Authors: David DeBatto
First, he had to go to Colorado to see a man about a mountain.
DELUCA RECEIVED A CALL AT HIS HOTEL IN Colorado Springs at 0600 hours, telling him his 0900 hour appointment with General
Thomas Koenig was being put on hold and to stand by. He waited at the hotel until noon, read the paper, went for a run (carrying
his SATphone in his hand), a swim in the pool, had lunch in a restaurant his guide book said was the best in town (using his
government credit card), bought a ski parka for Bonnie on sale (using his own), got a call at 1450 hours saying the general
would meet him at 1600 hours, and was halfway to Peterson Air Force Base in the government-issue unmarked Ford Taurus he’d
drawn from the 901st MI motor pool out of Fort Carson when his phone rang again to tell him the meeting had been rescheduled
for the following morning, with the location moved to the operations center at Cheyenne Mountain.
He spent part of the night nursing a beer in the hotel bar, listening to a musician sporting a two-inch ponytail strumming
an Ovation guitar with too much chorus on his amplifier singing James Taylor and Cat Stevens covers with his eyes closed,
until DeLuca couldn’t take it any more (and he’d been trained to withstand torture) and went to his room, where he reread
Sergeant Cheryl Escavedo’s 201 file.
It was a good record, superlative, really, describing able and honorable service. She’d been named Army Space and Missile
Defense Command’s senior NCO for 2002 in her capacity as SIIM (Supervisor, Information Integration and Management), USSTRATCOM,
Systems Center, after being transferred to Peterson AFB and NORAD from the Arizona Guard. She’d been honor graduate of her
PLDC class, top PT score of her BNCOC class, and she’d taken an advanced degree in information technology management from
Colorado Technical University in Colorado Springs. She’d won the Joint Meritorious Service Medal, the Army Commendations Medal,
the Army Achievement Medal, drilled with the joint honor guard, had been active with the Association of the United States
Army as its legislative affairs representative, served on the Pike’s Peak Chapter of the International Association of Administrative
Professionals, and worked at the Colorado Springs Women’s Center in her spare time, though DeLuca couldn’t imagine her having
too much spare time. She had eleven performance awards, seven time-off awards, three attached letters of commendation, and
even a note included from the children at Kit Carson Elementary thanking her for coming to their class and talking about what
they did at NORAD, closing with, “Thank you for keeping our country safe.” She’d graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University
of Tucson, where she’d been president of the Kappa Kappa Kappa sorority, a social organization that, if DeLuca remembered
his undergraduate days at the U of A correctly, only accepted total babes who wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire unless
you were rich and owned a hot car. Judging from her photograph, DeLuca gathered the Tri-Kaps hadn’t accepted Cheryl Escavedo,
a Native American, solely as a token gesture of affirmative action. She was quite attractive, with silky black hair and big
doe eyes, full lips, and a chest that could have held a lot more medals. If she wasn’t dating anybody, DeLuca surmised, it
probably wouldn’t have been due to a lack of attention.
He rose before dawn, went for a run, grabbed a continental breakfast at the buffet, and was presenting his credentials at
the gatehouse to the razor-wire-girded Protect Level 1 parking lot by 0700 hours. It was his hope that word would spread throughout
the command that someone from CI was asking questions about the missing woman. It wasn’t all that different from driving into
an Iraqi marketplace in a convoy of up-armored Humvees and Bradleys—the noise made the bad guys scatter, but it also brought
the good guys out of hiding, the informants who had the information he needed.
It had been snowing when he left the hotel, the six-mile drive up a winding mountain road something of an adventure, particularly
when plows coming down the mountain seemed to thunder by at ninety miles an hour with their blades missing his car by only
a few inches. But the pine trees looked lovely in the snow. Twice he passed small groups of deer, one group feeding in a field,
another scampering across the road in front of his car.
There was a large office building below the entrance to the underground complex labeled Building 101—Technical Support Facility.
The parking lot was only half full. At the turn into it, a billboard read: “Welcome to Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station,
our motto:
‘Deter, Detect, Defend.’
Home of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), United States
Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), and Air Force Space Command (AFSPC). A Bi-National Facility,” the last a reference to the
fact that about a quarter of the personnel were Canadian, since an attack on the United States by Russian ICBMs (the original
reason for NORAD) would most likely have to come through Canadian airspace. He was finally met outside Building 100, the security
building, by an African American woman who introduced herself as Sergeant First Class Gail Davies. He took his B’s and C’s
from his coat pocket and handed them to her.
“Welcome to Colorado,” she said with a salute. “Is it… Mr.… ?”
“David,” he said. “Special Agent DeLuca, if you need a title. You didn’t have to wait outside for me.”
“I’ve been in The Mountain for the last twenty-four hours,” she said. “You get to where you’ll take any chance you get for
a little fresh air.”
He was wearing a herringbone sport jacket over black pants and a white shirt, his tie pulled tight to his throat but with
his top button unfastened beneath it. He’d worn a uniform in Iraq, but here he was strictly plainclothes.
“Do you ski, Agent DeLuca?” she asked, glancing at his credentials before handing them back.
“Like a six-year-old,” he said. “I’ve gone off on weekends with my wife, but nothing like what you have in Colorado. You?”
“I snowboard. My son’s a knuckle dragger. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Have you ever been in ‘The Hole’ before?” she asked,
guiding him into the security building.
“I lived off my credit cards for about a year after college, if that’s what you mean,” DeLuca said. In Security, he was led
through a metal detector, though unlike at the airport, he wasn’t required to remove his shoes. A sign on the wall informed
him that neither smoking nor weapons were allowed inside the complex, and that he should turn his cell phone off.
“They don’t work inside the complex anyway,” Davies said, leading him through a turnstile and into the mouth of a tunnel,
where a bus, something like an airport shuttle, waited for them.
“The entry tunnel is a little over a mile long between north and south portals and banana-shaped. The blast doors are at the
midpoint on the inside curve. It’s designed so that the compression force from any detonation outside the facility will pass
through the mountain and out the other side.” The bus began to move. They were accompanied by a pair of young Canadian officers,
one reading the paper, the other with his headphones on. “You’re not claustrophobic, are you?”
“Nope,” he said, though he’d had enough miserable experiences in underground bunkers in Iraq to last him a while.
“You’re in luck then,” she said, “because today’s a full combat-readiness lockdown.”
“How often do you run lockdowns?” he asked. “They’re scheduled in advance?”
“It depends,” she said. “Wing-level exercises are more common than global. We locked down for real after 9/11 and people stayed
inside for days before we were sure what we were looking at. The doors themselves are tested regularly. They’re calling today’s
exercise Moses 2, as in ‘lost in the wilderness’—what do we do if we lose our global positioning system? It involves the 527th,
so it’s a bit more complicated.”
“The 527th?” he asked.
“Aggressor Squadron,” she said. “Like the guys who learned to fly Russian MIGs for all the Top Guns to practice against during
the Cold War, only now we do it with satellites. And computers.”
They paused at the blast doors and watched as they sealed shut behind them, a man and a woman scurrying past the guard to
get out before it was too late.
“You’re standing behind twenty-five tons of steel, or actually fifty because each blast door is twenty-five tons and curved
to withstand a multimegaton weapon detonating as close as half a mile away, nautical.”
“Do people get searched on their way out?” DeLuca asked. “Or in, for that matter.”
“Permanent party members, no,” Sergeant Davies said. “Visitors, yes.” She led him into the complex, explaining as she went.
“The central excavation consists of three main chambers, forty-five feet wide, sixty feet high, and two football fields long,
intersected by four connecting chambers thirty-two feet wide, fifty-six feet high, and slightly more than one football field
long, giving us a four-and-a-half-acre grid. You have two thousand feet of solid granite over your head. All the buildings
and connecting tunnels inside are constructed from continuous-weld low-carbon steel plates to attenuate any electromagnetic
pulses, and each building has its own blast doors to resist overpressure and to serve as fire doors, with blast valves in
reinforced concrete bulkheads to protect the air, water, and sewer lines. The buildings and tunnels are mounted on more than
thirteen hundred half-ton steel springs, which make the buildings both blast-resistant and earthquake-proof, able to move
twelve inches in any direction. We have a medical facility, a gym with treadmills and elliptical machines and weight machines
and free weights, and a full kitchen and dining facility, right here, serving four meals a day including midnight snacks…”
She opened the door and showed him the cafeteria, which included a salad bar, an entree line, and a separate line for fast-food
items. He noted, on the walls, large painted murals of rocky mountain landscapes, as if to create the illusion of a window
view.
“We don’t have living quarters, per se,” she said, “except for the firefighters who work on twenty-four-hour shifts, but in
an emergency, we have cots for everyone, and if we were to run out of food, we have plenty of MREs in storage. The chefs in
the kitchen also have over two hundred recipes for the preparation of human flesh, should we have to resort to cannibalism.
That’s a joke.”
“Good one,” DeLuca said.
“We have seven ops centers. Air Warning, Missile Warning, Space Control, Operational Intelligence, Combat Command, Systems
and Weather, all running 24/7/365. Missile and Air Warning are probably the ones you already know about, responsible for the
ADIZ, or air defense intercept zone. It’s still fixed antennae and phased array radars, but that’s being supplemented with
space-based infrared now. Space control’s satellite surveillance network tracks everything in orbit around the earth down
to the size of a baseball, over twenty-six thousand objects since this place was built in 1957, with about eighty-five hundred
currently in orbit, and about 20 percent of those are functional payloads or satellites, and the rest of it is space junk,
rocket parts and that sort of thing. We track both for threat assessment and collision avoidance—we’ve rerouted the Space
Shuttle twelve times to keep it from running into something up there, though the main debris field orbits about five hundred
kilometers farther out than the shuttle, which orbits at about three hundred kilometers. We also try to calculate the footprint
that satellites are going to leave when they reenter earth’s atmosphere, with lighter impacts at the heel and the heavier
stuff falling at the toe, but since the earth’s surface is 70 percent water and only 25 percent of the land mass is inhabited,
so far we haven’t had to issue any alerts.”
She ran the security card that hung from her neck on a chain through a scanner that opened a set of doors.
“I’ll take you to General Koenig’s office at STRATCOM, though I think he’s in a meeting with NORTHCOM right now. He should
be finished soon.”
“That’s the command set up after 9/11, right?” DeLuca said, though he already knew the answer to his question. Tasked to monitor
internal airspace after the Twin Towers.
“That’s correct,” she said. “We have about five thousand private aircraft flying at any one time and NORTHCOM watches those.
You sound like you’re from the East Coast. Did you know anybody in the World Trade Center?”
“My sister Elaine worked there,” DeLuca said. “She didn’t get out.”
“I’m sorry,” Sergeant Davies said. “I’ll take you to the general’s office.”
Despite claiming immunity to claustrophobia, he couldn’t help pondering the notion that there was two thousand feet of rock
over his head, and how much it would hurt if it fell on him. The waiting room outside the general’s office was relatively
calm, while people scurried back and forth in the hallway beyond the open door, the alarm siren a pleasant pinging sound,
still ringing.
The general’s secretary, a brawny lieutenant named Carr, entered, examined DeLuca’s badge and credentials, and told him the
general would be a few more minutes. When General Koenig finally arrived, he held up a finger to tell DeLuca he needed another
minute, then consulted with his secretary behind a closed office door a moment longer. When he finally opened the door, he
nodded to DeLuca without saying a word.
The office was small, for a general, but given the circumstances, that made sense. The wall opposite the desk featured a large
flat-screen monitor, showing a photograph of a windblown beach that DeLuca took to be the general’s screen saver. The wall
behind the desk held framed certificates, diplomas, awards, and photographs, one of a younger Koenig shaking hands with Ronald
Reagan, one of him with President Bush (George H.), and another with President George W. DeLuca wondered if there was one
with Clinton, tucked away somewhere. Koenig was a tall man, six-foot-four and lean, in his late fifties but fit enough to
pass for forty, with close-cropped black hair, a square jaw, and eyes that looked a bit too tight, as if he’d had work done
on them. On the wall opposite the door was a large color photograph of a sailboat. It was the only thing in the room resembling
decoration.