A standalone story from the world of DAY ZERO. You can listen to it on its own.

In the Caribbean Sea, the U. S. Coast Guard intercepts a ship that should not exist.

Aurora South was officially lost five years earlier after the strike on WHITE NODE, a secret Antarctic station. Now the vessel appears near Puerto Rico with its AIS off, its radio silent, and its autopilot steering it toward San Juan. On the bridge, no one is alive to explain who sent it there.

The boarding team finds bodies, radiation, a damaged transmitter, and a cargo hold where the main load has already been removed. One damaged container remains, along with documents from WHITE NODE’s lower storage — documents that point to southern Argentina.

To Patagonia.

That same morning, Jerusalem is celebrating Rosh Hashanah. Foreign delegations, journalists, Israeli officials, Pact representatives, and U. S. President Richard Burroughs are gathered in the square.

Then a dirty bomb explodes near the stage.

It is not a nuclear blast. But radiation at the center of an international ceremony, live cameras, wounded civilians, and the U. S. president only yards from the explosion are enough to push the world toward panic.

Within minutes, a manifesto appears online, giving the world a convenient enemy. But the technical traces from Jerusalem begin to match what the Americans found aboard Aurora South.

Washington sends a team into Patagonia, where the dead ship and the dirty bomb lead to a hidden program capable of turning the postwar order into a new nuclear crisis.

Now the United States has hours — then minutes — to decide whether to strike inside allied territory, wait for a government that may be lying, or allow a hidden nuclear program to become real.

NUCLEAR WAR: WHITE FIRE is a military-political technothriller about a ship returning from the dead, a secret Antarctic station, a dirty bomb in Jerusalem, and a world that survived Day Zero only to find itself once again minutes from catastrophe.