The Book of Truths (5 page)

Above Doc and Mac was Kirk, the team’s communication expert. He was also the latest addition to the team, joining them just in time for the “Fun in North Carolina” that had gone down six weeks ago. He was a lean, taut-muscled man whose main
claim to fame prior to joining the team was that he’d successfully changed his scorecards in Ranger School in order to pass. His right earpiece crackled with an incoming message. He quickly let go of his toggles for a moment and tapped in the code on his wrist transmitter to open the secure link to Moms.

“The silo you want is number seven,” a voice with a Russian accent informed Moms over the radio. Ms. Jones was the voice from which all information flowed to the team. And all orders.

“The first responders only formed a far outer perimeter, unaware of what the incident is,” Ms. Jones continued. “My data says there are only two people in the vicinity. They are not of consequence. However, we cannot rule out that there is terrorist activity.”

“Roland will be down in a few seconds,” Moms replied. She took a quick glance up, counting chutes.

And above the team, keeping a careful eye on all of them like a good shepherd, was Nada, the team sergeant.

Two hundred feet above the target, Roland grabbed air with his chute, slowing his descent. He touched down on top of the LCC with a slight puff of dirt. He unbuckled from his parachute harness and readied the M249, even though this most likely was not a shooting op. One could always hope though, and Roland fantasized a wave of terrorists rushing out of the LCC.

He was rarely that lucky.

He ran down the side of the bunker and around to the front door. He glanced into the beat-up pickup as he went by, but there
was nothing of interest. Roland tried the handle on the heavy steel door, but it wouldn’t budge.

He lifted the M249 and pounded on the door with the stock.

Eight stories down, Clarence and Peggy Sue snapped about and stared upward as the thuds on the door echoed down to them.

“This is
my
damn home,” Clarence said, heading for the weapons rack.

They had no running water but they did have a dozen assorted weapons. Clarence snatched an AR-15 off the rack and slammed home a magazine, pulling back the charging handle and letting it slide forward.

“Fill your hands, woman!” he barked at Peggy Sue.

She grabbed a pump-action shotgun and resignedly ratcheted a round into the chamber.

“Nine minutes,” Eagle informed them from his overwatch position, hovering five hundred feet above the LCC.

“The door’s locked,” Roland said. “Want me to shoot it off?”

“Negative,” Moms said. “Mac will blow it. We’ll be there in twenty seconds. Any sign of foul play?”

“Negative.” Roland lowered the machine gun with a sigh, which echoed inside his hazmat hood, and scanned the immediate area, hoping something would pop up that he could shoot.

The team touched down right in front of the bunker, all landing lightly.

Except for Doc, who made a sack of potatoes look graceful as he crumpled onto the ground. As he scrambled to his feet and out of his harness, he checked to make sure he still had suit integrity.

“Mac, get the door,” Moms ordered. “Everyone else, back up. Eagle, give us a rundown on how to get to silo seven once we’re inside.” With time running out, she made a command decision. “Suits off, people. We’re not going to need them based on the readings.”

Mac ran up to the old metal doors and opened up his rucksack, taking out a charge and placing it over the lock as the rest of the team stripped off the bulky hazmats.

“Back in the day,” Nada said, “I was on one of the last backpack nuke teams.”

“You mean when Eisenhower was president?” Eagle asked as he circled the Snake overhead. The chain gun mounted in a compartment in the nose of the aircraft was extended.

“SADM,” Nada continued as Mac jogged back toward the rest of the team, as best as one can jog in a hazmat suit, a remote detonator in his hand. “Strategic atomic demolition munitions,” Nada said. “I jumped with a live one on a training mission. That wasn’t fun. Heavy as shit.”

“Fire in the hole,” Mac warned, and then hit the toggle.

A brief flare of light and crack of explosion meant the doorway to the bunker was now unlocked. Eagle was relaying directions to them on how to proceed once they went inside.

Moms moved to the front of the team. “I’m taking point with Nada.”

Mac ripped off his hazmat suit.

Moms walked forward. “I’ll lose satcom in there,” she said. “Kirk, make sure you keep an open relay between me, Ms. Jones, and Eagle from here in the doorway. And use your own pad to work on that code. There’s got to be a reason it’s piggybacked on the countdown.”

“Roger that,” Kirk said.

Roland grabbed the edge of the heavy door and pulled. “Nobody’s oiled this sucker in a while,” he said as he grunted with effort. With a screech of protesting hinges, the door opened wide enough to invite them into its darkness.

There was an elevator directly in front crisscrossed with yellow warning tape, indicating it was nonfunctional. A set of stairs beckoned to the left. A dim glow seeped up from the depths of the LCC.

“Seven minutes,” Eagle said over the net.

Moms and Nada took point, a smoothly coordinated team, starting at the top of the stairs and clearing their way down. The countdown made them move faster than Protocol.

Thus they almost ran on top of Clarence and Peggy Sue on the landing just above the LCC Control Room.

“Who the fuck are you!” Clarence screamed, gesturing with the barrel of the AR-15 at Moms, his eyes wide with fear at the armed figures looming above him on the stairs.

Protocol was Moms should double-tap him right between the eyes while Nada took out Peggy Sue.

She broke Protocol by lowering her submachine gun, raising her hands in surrender, while still taking the last two steps and moving forward toward Clarence.

“Hey! I said—”

Before he got the next word out, Moms snatched the automatic weapon from Clarence’s hands, spun it around, and
knocked him out with the stock. As Clarence crumpled to the steel grating, Moms turned to Peggy Sue. “Are you going to be a problem?”

Peggy Sue dropped the shotgun and the Nightstalkers shoved past her and took the last flight of stairs into the LCC.

“Six minutes,” Kirk relayed from above.

Moms paused in the LCC, getting oriented to the verbal directions Eagle had given her. She pointed. “That hatch. Mac, you take point. Roland, behind him for muscle. Nada, you make sure the two idiots don’t do anything and relay commo into the tunnel from Kirk. I’ll be behind Roland. Doc, keep working on that second code.”

They ran to the hatch and Roland grabbed the metal and tried to turn the handle. It resisted. Mac pulled a charge out of his pack, but didn’t have to use it as the wheel suddenly turned with a screech. Roland’s massive biceps bulged as he spun the protesting wheel, unlatching the hatch. It was slow going and Moms considered having Mac blast it, but decided against it; something was already wrong here and setting off a charge in the LCC wasn’t going to help. Mac put a headlamp on, as did the rest of them.

“Five minutes,” Kirk announced over the net.

The hatch began to open and Mac slithered into the three-foot diameter access tunnel for silo seven. Moms followed, then Roland.

Doc was seated at one of the consoles, typing away on his computer. Nada took up position at the open hatch. Peggy Sue timidly came down the stairs. “Who are you folk?”

“Shut up or I’ll shoot you,” Nada said.

Peggy Sue was used to that kind of talk, so she shut up.

In the tunnel, Mac moved as fast as one can move in a three-foot tunnel that doesn’t quite require you to crawl, but doesn’t allow you to run. He shuffled forward, his pack in front of him. His headlamp penetrated about thirty feet, but all he saw was more tunnel.

“How far?” he asked Moms.

“Eagle said three hundred and fifty feet.”

Nada’s voice crackled in their earpieces. “Four minutes.” A slight pause. “I got a stupid question,” he continued, “but is the countdown for a launch or for the warhead to detonate? And can that thing even initiate launch not having been serviced for so long? Eagle?”

“Wait one,” Eagle replied.

Mac spotted another hatch ahead.

Mac tried the handle, but it wouldn’t budge. Everyone flattened against the floor of the tunnel as Roland slithered over them, a torrent of muscle. He grabbed the wheel and grunted with exertion, but still nothing.

Behind him, Moms knew they were in a bind. There was no time to back out and have Mac blow the door. Nada’s voice delivered bad news as he relayed Ms. Jones’s information via Kirk: “The countdown is an Orange; a self-destruct for the warhead. In case the complex was ever compromised. The Area 51 nuke Acme tells her there’s a forty-two percent chance the bomb is still viable, plus or minus fourteen points. A ninety-one percent chance the conventional explosives will go off.”

“That’s not very precise,” Doc muttered.

“Frak me,” Moms muttered as she was forced into another razor’s-edge decision: Leaving the hatch shut would protect them from the conventional explosives going off and the resulting
dispersal of radioactive material. But not the nuke going off. The rational odds said leave the door shut. “Roland?”

The weapons man contorted himself sideways in the tunnel, trying to get a better grip. Frustrated, he jammed his M249 into a spoke of the wheel, got leverage, and applied his entire weight.

The barrel bent as the wheel gave a shriek and moved a quarter of an inch.

“Faster please,” Moms said. “Doc? Anything on the second code?”

“It’s very old,” Doc said. “Not yet.”

“Kirk?” Moms asked.

“Negative.”

“Ms. Jones?” Moms asked, the message relayed via Nada to Kirk to the Ranch.

“The Acmes are on it,” Ms. Jones said, referring to the group of scientists across a wide spectrum of specialties the Nightstalkers had on call. The Acme moniker came from the company Wile E. Coyote bought all his gear from in the
Looney Tunes
cartoon. Given the gear rarely worked, like the Acmes’ advice, it was appropriate.

“Three minutes,” Nada announced.

In the access tunnel, the wheel creaked another quarter inch. Moms reached around Roland, barely able to get the tips of two fingers on the wheel, but it was better than nothing. They applied pressure and gained a half inch. Squeezed as tight as lovers, all Moms and Roland cared about was opening a door that was an invitation to an explosion.

“If there was an alert at the SAC museum,” Kirk said from the upper doorway, “then there has to be a live circuit between the two. Some sort of signal. How did this get triggered?”

In the control room, Nada turned toward Peggy Sue. “What did you guys do to set this off?”

“I didn’t do nothing,” Peggy Sue said. She rushed to continue the explanation because she’d learned growing up that words spoken quickly could sometimes stop the fists. “Clarence, he was bringing water down. Me, I was doing the wash. Hanging the laundry.” She pointed at the rubber tube, festooned with dripping clothes. “Swear, mister, didn’t do nothing. Was just—”