by Bob Mayer
Nada shifted uneasily. “I imagine he meant them.”
“In the summer of 1963, President Kennedy signed a presidential order that SADMs must be built with that time delay designed in the W54 system at the munitions plant. He was looking after those men who wore the Green Beret. He was looking after you.”
“And then they killed him,” Mac said bitterly.
“Ah,” Ms. Jones said. “Let us not get into that.”
Two weeks after the world had been saved from nuclear war, Neeley had been hanging in the climbing harness all night. One of the first things Gant had told her when they began training together was that patience was one of the most difficult traits for a covert operative to master, but one of the most essential. Neeley had honed that trait over the years. Twenty-four hours of surveillance on a target was considered an absolute minimum, yet most people couldn’t sit still for five minutes.
Neeley had been in Peru for four days, crossing the border illegally from Brazil after a two-week journey west across the Amazon. The long journey, to keep anyone from backtracking her, was another form of patience.
After crossing the border, she’d spent one day making it to this remote part of the Andes. One day observing the climbers’ base camp, which they broadcast on Facebook, which she found quite odd but very useful. And then one day climbing to get ahead of the team trying to ascend to the summit of Palcaraju Oeste, a peak northeast of Lima. At just under twenty thousand feet, it wasn’t a world-record altitude, but it was a technically difficult climb. Not something for the faint and almost unheard of for someone to try solo.
Neeley didn’t plan to go all the way to the top.
And she wasn’t doing it solo.
It was a beautiful morning, the sun sending bright streaks of daylight over the peaks to the east.
“You know that saying?” Roland asked.
He was dangling four feet to the right, his bulk encased in Gore-Tex, his position triple anchored because he put a bit of strain on the rope.
Neeley waited for him to complete the question, having gotten used to his habit of thinking his way into the completion during their journey from the States, across Brazil, into Peru, and up the mountain. She’d insisted she could do the job alone.
Roland had insisted on coming along.
Hannah and Ms. Jones had conferred and thought this would be a good “cross-training” opportunity for the Cellar and the Nightstalkers.
As if what they’d just done wasn’t enough.
“I think it was the Indians,” Roland continued. “You know, Native Americans. They say, ‘It’s a good day to die’?”
“I’ve heard of it,” Neeley said as she began the delicate operation of getting out of the sleeping bag without completely unhooking from the mountain.
It was a lot harder than it sounded.
“It’s bullshit,” Roland said. He hadn’t used a sleeping bag. He’d claimed his Gore-Tex pants and jacket would be enough and he appeared to be correct, seeming none the worse for the night at altitude. “I prefer my own saying: It’s a good day to help someone else die.”
With one arm, he pulled himself up, unclipped from all three of his anchors, unsafe at any altitude, then put in a new piece of protection that would allow them to go up the fifteen feet they needed for the perch they had decided upon. Then he began to lift Neeley, hand over hand.
“Hey!” she protested. “I can climb.”
“I know,” Roland said, “but I need the workout.”
Neeley settled in, shoulder to shoulder with Roland on a two-foot-wide ledge right next to a cornice of rock. One of the more difficult aspects of the route the two climbers below them would be taking this morning.
“Do you know why I told you about what happened in Pakistan?” Neeley asked Roland as she watched the two climbers struggling on their next pitch.
“You were bored?” Roland said.
Neeley smiled. “I usually operate alone. I don’t get bored.”
“To explain why we’re here,” Roland said.
“Yes.” And Neeley waited. “And we’re here.”
Roland’s forehead furrowed. If Mac had been there, he’d have told Roland not to hurt his brain by straining it too much. But by saying that, Mac would have stopped Roland from straining it and going to new heights, literally and figuratively.
“We’re here,” Roland finally said, “because you were on that Sanction.”
“And?” Neeley prompted.
“The entire purpose of the Sanction in Pakistan was to find these two guys.”
“Exactly,” Neeley said. “You think anyone really gives a damn about some garbageman and his wife? Even if he gave up bin Laden? In fact, no one, not even the Cellar, wants those people around. In my job, I have to always suspect the reverse. Think strategically. You’re great with tactics, Rollie.”
Roland flushed red, impossible to see under the balaclava that protected him from the harsh wind and cold. The only other woman who had ever made him blush like that was Moms, but she was his team leader.
Neeley was different. He just hadn’t figured out how yet.
Neeley continued. “But this is strategy. It’s like…” Neeley searched for the right words. “It’s like the difference between Patton and MacArthur. Patton was great in combat. Battle of the Bulge he turned Third Army on a dime and slashed apart the Panzers. But that was a reaction. MacArthur, in the entire Pacific Campaign with his island hopping, lost fewer troops than were lost in the single Battle of the Bulge. MacArthur thought ahead of his enemy.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Roland asked.
And for once he had her stumped for a moment, and then she flushed. “Because I’ve only helped one other person and it’s been a long time. I helped Hannah when she needed me. Because Gant helped me. And helping others, it’s…” She fell silent.
“It’s a good thing,” Roland said. He nodded toward the two climbers. “Let’s take care of business.”
They fell silent as the two men continued up the mountain, reaching this difficult stretch. One took lead, putting in protection. He made half a pitch then halted. The other climbed up to him as he took belay. As expected, on their next pitch, they hit a protection point just eight feet underneath and on the other side of the rock wall from where Neeley and Roland waited. As soon as both were in place, protection put in and one beginning to climb, Roland swung wide on his rope around the shoulder of the mountain into the man on belay.
His move was so startling, the man in the lead teetered. Neeley swung around and gave him a gentle shove and he fell to the end of his rope.
Roland held on to his belay man, keeping both on the mountain. Roland looped their rope through a figure eight on the front of his harness, then cut their attachment to their own anchor point, in effect making himself their anchor.
As one man dangled over the abyss, the other stared wide-eyed at Roland. “Who the hell are you! What are you doing?”
Neeley climbed down and locked in on the mountain on the other side of him. “Hey!”
He turned his head toward her and she slapped his face with her gloved hand, drawing blood from the small needle in her hand.
The man blinked. “What did you do?”
“Cherry Tree, Mr. Nesbitt. You are Nesbitt, right?” She didn’t expect an answer yet as she knew it would take a minute or so for the serum to work. “And our friend on the end of the rope is your partner, Mr. Porter.”
“What the fuck?” Nesbitt sputtered. “Who the fuck are you?”
“I’m from the Cellar,” Neeley said. “And you’re going to tell me the truth.”
At the word Cellar, what little blood was left in Nesbitt’s face drained out. At the end of the rope, twenty feet below them, Porter was yelling something, twisting and turning in the wind, which blew his words away into the empty sky.
Neeley was watching his eyes. She saw his pupils dilate slightly and knew Cherry Tree had taken root.
“Did you compromise
the mission?”
He blinked, shaking his head. “Mission?”
“The garbageman.”
“Oh. Fuck.” The next word was ripped from him. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“We claimed the interrogation. My group. We had to maintain integrity on our story. Get the credit.”
“Why?” Neeley asked in such a tone that Roland looked at her.
“Promotion.”
“Did your supervisor know?” Neeley asked.
“No.”
“Did he know?” Neeley pointed down.
Nesbitt followed her finger. “Yes.”
“Anyone else?”
“No.”
“Bye,” Roland said as Neeley was getting ready to ask her next question. He cut the rope and the two men dropped out of sight into the abyss.
“I wasn’t done!” Neeley yelled at him.
“Yes,” Roland said, as he took her in his arms. “You are.”
“Last day,” the Keep said. “What have you learned?”
President Templeton glumly nodded. “I don’t know if I’m relieved or just exhausted.”
“Both,” the Keep said.
They were seated, for the last time, in the same room on the top floor of the White House. Tomorrow there would be a new president. A new occupant of the position. A new person for the Keep to in-brief.
“Pretty amazing,” Templeton said.
“What is, sir?” The Keep had her book open, quill poised, but so far, she’d written nothing, which didn’t cheer the soon-to-be-ex-president very much.
“No one talked about it. What happened. Cherry Tree.”
The Keep lifted the quill and tapped it against her cheek. “Yes. I have to admit I was surprised and so was Hannah. But the Nightstalkers called that right by having everyone get infected. Not only were they able to burn it out at the same time, the psychological dynamics were most intriguing. So many people baring their souls to each other. So many secrets exposed. No one wants that. No one wants to talk about that. Everyone is pretending it never happened.”
The president laughed. “Nobody has looked anyone in the eye since then. I think everyone wants to get the hell out of here.”
The Keep said nothing and the president sighed.
“Tell me something,” he finally said. “The PEOC. Riggs had the code from the football. He had the targeting matrix. He launched. But he didn’t launch. You haven’t told me what happened. Why it didn’t go off like he wanted?”
“Ah…” The Keep shook her head. “Surely you don’t think it could be that simple. That a single man—or woman starting tomorrow—could simply open up a briefcase and begin Armageddon?”
She tapped the book. “It’s in here, but so few see it. Kennedy ran on the missile gap, then suddenly shifted gears. Reagan called the Soviets the evil empire, but then came within a single treaty of getting rid of nuclear weapons entirely. Nixon was crumbling, under impeachment, but he walked out of here without destroying anything when he so desperately wanted to. Do you know what changed them? That room.”
“It’s fake!” Templeton sat bolt upright. “The whole war room thing is a fake. Like a movie set.”
“No.” The Keep shook her head. “It’s real. The world could indeed be destroyed from that room. The Cellar or the Nightstalkers or any of us were never powerful enough to prevent that room being built for that possibility. What we could do was put in checks and balances. That’s something the Founding Fathers were all for. We just moved it into the nuclear age.
“Everyone adapts. As General LeMay and the others started Pinnacle to keep civilians like you from reducing the power they felt they needed, others worked to make sure that ultimate power, the power to destroy the world several times over, was not so negligently placed in one person’s hands.”
The Keep put down the quill. “Really. Think about it. How amazing is it that since Hiroshima and Nagasaki we haven’t used these weapons again? There have been studies on it, many studies, trust me, and the odds that we have never once used a nuclear weapon again are pretty astronomical. We’ve been in how many wars since the end of World War Two? The Berlin crisis, which we solved not with weapons but with food and coal. MacArthur wanted to use nukes when the Chinese crossed the Yalu. Nixon in Cambodia. Kennedy in Cuba. So many times we came so close, but it never happened.
“That was not chance, Mister President. Let me ask you something. May I, sir?”
Templeton seemed a bit surprised she was asking his permission. He nodded.
“What if you can only change when you truly, absolutely believe you have done the unthinkable? That you entered that code and pushed that button?” She tapped the book. “That’s the biggest secret in the Book of Truths. That’s the part you didn’t get to read when you came into office. That she won’t get to read when I brief her tomorrow night while she’s still heady from the inauguration, when I will, as you say, destroy her dreams and promises.”
“Who controls the nukes then? Or are they all a fake?”
“Oh, you know they’re real. You received the After Action Report on Pinnacle and the Nevada Test Site.”
Templeton snorted. “Hell yeah. Spent hours on the phone with the Russians and then the Chinese telling them we had an accident when they picked up the blast. But who controls them?”
The Keep tapped the book. “The Cellar, of course. The real launch codes are in here. And the only one who can authorize the release of that code is Hannah. Because this country needs people who don’t push buttons.
“The PEOC is why some presidents have changed so dramatically while in office. Because they did push it. Then they sat there for those two minutes, watching that screen, realizing what they had unleashed, the true impact of what had happened hitting them so hard that when that door opened and the Keep walked in, they fell to their knees in relief. They’d truly realized that nuclear warfare is lose-lose. A zero-sum game. They changed.
“Truman started the Cellar because he actually did have the bomb dropped. Twice. It all comes down to a simple truth that dates back to this quill.” She waved it. “Jefferson realized, after he had completed the Louisiana Purchase, that he had exceeded his constitutional powers. And he finally understood that one man can’t have ultimate power because eventually he will use it.”
The president got out of his chair and went over to a counter. He poured himself a stiff drink. He’d had the bottle and glass put there the previous day. He’d learned from his last meeting with the Keep to be prepared. He downed the glass, then poured another.
“I’m not buying it.” He downed the second glass and poured a third. “We’re not the only ones with nukes now. Truman had the power exclusive. But that changed.”
“Oh,” the Keep said. “There is a Russian version of Hannah. Sitting near the Kremlin.”
“And a Keep there too?”
“I hope, but that’s not within my need to know, sir. However, if you study history, you will see that many brave Russians have died keeping the world from destroying itself. One spy kept the Cold War balanced by keeping both sides up to date on the true balance of power. He was killed by the KGB as a traitor when they inserted him, still alive, into a crematorium inch by inch and filmed it to show to others as an object lesson. That man deserves a star on the wall at Langley. More so than the last two stars that went up on that wall.”
The president walked to the window and gazed out at a wintry Washington, DC. He took a sip from his glass. “You should have told me.”
“Then it wouldn’t have mattered, sir,” the Keep said. “You’re a politician. That personality type is the complete opposite of the person we need to have their finger over that button. Reagan could have signed that treaty in Iceland and rid the world of nuclear weapons, but he put politics first. They all do. Then some go in that room and push the button and they learn. Why do you think their hair goes white?”
The president ran a hand through his hair without even realizing it. “I didn’t
go into that room. I never pushed that button.”
The Keep stood. She shut the Book of Truths with a solid thud. “I know, sir.”
He looked at her. “Is that why I wasn’t reelected? Why you shut the book and don’t want my last lessons learned?”
The Keep smiled sadly. She picked up the book and tucked it tight to her chest. “It’s not a bad thing to be a good man, Mister President. It’s just not enough.”
“Like I said before, they shouldn’t call that the Book of Truths,” Templeton called to her as she headed for the door. “They should call it the Book of Secrets. And maybe, just maybe, all of this has taught us we shouldn’t have secrets anymore.”
The Keep paused at the door and looked over her shoulder. “That would be a very fine world indeed, Mister President.”
For more on the Nightstalkers, read the first book, Area 51: Nightstalkers.
For more on how Hannah and Neeley, the housewife and the assassin, were recruited by Nero for the Cellar, read Bodyguard of Lies. And for how the Cellar operates, read Lost Girls.
I write factual fiction. I gather real events and add in a fictional premise and characters.
Yes: There was a marine named Smedley Butler and he was awarded two Medals of Honor.
Yes: Churchill did say that truth must be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
Yes: The officially acknowledged first nuclear weapon ever “lost” by the US was in 1950 over Canada. Sorry, Canadians. Our bad.
Yes: When Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara instituted technical launch codes on nuclear weapons to prevent unauthorized deployment, the Strategic Air Command, on its own, decided to override that by setting all the codes to 00000000 and they stayed that way for a while before anyone caught on.
Yes: The Pentagon did secretly remove President Nixon’s ability to launch nuclear weapons in his erratic, waning days before he resigned.
Yes: President Jimmy Carter did send the nuclear launch authorization codes out with his laundry.
Yes: President Ronald Reagan had the codes in his pocket when he was shot and they ended up on the emergency room floor, forgotten about.