by Bob Mayer
“I’ll be glad to get some dinner,” Eagle muttered from the cockpit.
“Roland?” Mac asked, ignoring all of them.
“Something broke,” Roland said simply. “And we’re going to fix it.”
“B-R-O-K-E,” Mac wrote on his arm. “I think Roland, once more, in his finite yet elemental genius, will win theoretically.”
“Did you just insult me?” Roland asked, a scowl crossing his ugly mug.
“It’s not just the aging arsenal,” Moms said, stepping into the banter because Roland and Mac sometimes went a bit too far turning banter into something darker. “Remember what’s in your nuke briefing book? The ’95 Black Brant scare?”
“Norwegian clusterfuck,” Nada corrected. “Fucking scientists launched a weather satellite and forgot to tell the fucking Russkies. It went right into the flight corridor a missile from a silo in North Dakota would be on to hit Moscow. Yeltsin had his nuclear football open and was ready to toss the damn thing by pushing all the right buttons.”
“Only time a world leader has ever activated its nuclear suitcase,” Eagle threw in, because Eagle always threw in knowledge… and history… and movies. “Never even happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
“We were lucky Yeltsin was probably drunk,” Mac said. “That’s one thing you can at least count on with the Russians. Remember in Albania with the biological—”
“Eagle,” Moms cut in, “inform the personnel on the ground we’re coming in and they can disperse.”
Mac snorted. “Run for the fucking hills more like it. They only took an outer perimeter, anyway.”
“One minute,” Eagle announced.
“Thirteen on the countdown,” Doc added, still typing away.
“Going to jump soon, Doc,” Moms said. “Secure the computer. Kirk, when we touch down, I want you working with Doc to figure out that second code.”
Roland moved to the very edge and looked down. The sun was setting in the west, casting long shadows across the high plains. Snowdrifts were piled here and there, but at least they weren’t at the height of winter, with Christmas not far away.
“Go!” Eagle announced as the green light flickered on above Roland in the tail section of the plane. The verbal prompt wasn’t necessary as, like Pavlov’s dogs, Roland was gone at the green.
Roland let gravity take charge. He spread his arms and legs to get stable. Then he pulled his arms to his sides, tucked his head into his chest, and missiled down toward the target.
* * *
“Clarence?” Peggy Sue knew exactly how to slide her husband’s name under his rib cage by putting the emphasis on the second syllable.
Her mother had taught her well.
But not well enough since she was living inside a practically unheated, no-flowing-water concrete bunker in the middle of Nebraska.
Clarence dropped the last case of water, frozen solid from sitting in the bed of his pickup during the two-hour drive back. “What?” he demanded in that tone men use to indicate to their wives, significant others, and even one-night stands that they don’t want to hear the real question following the question mark behind their name.
“I ain’t never seen this light blinking before.”
Clarence checked his irritation. “What light?”
“This here.” Peggy Sue pointed to an open metal cabinet next to the pipe she’d been using as a clothesline. “I just pulled that cupboard open to see if—”
“It ain’t a cupboard,” Clarence said. “I told you not to touch nothing.”
“What is it then?” Peggy Sue had picked up the uncertainty in his voice and twisted the dagger a little. “You don’t know what it is, do you?”
It was a flashing orange light. Anyone could see that.
On a piece of crumbling masking tape underneath it, someone had scrawled PINNACLE in black marker. The container had a metal door, which Peggy Sue had opened, and was four feet high by two wide. There were a lot of lights, but only one was active. An old keyboard rested at the base of the cabinet connected to the panel by a single cord. Another piece of masking tape, which had half-peeled over the years, was above it. The same hand had simply written, ENTER CODE — GOOD LUCK OR GOOD-BYE! If they’d used emoticons back in the day, there probably would have been a:) there. Below it in pencil, someone had added: Smoke ’em if you got ’em.
“Oh, crap,” Clarence muttered. “You sure done it now, Peggy Sue.” He slammed shut the door as if doing so solved the problem.
“You don’t even know what I done.”
* * *
“Get ready!” Moms called out on the team net as she staggered to the edge of the ramp, loaded down with weapons and gear. She was tall, though not as tall as Roland, spotting him a little over four inches. She had wide shoulders above surprisingly narrow hips, giving her a body a beach volleyball player would envy. Her short brown hair had streaks of premature gray, more coming with each op, and it had never occurred to her to get it colored. “Eagle. Stay at altitude, just in case.”
The rest of the team was startled at that last sentence.
“That’s not Protocol,” Eagle said, his voice carefully neutral to mask his concern. “I will descend to be on station overwatch at five hundred AGL to give you cover and provide exfiltration as needed.”
“Don’t hit us on the way down,” Mac added, because Mac always had to add something, but also to cover Moms’s gaffe.
“Follow me,” Moms said, shaking it off and stepping from the ramp. Without hesitation, the others followed.
The four got stable, then pulled, getting full canopies. The quick pull was because they were conducting a high altitude — high opening drop, designed to give Roland some time with feet on the ground before they touched down. It was Protocol, the way the Nightstalkers normally ventured into an unknown and abnormal situation. One team member on the ground first for the quick recon, and the rest following right behind. Protocol was what the team lived and breathed, what kept them alive, but lately, it had started to fray at the edges.
“Time hack on the countdown?” Moms asked Eagle.
“Ten minutes, thirty seconds,” Eagle responded.
Moms was focused on the mission ahead, listening to some last-second updates from Ms. Jones back at the Ranch; Mac was mentally running through nuclear warhead Protocol, cut the blue or red wire sort of thing; Kirk was monitoring Moms’s radio traffic and scanning local freqs to see if word of a problem had gotten out; Doc was focused on trying to fly his parachute and dreading the inevitable impact with the ground.
It occurred to Nada as he twitched his toggles to get his position above the rest of the team that they might see a mushroom cloud race up toward them as they descended. Such thoughts filled Nada’s dark mind when he was on an op.
It was why he was still alive and the longest-serving member on the Nightstalkers.
* * *
Roland could see the compound — a gray concrete blockhouse surrounded by a high fence with razor wire on the top. The gate to the compound was wide open.
He could also see the flashing lights of emergency vehicles from various government agencies racing away after having secured a far perimeter on Ms. Jones’s alert. The spear was bent, according to the official government code, but if it went to broken arrow or nucflash, they’d better be damn far away to survive.
For a moment, Roland pondered spears and arrows as weapons, because Roland always pondered weapons when he wasn’t actually using them. He decided he’d prefer the former, because while the arrow had the advantage of range, the spear gave a definite advantage close in.
These thoughts, however, did not stop Roland’s mind from processing the ground racing toward him. He’d done enough jumps to have a fairly good idea of altitude. Five thousand, five hundred feet give a hundred, he experience-estimated. He took a quick glance at the nav board on top of his ruck. Five thousand, six hundred. Off slightly, not important at this height, but fatal closer to Mother Earth.
Rolan
d pulled his rip cord and the parachute blossomed above him. The opening shock pulled him upright and he did a quick check for full canopy and grabbed the toggle on each riser, a slightly more difficult task given the hazmat gloves encasing his fingers.
He hated hazmat suits, not for the same reason as the others — because it meant an NBC op: nuclear, biological, chemical — but because it restricted his movement and meant he had to leave his body armor in the team box lashed down in the Snake’s cargo bay. Roland felt naked without body armor.
He turned his attention back to the compound. He spotted a cluster of concrete-covered silos to the north. Another to the west. A few sprinkled to the east and south. “Moms, do we know which silo holds the nuke?”
“The satellite narrowed it down to area, but it could be any of four silos to the west of the facility.”
“I’m getting a schematic of the compound,” Eagle cut in. “All the silos were sealed and buried. You can’t get in from the surface. You’re going to have to use the access tunnel from the LCC to get to the right one.”
“Find out which is the right one ASAP,” Nada said. “Clock’s ticking.”
* * *
Moms and the rest of the team were passing through ten thousand feet, circling beneath their canopies. Doc was just above her, with Mac close by to make sure the team’s scientific expert didn’t do something stupid like “cut away” his main. Doc never liked jumping, but his desire to be on the Nightstalkers outweighed his fear of parachuting out of a perfectly good airplane.
Above Doc and Mac was Kirk, the team’s communication expert. He was also the latest addition to the team, joining them just in time for the “Fun in North Carolina” that had gone down six weeks ago. He was a lean, taut-muscled man whose main claim to fame prior to joining the team was that he’d successfully changed his scorecards in Ranger School in order to pass. His right earpiece crackled with an incoming message. He quickly let go of his toggles for a moment and tapped in the code on his wrist transmitter to open the secure link to Moms.
“The silo you want is number seven,” a voice with a Russian accent informed Moms over the radio. Ms. Jones was the voice from which all information flowed to the team. And all orders.
“The first responders only formed a far outer perimeter, unaware of what the incident is,” Ms. Jones continued. “My data says there are only two people in the vicinity. They are not of consequence. However, we cannot rule out that there is terrorist activity.”
“Roland will be down in a few seconds,” Moms replied. She took a quick glance up, counting chutes.
And above the team, keeping a careful eye on all of them like a good shepherd, was Nada, the team sergeant.
* * *
Two hundred feet above the target, Roland grabbed air with his chute, slowing his descent. He touched down on top of the LCC with a slight puff of dirt. He unbuckled from his parachute harness and readied the M249, even though this most likely was not a shooting op. One could always hope though, and Roland fantasized a wave of terrorists rushing out of the LCC.
He was rarely that lucky.
He ran down the side of the bunker and around to the front door. He glanced into the beat-up pickup as he went by, but there was nothing of interest. Roland tried the handle on the heavy steel door, but it wouldn’t budge.
He lifted the M249 and pounded on the door with the stock.
* * *
Eight stories down, Clarence and Peggy Sue snapped about and stared upward as the thuds on the door echoed down to them.
“This is my damn home,” Clarence said, heading for the weapons rack.
They had no running water but they did have a dozen assorted weapons. Clarence snatched an AR-15 off the rack and slammed home a magazine, pulling back the charging handle and letting it slide forward.
“Fill your hands, woman!” he barked at Peggy Sue.
She grabbed a pump-action shotgun and resignedly ratcheted a round into the chamber.
* * *
“Nine minutes,” Eagle informed them from his overwatch position, hovering five hundred feet above the LCC.
“The door’s locked,” Roland said. “Want me to shoot it off?”
“Negative,” Moms said. “Mac will blow it. We’ll be there in twenty seconds. Any sign of foul play?”
“Negative.” Roland lowered the machine gun with a sigh, which echoed inside his hazmat hood, and scanned the immediate area, hoping something would pop up that he could shoot.
The team touched down right in front of the bunker, all landing lightly.
Except for Doc, who made a sack of potatoes look graceful as he crumpled onto the ground. As he scrambled to his feet and out of his harness, he checked to make sure he still had suit integrity.
“Mac, get the door,” Moms ordered. “Everyone else, back up. Eagle, give us a rundown on how to get to silo seven once we’re inside.” With time running out, she made a command decision. “Suits off, people. We’re not going to need them based on the readings.”
Mac ran up to the old metal doors and opened up his rucksack, taking out a charge and placing it over the lock as the rest of the team stripped off the bulky hazmats.
“Back in the day,” Nada said, “I was on one of the last backpack nuke teams.”
“You mean when Eisenhower was president?” Eagle asked as he circled the Snake overhead. The chain gun mounted in a compartment in the nose of the aircraft was extended.
“SADM,” Nada continued as Mac jogged back toward the rest of the team, as best as one can jog in a hazmat suit, a remote detonator in his hand. “Strategic atomic demolition munitions,” Nada said. “I jumped with a live one on a training mission. That wasn’t fun. Heavy as shit.”
“Fire in the hole,” Mac warned, and then hit the toggle.
A brief flare of light and crack of explosion meant the doorway to the bunker was now unlocked. Eagle was relaying directions to them on how to proceed once they went inside.
Moms moved to the front of the team. “I’m taking point with Nada.”
Mac ripped off his hazmat suit.
Moms walked forward. “I’ll lose satcom in there,” she said. “Kirk, make sure you keep an open relay between me, Ms. Jones, and Eagle from here in the doorway. And use your own pad to work on that code. There’s got to be a reason it’s piggybacked on the countdown.”
“Roger that,” Kirk said.
Roland grabbed the edge of the heavy door and pulled. “Nobody’s oiled this sucker in a while,” he said as he grunted with effort. With a screech of protesting hinges, the door opened wide enough to invite them into its darkness.
There was an elevator directly in front crisscrossed with yellow warning tape, indicating it was nonfunctional. A set of stairs beckoned to the left. A dim glow seeped up from the depths of the LCC.
“Seven minutes,” Eagle said over the net.
Moms and Nada took point, a smoothly coordinated team, starting at the top of the stairs and clearing their way down. The countdown made them move faster than Protocol.
Thus they almost ran on top of Clarence and Peggy Sue on the landing just above the LCC Control Room.
“Who the fuck are you!” Clarence screamed, gesturing with the barrel of the AR-15 at Moms, his eyes wide with fear at the armed figures looming above him on the stairs.
Protocol was Moms should double-tap him right between the eyes while Nada took out Peggy Sue.
She broke Protocol by lowering her submachine gun, raising her hands in surrender, while still taking the last two steps and moving forward toward Clarence.
“Hey! I said—”
Before he got the next word out, Moms snatched the automatic weapon from Clarence’s hands, spun it around, and knocked him out with the stock. As Clarence crumpled to the steel grating, Moms turned to Peggy Sue. “Are you going to be a problem?”
Peggy Sue dropped the shotgun and the Nightstalkers shoved past her and took the last flight of stairs into the LCC.
“Six minutes,”
Kirk relayed from above.
Moms paused in the LCC, getting oriented to the verbal directions Eagle had given her. She pointed. “That hatch. Mac, you take point. Roland, behind him for muscle. Nada, you make sure the two idiots don’t do anything and relay commo into the tunnel from Kirk. I’ll be behind Roland. Doc, keep working on that second code.”
They ran to the hatch and Roland grabbed the metal and tried to turn the handle. It resisted. Mac pulled a charge out of his pack, but didn’t have to use it as the wheel suddenly turned with a screech. Roland’s massive biceps bulged as he spun the protesting wheel, unlatching the hatch. It was slow going and Moms considered having Mac blast it, but decided against it; something was already wrong here and setting off a charge in the LCC wasn’t going to help. Mac put a headlamp on, as did the rest of them.
“Five minutes,” Kirk announced over the net.
The hatch began to open and Mac slithered into the three-foot diameter access tunnel for silo seven. Moms followed, then Roland.
Doc was seated at one of the consoles, typing away on his computer. Nada took up position at the open hatch. Peggy Sue timidly came down the stairs. “Who are you folk?”
“Shut up or I’ll shoot you,” Nada said.
Peggy Sue was used to that kind of talk, so she shut up.
In the tunnel, Mac moved as fast as one can move in a three-foot tunnel that doesn’t quite require you to crawl, but doesn’t allow you to run. He shuffled forward, his pack in front of him. His headlamp penetrated about thirty feet, but all he saw was more tunnel.
“How far?” he asked Moms.
“Eagle said three hundred and fifty feet.”
Nada’s voice crackled in their earpieces. “Four minutes.” A slight pause. “I got a stupid question,” he continued, “but is the countdown for a launch or for the warhead to detonate? And can that thing even initiate launch not having been serviced for so long? Eagle?”
“Wait one,” Eagle replied.
Mac spotted another hatch ahead.
Mac tried the handle, but it wouldn’t budge. Everyone flattened against the floor of the tunnel as Roland slithered over them, a torrent of muscle. He grabbed the wheel and grunted with exertion, but still nothing.
