General Volkov twisted the heavy steel key.
There was no dramatic, Old World computerized voice counting down from ten. There were no flashing yellow strobe lights. The Scorch Protocol was a localized, absolute-last-resort dead-man's switch, hardwired directly into the detonation manifold of the fifty-megaton fusion warhead buried exactly one mile beneath their boots.
The microsecond the heavy steel tumblers clicked into place, the firing sequence was complete.
Deep within the planetary bedrock, the massive, hyper-dense fusion core violently collapsed in upon itself, achieving localized critical mass.
The physical manifestation of a fifty-megaton subterranean detonation does not begin with sound. It begins with a catastrophic, planetary-scale seismic displacement. The entire twenty-mile vertical silo violently shuddered. The pristine concrete floor of the command bunker instantly fractured into millions of jagged fault lines.
Then came the light.
