by Patrick Lee
Evelyn caught Paige’s eye and nodded hello.
“Pilot provided the verification code?” Paige said.
“Yeah.”
Travis let his eyes track over the room’s other workstations, set up to handle less-friendly situations. Technicians sat at or stood near these desks, idle but ready to engage in a hurry. Along with the network of cameras, the desert around Border Town hid one of the world’s most formidable defensive systems, designed to counter both ground and airbased attacks. The most critical ingredient, though, was simply the policy of not allowing unauthorized aircraft anywhere near the place. Even Air Force One had to forgo its usual complement of escort fighters when it visited.
Several of the screens on the curved wall had a visual of the giant aircraft, less than a mile out now, though its details were still vague. Every camera up top was either snug with the ground or raised above it by no more than a foot, which meant that when focused on a distant, nearly ground-level subject, they all looked through curtains of heat-ripples rising off the baked landscape. The effect was present now on every screen in the room, reducing the distant 747 to no more than a shimmering blob with wings.
Evelyn turned to Paige again as if to say something, but stopped herself. She’d noticed something on her desk display. She keyed her headset.
“Air Force One, I have you changing to heading zero-eight-seven. You are outside the glide path. Please acknowledge.”
Her eyes narrowed as she waited for a reply. She didn’t appear to get one.
“Air Force One, acknowledge change of heading. You are not on course for the runway.”
“He’s climbing,” one of the techs said. “And increasing airspeed. One-eight-zero knots. One-eight-five.”
“Air Force One,” Evelyn said, “if you are aborting approach please acknowledge. Say again, please acknowledge this transmission.” She looked around at the others. “Why the hell can’t he hear me?”
“One-nine-five knots,” the tech said. “Still climbing. If he’s aborting for a retry he should’ve turned by now. Still tracking dead straight on heading zero-eight-seven.”
Travis picked out the wall screen with the best image of the aircraft, and stepped closer to it. As it climbed and drew nearer, its shape began to resolve. So did its color.
Which was uniform gray, not blue and white.
Someone behind him said, “What the hell?”
At that moment the ripples diminished by a fraction, and the plane’s outline, even head-on, became clear. Not the massive bulk of a 747’s body with its wings tying in at the bottom. This was a narrower, sleeker form, and its wings met near the top of the fuselage.
Travis understood that he’d been wrong about Holt’s intentions: they weren’t subtle. They were as far from subtle as they could get.
“That’s not Air Force One,” Travis said. “That’s a B–52.”
Chapter Twenty
Colonel Dennis Pike hadn’t slept much during the night. Along with his wife and older daughter, he’d been up past midnight watching CNN’s coverage from D.C. Then he’d gotten a phone call—one he’d expected—and five minutes later he’d logged in at the front gate of his post: Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. In response to the attack on the White House, all branches of the armed forces were stepping up their levels of readiness. Pike had to oversee the status change for his own command, the 83rd Bomb Wing. It took about six hours, after which he’d gone home and caught ninety minutes’ sleep before another call came in. This one he hadn’t expected.
The man on the other end was the Air Force chief of staff, with orders coming directly from the new president. Strange orders. A wargame of some kind, to be conducted immediately by Pike himself. It would take place at a target range in eastern Wyoming—a location Pike had seen on maps throughout his career, though it had never been labeled as a practice area. It hadn’t been labeled as military property at all, but simply as Restricted Airspace—Undesignated. The president wanted Pike, without a copilot or navigator aboard, to fly a B–52 to the center of that place and test his ability to deploy a very unorthodox weapon, only two of which were even stored at Minot. Stranger still, Pike would relinquish control of his comm system for the entirety of the flight, setting it to a remote-access channel which would allow the Air Force chief and the president—or anyone they selected—to use his radio and do his talking for him.
“Don’t ask,” the chief of staff had said. “All that matters is that we’ll be evaluating your performance. Do this right and we’ve got something very special in mind for you.”
The target was in sight now, less than half a mile ahead: a seemingly arbitrary GPS point ten yards south of what looked like a pole barn, the only structure for miles around. The weapon was to impact that spot of empty ground precisely. Which it would, of course. Given the perfect visibility, low altitude and near-stalling speed, a trained chimp could’ve hit this target. It occurred to Pike, though only briefly, to wonder what the hell his superiors were evaluating. He’d performed the strange set of approach maneuvers exactly as ordered, but he could’ve done it drunk. So could every pilot in his command. There was no logic to it. Now, climbing and accelerating in the final seconds of the run, he realized this wouldn’t even make for a good story at the Officers Club. Whatever it was, no doubt it would be classified forever.
Well, strange was better than boring.
He reached for the weapons system panel.
Paige was already running, even as Travis got the last word out. Others in the room were scrambling for their desks, pulling up the defensive controls in seconds, as their training had taught them to do. But Paige’s solution would be faster. And simpler.
She all but crashed into the rack-mounted instrument cabinet she’d been aiming for, bolted to the wall near the entry. She pressed her palm to the scanner above the cabinet’s door, and with every tense muscle in her body she willed it to respond quickly.
A quarter-second later the cabinet clicked open.
Paige yanked the door aside to reveal a single, coaster-sized red button. It looked exactly like the kind Travis remembered from electrical shop in high school. There’d been one every six feet along the classroom wall, rigged to kill the power in case some freshman touched the wrong wire and started cooking.
The red button in Border Town had a different purpose.
Paige slammed it as hard as she could.
Pike felt a thud reverberate through the airframe as the bomb-bay doors locked open. Felt the sudden increase in drag as the slipstream passing under the plane churned and whirled through the complex interior geometry of the bay. He knew that in another second he’d feel the most dramatic change of all: the instant loss of nearly five thousand pounds of weight. The GBU–28 was a heavy son of a bitch, though only a small fraction of its mass was explosive. Well over four thousand of its pounds were just dumb, solid steel. For good reason.
Pike’s hand was already on the bomb release when everything changed. One instant the desert floor was bare and lifeless. The next, it burst open at half a dozen places, long, rectangular sections of ground being heaved aside from below. Pike had the crazed impression of casket lids coming up through the topsoil of a cemetery.
Half a second later he understood what he was seeing—a reality many times worse than a graveyard come to life.
Kill everything.
That was what the red button did. It deployed every weapon concealed in the desert and gave the system a universal, exceptionless command: target and engage any moving object within range.
Travis had already turned his eyes from Paige back to the wall screens. The bomber had come so much closer in the past five seconds it seemed surreal. Its apparent distance before must’ve been a trick of camera perspectives and shimmer.
Now, as the aircraft continued to swell on screen, Travis saw that its bomb doors were wide open. Even as he noticed, he felt the building shudder, and on every television in the room, multiple rocket-exhaust trails raced up
out of the ground toward the plane.
Pike spent the last second of his life numb. He didn’t feel what his hand was doing on the bomb release, if anything. Didn’t bother to reach for the electronic countermeasures switch either—it probably wouldn’t have saved him even if there’d been time to use it.
He found his brain doing exactly two things at once—each half acting on its own, he imagined. The left half recognized the flight profile and outlines of the Patriot missiles that had come up out of the desert to meet him. His eyes went to the one that would reach him first, its RF seeker head having apparently locked onto the B–52’s nose. He tried to remember the trigger distance for a Patriot’s proximity fuze. Five meters? Ten? Did it matter? The thing was closing toward him at more than twice the speed of sound, and its warhead was a two-hundred-pound frag bomb. Like a hand grenade the size of a keg.
The right half of his brain was looking elsewhere, and more frantically. It was struggling to grab the last image he’d had of his daughter, as he’d left the house the night before. She’d been sitting in the leather recliner beside the couch, in a big purple T-shirt. Bangs in her eyes. She’d looked at him and said what she always said when he left for the base.
Careful.
It meant good-bye, but it meant a lot more the way she said it—high and soft, her eyebrows arched. It meant I love you. It also meant If anything happens to you, I’m always going to love you. He knew it meant all those things. He wasn’t imagining any of it.
Careful.
That word, in his daughter’s voice, was Dennis Pike’s last thought.
Travis saw the first distinct explosion maybe a fourth of a second before the next. The leading Patriot detonated almost nose-to-nose with the bomber, reducing everything forward of the wings to a particle cloud—which the plane instantly outran. The second Patriot, coming from the aircraft’s left, exploded just beneath the port-side wing, which at once became a sheet of flame. An instant later the starboard wing, the only intact lifting surface, pitched upward, hauling the entire plane high and left in a roll.
And revealing, like a curtain drawn aside with a flourish, a bomb that’d been freed from the bay less than a second earlier.
Travis heard sharp breaths sucked in around him.
The loosed weapon, so close now that it was visible from multiple camera angles, was long and sleek like a missile, but it didn’t fly like one. It had no propulsion of its own. It simply arced forward in a smooth line, gently falling away from the climbing trajectory the plane had held. The bomb’s tip dropped to level and then gradually angled downward. Travis could see that by the time it hit the surface, its nose would be pointing straight down, and though he’d never seen one before, he knew exactly what kind of bomb it was.
A bunker buster.
The majority of the thing’s weight, mostly up front, would just be dead metal, shaped to penetrate soil and concrete. The explosive portion would be rigged to blow only after the weapon had traveled some distance beneath the impact point. What that distance might be, Travis couldn’t guess, but without question the bomb would explode inside the complex, not above it. Whether anyone in the place survived was a dice roll now.
He turned and found Paige beside him, Bethany just beyond her, both of them thinking the same things he was. Their eyes were wide—they weren’t even trying to hide the fear. None of them said anything. They just waited. Whatever was coming was only seconds away.
In his peripheral vision Travis saw orange light flare across the wall of screens; the last Patriots had converged on the crippled bomber and brought it tumbling downward in a cartwheel of fire. Now the floor of the room began to vibrate with a high-frequency hum—the 30mm chain guns in the desert had opened up, though in all likelihood they were just shooting at the falling aircraft. Travis didn’t look to see if any of them were firing on the bunker buster. Even if they were, they probably couldn’t stop it.
An absurd thought struck Travis in the moment before impact: an image of the little vault built into their closet wall down on B16.
Where they’d left the Tap for safekeeping.
Chapter Twenty-One
The sound the bomb made when it punched through into the building was nothing like what Travis had expected, whatever he’d expected. It sounded like a machine gun. He realized immediately what he was hearing: the successive impacts as the thing slammed down through one concrete floor after another. It seemed to pass very close to Defense Control, maybe just a few feet beyond one of the walls, before thudding onward, deeper into the complex. Travis could no more count the floors it passed through than he could count autofire shots, but he guessed it’d gone at least as far down as B20.
Then it blew.
Every sensation came at once. The air pressure wave, like someone had clapped a pair of hands violently over Travis’s ears, nearly rupturing the drums. The ungodly jolt to the building’s structure, killing the power and dumping the room into pitch blackness. And then the kinetic shock of the explosion itself, heaving upward, certainly powdering the dozen floors above and below it, and pressing hard against those farther away. Travis felt the concrete beneath his feet arch up impossibly. Heard the reinforcing steel within it groan and crack, and knew without any doubt that when it sagged back a second later it would simply break. He and Paige and Bethany and everyone in the room would plunge with it, pressed to nothing as the interior of Border Town pancaked to a few stories of rubble down at B51.
The floor reached the top of its upward heave. It seemed to linger there for longer than should’ve been possible—time itself was hard to gauge just now—and then it fell back toward level, and right past it. The rebar crackled and strained again at the lowest extent.
But held.
The floor was rising once more—not quite to even, but close—when Travis heard the screams. They came from directly below: Security Control on level B5. With the screams came the sound Travis had expected to hear all around him—the avalanche roar of concrete falling apart. The floor on B5 had given.
A second later the screams were gone, washed out by the maelstrom noise of one story after another collapsing in sequence. A steel-and-concrete waterfall rushing down and away. It sucked the air out of Defense Control and Travis heard a high, surging whine somewhere close by. He realized it was an airstream being drawn down through the line of holes the bunker buster had made.
And then it was over. No more sound. No more air movement. Just the building’s remaining framework shuddering with latent energy from the blast and the collapse.
Emergency lighting kicked on within fifteen seconds. Wall-mounted bulbs that normally ran off the grid switched to batteries.
The air was choked with concrete dust. Everyone stood in a daze, looking for one another or for the exits, or doing nothing at all. Travis saw a tech stoop and straighten a keyboard that’d slid partway off a desk.
Bethany was crying. Paige’s eyes were red but nothing was spilling from them. Travis had no idea what his own eyes were doing.
He took a step and realized the floor was tilted to a greater degree than he’d first believed. He imagined the entire level, or at least a portion of it, sagging toward some lowest, weakest point.
He indicated the door they’d come in through earlier. “Come on.”
As soon as they stepped into the corridor they saw where the bomb had passed. Dead centered in the hall, halfway to the elevator, was a ragged hole two feet wide. There was another in the ceiling straight above it.
Travis turned the other way and studied the stretch of corridor leading out to this level’s perimeter. On a normal day he could’ve seen the hallway’s far end, some ninety feet away, where a T-junction led left and right at the outer rim of Border Town. He couldn’t see it now; the corridor dipped in a long, severe bow that cut off the sightline. The lowest point seemed to be perfectly centered between the elevator and the building’s south exterior wall.
Travis stared for another second, then turned away and moved
toward the two-foot hole in the floor. He stopped just shy, knelt, and studied the edge. It looked strong enough. He eased forward on all fours and then lay flat on his chest, his head extended down into the opening.
What he saw, he would remember forever. Beneath him yawned nearly fifty stories of empty space, churning with concrete fog. Border Town, if it’d stood above ground like a regular building, would’ve been a cylindrical skyscraper with the rough proportions of a soda can. Through the dust, Travis saw that only the southern half of the structure had collapsed—as if the soda can had been cleaved vertically down the middle, and one of its sides had then been crushed flat while the other remained standing.
For all that, the collapse zone looked as big as the world. Stubs of broken floors lined its curved southern sweep like massive, fractured ribs. On the opposite side, the guillotined edges of the north half’s intact levels met the open space in a rough, upright plane. It looked strangely like a stack of balconies facing inward onto the atrium of a highrise hotel, seen from the top floor looking down. Only there were no balconies—just vivisected rooms and corridors and airducts and gushing pipes and sparking electrical conduits, all of it lit up from deep within by more backup lighting. Clothing from torn-open closets spiraled down into the heavy dust, out of sight. Travis saw a bed lying right along the cutoff, ten stories below, its topsheet held on by one corner and the rest fluttering like a streamer in the eddying air.
Two things came to him, so obvious they barely registered as isolated thoughts. First, his and Paige’s residence lay right along the cutoff. Through the dust he thought he could resolve which one was theirs, though it was hard to tell. Second, the Breach and its protective dome were probably unharmed. Level B51 was not a full floor, but simply a tunnel that extended straight north from the central elevator hub, before opening to the vast cavern housing the Breach and its fortifications.
