Operation Tollbooth

After half an hour of hard work under bad light, the men lowered the titanium sheath over the assembled round, making it ready to rain kilotons of irresistible nuclear fire on its target. They dropped from the track bed to the ground, glad to have fresh air and a breeze around them. Brede slapped his partner’s shoulder. “Good work, Pick,” he said. “Go tell the section chief to haul this one over to the gun, then take a break. I’m going to have a smoke and get some coffee before we start working on the next one.” As the sergeant hurried off, Brede stretched and shrugged into his fatigue shirt as he looked around the area. Twilight was bringing cooler air to the hilltop. By midnight some would look for light sweaters against the evening’s relative chill. Stepping to a safe area, he lit a cigarette and silently studied the activity around him, as his unit worked to perform its mission. Four men arrived with a loading pallet, carefully hefting and moving the assembled round to the waiting howitzer. The gun’s loader-rammer still worked perfectly. Soon the breech was closed. The first nuclear weapon used in anger since 1945 was ready to find its target. An initial “no-fly” warning was transmitted unencoded over several frequencies to all aircraft and aviation units in or near Quang Tri Province at eighteen-thirty hours local time, demarcating a fifty-kilometer circular zone centered on Lao Bao prison’s coordinates. The ban on all air traffic within the zone would remain in effect from nineteen-hundred to twenty-four-hundred hours. After twenty additional minutes were allowed to verify the airspace was cleared, permission was transmitted to Taskforce Tollbooth to commence firing. One minute later, the first W33 round thundered from its howitzer’s gun tube. The men on Hill 213 raised a subdued, ragged cheer as the howitzer boomed with overwhelming noise and dustily recoiled. There were no friendly eyes directly on the round’s impact, though an orbiting Corona spy satellite captured the event for later examination—once its film canister was recovered over Canada. An experimental Vela satellite, designed to watch for nuclear explosions, recorded the event as well. Other robotic eyes may also have glimpsed the brilliant flash. An impossibly bright almost-star lived briefly where the round detonated, one hundred fifty feet above Laotian forest. Vehicles, trees, dirt, and people within four-hundred feet of that event instantaneously dissolved, completely disintegrated. Anyone closer than half-a-mile away died from burns and blast concussion. A glowing, writhing gold-to-purple cloud rose from the initial explosion, carrying with it particles of metal, wood, and flesh. Some of these—the heaviest—would soon fall back to earth. The rest would coalesce into the emblematic mushroom shape that would climb more than two miles as it moved northeast, morphing into a glowing, writhing pyro-cumulus cloud as it drifted. Those near the target zone who escaped annihilation may have turned north or south on the trail to escape the horror confronting them. Some may have survived, at least until radiation exposure killed them—but most were caught by the second, third, and subsequent nuclear rounds which impacted the area during the next two hours. By midnight, when the no-fly order was lifted, six large craters cut the trail and its western subsidiary. Each was more than forty feet deep and almost two-hundred feet wide. To airborne reconnaissance cameras that photographed them the next day, they looked like giant steps down the slope of the hill where they’d been aimed, now filling like small lakes due to the region’s high water table. Months—if not years—of work using heavy construction equipment would be needed to make the trail usable again once background radiation had subsided. At the crater perimeters, blasted, fused sand replaced underbrush, and fitful, winking fires added smoke and haze to the opaque air. Trees and foliage in what had been dense surrounding forest were destroyed or wrenched from their roots, leaving barren, glassy soil behind. Further up the trail, the remains of destroyed vehicles still smoldered and burned, consuming the dead who lay around them. Those attempting to enter the area later without protective clothing soon found themselves poisoned. Many died. Operation Tollbooth had succeeded. The date was April 24, 1968, and the Ho Chi Minh Trail was now closed. Soldiers on the hill above the Sepon ten miles distant had been cautioned to look away from the monstrous eruptions they caused that night. Those few who disregarded that warning suffered blindness and corneal burns. Everyone in the task force heard the enormous explosions and felt the ground beneath them heave furiously as each round detonated. They watched the eerie clouds that rose, spread and climbed away to the northeast—each glowing, roiling, and flashing as it moved. The Moon rose as a decaying crescent that night. Hellish clouds scudded above it as they rose, turning the evening sky otherworldly. Even though he’d thought himself more prepared for what he witnessed, Brede was as shocked and shaken by the horrifying aftermath as those around him. He would never wonder again what the effects of the weapons he worked with could be—nor would he want to cause them, he decided. He looked to his left as the last blazing cloud began drifting away, and saw Caul standing nearby. “What happens now, sir?” he asked.