored as digits in the satellite's memory.
At 1729 GMT the KH is traversing the high American latitudes over Valdez, Alaska; by 1740 it is overflying Manitoba and Ontario. This KH makes no effort to record the activity in Hudson Bay. Other satellites, both American and Russian, are doing that.
At 1750 GMT, the Moscow images are downloaded to the National Security Agency station at Wallops Island, Virginia. They show no aircraft incoming to Sheremeteyvo, and all roads leading out of Moscow clogged with civilians, either in vehicles of all kinds or on foot and carrying their belongings, in the time-honored, war-weary tradition of twentieth-century Europe. The apparent evacuation sets off warnings at the North American Aerospace Defense Command Center in Cheyenne Mountain, where the banked supercomputers have long been programmed to watch for these exact images. The alert spreads to the Blue Cube Satellite Control Facility at Sunnyvale, California, and into the Gold Room at the Pentagon. Other military satellites are repositioned to overtly Moscow. The National Command Authority is alerted.
As he waited for the helicopter, sent by the President to take Vincent Kellner from the pad near his house at Fort Myers, he looked off to the northwest, then glanced at his watch.

 
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