by Bob Mayer
Nada turned to Moms with a wry smile and everyone on the team knew what was coming: Why We Are Here in some version. It was to be expected after a failure and it was a mantra Ms. Jones repeated over and over to the team, not because she believed they forgot it, but because working in the black world of covert ops, it was easy to lose track of the larger picture.
“The missile you just dealt with, the entire complex, the nuclear arsenals of every country that has the technology, are part of man’s insanity and also the peak of our genius. Scientists were able to split the atom, to gain power over an elemental and powerful force and at the same time give mankind the capability to annihilate itself. It seems the nature of man that we can do both at the same time. It is not just in the field of nuclear engineering, but, as we have discussed, the same is being done in genetic engineering, where scientists will develop cures for many ailments and afflictions. Yet at the same time, we know there are those in deep, dark labs who are working on genetically coded, biological weapons. They are the two edges of the same sword.
“We are here,” Ms. Jones finally got to her catchphrase, “because of that and more. We are here because as mankind advances scientifically, we also teeter farther and farther over the abyss of self-extinction.”
The sound of the lonely Nebraska wind filled the cargo bay for a few moments, and then they realized Ms. Jones was done.
“Let’s look at the bright side,” Moms said. “We have two weeks off when we get back.” She paused. “Correct, Ms. Jones?”
“Yes. After debrief. That’s two weeks away from the Ranch on two-hour recall,” Ms. Jones clarified. The only way Nightstalkers ever really got true time “off” was when they retired, were medically or mentally disabled, or died.
“Everyone enjoy the holidays,” Moms said, signaling for Eagle to get into the cockpit and power up the Snake.
“Bah, humbug,” Mac said.
“You know,” Kirk said. “Those carolers always sing about peace on earth, but they never say where it is.”
“Nowhere we’ve been,” Mac said.
“I celebrate Festivus,” Eagle said as he banked the Snake and gained speed, racing along just above ground level.
“Ah!” Nada was animated for once. “The airing of grievances! Feats of strength!”
“Forget I brought it up,” Eagle said.
“Hey!” Roland said, as if a major synapse had just fired.
Everyone in the cargo bay looked at him as he sang: “Always look on the bright side of death. Just before you draw your terminal breath.” He began whistling and it took a few seconds, but then they caught on.
As they flew away from the site where they had almost died, the Nightstalkers all pursed their lips and whistled away: Always look on the bright side of death.
“We were lucky,” Pitr said. Ms. Jones sighed, which was difficult to do with all the tubes stuck in her body. Any movement brought discomfort; a lot of movement brought pain. She’d lived with the situation for years and she hoped, but did not pray, that she had several more years. Unfortunately, she was a realist and she knew time cared as little for her hopes as it would for her prayers. She kept the speaker on, and in the background they could hear the team whistling that part of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” but there was that edge to it. It was forced.
“Was it luck the warhead was activated?” Ms. Jones asked her assistant. “If we say there is luck, then isn’t one as likely to have bad luck as well as good luck?”
“It was those fools who bought the silo that caused the problem,” Pitr said. “More so, it was whoever left that warhead in the silo.”
“Which brings up an interesting point,” Ms. Jones said. Her office was dimly lit and was actually a room behind the office where she “met” each new Nightstalker and in-briefed them and held debriefings with Moms and Nada. She’d been impressed when Doc had quickly surmised that the shadowy image sitting in the dark shadow on the other side of the desk was usually just an image, not a person. Not that it mattered. She always said what she needed to and she could see and hear everything pertaining to the Nightstalkers from her hospital bed.
“And that point is?” Pitr pressed, making her realize her thoughts had drifted off, which concerned her as it was happening more and more. It was a luxury of the elderly, but a person in her position could not afford that luxury.
“What if the nuclear warhead being left there wasn’t a mistake?” she asked. In the background, the whistling had petered out and there was no sound coming out of the speaker except the muted roar of the Snake’s engines. Ms. Jones turned the speaker off. “Here in the Nightstalkers we are so used to ascribing incidents to mistake or oversight or scientific malfeasance, we rarely consider that often there are those who scheme and plot and act. Sometimes in ways counter to what we believe is in our country’s and mankind’s welfare.”
Pitr frowned. He glanced over at the machines helping to keep Ms. Jones alive, scanning their various lights and indicators. He’d been doing this for so many years that anything amiss would have screamed out at him. All was within normal parameters. Pitr spoke with less of a Russian accent than Ms. Jones, but that was because he left Area 51 and interacted with other Americans. Ms. Jones had not left the Ranch in eight years. Pitr was a former Russian helicopter pilot whose life Ms. Jones had saved by stopping him from overflying Chernobyl, telling him it was a one-way mission even while she risked her life to save the man who’d started the chain reaction of that disaster back in 1986. Pitr was a tall, rugged-looking man with graying hair. He had perfect teeth that he revealed often when he smiled.
That was why Ms. Jones knew he could never replace her: the smile. The person who ran the Nightstalkers rarely had anything to smile about. He was good at his job as her assistant, but the mantle of leadership was not something she could drape around his shoulders.
That a former Soviet nuclear engineer was in charge of the Nightstalkers and had a former Soviet helicopter pilot as her aide was as improbable as an actor who had played the Gipper in Knute Rockne, All American becoming the fortieth president of the United States.
Probably less so.
“You suspect a plot?” Pitr asked, intrigued. Ms. Jones was not given to idle speculation.
“This weapon was listed as destroyed,” Ms. Jones said. “That’s not a simple oversight of forgetting it in the silo. Someone also deliberately wiped out any trace of it by recording it as having been dismantled. One event is an oversight. Two is a plan.”
“If it is a plan,” Pitr said, “it is a very old plan.”
“When I heard the year, 1962, I knew right away what the code name was,” Ms. Jones said. “Operation Ortsac is in the Nuclear Protocol binder. What is not in the binder is what didn’t happen. General LeMay was the chief of staff of the air force at the time. He advocated preemptive nuclear warfare from the moment he had any voice in the matter. Even after the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved, he pressed for an invasion of Cuba anyway. His deepest desire was to take advantage of the missile gap.
“While publicly the military and CIA were claiming our former country was far ahead in terms of nuclear warheads, the truth was the opposite. If the United States had initiated a first strike in the fifties or sixties, the result would have been devastating to Russia. Indeed, Pitr, I would have to say if the generals in our old country had had the same advantage, many would have advocated the same thing. What good is such power if it is not wielded?” She did not wait for an answer.
“The first mention ever of a so-called ‘missile gap’ was by JFK in 1958 when he was up for reelection to the Senate. He then ran his presidential campaign based on trying to catch up to the Russians, when he didn’t know the United States was actually far ahead. That is how effective the propaganda of the CIA and the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex was. Only after he was in office and briefed by the Keep about the reality did he change his views.”
“You bring up an interesting point,” Pitr said
. “If this warhead was kept there as part of a plot to secret away nuclear weapons in the face of mandated drawdowns due to the various treaties over the years, we are facing another critical era with RAD. You mentioned the Keep. Perhaps you should consult with Hannah? She might know something about this.”
“She might,” Ms. Jones conceded, but it was clear she was not warm to the idea. One did not go to Hannah with anything unless absolutely necessary.
“My thoughts,” Pitr said carefully, “are that this is more than just a mistake or an oversight.”
“Mister Kirk, of course, drove to the heart of the matter,” Ms. Jones said. “Pinnacle. It is not a term we have run across.”
Pitr glanced at his phone. “The Acmes haven’t reported back on it, which means it’s either completely black, completely forgotten, or worse.”
“I fear worse.”
“You always do.”
Ms. Jones did not respond, which Pitr took to mean she was considering his recommendation. They’d been together for so long they could read all the little signs in each other.
“They’re almost back,” Ms. Jones said, raising a single finger off the bed toward one of the many monitors that lined the wall.
One of them displayed the image from a video cam on the top of Baldy Mountain, which was fifteen miles northeast of Area 51. The Snake was flying fast and low, treetop level, except there were no trees to top here in Nevada.
In fact there was pretty much nothing here other than the government facility known to most as Area 51. Which is why it was out here. Founded in 1941 as an auxiliary base to Nellis Air Force Base, adjacent to massive bombing ranges, Area 51 gained its moniker by the simple fact that’s what the location was labeled on a map. There was an Area 50 and an Area 52 and so on in either numeric direction, but 51 held the distinction of having a dry lake bed that was perfectly flat and hard packed. On that lake bed was built a landing strip that currently held the distinction of being the fifth longest in the world at 23,270 feet, or almost four and a half miles. Why it needed to be that long, no one knew anymore, although it had been a backup landing strip for space shuttles and the lake bed made going longer easier. It was built in the days when the US government definitely believed bigger was better.
Interestingly, the officers’ club wasn’t built before the runway at Area 51.
Actually, there was no o’club at Area 51.
Nor was there a golf course.
That was because it wasn’t the air force that was pumping in the dollars, but rather an organization called Majestic-12 via a massive black budget.
As the years went on, more and more land in the emptiness of Nevada was gobbled up by various government agencies for various reasons. The Department of Energy grabbed over a thousand square miles to the west of Area 51 in 1951 to test nuclear weapons, and test them they did—over seven hundred. Many of those black-and-white reels of soldiers watching a mushroom cloud in the distance were filmed there.
The films still survive; the soldiers are another story.
To the north, Nellis Range is still used, and many conventional bombs are dropped there along with millions of rounds of ordnance being fired. Nothing living lasted out there long. Drone pilots, headquartered at Nellis, used the range to hone their skills so they could reach out to their worldwide network and attack with precision.
It was as if there had been a plan to even further isolate Area 51.
The Nightstalkers, under a different name, had been established at Area 51 when it became a hotbed of research and, as was inevitable, the scientists screwed up. Someone opened a Rift (scientists still don’t know what they are) and Fireflies came through (ditto on the not knowing). After many casualties and much consternation and blame, in 1948 a covert unit was formed to deal with Rifts, Fireflies, and the wide range of possible scientific misadventures, screwups, and accidents. The Nightstalkers were not formed, though, to deal with plots and counterplots within the US government. That was another unit’s responsibility, the Cellar, which Hannah ruled.
In fact, Hannah ruled an empire of Black Ops, of which the Nightstalkers were just one arm.
When Area 51 became so popular that tours were coming out on Extraterrestrial Highway—aka Route 375—to sit at the mailbox and stare at pretty much nothing other than a mailbox and a dirt road leading off toward a gate, it became time for the Nightstalkers to move to someplace less noticeable.
Still close enough to draw on the vast resources of Area 51 and have its support personnel based there, the operators moved into an underground bunker built below what appeared to be an old abandoned gas station. Actually, the bunker was built, then an “old abandoned gas station” according to specifications was built on top of it. Not far from the Ranch was the Barn, which was the hangar for the Snake.
Ms. Jones and Pitr watched another screen as the top of the Barn, which looked exactly like an old abandoned barn, split open, landing lights flashing inside as Eagle guided the Snake down. A sign on the outside boasted: SEE ALL THE POISINUS SNAKES 75CENTS. Though it was unlikely that anyone could make it this far into the Ranch, if they did dare enter the Barn, they’d run into things far more dangerous than poisinus snakes.
There were always twenty-six security personnel scattered around the Ranch, secure in bunkers that were not only invisible to the eye but had thermal shielding. They were armed beyond to the teeth, because the teeth put one back to pre-caveman days. Armament included automatic weapons, Hellfire missiles, surface-to-air missiles, and the ability to call in cruise missiles and air support from Nellis. Of more practical importance, they could exercise deadly force more easily and legally than the contract guards at nearby Area 51 because the Ranch was on “private” land.
The doors shut on the Barn and in exactly eight minutes, because that was Nada’s Protocol for off-load, the team would come racing out of the Barn in a Humvee, with Roland in the gun turret, singing one of his songs.
Rumination over, decision made, Ms. Jones hit the button that killed all the screens. “Let’s give the Acmes a day to research this incident and Pinnacle,” she told Pitr. “If they fail to unravel this, I believe it will be time to talk to Hannah. Check on what the Acmes have discovered so far.”
The Humvee tore out of the Barn, Eagle expertly handling the wheel so that they cleared the closing doors by inches. Everyone was crowded inside. (Doc had once made the mistake of suggesting they get a minivan and no one spoke to him for a week.) Roland, as always, manned the .50-caliber, spinning the roof turret, more than ready to kill something. The security personnel always made sure they were deep in their hide sites when the Humvee came flying by.
It was quiet inside, unusual for a mission return, as if Roland’s attempts at high-spiritedness on the Snake had sucked their spirits dry. Moms looked over her shoulder from the passenger seat and caught Nada’s eyes. She raised her eyebrows in question and then nodded up at Roland, wondering when he would start singing. It wasn’t Protocol. It was tradition, and that was something every soldier valued because they often had little more than that to hold on to.
Kirk tried. As the newest member of the team, he felt he had to. “I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand—” he began, singing Warren Zevon’s most famous song, but when no one else joined in, he fell silent.
Apparently they saved werewolves for successful missions.
The only sound was the Humvee engine and the desert rolling under its oversize tires.
When Roland started, his choice wasn’t surprising, but he didn’t start with the chorus, because that indicated the beginning of a mission.
“I’m the innocent bystander,” Roland more yelled than sang. “Somehow I got stuck…”
Eagle, who had more movies, books, and song lyrics stuck in his head than most Mac hard drives, joined him.
“… between the rock and the hard place.”
Moms, Nada, and Mac were on board for the next, appropriate line.
“And I’m down on my luck.”<
br />
Kirk finally got it and the entire team did the next two lines:
“And I’m down on my luck.
“And I’m down on my luck.”
And then they fell silent and that’s the way the Nightstalkers pulled up to the Ranch, which pretty much summed up what Nada would later call “The Clusterfuck in Nebraska.”
If only that was all there ever was to it.
Pitr walked back into Ms. Jones’s office. She could tell by the look on his face that it was bad news. She lifted a finger, indicating for him to deliver it.
“An Acme has decoded the missile’s guidance system. It had two targets preprogrammed into it, with an option switch back at SAC headquarters. And the warhead was a W59 one megaton.”
“Large yield.”
“Yes.”
“And those targets?”
“The first, naturally, was Cuba. That was a secondary targeting overlaid on top of the missile’s original, primary target.”
“And the primary target was?”
“Area 51.”
Neeley had long ago learned that waiting to kill people could be boring. Technically her mission here was recovery, but she’d accepted during Isolation that it would inevitably involve killing at least a few people. Since she’d been on the ground, she’d revised that number upward, because all was not as it had seemed in Isolation.
It never was.
She used the night-vision portion of her retina, just off-center of vision, as Gant had taught her so many years ago. She was experiencing déjà vu, and for good reason. The alley running between ramshackle concrete buildings held several Dumpsters, a burned-out car, and piles of refuse, very similar to an alley in the Bronx so many years ago. Except tonight she was in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and the clock was ticking on making contact with the extraction package.