Rutra began to suspect that the calmness of the politicians and military was due to a leak from Echelon 2, but he was assured that "everything was real," although it was clear that if Echelon 2 was not "making waves," Echelon 1 and the other levels were not worried, doing everything according to instructions. To make his intentions more convincing, the President ordered the submarine cruisers to surface. After the surfacing off the U.S. coast, which came as a shock to the public, as the public was reassured by the daily propaganda that this could not happen, "the Russians want to take a fright" – opinions changed radically. A brigade of anonymous hackers showed the world a supposedly intercepted secret report from the Institute of Physics of the Earth to the Russian president on the likely consequences of detonating the entire nuclear warheads of these submarine cruisers. This had the effect of an exploding bomb followed by a domino effect. Demonstrations, rallies and protests outside the Russian embassy, which had been going on since the beginning of the Russian president's threatening attacks on Western countries, stopped. People ran: some to buy everything, others to sell what they had.
The first to collapse was the stock market, its work was halted, followed by the rest of the trading floors, and a chain reaction went on all over the world. The next morning no stock exchange opened, and by lunchtime banks were closing. Discontent turned into riots and pogroms.
On his way to work, Rutra was particularly emotional about one scene. A crowd was rushing into a hypermarket, at the entrance of which a stately citizen, arms outstretched to the sides, was shouting: "I bought this center, I bought everything here, nothing is for sale." The crowd was pushing against the guards, who stood in front of him in two rows, heavily armed. He shouted to the guards, "Shoot, they will kill us all." The guards did not dare to shoot at people, they only fired warning shots in the air.
Another group drew attention to itself in this pandemonium. A man in civilian clothes, who was leading the group, shouted through the crowd: "This center is occupied by me, get out of here"; he ordered his "own" to "shoot in case of disobedience." A scuffle started between these groups of fighters, which caused the main crowd to disperse, and afterwards – they pounced, crushed, trampled on "their own" and "strangers", and started robbing the shopping center.
Two of Rutra's guards, this time FSO men who guarded him as head of the Special Affairs Division of the Presidential Administration, looked questioningly, waiting for a command. Rutra ordered to move forward, which was becoming increasingly difficult to do, even with the special signal, because of the traffic jams, "reckless" drivers, and special vehicles with flashers and sirens going in different directions.
Rutra got to the center by sidewalks, courtyards, and oncoming traffic. The soldiers remained guarding the entrance to the first building of the Institute of Statistics; they were not supposed to know the rest of the story. Rutra went down to the center and was told that he had to perform an urgent task, namely, to consider the possible consequences of actually detonating the entire ammunition of both submarines at maximum depth. Rutra was alarmed by this. First, because of the urgency, second, because the matter had not been considered before, but most of all because it had to be considered at all.
