Jennifer turned off the radio. She sat on the floor and let loose with tears and then wailed.
She didn’t care who heard her now.
48
1525 Hours
Ethel’s Truck Stop
Sachs and Captain Li were running toward the diner when the plane exploded with a thunderous KABOOM. She tried not to look back and be turned to ash, but she was worried about Koz, so she began to turn her head over her shoulder as she ran.
“No!” came a shout from behind.
Koz was flying toward her, tackling her like a shield as the force from the plane blew them off their feet and she felt herself hurl through the air over a snow bank. He intentionally landed on top of her, smothering her into the snow.
She couldn’t breathe and struggled for more than a minute until he got off.
Koz asked, “Still in one piece?”
She gasped for breath and brushed the snow off. “You trying to kill me?” she asked when a second thunderous explosion sent a chunk of the fuselage flying over their heads.
Once again Koz face-planted her into the snow.
“Stop it!” she ordered when he let her come up again for air.
“You can court-martial me later,” he told her as they stood up to survey the damage.
What was left of the Nightwatch plane—Air Force One—burned in smoldering ruins. Engine parts were strewn across the interstate. A broken wing stuck upright out of the frozen ground, glinting in the weak late afternoon sun.
Sachs said, “We need to contact Block at Northern Command and rescind Marshall’s launch authority.”
Koz pointed to his right, and Sachs saw it: Ethel’s Truck Stop Café. “With Air Force One gone, Block is going to assume you’re dead. How are you going to prove your identity?”
“With this,” she said, and began to unzip her flightsuit.
She watched Koz raise an eyebrow and then smile when she flashed the presidential authenticator card he had given her.
49
1548 Hours
Looking Glass
Marshall stood with his junior officers Harney and Wilson, staring blankly at the radar screens inside the battle staff compartment: The D-10s were in position, but the first-strike B-21s carrying the bunker-busting Mavericks were turning back.
“What the hell?” he said.
Thompson turned from her console, bad news written all over her face. “Bombers turning back, sir.”
“I can see that,” Marshall said. “Put me through to them right now.”
She paused, putting a finger to her ear. “Northern Command is calling.”
He nodded, and she put General Block through on speaker.
“Our bombers are retreating, Block,” Marshall said. “Zhang already surrender?”
“Sachs is alive,” Block said. “Just got the call.”
Marshall didn’t believe it. “You authenticate her?”
“Yep, and voice prints match too,” Block said. “Listen, son. You’re busted. The president wants to ground Looking Glass, pronto. You are to land at Grand Forks AFB, where a reception team will be waiting for you to turn yourself in. You’ll be tried in a military court and executed for your treason.”
Marshall blinked in disbelief. “I don’t know what kind of horseshit Sachs is feeding you, Block. But pulling back our bombers now is going to cost us. Big time.”
Block didn’t like backtalk any more than Marshall. “You heard me, Marshall. Your pilots have been instructed to land Looking Glass immediately. And in case you have any trouble understanding, we’ve got a couple of F-22s on the way to escort you. Over.”
Block disappeared from view, and Marshall was aware that his own, unreadable poker face was still plain to see for Thompson and the others. So he kept it that way on the outside. It wasn’t difficult. Because he knew exactly what to do next.
50
1625 Hours
Ethel’s Truck Stop Café
Sachs watched pepper-haired Ethel pour her a cup of coffee while the TV blared the downing of Air Force One and her death. It was freezing with the shattered windows, and a dozen AF1 crew were taping plastic sheets from the surplus store in back to keep out the cold. Koz, meanwhile, was still on the pay phone talking to Block, having been unable to connect his phone with its satellite in space. They were trying to set up a call with General Zhang for her, to confirm he knew the U.S. was standing down and requesting the same.
Ethel asked her, “You really the president?”
Sachs said, “So they say.”
“You spoiled everything, you know. Women have been running the country just fine for two hundred years, only our men didn’t know it.” Then she winked and walked off with her pot of coffee to serve the rest of the AF1 crew as if they had been her regulars for years. All 48 had been accounted for, thank God.
Koz walked over with a frown on his face. “Looking Glass landed at Grand Forks, but Marshall and three crew were missing.”
Sachs stared at him. “How can they be missing?”
“They must have bailed in flight.”
“From a 747? Is that even possible?”
“Not at 35,000 feet and 500 knots,” Koz said. “But the pilots report that Marshall had ordered them down to 18,000 and 150 knots. That altitude and speed are about what the top extreme skydivers use, and Marshall and his threesome are trained paratroopers. Four sky suits are missing, and there are bodies on the floor. Looks like they shot their way out the rear transport hatch on the cargo deck.”
“But where did they go? What does he hope to accomplish?”
Koz shrugged. “I have no idea. Looking Glass by definition circles the Midwest in a nuke attack, to be close to the missile fields. But the only active missile fields here in North Dakota are a couple of hundred miles away at Minot. There’s nothing in this immediate area except abandoned missile silos. Maybe he’s going to hide out in one and keep us hunting for him for as many days as possible.”
“He’s right, you know,” Ethel said, jumping right into the conversation. “We used to have a full missile wing here associated with Grand Forks AFB, until they closed it down, moved almost everything to Minot. That cost us a lot of jobs.”
“Almost everything?” Sachs asked, glancing at Koz.
Koz said, “They still keep a few weapons storage areas around here that hold nuclear contingency weapons. And there’s the old Safeguard complex in Nekoma, but that’s been abandoned even longer than the silos.”
“You sure about that?” Ethel said. “I’ve served more than a few strangers in recent—”
The cups and saucers on the counter started shaking again. The whole diner started to shake.
“Lordy, here we go again,” Ethel said.
But Sachs knew there wasn’t another Air Force One about to make an emergency landing outside. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a flame trail on the horizon.
Koz and Captain Li beat her outside to have a look.
She caught up and stopped cold at the sight of a 60-foot Minuteman III ICBM missile lift off into the sky at like a space shuttle launch. The ground quaked from rocket’s thrust.
“Oh, no,” Sachs said. “Marshall.”
“Beijing’s about 6,500 miles away,” Koz told her, doing some quick math. “And that rocket is going 15,000 miles per hour.”
“Which means we have 25 minutes until impact,” she answered when another Minuteman blasted off.
And another.
And still another.
Sachs counted ten flame trails lifting off from the fields in a ring of fire that turned the evening into day.
51
1600 Hours
Bailey Family Farm
Launch Control Center
In the hour before the Minutemen launched, Marshall’s dome-shaped parachute blossomed under the clear night. Marshall let the cold wind blow him across the desolate winter fields toward the lonely clapboard farmhouse below.
He looked over at Thompson, Harney and
Wilson, all doing fine on the descent. His jellyfish chute favored by U.S. paratroopers had been packed and ready aboard Looking Glass.
Special cuts in the fabric gave his chute more speed and greater steering capabilities, enabling him to avoid the grain silo on his right and turn into the wind to minimize horizontal speed as he landed.
He hit and rolled, then quickly detached from his chute. Then, with the others close behind, he pulled out his M9 and headed for the farmhouse.
The MP in a parka on the front porch looked surprised to see visitors and whipped out an older M-16. He was talking to somebody through an earpiece but froze when none other than General Brad Marshall walked up the steps. He relaxed and lowered his gun to salute.
“General Marshall,” he said with relief when Harney leveled his own M4 and spat out a round. Blam! Blam! Blam! And the MP was blown through the front door.
Sixty feet beneath the farmhouse in the launch control center, red warning lights flashed on the consoles like the Fourth of July. The two launch officers in blue uniforms sat tight in their aircraft-style seats, trapped by their shoulder belts designed to keep them from being thrown by the shockwaves if they ever launched ICBMs.
The missileers were dead men as soon as Marshall came through the vault door. Wilson and Harney shot them in the head. Thompson followed up by relieving them of their launch keys.
One of the launch officers was still alive, barely, and Marshall glared at Harney. Too many video games for these younger officers. They shot at faces to save bullets. But the pros always shot twice to confirm a kill. Worse, single shots to the head only dehumanized the enemy. And these launch officers were anything but. They were American patriots, and he needed at least one of them alive.
The launch officer groaned. “General Marshall?”
“It’s OK, son,” Marshall said, leaning closer. “We’ll get you some help. Don’t worry.” Then he popped the kid in the chest with a second bullet from his M9 pistol. The launch officer slumped in his chair, blood draining out of him. Marshall straightened and said, “Major Tom, how long will it take you to retarget?”
She looked at her console. “Thirty-six minutes using the Command Data Buffer system.”
“You have ten,” Marshall told her. “Harney and Wilson, you’ll need to strip some equipment here. I saw an Explorer parked outside. See if the MP upstairs has the keys in his pockets.”
As they left, Marshall hovered impatiently as Thompson calculated the retargeting information.
“You’re taking too long, Major Tom.”
“More than two hundred attack options have been programmed into this computer, sir,” she replied. “We just need to dial up the right war scenario. Those missiles that are supposed to go, go. Those that aren’t, don’t.”
“You don’t get it. I want them all going.”
“Oh, that won’t even take a minute—if you can live with collateral strikes.”
“As long as the Chinese can’t, Major, I can.”
Marshall pushed the launch officer he had killed off his seat and strapped himself in. Thompson did likewise in the other chair and then made the final adjustments.
“Missiles are retargeted,” she announced.
Marshall gave the order, “Insert launch keys.”
Thompson inserted her launch key into her console at the same time he did.
“On my mark,” he told her. “Three…two…one…turn.”
They turned their keys simultaneously.
The shaking began, and Marshall tightened his belt with satisfaction. Missiles on screen filled the silo cameras with their exhaust flames.
Finally, things were going according to plan.
52
1625 Hours
Bedford Country Club
Jennifer decided she’d had enough of herself crying over her mother and the end of the world. If this was the end of all things, she didn’t want to go out like a scared rat in a crap shack. She would face the future full-on, even if it was a mushroom cloud.
She rose to her feet with the old beach blanket around her shoulders for warmth. The floorboards creaked as she walked to the front door. She paused at the door and took a deep breath. She wrapped herself tighter in the blanket with one hand and flung open the door with the other and shrieked.
Standing inches from her face was one of the Green Berets, so close they shared each other’s frosty breath. There was alcohol on his. She then saw the open bottle in his hand.
“We knew you were here and were just waiting for you to come out,” he told her, pushing her back inside and slamming the door shut. “But now that your mom is dead, I thought you could use some comfort.” His lips twisted into an ironic smile. “You see, I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.”
Jennifer was terrified. “Where’s the other guy?”
“Ran home to mommy and the kids, seeing as this is the end.” There was a wild look in his eyes. He believed it, and this terrified Jennifer even more. “It’s a terrible thing when discipline in the ranks breaks down in a crisis. But I’m getting one last hurrah before we pop.”
She took a swing at his face but he caught her hand and twisted it back until she cried out in pain. Then he pulled her head back by her hair and started dragging her kicking and screaming across the floor.
“Stop!” she screamed. “You’re hurting me!”
He turned her over and thrust the neck of the bottle into her mouth painfully so that she choked as the fiery liquid poured down her throat. He laughed again, his eyes on fire as she struggled to breathe, feeling like she was drowning.
53
1625 Hours
Ethel’s Truck Stop
Sachs stared at the ten missiles as they arched into the twilight. Disbelief dissolved into despair as she recognized the world as she knew it was ending. A black hole seemed to open up under her feet and suck the soul out of her.
“God, no,” she breathed.
Koz, standing next to her, sounded flat and distant. “Minutemen out of the Nekoma missile field. It was supposed to be inactive.”
Sachs simply could not believe what she was seeing. “They’re going to China, aren’t they?”
“Can’t tell you until they explode,” Koz said, looking grief-stricken. “But at fifteen thousand miles per hour, they can reach their targets in less than 30 minutes.”
She said, “We have to destroy them.”
The look on Koz’s face didn’t inspire hope. “Only way to abort is from the launch control center. We could try our sea-based AEGIS ABM systems with the Seventh Fleet, but they can’t take out all 10 Minutemen. Our best bet would have been the Tier 1 Defender complex in Alaska.”
Sachs grew icy calm. “What about this abandoned Safeguard complex nearby that you talked about? What did that use to be for?”
“It was the original Defender system,” Koz said. “Safeguard was designed to defend Minutemen silos around here from a Soviet or Chinese counterforce attack during the 1960s.”
“By ‘counterforce’ you mean nukes like the ones the Chinese are about to launch in answer to the Minutemen that Marshall just fired?”
“That’s right,” Koz said. “The Safeguard missiles would hit the incoming Soviet or Chinese nukes, giving us the all clear to launch a second wave of missiles.”
“Punishing them even harder.”
“A nice option for us to have now, huh?” Koz said. “But it was operational for only about four months before they shut it down. Been abandoned for decades.”
Sachs said, “You mean like those Minuteman silos we just saw shoot off?”
Koz stared at her like she was either crazy or crazy brilliant. “You think Marshall built his Defender system on top of Safeguard?”
Sachs nodded. “Marshall isn’t a lunatic. He wouldn’t let those missiles off unless he had some degree of confidence he could shoot down those DF-5s the Chinese launch back at us.”
Koz’s face fell. “It’s at least 40 minutes to Nekoma. We’ll
never make it in time on these roads.”
“Stop telling me what we can’t do!” Sachs lost it there, punching him squarely in the chest with her fist. “You dumb bastards!” she screamed, pummeling him again and again. “You’re going to blow up the world with your pissing contests.”
Koz took the blows stoically, waiting for her to stop.
Sachs calmed down, the missile roar faded, and there was only a ghostly cold wind until she heard the unmistakable snap of gum and turned to see Ethel standing behind them.
Ethel said, “I know how you can get there in 20 minutes.”
Sachs stared at her, daring her. “Tell me.”
“Same way me and Rusty got to the diner this morning.”
54
1635 Hours
Pembina Trail
The icy Pembina Trail wound through several ghost towns and rivers toward Nekoma’s infamous Safeguard complex. The snow-covered prairies glittered under the sparkling night skies. Sachs wrapped her hands around Koz’s waist as he leaned forward and kicked up the speed of Ethel’s four-stroke Yamaha snowmobile. She looked back at Captain Li, further behind on the trail, trying to keep up in Rusty the waitress’s two-stroke Thundercat.
“This sucker can go 110 mph and stay there all day long,” Ethel had promised them back at the truck stop diner, and Koz was determined to max the 145 horsepower to reach the Safeguard complex inside of 20 minutes.
Sachs felt herself slipping and tightened her grip on Koz, but her hands were too numb to feel. Her face was a frozen mask in the wind. But she could feel her heart pounding out of her chest. The stillness before the coming nuclear storm was ghostly, and she and Koz were just vapors in the night.
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