Back in the hold, John finished his explanation of their strategy to Jack, “Once we have closed this access hatch, we will be essentially sealed off from the rest of the ship. With the captain ashore and Chief Engineer Bill Shadley … ‘detained’ in your quarters, no one can open these ports without one of the sealed emergency codes which are reserved for active combat. In fact, even if there is an emergency tonight, the first lieutenant and acting captain will find that even the emergency codes will have mysteriously ceased to work.”
Jack shook his head a little and thanked the gods, not for the first time, that this man was on his side. Then he shrugged and smiled resignedly. John returned the major’s smile with one of his own and nodded toward the crates, saying, “Now, I’ve lined up the first eight of these along the edge of the open hatchway. Now I am going to jump down to the bottom of the main hold and you are going to stay here and push them, one by one, over the edge. I’ll catch them below and stack them up, then come back up here and line up the next eight. Sound good?”
Jack’s eyes widened once more, “Wait a …” he managed to get out, but before the rest of his objection registered, John had grabbed one of the crates, hefted it over his head and stepped off the edge. Jack stepped quickly to the side of the hole and looked downward in time to see the top of the crate stop with a thud at the bottom of the dimly lit space below him, then shift to one side revealing an unharmed John Hunt as he placed the heavy box in a corner.
John looked up expectantly and Jack stared at him. He couldn’t believe he was about to do this. But after a moment of looking down at the sweet-looking face of the Agent, he shrugged and set to. Stepping back he jammed his shoulder up against the first crate and heaved. It slid slowly forward, and then, with a sudden flood of speed it was gone, falling down into the darkness. Again Jack watched in amazement and again the crate seemed to hit solid ground, but this time without any perceptible noise. It just stopped, hung there for a moment, and then was hefted aside easily by the comically innocent-looking lieutenant.
Jack shook his head, reconciled himself that he was a long, long way from Kansas, and started heaving the big boxes over, one by one, into the waiting arms of his superhuman friend below.
* * *
They did not pause once they had the materials at the bottom of the hold. After John had resealed the hold from prying eyes, they cracked open the crates and began stacking the big super-conducting armor plates ready to carry them to the six main missile silos. From the bottom of the hold, a long, spinal corridor could be accessed through thick, steel doors that ran almost the length of the ship. It was through this strictly controlled access way that the ship’s vast arsenal passed outward from the loading bays, moved on pulleys that hung from railings running along the roof of the dark hallway.
“Can I suggest,” said John, being careful not appear patronizing, “that you let me carry all the plates to the various silos while you start removing the bolts on the nose cones of the forward SLAMs. I’ll hack each of the access hatches and disable the cameras and then we should be able to move about pretty much un-noticed down here.”
Ship Launched Anti-ballistic Missiles, or SLAMs, had to be one of the greatest military acronyms ever coined. But Jack was not thinking of such things as he looked at the Agent. Jack had been a college football player before he had become a pilot, and he had never experienced the sense of being utterly outclassed by someone, physically. It was not a pleasant sensation, but nor was it a particularly useful one either, he thought as he set such considerations aside. Jack knew that his strength was like a child’s when compared to the Agent in front of him and he was not too proud to admit that his time was better spent wielding a power driver than trying to maneuver the huge boxes around the ship.
Jack nodded his agreement to the plan, unable to come up with much more enthusiasm than that, and with that John picked up one of the six huge stacks he had piled up and turned the corridor that led aft. They walked off, stepping through several bulkheads where the corridor could be sealed in case of a breach. Three times John had to put the stack down to type in a complex code into another armored door, red lights spinning ominously above his head as he hacked the system and temporarily disabled the ship’s advanced security. Once they were completely done, he would check one last time that their movements had been completely removed from the records and then he would send his programs to hibernation once more, leaving no evidence that either Jack or John had ever been in the weapons hold.
Following behind the Agent, Jack Toranssen studied the ship that formed such a key part in their plans. He knew that the ship was recently launched, and he knew it was the very latest in naval technology. But he was only academically impressed. Deep down he knew why he had joined the air force: he felt constricted and claustrophobic in this confined space and longed for the wide open feeling of flight. They came to an abrupt halt after another stretch of steel corridor, and John placed the large, heavy stack on the floor once more. Typing for the last time, he opened the final bulkhead and urged Jack through into the missile room that marked the end of the corridor. They had passed others to each side along the way back through the ship but they would start back here and work forward.
Stepping into the massive space, Jack was stunned once more. The two men now stood at the bottom of another space like the one they had lowered the crates into, but this one was a military man’s dream. Lining the walls on complex railings and movable brackets were a host of missiles of various lengths. Jack recognized a couple of Tomahawks and other cruise missiles, but those were just gravy; the meat of the room was an array of deadly ship-to-air missiles and finally the massive SLAMs.
These leviathans had chemical boosters and were capable of sustained supersonic flight and atmospheric egress. They were tipped with various warheads with technical names that went some small way to describing the havoc they were designed for: Tactical Electro-Magnetic Interruption Device and Explosive Deployed Cluster Kinetic Collision Warhead. But these were just names. In practice they were badasses. And each automated silo was designed to allow the rapid deployment of up to six of them a minute. At any time any one of them could be selected by the firing control computers and automatically lifted and braced into the bulky launch tubes at the top of the chamber, ready to be fired within a tenth of a second of the tube being sealed.
To be in this space during a missile deployment would be suicide, as the motors necessary to move this arsenal’s massive weight would mutilate anything as flexible as an arm or leg without compunction. But when the room was not action ready, a central shaft about a meter in diameter was kept free of missiles. Down this shaft the main clamp tube ran, a thick, well-greased steel tube like a giant firemen’s pole which the missiles were latched to for lifting to the tube launchers above. Jack stared at the vast array of firepower and considered how much more this one silo held than even his huge B-2 bomber’s large bays. Suddenly he had an appreciation for the role this powerful destroyer would be able to play in the coming attack, and a more profound appreciation for the navy as a whole.
While Jack stared agog John headed over to a small compartment set just inside the bulkhead and grabbed one of several large wireless bolt drivers from the charging brackets inside. “There,” said the Agent to the major, handing it to Jack, “now, let’s go on up to where the SLAM missiles are stored up top and I’ll show you how to start unbolting the nose cones.”
John and Jack climbed onto a small removable lift platform at the bottom of the shaft and John pressed a foot pedal that sent them up through the core of the missiles. Jack felt small next to these billion-dollar death bringers, like an ant climbing amongst bullets in a Titan’s handgun. At the second of three levels of missiles, John stopped the lift and Jack noted that he could easily step to either side and plummet thirty feet to a painful death below, but he stayed calm as he watched John Hunt step expertly onto a set of rungs mounted on the side of the brackets holding one of the SLAMs. Jack noticed that all of the brackets were designed so that a lone man or woman could stand on their sides and it would place them exactly level with the nose cone of that missile. Smart.
John took the bolt driver and placed the bit against one of the bolts.
“Now,” said John Hunt, holding the bolt driver steady, “you must start with this bolt here with the small yellow arrow next to it. You will notice there are also red and blue arrows next to some of the other bolts. It is a small security measure, but unscrew the wrong bolt first and you will set off a small explosive device inside that will disable the missile and almost certainly kill you at the same time. Just our little way of stopping people tampering with the equipment.
“There are other failsafes inside the warhead, but we aren’t going to even touch the actual warheads themselves so don’t worry about those. Yellow, remember, the yellow arrow.” Jack nodded to the Agent and John nodded back, then he expertly removed the first bolt and handed it to Jack.
“I’m assuming the driver is magnetic.” said Jack, putting the bolt into his pocket.
John glanced down at the floor far below and nodded, “Yes, it is, you wouldn’t want to drop anything in here.”
With that John handed the driver back to Jack and stepped back onto the lift platform. Jack in turn took his place on the missile frame and went to the next bolt. After he lined it up, a little nervous about the explosive, he turned to John, who nodded.
“You are good to go. Don’t bother trying taking off the cones once they are unbolted, they weigh fifty pounds each and they are fitted very tight. Just remove all the bolts on the missiles on this level and then come down. Once you’re done I’ll take the shield components up, take off the cones, and fit the superconducting shields between them and the warhead’s ceramic heat shielding underneath.”
Jack nodded, focusing on his task, and John went on, “In the meantime, I’ll finish getting the boxes stacked in each missile silo. This is one of six. When you’re done here you can get started on the next. Sound good?” They nodded at each other once more.
“You’ll need this to get down,” said the Agent finally, indicating the lift mechanism he was standing on, “so I’ll leave it here for you. Just shout if you need me, or walk back down the main corridor and you’ll find me soon enough.” He nodded once more, Jack smiled back at him, and with that John stepped off the side of the lift platform and slipped between the platform’s side and the missiles. He plummeted the thirty feet to the floor and Jack stared after him, his heart skipping a couple of beats until he saw the man land with a loud clang on the floor below. Jesus Christ that was weird to see. John glanced back up momentarily, waved and then walked off to grab another half-ton crate, leaving Jack to his work.
* * *
Jack managed to keep up with the Agent for an hour or two. It took a while for John to carry all the shielding to each of the six missile silos, but there were eight SLAMs in each of the tall loading rooms, and it was already 11pm when they started. He continued to work even as John started to catch up to him, finishing whole silos in just the time it took Jack to remove the bolts. By one in the morning, Jack was exhausted, a profound, bone-deep fatigue that he could no longer ignore. He had worked his way through three of the missile rooms, clambering over twenty-four of the huge missiles to remove the tight-fitting bolts, eight bolts a piece.
For each missile, Jack only had to take off the bolts, while John had to carry up the thin, black shielding components, remove the fifty-pound nose cone, place the sheets in precisely the right positions, weld them there using his onboard lasers, and then replace the cone. The pressure required to squeeze the cone back into place alone was roughly three thousand pounds, roughly the weight of a small SUV, which had to be evenly and consistently applied. Jack had kept ahead of him for a while, but now John was able to do all this in less time than it was taking Jack to unscrew the bolts from each missile.
As the night wore on, Jack got steadily slower. But John Hunt never tired, never lost concentration, never stopped for breath or to go to the bathroom. Soon the Agent had caught up with the determined but flagging major and so he went back and picked up the large pile of bolts Jack had left in the first missile silo, took another of the bolt drivers and started reaffixing the bolts.
By 5am they were nearly done, but Jack was a shell of a man. He could barely lift his right arm anymore, and his body was screaming at him to rest. He went looking for his indomitable colleague with the resignation of the outclassed. He could hear the whine of the bolt driver in the fifth missile silo as he stepped through the bulkhead and into the big room.
“John,” he shouted up into the shaft of the fifth missile chamber, “you got a sec?”
As he shouted, Jack noticed the lift platform still on the floor, but was certain he had heard the sound of the bolt driver coming from the room. Jack heard the whoosh a moment before John landed on the steel floor, his legs flexing abnormally low to take the blow while his face remained passive.
Jack looked at the Agent. The relatively fit and healthy Major Toranssen felt as tired and beaten up as he ever had. He was bruised and battered all over, and he ached from his hair down. His hands were bleeding and sore, blisters rising on the inside of his right hand while welts from the battle-grade steel bolts lined the fingers of his left. But this young-looking man in front of him looked as bright and cheerful as a six-year-old on Christmas morning. Not a drop of sweat, not a single puff of exertion to show how hard he had been working. A slightly hysterical snort escaped Jack’s lips as he stared at John, bewildered.
“Tell me something,” Jack said to the Agent, “I know you are a machine, but you have also said that you have a copy of a person’s, I mean a Mobiliei’s personality in you.” John nodded and Jack went on, “Do you … I mean … is it … well …”