by Cindy Dees
“Lily, this is General Fiske. Sir, this is Dr. Lily James, the astrophysicist H.O.T. Watch told you about.”
Lily shook the hand the general offered her and managed not to wince at the man’s painful grip.
“Nice to meet you, Doctor,” he rumbled. “We’ve arranged a place for you to work while you’re with us. I took the liberty of having some breakfast sent over there so you can get right to it. We’re eager to hear what you can tell us about our crisis—”
Carter interrupted. “I haven’t briefed her in yet, sir. Haven’t been in a secure location to do it.”
“Hmm. Well, then. Yes. Must get you two to work right away. Time is of the essence, Captain.”
Carter nodded briskly at the general while Lily stared at him. A crisis? What crisis? He hadn’t said anything about a crisis! Alarmed, she followed the men from the cabin. Carter helped her up into the backseat of a black Hummer, then climbed in beside her as the general took shotgun. A driver guided the vehicle down the narrow drive.
After checking what the driver could see in the rearview mirror, she eased her hand across the backseat to lay it on Carter’s thigh. She craved the reassurance of his touch right now.
She was on a secret military installation, some crisis was brewing and they thought she had all the answers? She was just some nobody assistant professor whom her colleagues unanimously believed had a screw loose. How was she supposed to explain to Carter that he’d be wise not to depend on her for any help at all?
He seemed to sense her disquiet, for he laid his big, warm hand over hers and squeezed gently. Even better, he didn’t draw his hand away or push hers off his leg. Although unmistakably powerful, his thigh muscles were relaxed beneath her palm this morning. No sign of a seizure or whatever it was that ailed him. As soon as she had a free moment and access to the internet, she planned to do a little research of her own on this condition of his. He didn’t strike her as the kind of person to have random, full-body seizures without a darn good reason for them.
“Here we are,” General Fiske announced. Lily jumped and yanked her hand out from under Carter’s as the vehicle abruptly stopped.
She frowned. And where exactly was here? All she saw was another cabin, somewhat more ramshackle than theirs had been, nestled up against the side of a huge outcropping of red sandstone.
Perplexed, she followed the two men into the tiny building. And then all became clear. The cabin was merely a shell over what looked like basically a lobby. A stainless-steel elevator door loomed in front of them, and armed guards stood at attention on either side of it.
“At ease, men,” the general said.
In unison, the guards took a single step to spread their boots shoulder-width apart and placed a hand behind their backs. If that was their idea of being at ease, she’d hate to see their idea of rigid and tense.
The elevator door whooshed open and she followed Carter and the general into the conveyance. Ugh. She genuinely disliked little boxes that whisked her up and down at breathtaking speeds. The elevator lurched slightly and descended fast. Her ears popped and she tried to guess how far underground they were but had no idea. Possibly many hundreds of feet.
After a full minute, the doors opened on a brightly lit white corridor that looked like it came straight out of a bad science-fiction movie. “Where are the people in the white lab coats carrying clipboards?” she murmured.
Carter’s mouth twitched and his eyes sparkled at her but he didn’t reply.
The general strode up to an unmarked door and threw it open with a flourish. Curious, she stepped inside to see a small, square room decorated in more unimaginative—and blinding—white. White boards were mounted on two walls, and a gray metal desk sat against the third wall, a computer and printer on top of it. Two chairs sat in front of the desk.
“Top-of-the-line system there,” General Fiske said proudly.
She glanced at it and frowned. She’d had a more powerful system than that in her office several years ago. But she held her tongue as Carter rolled his eyes at her behind the general’s back.
“You two get to work and save the world now, you hear?” And with that, Fiske backed out of the room and closed the door behind him.
Lily rounded on Carter. “What’s this about a crisis? We’re supposed to save the world?”
He replied in a falsely bright voice, “All in good time. Why don’t you crank up that dinosaur and see what it’ll do?”
She frowned and sat down at the desk to boot up the computer. Her frown deepened when Carter commenced examining the walls and ceiling in minute detail. The system had woken up and she was entertaining herself adding layers of password encryption to the log-in sequence when Carter finally leaned down over her shoulder.
“No cameras. The room’s clear,” he murmured, his lips moving lightly against her ear.
Oh, my. Operation Hunk for Lunch was back in play. Big-time.
She half turned in her seat and was preparing to stand up and give the target of her experiment a proper good-morning hug, and maybe even a kiss, when the door opened behind Carter without warning.
He straightened casually and turned around. She peered out from behind him and saw a young man in fatigue pants and an olive-green T-shirt wheeling in a cart with steaming plates of food and a coffeepot on it.
“Thanks, Sergeant,” Carter said. “And could you put a note on the door to have people knock before they come in?”
“Yes, sir. Right away.” The sergeant backed out of the room.
“Ooh. I like it when you go all military and commanding like that,” she purred.
Carter laughed. “Don’t tempt me, sugar. We have work to do.”
“Right. We’re supposed to save the world. Did I mention that I’m a tiny bit claustrophobic? I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to stand being down here.”
He momentarily looked concerned, but then his eyes lit in a smile. “Let me know when you need distraction. I’m sure I can come up with a way to take your mind off being fifteen hundred feet underground. I’ve learned a thing or two from all the shrinks who worked on me for the past few months.”
“Fifteen hundred—” her breathing accelerated rapidly. “I’m not kidding, Carter. I really hate confined spaces. And being buried alive like this ranks right up there on the freak-out scale.”
He stepped close enough that she caught the scent of soap and shaving cream and her breath hitched. “I’m not kidding either. I can jam that door lock so no one can get in here anytime soon and we can do all the distracting you need.”
“Explain to me again how wild monkey sex is going to save the world?” she mumbled.
He laughed. “Ah, you are enough to test a man’s selfcontrol.” He smiled regretfully at her as he added, “And you’re right. We really do have to get to work. Okay, here’s the deal. You did a preliminary test run of your equations on an asteroid a while back. A-57809C.”
She nodded. “It’s an insignificant little chunk of rock due to hit Earth in a few weeks. It’s big enough that it won’t burn up in the atmosphere, but not so big anyone’s worried about it. I was hoping to run my calculations on it and then get grant money to go to Siberia after it lands and measure exactly how accurate my predictions turn out to be. But I can’t even get money to run the calculations, let alone go see if I’m right.”
“If you could run the simulation, what sort of damage would you expect to see in the impact zone?”
“I can’t be certain. That’s what the equations are for.”
“Come now. Surely you’ve plugged in some estimates and crunched them just to see what you’d get.”
“Well, yes,” she replied doubtfully. “But they’re guesses at best.”
“Indulge me. What do you guess your equations will suggest by way of damage?”
Guessing made the scientist in her intensely uncomfortable. But she nodded gamely and answered him. “Well, the asteroid’s core appears to be iron. When it explodes on impact, it s
hould throw out a decent-size electromagnetic pulse. If there were people in the area, their electricity, radio, television, computers—anything with a microchip in it—would be wiped out.”
“Go on.”
She continued, “The region should experience what feels like a small earthquake and any standing foliage immediately around the impact point could be flattened by the shock wave. The main impact crater should be about fifty feet or so across and about half that deep. If this rock were to hit a city, the death toll could run into the hundreds. But as it is, only a few Siberian hares should get cooked and maybe a few reindeer. It’s going to hit a truly desolate region.”
He grimaced as if she’d just confirmed his worst fear.
She frowned. “Even if my calculations are off a little, this asteroid’s still going to hit about as far from human civilization as it’s possible to get on this planet, with the possible exception of Antarctica. So what’s the big crisis?”
“Okay, here comes the classified part. And for the record, I expect General Fiske doesn’t plan to let you out of this hole in the ground until you’ve signed away your life to him.”
A horrible thought occurred to her. “Oh, no!” she exclaimed. “Speaking of my life, I have a lecture this afternoon! My advanced cosmology class—”
Carter interrupted. “Already taken care of. Before you woke up this morning, I asked General Fiske to call the dean of your university. She, in turn, called your department chair, and he assured her the astronomy department will be happy to cover your classes while you’re consulting with the government on a highly important and classified project.”
A slow grin spread across her face. “I’d pay good money to have seen Bill Kaplan’s face after that call. Not only will he be furious that the dean told him to cover for me, but he’ll also be going crazy trying to figure out why the government wanted to talk to me and not him.”
Carter grinned. “I might have suggested to the general that he make it known to the dean how extremely impressed we are with your research and how disappointed we are that the university hasn’t funded your work more aggressively.”
“You didn’t!” she exclaimed. “You’re the best!” She flung her arms around him, and just like that, the atmosphere in the tiny room went from exuberant to crackling with sexual tension. She eyed the door lock wishfully.
Carter stared down at her, his body rigid against hers. Suddenly, she was hugging a marble statue. “Oh, Lordy. I didn’t trigger an episode, did I?” she wailed.
“No,” he gritted out. “This is me doing my damnedest not to throw you down on the floor and have my way with you.”
Oh, yeah. Operation Bed the Hunk was definitely back on track. She asked as casually as she could muster, “Are you sure we don’t have time for a little hanky-panky?”
He sighed and dropped a quick kiss on her forehead before taking a step back from her. “Let me finish briefing you and then you decide for yourself.”
She tried to gather her scattered thoughts as he perched on the edge of the desk. This was crazy! She lost her mind completely every time he touched her. She had to focus here. Try to at least act marginally intelligent. There was no way she was as accomplished a scientist as he seemed to think, but she had to fake it as best she could.
Was it getting stuffy in here? She paced the room restlessly. It was already starting to feel like a cage. The walls were not slowly creeping in on her.
He said heavily, “I took a look at the spot you’re predicting the asteroid is going to hit, and there’s a little problem with it.”
Now what? She stopped pacing and faced him head-on. What had she missed? She cast back over her research. Nothing indicated that even a single human would be hurt when A-57809C landed in a blaze of glory in a few weeks.
Carter continued, “You see, the Russians installed a remotely operated computer system a few years back right where you’re saying the asteroid’s going to hit. We in the U.S. government call it the doomsday machine.”
“Sounds ominous.”
“It is. It’s an automated system for launching their entire nuclear arsenal if a certain set of conditions are met.”
Apprehension was starting to buzz low in her belly. “What sort of conditions?”
“We believe it’ll be a combination of several triggers. Loss of computer or radio contact with Moscow. Loss of external power to the system itself. A nearby impact of sufficient heat and force to simulate a nuclear detonation. An accompanying electromagnetic pulse to verify the nuclear nature of the explosion.”
Oh. My. God. She asked in a small, scared voice, “And who will this machine launch the entire Russian nuclear arsenal at?”
“Us.”
Chapter 4
Lily’s stomach simultaneously turned to stone and dropped all the way to her feet. “This is bad, Carter. Really, really bad.” She paced around the small space, wringing her hands, then reversed direction when she started to make herself dizzy. “We have to tell someone. Right away! That asteroid could accidentally set off this doomsday thingie!”
He smiled gently. “I already have told plenty of people. Why else do you think you’re here? Uncle Sam wants you and me to run your simulation and verify the accuracy of your predictions, and then we’ll figure out what to do next.”
She couldn’t seem to stop pacing, nor could she seem to pull her scattered thoughts together enough to think.
Thankfully, Carter stepped in front of her, halting her latest lap around the room. He took her icy hands in his warm ones. “It’ll be okay, Lily. Thanks to your forecast model, we’ve got a little time to fix this before something unfortunate happens.”
“Unfortunate?” she cried. “It’ll be the end of the world! Even if no one fires back at Russia, they’ll throw the entire planet into nuclear winter. Whoever doesn’t die of radiation will starve!”
“Like I said, we’ve got some time.”
“How can you be so calm about this?” she demanded angrily. “This is horrible!”
“I got my panic out of the way when I first saw your data. And besides, I’m a soldier. I’m trained not to panic.”
He was right. She had to calm down. To think. She was a scientist. She could come up with a logical way to avoid Armageddon.
“Why don’t you sit down, Lily? Have a bite to eat? Clear your head,” he suggested mildly.
She flared up, “If you think I can eat at a time like this, you’re crazier than me.”
He merely shrugged and reached for a piece of bacon. Gradually, his complete calm penetrated her panic and she moved to the desk and started to type into the computer.
“What’re you doing?” he asked.
“Signing on to the internet so I can access my files at the university.”
“This facility isn’t connected to the internet. It’s too big a security risk for a place like this. I do, however, have a flash drive with your equations on it. I downloaded them from the internet a few days ago.”
Smiling brilliantly at him, Lily gratefully took the storage device he held out to her. She plugged it into the computer and got to work.
Two hours later, she was about to pull out her hair in frustration. The computer they’d given her was too slow, it lacked the right programs to run the calculations she needed, and furthermore, the keyboard typed funny. She needed a decent mainframe, darn it.
“Carter, this isn’t going to work,” she announced.
He looked up from the laptop someone had brought in for him. She’d put him to work designing a program to cross-check the string calculations that were the basis of her entire theory. He kicked his feet down off the corner of the desk and sat up straight. “What isn’t going to work?” he asked warily.
“I need access to real computing power if I’m actually going to run a full simulation of the asteroid strike.”
“How much power are we talking?”
She sighed. “I need a full-blown supercomputer array. They don’t happen to have one of
those stashed down here, do they?”
“Sorry. We’re at Camp Nowhere, not the Pentagon.”
“Any chance you know where I can get access to a big system?”
“Actually, I do. But we’d likely have to take a little trip,” he said.
“I’m up for anything that’ll get me out of this salt mine. It is an old salt mine, isn’t it?”
He blinked. “How’d you guess?”
“Not too many minerals indigenous to this region have to be mined so deep, and this facility is dry, which eliminates just about everything but salt.”
Grinning, he commented, “I forgot for a minute that you’re a brilliant scientist.”
“I don’t know about the brilliant part. Most folks think I’m a certified looney toon.”
“That’s because they don’t understand your work and they don’t like feeling stupid. Better to call you crazy than admit you’re smarter than they are.”
Her eyes widened. That possibility had never occurred to her. “You think?” she asked doubtfully.
“I do. I also think you need to eat something before you pass out on me. You’re a tiny little thing and can’t possibly store much reserve energy.”
Now that he mentioned it, she was getting a decent headache. Reluctantly, she left her calculations and forced down a dry sandwich, a small bag of chips and a soda.
“So, where are you from, Lily?” he asked as she ate. “Your dossier only said Florida. But that’s a pretty big place.”
“I have a dossier?” she exclaimed. “My God, my parents were right. They’ve always sworn the FBI was watching us.”
“A little radical, are they?” Carter asked wryly.
She shrugged. “They protested the Vietnam War. That’s enough to get someone investigated by Uncle Sam, isn’t it?”
She thought he reddened a little. “I wouldn’t know. A dossier was only prepared on you when I had to brief the doomsday scenario to my superiors. I needed them to respect your credentials and take your predictions seriously.”
“Did you tell them I’m a crackpot?”
He laughed. “No, I told them what I told you. That you’re brilliant and I think you’re onto something.”
