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8:12 A.M.

All the way from Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, the dull black B-2 stealth bomber cruised at Mach 2 at an altitude of twelve hundred feet over the South Pacific ocean.

“Look at that, Zack! The thing’s already breaking apart,” said the copilot.

As they approached the island they could see one of its walls collapsing into the ocean as they approached.

“Damn! OK, let’s lay this egg,” said the pilot.

Before the aircraft cleared the cliffs of Henders Island, the bomb bay doors opened and a B83 gravity bomb fell forward. A parachute deployed and like a two thousand pound lawn dart, the warhead plunged five thousand feet.

As the aircraft pulled up, the bomb’s hardened nose penetrated forty feet into the rocky core of the island. The reverberating clap of the missile’s impact with the stone heart of Henders Island drew rats, spigers, and swarms, which converged around the neat hole punched into the island’s bull’s eye. A 120-second delay began ticking down inside the bomb so that the pilots could achieve safe distance before its one-megaton nuclear warhead detonated.

“That’s gotta be the most expensive can of Raid in history,” the pilot remarked as they left the island at twenty miles a minute, covering nine miles in about thirty seconds. The boomerang-shaped B-2 banked in a wide circle as they gained altitude.

“Check it out, Zack,” the copilot said.

The two men looked over the expanse of the carbon-graphite composite wing as a brilliant light popped like a giant flashbulb in the bowl of the island.

A 250-foot deep crater a thousand feet wide was instantaneously excavated at the island’s center from the initial blast.

Within four seconds every living thing on the surface of the island was vaporized and the ashes blasted over the rim in a cone of smoke. Sand turned to glass. Rock flowed red-hot as a sun-like inferno filled the bowl.

The bomber pilots watched the eruption of light bloom on the island like a yellow rose.

“Don’t look at it too long,” the pilot warned. “Burns the retinas.”

“We’re past the nine-mile range…” the copilot said. “God, you can feel the heat of that thing from here!”

The intense light faded as a giant funnel of dense smoke rose out of the bowl three miles into the sky.

“We better stay ahead of the shockwave,” the pilot said, and he throttled up to just under the speed of sound.

“Target confirmed killed, Base. Copy?”

“Copy that. Mission accomplished. Come on home, boys.”