by Bob Mayer
“But he’s not here now.” But Egan stopped, about two-thirds to first, called out, but keeping it in mind.
“Remember what happened to Fred MacMurray by the end of that movie.” She turned from him and looked about the museum. “Only planes?”
“There are some missiles in here.” Egan stepped next to her and pointed. “Over there.”
“Ah yes. Missiles. Men love their missiles.”
He put his hand once more on her back. She didn’t step away. He let his fingers spread a bit so he could feel the slight arch of her spine as it curved outward from her tight bottom. He assumed it was tight, not being that forward yet, because women these days all worked out more than any physical drill the air force had ever pressed upon him. Sometimes he missed the softer, rounder girls of his youth. He often reflected that Marilyn Monroe would never have lasted long with today’s standards. He’d seen her in a USO show once in Korea. Or was it Alaska?
He couldn’t quite remember.
“Planes and missiles,” Mrs. Floyd said. “That’s it?” And once more she stepped away from his touch.
“No, that’s not it,” Egan said. “This hangar was built on top of the war room for SAC—the Strategic Air Command.”
“Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” she said, and Egan tensed. He hated that movie.
“We kept the peace,” Egan said. He strode toward a concrete bunker in the middle of the hangar, not caring if she kept pace.
She did, looking at her cell phone. “I’m not getting a signal. I can’t check on when my husband will get here.”
“The entire building is Tempest-proof,” Egan said. “Shielded. Everything in and out goes via landline.” He reached the bunker. “When nuclear weapons go off they release an electromagnetic pulse, which fries most electronics. So, naturally, we shielded our command post.”
“Battlestar Galactica stuff,” Mrs. Floyd said. Egan was getting tired of the media references as they weren’t heading toward first base anymore but rather the fog covering the outfield. He opened a heavy steel door. Metal steps beckoned on one side, descending into dark depths. Large elevator doors were directly ahead.
“This isn’t part of the normal museum tour,” Egan said as he walked up to the elevator and pressed a button. The two doors rumbled open, exposing a freight elevator. The paint was gray and peeling. The museum wasn’t high on the air force’s budget priority list, although most military personnel knew how that worked. The longstanding joke was that when the air force opened a new base, they built the officers’ club first, then the golf course, then asked Congress for more money to build the airstrip and hangars.
Those in the other armed services had a lot of respect for the air force’s base priorities—as long as they were officers and played golf.
Mrs. Floyd hesitated at the hatch. “Perhaps we should wait for my husband?”
“I don’t need his shoulder,” Egan said. He looked back at her. “Do you?”
Mrs. Floyd got into the elevator. Egan hit a button and the doors shut with a solid thud. The elevator lurched and then descended, faster and faster.
“How deep are we going?” Mrs. Floyd asked.
“Five hundred feet, and passing through forty feet of reinforced concrete. This place could take a direct nuke strike and continue functioning.”
“What about the people in the hangar above?”
Egan didn’t answer because one simply did not think of the people above. The elevator came to a jolting halt. The doors slid open, revealing a yawning darkness. A musty smell wafted over them. One could almost smell the cigarette and cigar smoke from generations of men watching screens, on edge for entire tours of duty, the fate of the world in their hands.
“Maybe we should go back up?”
Egan took two steps forward, turned left, took one and a half paces, reached out, and pressed an unseen button.
Banks of fluorescent lights flickered on. They revealed descending rows of consoles facing a stage on which there were several large Plexiglas boards. The tables were wood, and even the consoles had wood framing. There were numerous empty holes where monitors and other gear had been ripped out. Phones were scattered about, some rotary dial. All had red warning stickers on them. There were toggles and buttons and there was almost nothing digital about the place at all except some boxy clocks, their red numbers long dead, along the top edge of the walls.
It was a war room from an age when the United States could put a man on the moon using a computer less powerful than the average “smart” phone and bring them back when things went wrong using slide rulers and ingenuity.
“It’s old,” was Mrs. Floyd’s only comment from the safety of the elevator.
“My dear, it worked,” Egan snapped. He waved a hand. “The men in here controlled the fate of the world. They controlled power beyond what you can imagine.”
Mrs. Floyd shook her head. “Men and power.”
“It kept you safe.”
“From other men and their power.”
Egan snorted. “I’ve got a theory. You want to know how I think the first war started?”
She sighed, knowing she shouldn’t respond, but playing along. “You’re going to tell me anyway.”
And he did. “Back when we were in caves, armed with clubs and spears, some woman from a tribe saw a woman from another tribe and she had this here bowl. And the first woman wanted that there bowl. And, by God, she was gonna have it. So she harassed and henpecked her husband until he got his buddies together and they went over to that tribe in the next valley and they got that bowl for her. And that was the first war.”
“Women start wars?” Mrs. Floyd was incredulous. “Over a bowl?”
Egan shrugged, but didn’t reply. He gestured. “Over there is where the launch control—”
“Should that thing be blinking?” Mrs. Floyd asked, her hand pointing to the right with a large, expensive diamond reflecting the cheap lighting.
Egan followed the flow of the elegant finger. An orange light was flickering on a large panel full of dead lights.
He was finally speechless as his aging neural network tried to process what was happening. Everything he was seeing was important and he struggled with the logic flow.
Orange.
On that panel.
In that location.
Flickering. Not steady.
He’d been briefed verbally on this when he took the job, but he’d thought the old fart he was replacing had been a bit touched in the head to believe anything down here still worked. And word of mouth, from one generation to the next, was like playing telephone as a kid—the message eventually got garbled down the line. “Emily farts in class” became “The homily darts in the ass.”
He had to call someone. Of that he was certain. He went to the console right below the flickering light. There was a red phone. No buttons, no rotary. Just a phone with the word PINNACLE written on a piece of tape on the handle.
He’d heard whispers of Pinnacle and his hand hesitated for a moment, hovering over the receiver.
As he picked up the phone, his heart thrilled for a moment until the pacemaker slowed it down for him. Funny, he thought, catching a glimpse of Mrs. Floyd out of the corner of his eye as he put the handset to his ear. Now that he had a mission, and an important one, because saving the world or at least a chunk of it was important, he’d almost forgotten all about the woman.
Almost.
The phone was dead.
“What’s wrong?” Mrs. Floyd asked.
He didn’t hear her as he closed his eyes and focused his mind. He’d had another briefing years ago. A way to report an incident.
Egan ran, shuffled fast, to the elevator. Mrs. Floyd, being no fool, was right next to him as he shut the doors and the elevator accelerated upward.
“Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” Mrs. Floyd asked.
Egan smiled his confident smile, the one copilots had seen on his face as they flew through
horrendous weather or dodged surface-to-air missiles or landed with a shot-up plane. Trust me, the smile said.
The doors opened and Egan made a beeline for the admin office on the side of the hangar, Mrs. Floyd still at his side. He entered and went to the landline. He picked it up and dialed: 666.
The earpiece crackled as circuits that hadn’t felt electricity in a long time made connections.
Egan was startled and almost dropped the phone when, instead of a voice answering, there was a blast of music and then a deranged man singing over and over:
“Send lawyers, guns and money!”
And that was why the Nightstalkers were ten minutes out from drop.
Moms filled them in. “It’s an old launch control center. It was bought a few months ago by a couple of civilians. Since we’ve been airborne, Ms. Jones had her sources run their background: a pair of doomsdayers.”
“The end of the Mayan calendar must have bummed them out with no payoff,” Kirk said.
“They probably hit the wrong button,” Mac said. “But how can there still be a nuke there?”
“It’s a launch control center,” Moms repeated. “It has fourteen outlying silos. Ms. Jones just had a Key Hole satellite do a deep ground penetration and it picked up radiation from a cluster of silos. There’s still a nuke in at least one of them.”
“Nada wins,” Mac said, which wasn’t surprising since Nada always predicted the worst and Nada often won. Mac shook his head, the movement unnoticed inside his protective hood. He was a good-looking man, part young Tom Cruise, part more rugged than the actor from actually being a soldier instead of playing one. He was the best explosive ordnance man to come out of the army, which is why he was now a Nightstalker.
Partly.
Ms. Jones’s means of recruiting were a mystery, although it basically entailed combing the ranks of the elite, looking for those who had the added benefit of being unique in ways she felt the team needed. Often that uniqueness was something their former units didn’t really appreciate, or in fact rejected.
“No way it can go off,” Mac continued. “We’re talking—”
He was cut off by Doc. “I’ve broken apart the signal. It’s two overlapping transmissions. One is a countdown.”
“Fuck me to tears,” Nada muttered.
“What’s the count?” Moms asked.
“Twenty-two minutes, sixteen seconds, and dropping,” Doc informed them.
“Except there won’t be a launch,” Moms said, “because all those silo covers were welded shut and had concrete poured on top when the complex was closed.”
“That’s not good.” Roland stated the obvious, because Roland always focused on the obvious. It was irritating at times but very effective in combat.
Like Roland.
Moms ignored him and addressed Doc. “What’s the other transmission?”
Doc was frustrated. “I can’t make it out yet. Some old code that keeps repeating over and over.”
“Ten minutes out,” Eagle announced.
Ears popped in the cargo bay as pressure finished equalizing to fifteen thousand feet above ground level.
“All right,” Mac said. “The pool is now open as to cause.”
“Human error,” Nada said. Because Nada always thought it was human error. His faith in his fellow men was never above the half-full level, and usually pretty much near empty, and often he thought the glass simply didn’t even exist, but rather was a mirage, a cruel joke of an uncaring Fate.
“Of course there is some human factor involved,” Doc said, blinking behind his thick glasses and peering through the protective plate in the hazmat hood, focused on his keyboard. “It is part of my rule of seven.”
“Well, you gotta pick one, not seven,” Mac said. “The bet is on the primary cause.”
“Computer glitch,” Kirk said. Kirk always wanted it to be something to do with computers, because that made it his responsibility to fix the situation as the team communications man and computer specialist.
“Hardware or software?” Mac pressed.
“Hardware,” Kirk said.
Mac was using a felt-tip marker to record the bets on the arm of his suit. “I got Kirk with computer glitch, narrowed down to hardware malfunction. Nada with human error as primary. Doc?”
“I do not speculate,” Doc said, ending his participation.
“Sure it’s not a bug?” Mac chided him. Doc always wanted it to be a bug, the more exotic, the more interesting.
“Come on, Moms,” Kirk pressed.
Moms sighed, the sound echoing inside her hood, and for the sake of teamwork allowed herself to be drawn in. What most of the team, other than Nada, didn’t quite grasp was that she allowed the betting because it was an active way of getting everyone involved in “war-gaming” possibilities. The Nightstalkers often jumped into confusing and rapidly changing scenarios, and the more open their minds were to the range of problems they could face, the better they could face them.
She spoke: “Someone left an inspection plate open or an inner tube in the rocket from the engines fell apart and a rat got in and chewed through some wires. Or the doomsdayers were playing make-believe launch-the-missile, pretending they were actually ending the world not knowing they had a loaded silo.”
Mac whistled. “Now that’s specific. But you do remember that’s what happened in South Dakota when we went there two years ago?” He wrote R-A-T on his sleeve.
“Of course,” Moms said. “History has a way of repeating itself.”
Doc got up and waddled over to Roland to do one last check of the hazmat suit as per protocol. Moms did one more check of his parachute rig, not protocol, but she was a worrier. Doc tapped Roland lightly on one shoulder and Moms tapped him on the other, a mixture of reassurance and support, and they both sat back down.
“Keep working the second freq and code,” Moms said.
Doc was already back on his laptop.
“Five minutes,” Eagle announced. “Opening ramp.”
The Snake was a tilt-wing, jet-powered Black Ops aircraft, so experimental Eagle could have put in for test pilot wings with the air force. Except Nightstalkers never put in for badges, or awards, or wings, or any of that.
At the rear of the Snake, a crack of late daylight appeared as the back ramp lowered until it was horizontal. Very cold wind swirled in and the sound level increased accordingly.
Roland yawned and stretched his massive arms wide as he walked onto the ramp, stopping a foot short of the edge of the drop into potential oblivion. He’d been fast asleep at the Ranch when the Zevon alert came in, and he hated having his sleep cycle interrupted. Even for a nuke.
Especially for a nuke. You can’t shoot nukes and Roland lived to shoot things. Roland was a large man, four inches over six feet, with the build of an athletic middle linebacker. The scar that curved along the right side of his head from temple to behind his ear hadn’t been earned on a football field, though, but in combat during his first tour with the Eighty-Second Airborne in Iraq. Years ago and miles away.
“Eagle?” Mac asked.
“At the height of the Cold War, the United States had thirty-one thousand, two hundred and fifty-five nuclear weapons,” Eagle said, drawing on his vast reservoir of useless information. Useless until they needed it to save their asses. “It is not improbable that our government lost track of some. This is the fifth Bent Spear we’ve been on this year, which is a two hundred and fifty percent increase from last year.” The Bent Spear was a reference to a nuclear event that did not involve the possibility of nuclear war. “My summation,” Eagle continued, “is that there was a paperwork error and the missile and warhead were simply left behind.”
“Yeah, but that don’t explain why it’s going off now,” Mac said.
“It’s old,” Eagle replied. “Old things malfunction.”
“Like Nada,” Mac said with a grin no one could see but everyone knew he had. Mac liked to push everyone’s buttons. Usually for fun.
; Nada was indeed old, in military terms, having passed his fortieth birthday several years ago, the oldest member of the team and the longest serving. He was of Colombian descent, although many mistook him for Mexican, with graying hair poking straight out his skull as if seeking to escape his head, and a pocked, dark-skinned face. He’d plowed through a stellar Special Ops career: Rangers, Special Forces, Delta Force, Black Ops freelancer… and now he was a Nightstalker. It was either the tip of the spear, or the shit depth of the ocean depending on which day of the week it was. Today it plunged toward the latter.
“Three minutes,” Eagle announced and Roland shuffled another inch closer to the edge of the ramp.
“O-L-D,” Mac spelled out as he wrote it on his sleeve. “Old what? You always say it’s old with nukes and there’s no way we can really pin that down. You gotta pick something specific.”
“That’s because pretty much our entire nuclear arsenal is old,” Eagle said. “Old and falling apart.”
“That’s the reason,” Moms said, “they’re going to sign the SAD treaty at the United Nations soon.” She was referring to the Strategic Arms Disarmament Treaty, in which all nuclear powers were pledging to work to zero weapons in ten years. At least those countries that acknowledged actually having nuclear weapons. It was what Reagan and Gorbachev had come within one word of achieving in Iceland in 1986.
“And pigs will fly,” Nada muttered.
“They do if you toss them out of a plane,” Mac observed. “It’s just the landing that ain’t pretty.”
“I’ll be glad when they get rid of all the obsolete material,” Doc said. “Both hardware and software,” he added.
“I’ll be glad when we don’t get called out on these anymore,” Nada said.
“I’ll be glad to get some dinner,” Eagle muttered from the cockpit.
“Roland?” Mac asked, ignoring all of them.
“Something broke,” Roland said simply. “And we’re going to fix it.”
“B-R-O-K-E,” Mac wrote on his arm. “I think Roland, once more, in his finite yet elemental genius, will win theoretically.”