by Jack Mars
They stepped out onto a catwalk.
Below them was a vast cavernous space. Banks of ancient computer consoles were in the near foreground. The consoles had small video screens, clock faces, dials, and buttons. Every ten feet or so was a command keyboard.
About two dozen men and a handful of women in military uniforms moved about or sat at the consoles. Above their heads were more four modern video screens, like the jumbotrons at a football game. Each screen appeared to show a different ballistic missile, mounted in a silo. The screens scrolled through various angles—upright from a distance, worm’s-eye view looking straight up the length of the missile, a view from above the nose cone. There was Persian writing on the fuselages of the missiles. There were also American flags, which had never been painted over. The missiles themselves were silver, and were at least five stories tall.
“Ed?” Luke said.
“It’s real, man. Those are American-made Titan I missiles, deployed in the early 1960s, then scrapped almost right away—like three or four years later. That thimble-looking thing there at the top is a W38 nuclear warhead. Three and a half megatons, if I’m not mistaken. More destructive power than all the bombs dropped during World War Two combined, including the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
“And they’ve got four of them here,” Ari said.
“Yeah.”
“What’s that computer system?” Luke said.
“UNIVAC Athena,” Ed said. “Vintage, circa late 1950s. It was designed to launch missiles and nothing else, and that system is probably married to the onboard computers of those specific missiles. Real primitive, but the kind of thing that used to launch men into space. I’d say this one predates the earliest versions of the Internet by at least ten years, which means it was probably never networked to the regular world. These days, I doubt anything is left that can communicate with it.”
“Meaning the system is isolated,” Luke said. “Launch and control can only come from here?”
“In all likelihood, yes.”
Luke’s hands started to roam his own body. He had two Israeli grenades left. He glanced at Ed. Ed had at least a couple of Israeli grenades. His M79 was gone. It wouldn’t have looked right walking into an Iranian missile silo with a big American grenade launcher strapped to his back.
“Why were the missiles scrapped?” Luke said.
No one seemed to notice them up here on the catwalk yet, or if they had, they didn’t show the slightest interest in them. They had a minute, maybe no more than that, to talk. If he could get a sense of the capabilities of these things, and their vulnerabilities, maybe he could figure out what to do about them.
Ed shrugged. “Technology was moving too fast. These things were obsolete almost before they were deployed. They operate on liquid fuel. An oxidizer has to be added at the very last moment to get the fuel to ignite. If you look closely, you’ll see they’re sitting on hydraulic platforms. They have to be lifted to the surface before they’re launched. The whole mess can take fifteen minutes or more, if people know exactly what they’re doing. Longer if the people are clueless. Who’s got that kind of time?”
“Can they hit Israel?”
Ed nodded. “Oh yeah. And with pretty good accuracy. They’re fast, and they’re big. If they can still get airborne after all these years, just one of these things would turn Tel Aviv into a Rorschach test.”
Luke looked at Ari. “Can Israeli missile defense knock these out of the sky?”
Ari shrugged. “I’d hate to have to find out.”
“If we blow that command system…” Luke said.
Ed was noncommittal. “The UNIVAC? Maybe.”
“It might be worth a shot,” Luke said.
“Yeah,” Ed said. “The only problem would be if they switched the missiles over to a different operating system years ago, and the UNIVAC, and all these people, are just for show. I wouldn’t put it past them.”
Luke pondered that. Right until the alarm bells went off.
It started with a loud buzzer that went for several seconds, then stopped as abruptly as it had started. An instant later, the clarion started. CLANG, CLANG, CLANG, CLANG, CLANG.
Then another sound joined in.
WHOOOP. WHOOOP. WHOOOP.
The two shrieking sounds overlapped and engulfed each other.
“What is that, the war?” Ed said. “They started the bombing?”
“I don’t think so,” Ari said. “Look!”
The catwalk started to shake. Luke looked down toward the other end. A door had slid open and a squad of men ran toward them.
“I think they figured out my ruse,” Ari said.
“Oh man,” Luke said. He drew his gun, the last one he had left—a pistol he had taken from a dead Iranian officer at the police station.
Without thinking, he ran straight at the approaching men, gun pointed. He fired.
BANG!—the sound deafening, echoing through the cavern of the command center. Ahead of him, a man dropped. The other men were bringing their weapons around.
He fired again.
BANG!
Another man dropped. Below him, people were screaming.
He threw the gun and barreled into the crowd of soldiers. Now his fists were flying, beating men down. Suddenly Ed was next to him, doing the same. Fists, knees, elbows, they battered the Iranian soldiers, and were battered by them. Ed flipped a man over the side. A rifle fell to the steel surface of the catwalk.
Ed picked it up. He shot a man on the ground. Luke barely heard it. His ears were ringing. The others were running back the way they came.
Luke looked down at the floor of the command center. Ari was down there. He stood amidst chaos, as people scrambled to get away. He was shouting something.
Between the alarms and the ringing in his ears, Luke could barely hear him.
“What?”
“Your grenades! Throw me the grenades!”
Oh. Luke unclipped his grenades and tossed them over the side, one after the other. Ari caught them both. He pulled the pin on one and placed it on one of the large UNIVAC consoles. Then he ran.
“Don’t look now, man,” Ed said. He pointed to the other side of the command center. Another squad of troops had emerged from a door over there. They weren’t coming up here. Instead, they were assuming firing positions.
BOOOM!
The grenade went off.
The explosion was insane. The catwalk shook, knocking both Luke and Ed to the deck, but it did not fall. For an instant, the cavern was filled with red and orange light. The overhead lights flicked and went out, making this part of the command center dim, but not dark. Not black of night. Somewhere nearby, emergency lights were still operating.
Luke blinked. In his mind’s eye, he rewound a few seconds. He saw the computer system blow apart, and then black smoke begin to pour out. No way that smoke was good for you. The smoke began to rise up all around him.
Machine gun fire strafed the catwalk, bullets ricocheting.
“Ow!” Ed shouted. “Ow! Ow! Ow!”
“Ed?”
“It’s okay, it’s okay. I’m hit. I’m hit in the bicep.”
Luke couldn’t see him. Ed was obscured by smoke.
“You all right?”
“I’m hit, man. Every time I come out with you, I get hit. Do you ever get hit?”
“Yeah, I do. I got hit a few weeks ago. Remember? It’s not like I never get hit.”
BOOOM!
Another grenade went off. Somewhere, on the other side of this smoke, sparks and flames flew. It was impossible to see down there now. Gunfire erupted everywhere.
The catwalk began to shake again. A man came running out of the smoke. At first, he was nothing more than a silhouette. A moment later, he turned into Ari.
“You guys ready?” he said. “I blew the computers. I think we better get out of here.”
The elevator ride to the surface was interminable. At every moment Luke expected it to stop. The three of them st
ood there, silent, sweating, the place filled with acrid smoke, the distant rumble of ongoing minor explosions.
And yet, somehow, none of the Iranians, in all the smoke and chaos below, thought to do the simplest thing—to stop their elevator.
They reached the top and the three of them burst out.
Luke was expecting a blazing gun battle when they came out of the elevator building. Instead, the four guards were gone. So was the Mercedes. Iranians knew how to hotwire things, too.
Luke pulled out his phone and pulled up Swann’s number. For several seconds, the phone beeped, then his voice came on.
“Helu,” Swann said.
“Khojir National Park,” Luke said. “Confirmed. Four Titan I 1960s-era ICBMs. Very deep underground. Massive bunker busting ordnance required. You have the coordinates.”
“Roger that,” Swann said.
“Good bye, Swann.”
“Good luck,” Swann said. “Be safe.”
Luke hung up the phone. He wasn’t sure what was going to happen, but it certainly seemed like he had just called an air strike in right on top of their heads. They stood in the empty lot for a moment, white plumes of breath rising from their mouths. In the far distance, south and west of the city, giant explosions erupted. A few seconds later, three supersonic fighter planes streaked overhead, one by one, very low, their engines screaming, splitting open the sky.
Ed was covering his ears with his hands. Blood ran from his right arm. His shirt was shredded there. He had the Iranian rifle slung over his back.
“Those were American fighters,” he said. “It looks like the war has started. This is probably not a good place to stand for very long.”
“With no car, I don’t know where you’d like us to go,” Ari said.
Close by, Luke spotted a chopper in flight. Had it always been there? It seemed to appear out of nowhere. It was a Bell helicopter, a variant of the common UH-1 Huey troop transport that Americans flew. A lot of militaries used that chopper. This one had the distinctive yellow and black markings of the Iranian Air Force. It was coming down to the helipad.
“Maybe we can borrow that chopper,” he said.
He started to walk toward the pad. Ed unslung his rifle.
“Watch those forward guns, man. M60s, they’ll slice us to ribbons in two seconds flat. Don’t irritate those pilots.”
Luke saw the two forward machine guns, loaded with big 300-round ammunition belts. Slice them to ribbons? Those guns would liquefy the three of them, and barely leave anything for the crows.
The chopper touched down lightly. Luke put his hands in the air and walked slowly, moving straight toward the cockpit. Suddenly, a woman’s head popped out of the right hand side of the cockpit.
He couldn’t believe it.
It was an American.
It was Rachel.
“Luke!” she shrieked. “What are you doing? Run! We don’t have all day.”
* * *
The chopper lifted off, banked hard left, and turned toward the north. In a moment, they were flying fast over snow-capped mountains, the sprawl of Tehran to their left, and then behind them. Straight ahead, maybe twenty miles away, was wide open water.
More fighter jets zoomed overhead, moving faster than sound. Compared to them, this helicopter crawled at a snail’s pace.
Luke poked his head into the cockpit. There was a woman and a man in here. The woman was putting her helmet back on over her auburn hair.
He knew these two—of course he did. Rachel and Jacob. They were old friends of his, and they had followed him to the Special Response Team. Both of them were former U.S. Army 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment—code names Nightstalkers. The Nightstalkers were the Delta Force of helicopter pilots.
Rachel was as tough as they came. She had a muscular body, like the old Rosie the Riveter posters from World War Two. She had recently given up her long-held career as an amateur cage fighter. Meanwhile, Jacob was as steady as a rock. He was very thin, all angles and jutting Adam’s apples. He looked nothing like your typical elite soldier. But his calm under fire was legendary. He was one of the best helicopter pilots on Earth.
Luke liked Rachel. He liked her fire. Always had. He liked them both, and that was putting it mildly. Right at this moment, he liked them more than ever before.
“What are you guys doing here?” he shouted.
“Your girlfriend sent us,” Rachel said.
“My girlfriend?”
Jacob shook his head and smiled. “She’s teasing you. The President asked for volunteers to come in here and extract you people. We had nothing better to do, so we raised our hands.”
Behind them, an explosion rent the sky. An instant later, a shockwave hit them and the helicopter shuddered. Luke nearly fell forward into their laps.
Jacob raised a hand. “We’re okay.”
Luke went back to the side bay door and looked back. A massive bomb had just hit the Khojir facility, right where they had been a few moments ago. A cloud of smoke and dust reached high into the sky from the explosion. An instant later, another bomb hit, and another gigantic explosion went up.
Luke held on tight as the next shockwave hit. He looked at the sky. The bombers were so high, he couldn’t even see them.
South of the city, anti-aircraft guns opened up, looking for something to hit. Luke turned and looked forward. The chopper was dropping in altitude. Already they were almost out over the water. They were flying fast—better than 130, Luke would say.
He passed through the hold again. Ed and Ari were strapped into their seats. They’d both taken some lumps this morning. They were sitting back with their eyes closed. They looked ready to call it a day and let the pilots do their jobs. Luke poked his head into the cockpit again.
“What’s the plan here?” he said. “I know we’re not flying this thing back to DC.”
“We’re running for daylight,” Rachel said. “We get over the Caspian Sea, then out past Iranian territorial waters, we should be—”
Just then, the radio squawked. A voice shouted in Farsi. Luke heard it and knew instantly what it meant.
“Helicopter, identify yourself.”
“Oh boy.”
Below them, the land ended and they passed over the water. For an instant, Luke caught a glimpse of waves breaking white against the shore.
“What do they want?” Jacob said.
“They want us to identify ourselves. Got anything for that? A mission name, call numbers, anything bogus that might hold up for a few minutes?”
“No. I really don’t. We launched this thing off a ship out at sea. It’s just an old captured Iranian Huey. It’s a little outdated, but it rides pretty much the same as one of ours. Swann sent us the coordinates through channels, and we flew in there without talking to anybody. I don’t know why they need to talk to us now.”
“Identify yourself now,” the voice said over the radio. “Or we will shoot you down.”
“Sounds like they don’t trust us,” Rachel said.
Luke looked out through the windshield. The dark sea buzzed by below them, maybe fifty feet down, almost close enough to touch.
“I don’t even see anybody out here. I’d just ignore that guy and keep moving. What do you think?”
Neither pilot had time to answer. The second Luke spoke, a jet flew by overhead, the shriek of its engines impossibly loud.
“Fighter plane,” Rachel said. “Same colors as this, yellow and black.”
“Did you get a make on it?” Jacob said.
“Looked like a MIG-21, Russian made.”
“Terrific. Luke, if I were you, I’d go strap myself—”
Another jet screamed by. A dark shadow went by, to the left and behind the plane. Then another.
“We’ve got trouble.”
“Can’t we do anything?” Luke said.
“Against those guys?” Rachel said. “Supersonic fighter jets?”
“Just asking,” Luke said.
Jacob gla
nced to his left and skyward. Suddenly he shouted. It was an act so out of character Luke didn’t know what to make of it.
“Incoming!”
“Right stick!” Rachel screamed.
Luke dashed backward, moving toward a seat to strap in. Suddenly, the chopper lurched hard right. Luke fell to the floor of the hold. The chopper banked, flying nearly sideways. Luke clung to the floor. Through the right side bay door, the water was right in front of him.
Then gunfire erupted all around them. Bullets ricocheted inside the cabin. Metal shredded and sparks flew.
Luke caught an image of Gunner. Not tall, thirteen-year-old Gunner. But tiny, eight-year-old Gunner, already into zombies at that age, wearing Dawn of the Dead footsie pajamas.
“Circling,” Jacob said, his voice calm again. “Coming back around. Jesus.”
“Circling?” Luke shouted.
“The jets are circling,” Rachel said.
Luke pulled himself upright. He had to get strapped in. He fell into a seat, pulled the leather straps around himself.
“Fighter number one,” Jacob said. “Making a run. Here… he… comes.”
Another burst of gunfire came. THUNK, THUNK, THUNK, it shredded the metal skin of the chopper.
Rachel made a squeak, almost like a mouse.
Something was severed up front and steam began to shoot out in a violent cloud.
Ed opened his eyes. He shook his head. “This day just gets better and better.”
“How’s your arm?” Luke said.
Ed nodded. “It hurts, man.” The shirt was soaked through with blood.
“Sorry,” Luke said. “I should have patched it up when I had the time.”
“When was that?”
Luke shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Fighter number two,” Jacob said matter-of-factly. “Incoming.”
Luke closed his eyes.
THUNK, THUNK, THUNK, THUNK, THUNK.
It sounded like hard rain falling on a tin roof. Metal peeled and shredded all around them. Somewhere glass shattered.
An alarm in the cockpit began to sound.
BEEP, BEEP, BEEP…
Jacob’s disembodied voice said: “Mayday, mayday. Tail rotor is hit. We’re going to lose it. Assume crash positions.”
