by Mike Kraus
After another brief stop the convoy passed through into the base and circled around to an aircraft hangar. Rick’s Humvee and one other vehicle passed into the hangar while the rest stopped outside. When the two vehicles finally came to a stop inside, the soldiers jumped out and pulled Rick and Jane from the backs of their respective vehicles. Their bags were taken out next and thrown on the floor, though Rick’s guns were held back.
“Get your bags and follow me.” The soldier who had been driving the Humvee with Rick in the back spoke gruffly to Rick and Jane as he pointed at their gear.
“Where are we going?”
“The Colonel wants to have a word with you.”
“Who’s that?”
“Colonel Leslie, head of the 99th Air Base Wing.”
“With me?” Rick blanched and shook his head. “There must be some mistake.”
“No mistake. This way, please.” The soldier took out a short pair of scissors and snipped the zip-tie off of Rick’s wrists. He placed a hand on Rick’s back and guided him forward, deeper into the hangar and through a door at the side. They descended a wide flight of stairs into the subterranean section of the base and the soldier pointed down a hall.
“Keep going that way. One of the airmen will pick you up and take you to the Colonel.” The soldier turned and hurried back up the stairs, eager to get back to his companions and off the Air Force base as soon as possible. A battalion of soldiers had been running cooperative drills with the Air Force when the event occurred and while the two areas of the military worked well together on the outside there were still plenty of sub-surface tensions that rubbed members of both branches the wrong way.
A few seconds after the soldier left, a man in a blue uniform came jogging up to Rick. “This way, please.” The young man was tall, wore wire-rimmed glasses and spoke quickly as he, too, put a hand on Rick’s back to guide him forward.
“You know, I think I can manage to walk without being shoved all over the place.” Rick shrugged off the airman’s hand and the young man smiled.
“Of course. Sorry about that. Just follow me.”
Rick thought briefly about trying to make a run for it, but he had no idea where Jane had been taken and he wasn’t about to try running off while in the middle of a military base. Something about that idea sounded positively suicidal.
After a few minutes of wandering through the underground labyrinth, Rick and his escort arrived outside a large door with tinted glass and a sign that read Conf Rm. 2. The airman stopped and nodded at the door. “The Colonel’s waiting for you inside.” With that, the airman was gone and Rick suddenly had to fight the urge to bolt again.
Rick raised his hand to knock on the door but someone inside pulled it open as he raised his hand. He took a timid step forward and was greeted by an outstretched hand that grabbed his and pumped it vigorously.
“Colonel Donald Leslie, but call me Don if you’d like. You’re Rick, is that right?” Of all the people Rick had imagined working in the upper echelons of the US military, Colonel Donald Leslie was as far from Rick’s expectations as it was possible to get. A portly man in his late forties, the Colonel had hair that was clearly bright red even with as short cropped as it was. His eyebrows were bushy and his face was flushed—either from exertion or excitement, though Rick couldn’t tell which.
“Yeah. Rick Waters.” Rick shook his head. “I’m sorry; how do you know who I am?”
“The girl you were running with, Jane. She mentioned your name a few times. From what I heard you’re the reason she’s still alive.” Leslie nodded approvingly. “Well done to you.”
“Thanks… I think. Colonel, listen, it’s been kind of a weird night. Why am I here, talking to you? And where is Jane anyway?”
“She’s safe. We have temporary shelters set up here at the base while we’re working on relocating civilians from the area.”
“Can I see her?”
“Not quite yet.” Colonel Leslie stepped back and waved at a chair across the conference table. “Sit down, please.”
“What’s this about?” Rick walked slowly around the table. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful but I was just handcuffed for a few hours in the back of one of your vehicles.”
“That was Army, actually, but you have my apologies anyway.” Leslie sat down opposite from Rick. The smile on the Colonel’s face faded as he glanced through a folder filled with pages and photographs. “I’ll cut to the chase, Rick. The grunts that brought you in let it slip that you asked a lot of questions. Questions about the cameras, our satellites and about the… incident that’s been going on.”
Rick couldn’t help but chuckle as he sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. “Is that what the feds are calling it now? An ‘incident?’”
“Sometimes we overstate things. Sometimes we understate things.” Leslie shrugged. “The point is, you’ve been asking a lot of questions that point to you being someone who may be able to shed some light on what’s going on.” The Colonel shifted some of his papers around and cleared his throat. “While you’re under no official obligation to conform to what I’m about to request, I do want to tell you up front that if you don’t agree to the request you’ll be held indefinitely until you agree.”
Rick’s eyes narrowed. “What is it you’re going to ask me to do?”
The Colonel slid a piece of paper across the table. Rick skimmed its contents and when he finished Leslie spoke. “This is a national emergency, Rick. The President has requested that anyone who may be able to assist in containing the current crisis be brought to Mount Weather, just outside Washington. There you’ll join others in a think tank of sorts to try and find a solution to whatever the hell is going on.”
“What’s really going on here, Colonel? I’ve heard rumors and whispers but I’ve been running for my life ever since this started and I haven’t had much time to sit down and watch the news.” Rick pushed the piece of paper back across the table and shook his head. “Besides, I have more important things to do than this.”
“More important things to do than helping to save your country?”
“Yeah. It’s called getting home to my family.”
“Rick, I’m sorry about your family, but what we’re facing here is slightly more serious than one man’s family.”
Rick clenched his jaw. “That’s easy for you to say.”
Colonel Leslie’s face darkened and all of the warmth and kindness that had been present since Rick met him completely vanished. It was as if a spirit took control of the man’s mind, the change was so dramatic. The Colonel stood up and planted both palms on the table, leaning forward until he was over halfway across the table. His nostrils flared and his teeth ground as he spoke. Not with a loud voice, but almost with a whisper.
“Your family, Rick, are going to die unless we get this situation under control. So will my family, so will the families of everyone stationed here and so will the families of everyone in this fabulous place we call America.”
Rick pushed back in his chair slightly and shook his head. “Intimidating me to try to get me to help you isn’t going to work, Colonel. I don’t know you, I don’t know what’s going on and I’m certainly not going to agree to go be part of some think tank and sit around twiddling my thumbs while my family’s out there in this mess. Frankly, I find this whole business of you dragging me in here and getting pissy when I refuse to help you do something I don’t know anything about to be more than a little bit concerning.”
“Then consider this your final chance.” Leslie pointed at the document still in front of Rick. “That offer is your only ticket out of here.”
Rick shook his head. “Once I know my family is safe I’ll be happy to help you. Until then, though, they’re my only priority.”
Colonel Leslie stood back up. He reached under the table and pressed a small button. A few seconds later the door to the conference room opened and two military police walked in. “Holding area three.” The Colonel nearly growled the words
as he glared at Rick. “Once you think it over, hopefully you’ll change your mind.”
“What the hell?” Rick struggled as the MPs grabbed him by the arms and dragged him from the room. “You can’t do this! I’m a citizen! Hey, you can’t do this you—” The door closed and the Colonel sat back down in his chair. He sighed wearily before flipping back through the paperwork and photographs in front of him. The orders to detain any civilians with skills or suspected skills that could potentially be leveraged to stop Damocles had, in fact, come down from the highest levels of government. The suspension of habeas corpus and the effective implementation of martial law meant that Rick could, in fact, be held indefinitely.
While the Colonel suspected—based on Rick’s questions on his ride back to Nellis—that Rick had some passing familiarity with computer systems similar to Damocles, if he had known Rick’s actual credentials related to the field he would have had Rick on a plane to Washington twenty minutes after having him hauled into his office. For his part, Rick was starting to understand the gravity of the situation even more as he struggled to remain upright while being pulled down the halls of the base.
In truth the situation was far grimmer than Rick could have imagined. With Damocles having infiltrated and damaged so many vital systems there were virtually no more satellite networks operational. While the satellites were still in orbit and functioning they were nonresponsive to commands from the ground, having been locked out by Damocles. Newer test aircraft and vehicles linked together in experimental systems had also been affected. Each vehicle and aircraft had to be hand-checked and have its firmware flashed and run through a series of offline diagnostics before they could be cleared for use. Of all the scenarios Rick could imagine, none up until that point had been as terrible as reality.
As Rick sat in the brightly-lit cell somewhere in the bowels of Nellis, he contemplated the events that had led him there and began trying to assemble the facts and speculations he had gathered.
“It’s a virus,” Rick mumbled to himself. “I knew that already. But it’s a smart virus. A learning virus. More than a virus, really. It’s affected everything… even the military can’t fight back against it.” Rick snorted. “They sure as hell can’t fight it if they’re trying to pick up people off the street who sound like they know anything about a computer. Why, though?”
Rick thought back to the piece of paper the Colonel had placed in front of him. The content of the letter was matter-of-fact and got straight to the point. A piece of weaponized computer code that could evolve and change to adapt to a wide variety of situations had been loosed on the country and the world at large. The US government was looking for people with any sort of computing experience to lend their knowledge towards helping find a weakness in the virus so that it could be stopped.
At the bottom of the letter, after a paragraph-long impassioned plea for help, sat the signature of the President of the United States. Rick had nearly laughed upon seeing it, thinking it was some sort of elaborate joke, but the more he sat and thought about it the more he realized that the letter was completely serious.
Rick continued mulling over the conversation between himself and Colonel Leslie when he remembered a detail that had completely escaped him at the time. Mount Weather. Virginia? Rick jumped up from his seat at the edge of his metal bed and ran to the door of his cell. He started beating on the bars with his fists while shouting at the top of his lungs. “Hey! Hey, you! Get the Colonel!” Rick shouted and pointed at an MP who stood down the hall. “I’ll do it! I’ll do what he said!”
“Shut up down there!” The MP took a few menacing steps forward as he shouted back down the hall.
“No, really! The Colonel said—”
“You’re about to find out what he said to do to anyone who doesn’t listen!”
Rick backed away from the cell door, clenching his fists into a ball. While he hadn’t realized it at the time of the conversation, he had suddenly remembered that Mount Weather was in Virginia, just outside of Washington. He figured that, if he was smart and played his cards right, he could use the Colonel’s offer to get to Mount Weather and then slip away down south to reunite with his family.
“Dammit!” Rick hissed to himself as he sat back down at the edge of his bed. Thirty minutes prior he had been handed a golden opportunity to get across the country to within a stone’s throw of his family and he had turned it down without realizing it.
Chapter 16
Nellis Air Force Base
Las Vegas, Nevada
“That’ll be all. Thank you, ma’am.” Colonel Leslie nods to the young woman. She stands up, nods back and quietly leaves his office. Outside, an MP accompanies her down the halls, up a flight of stairs and to a small tent. In a few hours she’ll be strapped into a seat in the back of a C-130 on a flight bound for a shelter city set up hundreds of miles to the east.
As Leslie goes back over the notes of his conversation with Jane, he is interrupted a short time later by the phone on his desk. He picks it up and listens intently, his brow furrowing and his expression darkening with each passing second.
Although Colonel Leslie wasn’t originally the highest ranking officer at Nellis Air Force Base, the redistribution and deployment of much of the base’s assets have left him as the de facto base commander. In addition to looking out for his men, dealing with the disaster caused by Damocles and trying to get enough planes in the air to meet the constant battery of orders coming his way, Colonel Leslie has had to task a large portion of his men with helping to care for the civilian population.
As thousands upon thousands have come seeking shelter, the Colonel has had to balance caring for them, watching after the men under his command and trying to keep the peace in a situation only ever dreamt of in far-off conference rooms. Finding the proper balance between the extreme of kicking every civilian off the base and denying all aid and the opposite extreme of allowing any and everyone onto the base has been difficult.
The phone call has made things even more difficult. After a few curt replies Colonel Donald Leslie puts the phone back on the receiver and leans back in his chair. He has been at Nellis for eighteen months, but in that amount of time he has grown fond of it like no other assignment he has ever had. The order to abandon the base comes as a shock to him and he struggles to try and process what the implications could be.
A few hours pass, and the Colonel is still in his office drinking another cup of coffee as he works on plans for the withdrawal from the base. The phone rings again and he answers. His eyes grow wide and he slams down the phone, picks it up again and dials another number. After a few minutes of playing phone tag he is finally in a conference call with other Air Force officers. The conversation is fast, furious and more than a little heated.
The discussion and disagreement centers around what to do about the growing population of unruly civilians just outside the base. Other officers are in favor of using lethal force to prevent anyone from making unauthorized entry onto the base. Others, like Colonel Leslie, are unhappy with that option and refuse to fire upon their own countrymen, no matter how bleak the situation may be.
In the end, as the one in command, Leslie makes the decision and hands down the orders. The civilians outside the base are to be kept out for as long as possible. If they do manage to break through the gates and start rioting and looting, the base assets are to be immediately locked down until the people calm down. No one is to fire upon an unarmed civilian unless their life is in immediate danger, and every soldier and airman is to do everything in their power to prevent harm from coming to anyone on and around the base.
As Leslie sits in his office, contemplating the worst possible scenarios, he wonders if his decision is the correct one. The temptation to use lethal force on agitated and unruly crowds is strong, but with the situation being as dire as it is and Nellis being abandoned anyway, the last thing he wants is to contribute to even more death and destruction. His authority—and arguably duty—is clear, but th
e moral argument is a far more pressing one in his mind. He prays that it ends well both for the men and women under his command and for the throngs of desperate people outside the base, desperately trying to get in.
Chapter 17
Nellis Air Force Base
Las Vegas, Nevada
When Colonel Leslie ordered Rick to be thrown into a holding cell, Rick had expected the Colonel to fetch him within a day at most. By the time a week went by Rick was trying to adjust to the fact that he could be in the holding cell indefinitely. Food was brought to him three times a day, and though it was bland it kept him alive. Every day he called out to the MPs multiple times, asking to see the Colonel. At first the pleas were indignant but by the fifth day he was reduced to begging anytime he saw anyone in uniform passing by.
On the eighth day of being held, as Rick was giving up all hope, he was awoken at an unholy hour by a pair of MPs who dragged him off of his bed and ordered him to get moving. As Rick was guided through the base he started realizing that things weren’t as they had been merely a week prior. Distant shouts and the roar of engines came from somewhere far above Rick’s head and what seemed like an abnormally large amount of soldiers and airmen were running down the corridors with worried looks on their faces.
A shout from down the hall behind Rick and the pair of MPs surprised the three of them. “Get down here! We’ve got a couple of wounded coming in and need crowd control!” The MPs dropped Rick and one of them ran back down the hall immediately while the other lingered for a moment to help Rick back to his feet and talk to him.
“Take this hall down to the end. When you see the stairs leading up, walk past them, through the door on your right and take those stairs up and out.” With that the second MP was gone, going after the first at a full-on run.
