Phantom

by Ted Bell

  He let himself in the front door, went to the bottom of the staircase, and called up to let his wife know he was home.

  “Hey, you,” she said five minutes later, walking into the living room. Colt was in his chair, staring into the fire like he always did. “You’re soaked to the bone. I thought you were coming straight home from the gym.”

  “Aw, baby, don’t be a grouch. Speed and I are going in the hole in the morning for two whole days. I just needed to blow off a little steam at the Onion, y’know. Sorry I’m late.”

  “Well, we can’t have the man who’s got his finger on America’s nuclear trigger building up a head of steam, can we? Nosiree bobtail. Go up and put on some dry clothes. I’ll put supper on the table.”

  “Something sure smells good. What are we having?”

  “Meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and lima beans.”

  “My favorite.”

  “Really? I didn’t know that.” She turned around and headed for the kitchen, swirling her pleated red plaid skirt, the one that said tonight would be one of their “special” nights. Colt smiled, proud of himself for being mature enough to ignore the pretty little balloon smuggler at the Onion and come straight home to mama. There had been a time, not so long ago, when he might not have done that. But he loved his wife, loved his kids, and he loved his country. Not necessarily in that order.

  His late granddad had been Army Air Corps. Flown B-25s over in the Aleutians, an archipelago of three hundred volcanic islands that extended westward from the Alaska Peninsula and marked a line between the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska.

  For taking out a forward Japanese naval base, Captain Colt Portis Sr. had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. It hung framed on the wall over Colt’s dresser, beside the Silver Cross and Purple Heart his dad, a West Pointer, had received as a young lieutenant in the First Air Cav during the horrific Battle of Ia Drang in Vietnam.

  His gramps had come home from his war. His dad had not. Colt planned on coming home from his.

  After dinner, he and Margie checked on the girls and fell into bed. After they made slow, whispery love, she was instantly snoring away, a sound he had come to find very reassuring. It meant the woman he loved was sleeping soundly, and peacefully, and would wake with a smile.

  He lay on his back with his hands clasped beneath his head, staring at the ceiling. He didn’t have any money to speak of, never had, most probably never would. But he felt like the luckiest man in the world.

  The tunnel entrance was well camouflaged. From the air, or an enemy satellite, it looked like a deserted barracks building. The wide entrance at the rear was disguised by two large boulders. Inside that huge empty building, a two-lane roadway angled sharply downward into the earth to a depth of fifty meters. Silent, electric-powered vehicles, each capable of carrying three men plus a driver, were constantly shuttling in one direction or the other.

  Colt and his partner hopped on one and began what Speed always called their “journey to the center of the earth.” They traveled swiftly down a steep but smooth and well-lit incline. Eventually, the eerily silent transport slowed to a stop close to an entrance in the wall of the tunnel. They grabbed their forty-eight-hour kit bags and hopped off. A door slid open and they stepped inside a large elevator, perhaps ten feet square.

  Judging by the initial acceleration, Colt had calculated this lift descended at a very rapid rate, maybe a thousand feet or more per minute. The trip was three minutes long, which put his workplace about three thousand feet below the surface of the earth. They emerged into a brilliantly illuminated corridor and followed it to an escalator that took them down to their guard stations.

  They swiped their credentials cards and the glass doors hissed open. The two enlisted men currently manning the control panels immediately stood, saluting Portis, an officer, and stepping away from the panel. The senior man, a fresh-scrubbed kid from the Midwest, handed Portis an eight-by-ten metal box that contained records of his just completed six-hour watch, notated by hand, a new concept.

  “Watch is yours, Lieutenant Portis,” the senior man said, officially relinquishing his team’s duty to the new men. Colt had to acknowledge responsibility.

  “I have the watch. Anything interesting?”

  “Must be something going on with one of the primary generators in this sector, sir.”

  “Why?”

  “We’ve been getting sporadic power surges. Nothing too close to the red zone, but I gave Engineering a heads-up. Looking into it. Other than that, there’s peace in Happy Valley, sir.”

  “May it ever be so. See you guys at 0600 Monday, Sergeant. Try not to be late.”

  “We’ll be counting the hours, Lieutenant.”

  The two men left and the doors slid shut.

  The new “Guardians of the North” immediately took their battle stations, two comfortable swivel chairs on wheels with padded armrests. Portis, the ranking officer, was on the right. Four men would rotate in six-hour shifts, the off-duty team using the time for recreation or sleeping or both.

  “Don headgear,” Portis ordered, and the two men each picked up one of the “crowns of glory” the departing team had left behind on the console. The army had been looking into ways to make humans more machinelike through the use of stimulants, other drugs, and various devices. Portis had the feeling the earphones were designed to keep you alert through hidden audio signals.

  An ABM operator’s life consisted of six straight hours of uninterrupted, mind-numbing tedium. Lacking stimulus, minds wandered. To the brass in Washington in charge of the Missile Defense Agency’s “Operation Vigilant Spirit,” that human flaw represented a threat to national security.

  The “crowns” had been designed by army engineers to counter that threat. They were rigged with electrode fingers that rested on the scalp and picked up electric signals generated by the brain. Additional add-ons included devices for constant heart-rate and eye-movement monitoring.

  Should a soldier exhibit fatigue, anger, excitement, or become overwhelmed in the event of an attack, signals were sent to a supervisor five levels up who could immediately shift control of the station to another operator. If an operator’s attention waned, he was cued visually and a magnetic or chemical stimulant was fired into his frontal lobe.

  In the event of an actual enemy ICBM attack, both men would have to key in matching codes, then insert the keys that hung from chains around their necks and turn them simultaneously. This would initiate the firing sequence.

  Arrayed in an enclosed perimeter in the center of Fort Greely were eight THAAD antiballistic missiles in their impregnable silos. The acronym stood for terminal high altitude area defense. Their sole reason for being was to destroy incoming ICBMs detected by the powerful GBR, or ground-based radar. GBR was employed for surveillance at ranges up to a thousand kilometers, target identification, and target tracking. Targeting information was uploaded immediately before launch and updated continuously during the flight.

  These ABMs were powered by a single-stage solid-propellant rocket motor with thrust vectoring for exo-atmospheric guidance. The KV (kill vehicle) destroyed the target on contact. THAAD could intercept incoming ballistic missile targets at altitudes up to 125 miles. They were designed to intercept the enemy missiles in outer space, killing them before they even entered the earth’s atmosphere.

  The difficulty with intercontinental ballistic missiles is their extremely high velocity. The first view of an incoming ICBM may be as it comes over the horizon. At first contact with the atmosphere it may be traveling at fourteen thousand miles per hour. By the time it reaches its target it will have slowed to seventy-five hundred miles per hour. This leaves the defender with very little time to react and requires extremely quick missiles to intercept, with very good guidance from the GBR.

  Just after 0900, Colt Portis heard his partner say, “Holy shit! Incoming!”

 
He looked at the display in front of him in sheer disbelief. Fear seethed through his brain like a strong tide surging through a narrow gate.

  “You see this, Speed?”

  “What the hell?”

  “I’ve got eight, I repeat eight, unidentified objects traveling west to east at twenty thousand miles per hour, altitude one hundred miles.”

  “Ain’t an ICBM in the whole damn world that fast. Estimate time of atmospheric reentry at nine minutes and counting. GBR plotting their course now . . . fuck me . . . they’re all headed this way!”

  “Sir,” Portis said to his watch commander, adjusting his lip mike, “request permission to arm all eight ABM missiles!”

  “Request granted. Light ’em up, Lieutenant. Shoot first and apologize later.”

  “Hey, wait a second,” Speed said, staring wide-eyed at the rapidly moving dots converging on his screen, “nobody kills me till I say so.”

  “Code sheets, Speed, now!”

  Both men ripped open the sealed red manila envelopes and pulled out the code sheets.

  “Code!” Portis said.

  “Alpha. Alpha. Whiskey. Bravo. Zulu,” Midge said, keying in the code. “Response?”

  Portis responded with the code on his own sheet. “Alpha. Alpha. Whiskey. Bravo. Zulu.”

  Portis reached forward and toggled the switch that put the entire ABM site on a war footing.

  Portis nervously readjusted his lip mike. “We have code match, sir. With your authorization we will now key in and initiate arming sequence.”

  “Roger that. Affirmative.”

  The two men inserted their keys into the twin arming mechanisms arrayed in panels before them and turned the keys simultaneously. A low, beeping tone could now be heard over every loudspeaker in the underground complex. The country was under attack. Hell, Greely was under attack.

  “Missiles one through eight now armed and ready to launch, sir, awaiting GBR upload.”

  “Affirmative, Guardian . . . incoming enemy missiles, or whatever the hell, now entering atmosphere. They should start slowing . . . Good God . . . they’re not slowing, they’re bloody well accelerating!”

  “Roger that, sir, GBR readouts calculate speed increasing rapidly to thirty thousand . . . fifty thousand . . . now traveling on course zero-one-forty at one hundred thousand miles per hour!”

  “What the hell?” Midge shouted. “U fuckin’ Os?”

  Portis could hear his watch commander speaking heatedly to his superior officers at the Pentagon. “Yeah, Charley, we got incoming traveling at speeds in excess of 100K and climbing. UFOs is all I can say, sir. Request permission to take them out.”

  “Permission granted.”

  “Portis. We’ve acquired a sat fix on these birds. Never seen anything like it. What the hell are they, Guardian?”

  “God knows, sir.”

  “Maybe he knows, maybe not.”

  “Take them out, sir?”

  “Hell, yes, take them out!”

  Portis said, “Silo crews, we are going to launch mode with all eight missiles. You are authorized to open all eight blast doors. Hatches open now!”

  “Portis,” Speed suddenly said, “they’re gone! Screen is clear!”

  “Gone?”

  “Yeah. Disappeared. Wait a second. Jesus, now they’re back. Descending from eighty thousand feet . . . coming this way . . . decelerating . . .”

  Portis stared at his screen in disbelief. He said:

  “UFOs are now located directly overhead . . . uh, Command, and they, uh, they appear to be hovering. Just above us at twenty thousand feet. They are . . . I don’t know how to tell you this, sir . . . they appear to be stationary.”

  “UFOs? I don’t believe in UFOs!”

  “I don’t either, sir, but I swear to you that what I’m looking at are objects, they’re flying, and, by God, they are completely fucking unidentified.”

  “Launch, goddamit! Light the candles! Pull the trigger. Blow those bastards out of the sky.”

  “Confirm. Launching . . .” Portis said, fingers flying across his control panel, flipping open the red protective covers over each of the eight red toggles that would send eight of the most powerful antiballistic missiles on earth skyward. He thumbed each one in sequence, an act he thought he’d never live to see.

  Portis watched his multiple display screens transfixed. There were live video feeds from inside each of the silos. The umbilicals detached themselves from each missile and dropped down against the inside of the silo walls. Brilliant fire and white smoke appeared at the base of the missiles.

  “Abort, abort!”

  “What?”

  “This is Silo Control, you must abort! Silo hatch cover malfunction. Blast doors not responding to my commands . . .”

  “We have ignition . . .”

  “Abort! Abort! Abort!”

  “Say again, Silo Control Center!” Portis said. Was this guy insane? It was too late to abort. If the silo hatches wouldn’t open, all eight missiles would explode in place and—”

  “Abort! The fucking silo blast doors won’t open. A malfunction. They are still shut! Manual override dysfunctional.”

  “What?” Portis said, feeling the needle in the crown pierce the top of his skull. “What do you mean? The hatch covers won’t open?”

  “I mean the hatch covers won’t—”

  He was thinking of Margie and the twins in the moments before he died. He knew the explosive power of the eight ABMs was enough to blow a hole in the earth’s crust half a mile deep and two miles across. No one living inside the perimeter of Camp Greely could survive this.

  No one.

  The very last thing Lieutenant Colt Portis saw before the multiple explosions vaporized Fort Greely and every living soul was the eight enemy intruders shooting straight up into the heavens. Traveling . . . at the speed of light.

  What were these things? What the hell were—

  Oblivion.

  Twenty-four

  Iran, Present Day

  “Can’t sleep,” Darius said to his captain of the Guards in passing. “Nightmares, you know.” He nodded at the surprised uniformed guards lining either side of the approach to his boudoir as he floated swiftly by them. He giggled at the looks on their faces. Usually the master of the house didn’t appear in the morning until the crack of ten.

  The “Special Division” uniformed Revolutionary Guards snapped to attention in sequence but the lord and master was already long gone from the residence. Dawn was just breaking as he raced along under the vast open air portico, finally making an abrupt ninety-degree turn and careening through one of the long rows of tall, south-facing portals opening directly onto the Persian Gulf.

  The air was full of sound: the cries of gulls riding the winds, the hiss of waves crashing and receding on the rocks below. Above, a few small clouds chased across the skies like dark-grey riders. Darius threw back his head and sucked down great lungfuls of sea air. It was going to be, he believed, a lovely day.

  Especially, he thought, if you were lord and master of all you surveyed. L&M, he thought, not the cigarette but the God who ruled this citadel. He giggled again to himself, thinking what a pity it was that no one around him was clever enough to appreciate his sense of humor. No one, that is, save mighty Perseus, whom he was on his way to meet.

  Clamped to his shiny bald head, Bluetooth headphones were providing a sound track for this private morning movie. It was Wagner today, but always Wagner or Rachmaninoff or Schubert, and this morning he was grooving to Ride of the Valkyries, one of his favorites. He’d listened all night to Schubert’s Impromptu op. 90 no. 3 to help him sleep, finally said to hell with it, popped one or two Ambien, and cranked up the Wagner.


  Darius’s mode of transportation was unusual, to say the least. Technically, it was a wheelchair. But, technically, it was like no other wheelchair in existence: for starters, this particular wheelchair had no wheels. It floated on a cushion provided by controllable gas nozzles. It was powered by a cold-fusion system of Darius’s own invention. The mother of this particular invention was his birth defect, an infirmity that caused the loss of use of his legs.

  Darius was nothing if not inventive. He was blessed (some might say “suffered”) with a condition known as synesthesia, a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in other sensory pathways. Say a number, and Darius could not only “taste” it, he could locate and see that number in space, in color, and actually “hold” it in his hands.

  He had put his extraordinary capabilities to good use since childhood, building ever more complex computers, mastering sixteen languages, creating one of his own, and solving complex problems of physics at a level few but Einstein himself could appreciate. In addition to his experiments in the field of artificial intelligence, his current interests involved study on two fronts: cosmology, the study of the universe on the grandest scale, and particle physics, the study of the universe on the tiniest scale.

  Both scientific fronts were derived, ultimately, from the work of his god, Albert Einstein: cosmology was based on the general theory of relativity, Einstein’s rewriting of our understanding of gravity, while particle physics had evolved from quantum mechanics, the rules that govern the universe on the atomic and subatomic scale. These abstractions were his playgrounds, and this was where his mind spent most of its time.

  On a far more humble scientific level, the hover-chair that now transported him was one of his most primitive inventions. Still, it was not without its attractions. In addition to being surreally speedy and completely silent, it was also heavily armored—and heavily armed. Unusual for a wheelchair, perhaps, until you considered that Dr. Darius Saffari, with good reason, was hyperparanoid about his safety every second of his life.