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glanced out of the left-hand window at the jury-rigged floats and hoped they would bear the weight of the heavily loaded machine. A swim in the contaminated water would almost certainly be fatal to anyone in ordinary-issue antiradiation gear. |
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Ave was very uneasy, wondering if he had run out of luck on this one. He hated operations controlled by politicians, and it was clear that this one was tainted by politics from start to finish. It had the stink of Desert One. At least he wasn't listening to the President's voice in his ear, telling him when to go up and when to go down. If Morgan failed to deactivate the warhead, it was over. This part of Hudson Bay and an unknown number of miles of shoreline would simply boil away into the stratosphere, together with everyone on the scene. |
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The realization shook him to the core. He had always known that thermonuclear weapons were open-ended systems. It was possible to enhance a hydrogen warhead, raising the yield exponentially. Nikita Khrushchev, operating on the Russian peasant's dictum that more was always better than enough, had ordered some fifty- and a hundred-megaton devices built and tested at Semipalatinsk. The ensuing detonations had frightened scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain so much that no warheads of over two megatons had been built since. Most weapons in the Russian and American arsenals were two to five kilotons in yield. The really big bombs had remained hidden and unacknowledged. Until now, Ave thought bitterly. These fucking fanatics had deployed a great fucking monster on the fucking seabottom, not more than a thousand fucking yards, give or take a few, from where he and a helo of fucking heroes were at this very fucking moment. |
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He brought the MH-56 into the wind and landed it delicately on the water inside the circle of red-flagged buoys. He was aware that it might well be the last helicopter landing he ever executed, and by goddamn, he wanted it to be perfect. It was. |
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