Zero Day

by Ezekiel Boone

  Plus the bunker was way nicer than he’d expected. He’d spent some time on a nuclear submarine as part of a training program that allowed officers in one branch to do limited tours shadowing officers in another branch. Although he’d written a relatively positive after-action report, mostly all he’d gotten out of it was the deep understanding that he was truly grateful he hadn’t joined the navy. He had a lot of respect for what they did, but he spent a lot of emotional energy trying not to panic at the idea of being in a metal tube that was traveling under the ocean. Which, when he thought about it, was kind of funny, because he had devoted his career to the branch of the military that specialized in being in metal tubes flying through the air. Regardless, when he’d learned of his new orders, he was, to put it mildly, less than thrilled.

  The Strict Actual Failure and Error Guardians Under All Radioactive Decrees program’s name had clearly been chosen only because it made a cool acronym: SAFEGUARD. The entire point of Operation SAFEGUARD was to serve as a control over the use of nuclear weapons, so it would have made sense to call it something like Nuclear Fail-safe and Oversight, but that would have made for a crappy acronym. Not that it actually mattered, since basically nobody knew it even existed, and Lou faced imprisonment for disclosing classified information if he told anybody outside Operation SAFEGUARD where he worked. Besides which, the thirty people who actively worked on Operation SAFEGUARD, split equally between operators like Lou and support staff, didn’t even call it Operation SAFEGUARD. They just called it “the bunker.” As in: “Yeah, another two weeks until I can leave the bunker for my R&R.” Or: “Man, I can’t tell you how good it is to be back in the bunker after the last two weeks. My parents were on my case the whole time about when I was going to finally ask Susan to marry me. I’d rather do back-to-back tours here than have to deal with another day of that.”

  They all complained about the bunker, but the truth was, aside from the restrictions placed upon them by the classified nature of the program, the bunker was actually a pretty sweet gig right up until this whole thing with the spiders. There were no women in the bunker—it was an all-male crew—because the isolation and small size of the crew would certainly have led to issues, but he had a serious girlfriend anyway. And, sure, Lou had to suffer through six months of incredibly intense training in cyberwarfare and security, but he had assurances that at the end of the two-year assignment his new top secret rank of lieutenant colonel would no longer be top secret. He figured that two years in the bunker was worth it if it meant he got promoted early to captain and then immediately from there to O5. There was no way during peacetime he would have made it from first lieutenant to captain to major to lieutenant colonel so quickly. Plus, honestly, the bunker really was pretty luxe. Not gold-plated-faucets-and-plush-hotel-robes luxe, but nicer than anything else he’d experienced in the military.

  It had to be twenty thousand square feet. There was a full-size basketball court as well as workout facilities, including a close-quarters-combat room and a two-lane lap pool. The dining room was nicely appointed, and there were always at least two cooks in the bunker at any time. Having tasted a whole lot of military chow in his day, Lou wondered if maybe Operation SAFEGUARD had poached some outside talent. Because while there were some damn fine cooks in the military, the cooks working in the bunker could have held their own in any white-tablecloth civilian restaurant. He had to spend some serious time on the treadmill and doing CrossFit workouts every day to make sure he didn’t put on weight during each six-week stint. He had his own quarters and private bathroom, which felt like a luxury, and the bunker was stocked with pretty much every movie ever made and an unlimited library of e-books. For all that, however, the job was boring. Boring, boring, boring. Booooooring.

  Part of his training had been hours upon countless hours emphasizing that he had the most important job in the world! That was how he always heard it come out of the mouths of the man and the woman—both civilians, both of them using names that were obviously fake, and both extremely annoying—who ran the six months of training before he was physically assigned to the bunker. They said it every time so that he could hear the italics and the exclamation point: the most important job in the world! He and the other operators, all of whom had gone through the same training, constantly joked about it. “Hey, Joe, pass the potatoes. Wouldn’t want to be hungry while I’m working the most important job in the world!”

  Even though they joked about it, Lou figured all the operators took it seriously. The thing was, at the end of the day, it might just be the most important job in the world. No joke.

  Sometime in the aughts—nobody working in the bunker seemed to know exactly when or how, only that it had happened under GWB’s watch—every nuclear weapon in the US arsenal had been outfitted with two-factor authentication. It worked, more or less, like two-factor authentication did when you signed on to Google. When the president dipped into the nuclear football to order a strike, there were a number of supposed fail-safe checks to make sure that it was a legitimate order before things went kaploowee. They were all along the same chain of command, however. Before GWB, there were a terrifying number of near misses in the history of the United States. Lou didn’t even want to think how much worse it had probably been in other countries. But Operation SAFEGUARD had added that second step. Like when you enabled two-factor authentication and you signed into your e-mail on a new computer, you had to enter your password; but then you would also get a verification number texted to your phone, and you had to have that number to proceed. That was what they did in the bunker.

  In the event of an ordered nuclear strike, once it was determined that the president had, in fact, given the order, the bunker authenticated it. It meant that a strike couldn’t be authorized by accident, and it also meant that in the event some crazy dude got the opportunity to press the button, it wouldn’t do anything more than fizzle out.

  The thing was, even though they took the job seriously, they joked about it, because the most important job in the world! was both boring and really easy. It was the sort of thing that would probably have looked all high-tech and sexy in a Hollywood movie, but the sad reality was that the command room in the bunker was basically a pair of cubicles equipped with PCs that you could have bought at your local Best Buy. There were always two men in the room, and they worked eight-hour shifts. And what you did, essentially, was . . . sit. You sat and waited for the order that never came. Supposedly, for the first few months of Operation SAFEGUARD, operators were not allowed to do anything that might distract them, which included talking to the other operator, reading, listening to music, etc. You had to just sit at your desk and stare at your screen. As a result, pretty much every operator fell asleep at his desk. Repeatedly. In order to prevent that, they quickly changed orders so that operators could bring in a book or watch a movie on a tablet or do whatever they needed to do to kill the time while still staying alert. Still, the most important job in the world! basically involved being stuck in a cubicle killing time while waiting out your shift, knowing that the thing you had trained to do would never be required.

  Until, all of a sudden, it was required.

  They had Internet and television and relatively unlimited access to outside media, so they’d been following the spider outbreak from the jump. They’d seen footage from Delhi and Los Angeles. They’d seen pretty much the whole thing unfold on their laptops and tablets and televisions, and even with the Chinese dropping nukes and the president authorizing the use of conventional weapons to destroy the highways, Lou never truly believed he would have to verify a nuclear strike order.

  He’d been five minutes from the end of his shift when the president ordered the strikes and tripped all the alarms in the bunker. He was leaning back in his chair, finishing a crossword puzzle—the easier Monday puzzle, because the harder ones were way out of his league—when the big red light on the ceiling started flashing and a loud, piercing siren screamed at him. He was startled so badly that he tipped ov
er and clattered to the floor. When he got back to his feet, rubbing his head, Hubbard was already going to the shelves to pull down the binder.

  Operation SAFEGUARD was cutting-edge, one of the few places in the United States government where cybersecurity was properly considered even before the whole Russian election hacking fiasco, but it was weirdly antiquated at the same time. There were redundancies on top of redundancies, and even though the actual program could be run on a bare-bones PC, everything surrounding Operation SAFEGUARD was high-tech. Heck, the bunker was hardwired to the outside world just in case the other systems—cellular and satellite and radio—went down. Thousands of miles of cable, all to make sure that the two operators on duty could enter the needed codes in a timely manner. Yet they were required to go to a physical bookcase, pull down a physical binder, flip to the correct physical page, and look at codes printed on physical paper, and then type them in by hand. The reasoning was that if the codes existed only in this one place, and only in printed form, it made them virtually impossible to hack or steal. It seemed nuts to Lou, but then again, it was the most important job in the world!

  Hubbard ran his finger along the shelf until he found the binder for that day’s date and then walked back to his desk, flipping through to find the page that corresponded to the time and to the authorization code that had been used by the president.

  Lou liked Richard Hubbard just fine. Even though pretty much all he wanted to talk about was Brazilian jujitsu, he was a nice guy. He spent all of his downtime either watching YouTube videos about Brazilian jujitsu or working out in the gym and trying to persuade the other guys to spar with him in the close-quarters-combat room. Nobody would, because Hubbard wasn’t a drive-by dojo practitioner. The one time Lou had agreed to spar, thinking he knew how to take care of himself, Hubbard had handed him his ass, bouncing him off the padded floor until he was black-and-blue. Since then Lou had made it a point to call jujitsu “karate” as a way of needling him. Of course, if it bothered Hubbard, he never showed it. He was one of the few operators who never joked about it being the most important job in the world! He was a rah-rah kind of guy who took his job seriously, and as Lou watched him work his way through the binder, he thought that maybe Hubbard had the right attitude after all.

  Quickly they ran through their checklists, confirming everything, and then Hubbard called out the code: “Echo Romeo India November Sierra Echo Papa Tango one zero one nine seven zero.” Dutifully, Lou typed in the letters and numbers.

  The funny thing was that as they successfully executed the confirmation procedure, Lou really did feel like it was the most important job in the world—no joke. What they were doing was going to help save the entire world.

  It was only later, when he’d been relieved, when he was back in his quarters, that he thought to check to see where the nukes had been delivered. It was a long list, but one city stood out: Denver.

  Denver was gone.

  His parents. His brothers and his sister. His girlfriend.

  He’d had to debrief with the bunker’s commanding officer, Brigadier General Yoats, the next day, and by then, he’d come to a decision: he could stomach the loss if it meant he’d helped to save the world. He was heartbroken and devastated, but he’d joined the military because he believed in the higher good. Yoats had cleared him to resume duty, and his next shift he’d gone in fully expecting and prepared to confirm the use of more weapons.

  And then there’d been the coup.

  The brigadier general had done something unprecedented: he’d called the entire bunker in for a meeting. Every single man in the bunker was in the common room. There had been all-bunker meetings before, but the two operators on duty had always been patched in on the intercom. Not this time.

  “If the sirens go off, well, that’s why we’re having this meeting,” Yoats said. “We’re getting two sets of conflicting orders. Much of the armed forces seems to be reporting to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I’ve spoken to him directly, and he is ordering us to report to him. But there’s still a large part of the military that is under the command of President Pilgrim, and she still holds her title. The president has ordered us to deny any and all requests for verification through Operation SAFEGUARD. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.”

  That was true enough. They’d suffered some communications failures that were clearly a result of the outside world going to hell, but the bunker hadn’t been designed to keep the operators out of the loop. Operation SAFEGUARD was there to make sure a rogue commander or a small group of men and women or even a mix-up in the chain of command couldn’t cause the use of a nuclear weapon. When it was designed, the idea of a military coup hadn’t even been considered.

  Lou knew he should have been relieved at the president’s orders. After all, he’d been on the desk and, with Hubbard, had confirmed the use of the nuke that wiped out Denver and pretty much everybody he loved. And yet. And yet he couldn’t help but feel that it was foolish to stop. Wasn’t the sacrifice in vain if they failed to keep going? If they didn’t burn every one of those spiders into nothingness, then what was the point of those first launches? Had Denver been sacrificed for nothing? When you had your foot on your enemy’s throat, you didn’t let off. Why use nuclear weapons in the first place if you weren’t going to finish the job? The president wanted to just, what, watch and wait? To risk having the death of his family, his friends, his girlfriend, be for nothing?

  They talked for a little while, Yoats giving all of the men, even the ones who were support staff, a chance to vent or ask questions.

  Lou kept his mouth shut.

  After close to an hour, Yoats wrapped things up: “Men, we all know that with most of the military under his command, Broussard”—Lou couldn’t help but notice the lack of a title and the disdain in Yoats’s voice as he named the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—“is going to be able to circumvent Operation SAFEGUARD in a matter of days. But until then, we are going to do what we have sworn to do, which is to obey the commander in chief.”

  Lou looked at the other operators. Some of them, like Hubbard, were sitting up smartly and looking at Yoats like good officers, but he noticed not everybody seemed to be hanging on every word the brigadier general said.

  Those were the men he was interested in talking to.

  USS Elsie Downs, Atlantic Ocean

  “Would a satellite phone work?”

  The scientists turned to stare at Fred. He was sitting on a stool in the corner of the lab. One hand was reaching down to scratch Claymore’s head. In the other hand he held up a phone. Melanie realized her mouth was hanging open. She closed it, hoping nobody had noticed.

  “What?” Fred said. “I mean, I have an iPhone, too. I’m not a complete savage. But we don’t exactly get good cell phone reception back in Desperation.” He looked at Melanie, Julie, Mike, Laura, and Will. “Desperation? California? A couple of hours from LA?” They stared back blankly. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Middle of nowhere, really, and no cell phone towers, so Shotgun got us satellite phones.”

  Amy also held up a phone. “Gordo and I have them, too. I don’t use it much, though. It’s, like, a dollar a minute. And before all of this happened, I don’t think Gordo ever actually used his. He only carries it because I make him.”

  Mike Haaf walked over. He eyed the dog warily, although, in Melanie’s experience, the worst you could expect from a chocolate Lab was that they’d jump on you or shed on you. Or eat your lunch if you were dumb enough to leave it near the edge of a table. Mike moved like he was afraid the dog was going to tear his throat out. Definitely a cat guy.

  Finally, Mike motioned toward the phone and waited for Fred to give assent before taking it. “You’re saying that you both have satellite phones?” Mike said. Amy and Fred nodded. “And why are you just telling us about them now?”

  Fred gave Mike a look that could have cut glass. “Because, until now, you haven’t needed to call anybody.”

&nbs
p; Mike looked up from the satellite phone. “Okay. Fair enough. Do they work?”

  Fred reached out and took the phone back. “Well, duh. Of course they work. Not that I actually set them up or anything. Shotgun handles all the tech stuff. We have what I like to call a division of responsibility in our marriage. He takes care of all the boring things, like making money and making sure that when I press a button, stuff just works. I take care of cooking and entertainment and making sure that our life is generally fabulous. Which, I have to admit, has been a challenge of late. This whole spider thing has been an absolute drag.”

  “Fred!” Amy smacked him on the shoulder. “Ignore him. Please. I’m sorry, Mike.” She looked around the room. “He’s just trying to get a rise out of you. Fred is a menace when he gets bored. But, yes, we’ve got satellite phones, and near as I can tell, they’re still working. Both of us sent texts to our husbands about the . . . Is this a coup? I guess this is a coup. But we haven’t heard anything back.” She held up her hand, closing her eyes for a moment, and Melanie was reminded that whatever threat they felt they were under here, on the USS Elsie Downs, Gordo and Shotgun had been left behind when the overloaded helicopter took her to safety.