“She didn’t know,” Franzman told him. “She just said we were in ‘imminent danger.’”
“God,” Richards moaned as he dashed the last few meters, passing by the men laboring with Jack’s unconscious weight. Richards stopped at the first of his team members he came to, snatching off the man’s headset. His own had been blown off by the blast.
“Naomi!” he shouted into the microphone. “Open the portal! They’re going to nuke us!” To the rest of his team, who had their weapons aimed at the other FBI agents approaching from the direction of the main gate, he yelled, “Drop your weapons. They’re friendlies now. We’ve got to get back inside!”
Impatiently, they all gathered around the thick blast doors, waiting for them to open.
***
They’re going to nuke us. Richards’ words hit Naomi and the others like a punch in the gut. Had it been anywhere else or any other time, she would have laughed at the bad joke. Now...
“Naomi!” Richards shouted again.
“Stand by,” she told him. “We’ve lost utility power and we can’t open any of the blast doors on batteries alone – the hydraulic rams for the doors need too much power.” Turning to Renee, she said, “Start the backup generators.” They were the only thing that could provide enough electricity to drive the hydraulic actuators.
Renee stared at her. “We can’t,” she said. “The intake tunnel is blocked by the steel plating we welded on to hold in the...the thing!
Naomi sat back, her warning to Jack about welding the intake tunnel shut echoing in her mind, but there had been no other choice.
Just as there was no other choice now. “Open all the internal blast doors,” she ordered, “then start the generators. That should give the diesels enough air from inside the complex for the time it’ll take to get the portal open and closed again.”
“All the blast doors?” Renee said. “Even the antenna complex?” The harvester they had captured from Spitsbergen was contained there in one of the cells. It had been dormant since they’d returned, and there had been no time since then for anyone to do more than make sure it didn’t get into trouble.
“Yes,” Naomi said. “We’ve only got one shot at this, and we can’t afford to run out of air or we’re dead. We should get most of our air back once there’s a clear airway up through the portal when the surface blast doors are open.”
“You’re the boss,” Renee said quietly as she began to open all the blast doors, a shiver going up her spine as she hit the control to open the one to the antenna complex. “You’re clear, power!” she called to the woman in charge of the complex’s power systems.
“Starting the generators now,” the woman said uncertainly.
Even here, upstairs in the command dome, they could hear the deep roar of the two massive diesel generators in the lab dome as they coughed into life.
Naomi had to pop her ears right away as the big engines began to suck in hundreds of cubic feet per second of the complex’s air. Huge as the base was, the air wouldn’t last long at all.
They had to endure an agonizing wait while the voltage on the generators stabilized before the woman at the power console shouted, “The generators are on line! We’ve got power!”
“Naomi!” Richards called again. “Open the goddamn door!”
“Open the portal doors and get everyone below, now!” Naomi shouted.
***
“Christ,” Jack gasped, blinking his eyes as he finally came to. He slowly sat up, holding his arms across his chest where the Kevlar vest had stopped the slugs that otherwise would have killed him. It gave him a chill, how closely the shots matched the rounds he’d taken in Afghanistan years ago. Fortunately, the FBI agents had been shooting 9mm weapons that couldn’t penetrate his vest. But it still felt like someone had hit him in the sternum with a sledgehammer. “That hurts.”
“Nice of you to join us,” Richards snapped, kneeling down to make sure Jack was okay. “I guess you’ll live, at least for the next minute or so.”
“What the hell’s going on?” Jack asked, looking with bewilderment at the gaggle of FBI agents standing around them and the Blackhawk helicopter sitting nearby.
“Nothing good,” Richards told him tersely as he helped Jack to his feet. “Naomi!” Richards shouted angrily. “Open the goddamn door!”
As if on cue, the huge concrete and metal doors of the portal began to open, the two leaves slowly rising upward. There was a curious sucking noise as the doors opened that Richards didn’t remember it making when they’d come up to the surface.
Once the doors reached their fully open position, the elevator appeared, and Richards ushered everyone on.
“Can I ask what the rush is?” Jack said as he stood on the concrete lip of the portal, not wanting to step onto the elevator. As large and strong as it was, it was clearly overloaded, and he didn’t relish plunging the seven stories to the bottom.
From the east there came the faint sound of a large jet, and everyone turned to look. The aircraft was barely visible, trailed by black sooty exhaust. It was making a steep climb, and if it kept on its current course, it would fly right over the base.
“That!” Richards shouted as he shoved Jack onto the elevator. “Naomi,” he said through the microphone. “Get us down! Now, now, now!”
“Oh, shit,” Jack whispered to himself as he finally put together the things that Richards hadn’t had time to tell him. He recognized the plane, even though it was difficult to make out any details at this distance. He had seen B-52s in action in Afghanistan, and once you’d seen one and what it could do, you never forgot.
Slowly, so slowly, the portal elevator began to descend.
“Yeah,” Richards told him, his eyes riveted on the plane as it ballooned skyward, still heading right toward them. “That about sums it up.”
At last, after what seemed a lifetime, the massive portal doors began to close over them, and that’s when Jack made out the roar of engines somewhere in the complex. The diesels, he knew. They had to start the backup generators. The air...
The last thing he glimpsed before the doors sealed shut was a tiny speck falling away from the B-52.
***
“Bomb away!” the bombardier cried. “If that isn’t right in the bullseye, I’ll eat the pilot’s undies.”
“You wish,” Harris quipped back as she hauled the big plane around in a diving left turn. This course would put the buttes between the plane and the bomb when it ‘went off,’ and might also give her a legitimate reason to do a flyby over Beale. The air traffic controllers in the area were having a complete cow, but if her orders were to simulate a bombing of Sutter Buttes, she was going to do it right: they’d just have to clear any traffic out of her way.
“Get your blast curtain closed!” she snapped at her copilot. The cockpit had thick curtains that were pulled shut to prevent the crew from being blinded by a nuclear blast.
“Major,” he snapped, “you can’t be serious! We’re at five hundred feet flying at almost five hundred knots, with air traffic all over the place out there!”
“Close them!” Harris shouted. As soon as we get back to base, she vowed, I’m going to kick your ass off my crew.
Muttering under his breath, the copilot did as he was told, yanking the heavy curtain closed.
“Time to detonation?” Harris asked.
“Fifteen seconds,” the bombardier said, estimating the time until the bomb would reach the proper altitude above the target before it electrically simulated detonation. But there wouldn’t be so much as a puff of smoke, he lamented as the timer wound down. “Ten... nine... eight...”
***
“Shut down!” Naomi cried as soon as the elevator reached its stops at the bottom of the portal shaft.
The woman at the power console hit the kill switch, and the droning of the big engines suddenly ceased.
“Get the surface sensor array down!” Naomi remembered that the array would be blown away if it was still protruding abov
e the ground.
“Already done,” Renee said as the screen at the front of the room faded to black.
Naomi didn’t hear her. She was dashing down the steps to the lower level. “Jack!” she cried. “Jack! Everyone get in here, fast!”
Jack followed the others out of the portal into the main junction, pausing just long enough to slap the button that would close the portal blast door before running headlong into the command dome and into Naomi’s waiting arms.
The portal door closed and locked just as the bomb detonated.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
What had been an intact B83 thermonuclear bomb microseconds before was transformed into a tiny sun shining above the scrub-covered base of the Sutter Buttes, briefly reaching a temperature of nearly ten million degrees at its core.
Set for a yield that was equivalent to three hundred thousand tons of TNT, the explosion obliterated everything to a distance of two miles north of the buttes. The crops and orchards were set alight by the thermal radiation, and then ripped from the earth by the blast wave that followed. Homes and buildings half a mile past North Butte Road, nearly two miles from ground zero, were first ignited by the thermal radiation, then crushed by the blast wave. At a distance of nearly five miles from ground zero, people, animals and birds were killed or injured throughout the Gray Lodge Waterfowl Management Area. The town of Live Oak, nine miles to the west, suffered minor damage, with several hundred people temporarily blinded by the flash. The areas to the south, as the Clement-thing had predicted, were largely shielded from the blast by the intervening buttes.
After the flash heralding the bomb’s detonation, everyone in a radius of nearly twenty miles was treated to the chilling sight of a mushroom cloud rising over the buttes, which themselves had been scoured clean of life.
***
The old Titan complex had been built to withstand the blast and overpressure of near-misses by the megaton-range warheads developed early in the Cold War. But a three hundred kiloton blast five hundred meters directly above the entry portal would not so easily be shrugged off by any structure ever built by the hands of Man.
In the fraction of a second that the blast wave took to reach the ground, the huge blast valves in the exhaust complex, still open from when the generators were being run, snapped shut, holding back the enormous overpressure.
The valves in the intake complex were already closed, but one of them had suffered minor damage from the satchel charges used by the FBI agents. A small gouge in the edge of the lowest blast valve, no wider than a dime, allowed enough of the blast overpressure through to blow open the door at the rear of the filtration area and tear off one of the steel plates that had been welded to the intake tunnel entrance.
The young harvester in the air intake complex, just recovering from being stunned by the earlier explosion of the satchel charges, was hurled to the rear of the air intake complex, where it lay still.
***
Jack felt as if a god from Greek mythology had taken the entire world and given it a vicious shake. He held on tightly to Naomi as the walls of the command dome rang like a huge bell, the concrete vibrating and warping. They were tossed around on the floor, but the base designers had been careful to mechanically insulate the floors: that was the purpose of the huge gaskets around the edges of the floors and walls.
A small crack suddenly zipped along a section of the dome wall, but the old structure held together.
Deafened by a roar from a hundred freight trains, Jack’s ears popped as the pressure spiked, and he saw in the flickering light that the dome’s blast door hadn’t fully closed behind them. The temperature, too, suddenly shot up, and he caught the scent of something burning. He hoped that they weren’t about to be seared by superheated air.
The main lights flickered out, to be replaced by emergency lighting along the ceiling of the command dome’s lower level. The intense beams provided a surreal shadow theater of dust, smoke, and bits of debris from the ceiling that had been shaken loose to rain down on Jack and the others.
As he lay on the floor, Naomi pressed tight against him, he realized that the roar was gradually fading.
“Naomi,” he said, his voice sounding distant, muted. “Naomi!”
“I’m okay,” she said, pulling away from him slightly, blinking some of the dust from her eyes. “My God, I can’t believe they...that they did this!”
“I can’t believe we’re still alive,” Jack said, giving silent thanks to God that he was still capable of thinking or believing anything.
“We may not be around for long if we don’t get power back and find whatever’s burning and put it out,” Naomi said, shakily getting to her feet. There was a thickening layer of smoke drifting through the door from somewhere out in the main junction. Jack joined her, and they began to help the others up.
“You know, Dawson,” Richards told him, “I think right now I’d rather be outside thinking you were still a bad guy, rather than in here waiting to be slow cooked.”
“I love you, too,” Jack said, clapping Richards on the back.
“Renee!” Naomi called, carefully moving up the stairs.
“We’re here,” Renee called down, “but I think we’re back to using slide-rules for a while.”
“We just have to get the power back on,” Naomi said. “The main breakers must’ve tripped.”
Renee, her hair covered with white dust, shook her head. “It’s not just main power. The command systems all have uninterruptible power supplies, so the computers are still up, but they don’t have anything to talk to beyond the command dome. I think the network fiber must’ve been severed somewhere.” She spat out a mix of spit and dust, then waved her hand in front of her face to ward off the thickening smoke. “We’ll have to get into the lab dome. All the power systems are there, and I should be able to get control through one of the workstations, assuming there’s not too much damage, and track down where the network cabling’s severed. And we need to get the air handlers going to bring in some outside air and pull out the smoke.”
“Have you people ever heard the term ‘fallout?’” Richards chimed in. “We’re right under a mushroom cloud, in case you hadn’t noticed. Sucking in a bunch of that nice radioactive air may not be such a bright idea.”
Renee looked at him as if he were a turd stuck to the bottom of her shoe. “We have NBC filters, you moron,” she snapped. “That would be nuclear with an ‘N’, biological with a ‘B’, and chemical with a ‘C.’ Think your pea brain can handle all that?” As she pushed by a gaping Richards, she turned to Jack and said, “Find somebody smarter the next time you need a sidekick, will you?” With a last glance at Richards, she added, “And get somebody better-looking, too. With hair.”
Jack shared a grin with Naomi at Richards’ expense before catching up to Renee. “No you don’t,” he told her as she made to squeeze through the blast door, frozen partway open, to the junction. Except for the portal door, the other inside blast doors hadn’t fully closed before the main power had gone out when the bomb detonated. “You wait until we give the all-clear. You’re the only one who can get all this stuff running again, and we can’t afford to let anything happen to you.”
“I’m touched,” she said sarcastically, just before she bent over and vomited on the floor. “Fucking nerves,” she whispered, angrily wiping her mouth with the back of her sleeve as she stood up, still unsteady. Looking up at Jack, she said, “I’m fine. Let’s get this over with.”
Jack exchanged a glance with Naomi before he squeezed through the blast door. Naomi and Renee followed behind.
In the main junction, the emergency lighting was on, but the junction remained dim: the lights were near the ceiling, and much of the light was being swallowed by the smoke.
“The smoke’s coming from the lab dome,” Jack said over his shoulder as he carefully crossed through the junction.
“We need to go make sure the others are okay,” Naomi told him, referring to the complex’s other per
sonnel who’d been in the apartments next to the three missile silos. “I’ve also got to check on the silos. If they’re not intact...” She shook her head. “All this could be for nothing.”
Jack wasn’t happy with her making the trek down the long tunnel to the silos, even in company with other armed men and women.
“I’ll take her,” Richards told him quietly.
“We’ll help,” Franzman, the FBI agent who’d formerly been in charge of the assault on the base said.
Jack nodded gratefully. “Keep her safe,” he said. To Naomi, he said, “Be damn careful. We should have the power back on soon so you can get through the blast locks. And watch out for any metal that might’ve been connected or exposed to anything on the surface. The heat...”
“I know,” Naomi told him with a wan smile. Then she turned and headed off down the dim tunnel. Richards took the lead, with Franzman and nine other agents forming a protective circle around her.
“Come on, Romeo,” Renee told him. “Let’s see what the damage is in here.”
Jack and two agents who had come with Franzman squeezed through the open blast door into the lab dome, not sure what they’d find.
Behind them, the remainder of the command center crew returned to their stations, hoping that soon they’d be able to bring the base back to life.
***
“Criminy, what a mess!” Renee exclaimed after she’d managed to finally squeeze her way through the door to the lab dome.
The main floor was a disaster area, with equipment and tables knocked over, and everything covered with paint chips and dust. Jack had to swallow his fear as he saw cracks in the dome wall that zig-zagged like lightning bolts toward the ceiling, disappearing into the smoke above his head. “Make it fast, Renee,” he told her. “I don’t think this place is going to–”
A hunk of concrete as big as Jack suddenly fell from the obscured ceiling, plunging out of the smoke to shatter on the floor with a jarring crash, nearly hitting the pair of FBI agents.
Season of the Harvest Page 40