Joe smiled. “I wanted to be a pilot and my family didn’t even have any chickens.”
They took the industrial-size elevator eighty feet down. Lieutenant Tom Marshal had already opened the ten-ton blast door leading from the atrium into the control center. The door, huge, black, and slightly convex, reminded Washington of a whale. Should an adversary’s nuclear warheads explode nearby, but not too nearby, the whale would shield them.
Was humor a plus or minus on this job? The crew of another control center had painted their blast door to look like a pizza box reading, “Worldwide delivery in thirty minutes or less. Or your next one is free.” Was this funny? That might be a good question for a personality test, a battery of which they had all taken. The tests, however, only identified instability, anxiety, depression, fanaticism, and other undesirable traits. As far as she could tell, a sense of humor was not assessed.
In large red letters on the wall next to the blast door a decidedly unfunny sign read:
NO LONE ZONE
TWO PERSON CONCEPT MANDATORY
A steel room the size of a small school bus, the control center was surrounded by a wrap-around, four-foot thick rebar and concrete cocoon affixed to four shock absorbers.
Lieutenants Tom Marshal and Greg Kelly, looking forward to seeing natural daylight again, enthusiastically shook hands with the relief crew before sitting back down in their red chairs.
Pushing with their feet, they slid their chairs along a steel track, past row upon row of knobs, switches, and little red lights, to their respective work areas. They swiveled to face Joe and Makenna.
“Don’t worry, Makenna,” said Kelly. “We’ve removed the Playboy magazines.”
She was accustomed to, if sometimes annoyed by, the ribbing from a small minority of the men, but she’d never been passive in the face of adversity.
“You’ve been on duty all night,” she said. “How’d you get them out? If you broke the no lone rule, I’ll have to report you. Maybe I’ll report you anyway. Sexual harassment.”
The silence was heavy.
Kelly looked as if he’d been slapped. The other two men frowned.
After a moment Washington burst into laughter, stopped, caught her breath and said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I couldn’t help myself.”
They all laughed now, fear of being involved in a me-too moment having evaporated.
“You really got me, you know,” said Kelly. “I won’t mess with you again,”
“No. No. Please do. I like jokes.”
“But only in good taste, right?”
“Well, that’s preferable but a properly chosen dirty joke can go a long way. Did you hear one about the golden retriever that could count ducks?”
“If we’re lucky we may also find a little time to give a report,” said Marshall, interrupting the banter.
For the next forty minutes Marshall reviewed the status of each of their ten missiles and silos, equipment function, and messages.
Slowly, as if speaking to a small child or an idiot, Marshall now finished up his report.
“And we had a trespass at B-02 a while ago, or so we’ve been told. Happened before we came on duty.”
Kelly nodded solemnly and then Marshall did.
“Well?” said Calderone.
“A team went out there,” said Marshall. “They saw this old woman as soon as they entered the access road. She hadn’t breached the fence. She was just standing there.”
“Old woman?” said Washington.
“About as old as they come,” said Kelly, “lives on a farm just outside of Minot. And she invited any airmen interested to come over for coffee and cake,” said Marshall.
“Fat chance,” said Joe.
Kelly and Marshall left. Washington closed the whale of a blast door. That woman sounded interesting.
Chapter Twelve
At the dinner table, Karen Haugen told her father about the red-headed old woman she and Suzy had spoken with on the steps of Old Main. She did not mention the young man because her attraction to him made it a personal matter.
Given that her father was a sergeant at the air force base, she’d been embarrassed that she hadn’t known what GBSD stood for, nor nuclear winter for that matter. Keeping her embarrassment to herself, she repeated some of the woman’s arguments.
“That’s the same woman our security team picked up,” he said, ignoring the arguments. “The Russians have a lot of missiles aimed at us. They know better than to use them, though. Peaceniks always know better than the experts. And if there’s a nuclear war, we’re going to win it.”
He lay his knife and fork on the plate.
“Are you upset about that lady, Daddy?” asked ten-year-old Lilly.
“Your father had a bad day at work. Let’s just let him eat dinner in peace,” said Amy Haugen.
“I wasn’t bothering you, was I, Daddy?” said Lilly.
“No, you weren’t bothering me.” But he wasn’t bantering with his children as he usually did, nor did he have any educational stories to tell. He didn’t ask his wife how her day had been. Though a disciplinarian, he was usually not a sourpuss.
“Is it that lady?” asked Karen, repeating her sister’s question.
“Of course not. Old ladies don’t bother me. Neither do young ladies. Most of the time.”
“Really, kids, let him be,” said Amy, who managed her husband as if he were a domesticated lion.
“It’s all right. I might as well talk about it,” he said. “The tail gate of a Humvee opened while the vehicle was traveling and a box of grenades fell out, if you can believe that.”
“Oh, no.” said Karen. “They didn’t explode, did they?”
“Apparently not. But they’re still missing so if you find a heavy green metal box that says, ‘Thirty-two grenades” on it, let me know.”
“Are you worried a terrorist will get them?” asked Karen.
“Not so much. But I imagine some deranged weapons enthusiast, or bank robber, or, like you say, maybe even a terrorist, paying two or three hundred dollars for a grenade.
His frown alone probably kept his men under control and had somewhat the same effect on his family, when he used it. He was a martinet, insisting on a dress code, on seeing Lilly’s homework assignment when she was in school, on quizzing them on the multiplication table at meals. But he was not generally glum. He barked or growled or hissed or made other animal noises when one of his children broke a rule but had never struck them. The only time Karen had been spanked was when, at three years of age, she’d dashed into the street. Her mother gave her a single swat on the behind.
“So, did she talk about mutually assured destruction?” asked her father.
“Yes,” said Karen.
“That sounds really bad,” said Lily.
“Actually, it’s good,” he said. He explained, at a precocious ten-year-old’s level, that the country was safe because it had all these super powerful bombs atop super powerful missiles, including the sixty-foot-long, six-foot in diameter missiles around Minot Air Force base, each protected by a steel and concrete silo.
“So, no one would attack us because if they did, we’d blow their whole country to smithereens.”
“What if some crazy person, some terrorist or something, tried to blow up one of those missiles?” asked Lily.
“Even if they got through the fence, they’d have a heck of a time getting to the missiles. The cap on top of the silo weighs as much as three eighteen-wheelers”
“What are eighteen-wheelers?” asked Lily.
“Eighteen-wheelers are very large freight trucks,” said Amy.
Karen imagined three long trucks lying across the silo, one on top to the other.
“Can I go and see one?” asked Karen.
“Don’t even think about it. You can see everything you could possibly want or need to see on the internet.”
“Daddy,” said Karen, “I’d like to go to the movies this weekend with Jack. I don’t think I can be ho
me by eleven. The movie starts late.”
She thought she might preempt her father’s invoking the standard curfew.
“What are you going to see?”
“Firestorm. It’s about fire fighters.”
“What’s it’s rating?”
“It’s an R, Daddy, but I’m eighteen.”
“Let it go, Roy,” said Amy. Remarkably, he did.
Later that evening in the privacy of their room, their voices lowered, Amy sat at the dresser while Roy paced.
“It’s the damndest thing. The team that lost the grenades is the same team that picked up the O’Hare woman at the silo. What the hell that means, if anything, I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“So, the long and short of it is that they’ve reprimanded the team chief and put my promotion—or demotion—on hold until the investigation is over.”
“If you’ll forgive me for saying so,” she said, “that makes my job all the more important. If I lose it, making ends meet will be hard and if you’re demoted and I lose my job we won’t be able to pay the mortgage.”
Roy Hagen continued his back and forth pacing, but now clasped his hands behind his back as if he’d been arrested and were being led off to a jail cell. They should have heard that low tailgate open, the shifting of the box, the thump as it hit the ground. The way they described it, the jiggling and rattling of the storage area’s haphazardly packed contents made it hard to hear much of anything, explaining why they’d turned up the volume on that country and western song about a yellow dog to foghorn volume. And to top this off, some asshole had failed to secure the tailgate.
“You’re not listening to me, Roy.”
“Sorry, go on.”
“Rumor has it that old man Wilburn’s going to lay off reporters. Every newspaper in the country is doing it as things go digital. I don’t think he’ll can me, but you never know. You censored me when I wanted to report that rumor about drug use on base.”
“And it’s a good thing, too. Nothing came out on that.”
“Nothing came out of it because none of the higher-ups were interested in looking into it. Those missile launch officers must be bored out of their heads down there, bored and stressed alternately. I could understand their wanting to zone out on some Mary Jane from time to time.”
“Don’t even talk like that.”
“Look, Roy, a scoop about missing grenades would be a feather in my bonnet.”
He snorted but squelched the commanding bark. She was not a disobedient airman.
“That’s a bad idea, Amy. I’m in trouble enough already. Don’t do it.”
“All right, but don’t ask me to censor myself again. I swear I’m going to write what’s necessary to write.”
Had she already transgressed in trying to have that article about Edna O’Hare’s protest published?
Chapter Thirteen
She could not sleep after this. Amy Haugen thought about cults. The media regularly reported stories about young people giving themselves completely over to dictatorial cult leaders, abandoning their belongings, their families, their identities. How could one understand these things?
She’d begun thinking about this herself after having written a story about a cult in Fargo, whose leader was, in this case, an out-of-place Indian guru who rented a sprawling farmhouse where his family lived. He represented the uniting of the divine and the work-a-day world; and a work-a-day world it was, keeping up the farmhouse, the barn heated, and following rules of behavior, strictly enforced. In return he would teach them the path to bliss on earth. Not unusual in such cults, the demi-god encouraged sexual offerings to him as signs of faith and of the wish to achieve higher planes of consciousness, whatever that meant.
So why were some people attracted to cults like this? To leaders like this? Why did they accept being told when, where, and what to eat; when, where, and with whom to sleep; when to arise in the morning, what to wear, which chores to do, which thoughts to have and not to have. The list of strictures was long.
She thought of children whose parents laid down and enforced rules of behavior against which they may have chafed but, being children, had no recourse but to follow. Rules about when to be silent; table manners; being in bed at seven when it was impossible to sleep; and curfews.
Now grown, away from home, on their own, would people who’d had such parents—that is parents who parented—wish to be subjected to the whims of a dictatorial guru. Not on your life. Once was enough.
But what of people who as children ran wild, coming and going when they wanted, and doing whatever they wanted to do? Children whose clothing needed attention? Who had to scrounge for something to eat? How might they see a completely structured life with a figurehead who cared enough to set the rules? It was Amy’s hypothesis that these people, once neglected children, were those who fell under the spell of the uber-parent, albeit often a kinky one.
Amy herself was a latch key kid whose mother was intermittently depressed and hence intermittently absent. Their father had disappeared from their lives when they were little. Amy was often on the loose. She and her sister took money from their mother’s purse and went shopping. They cleaned house and did laundry, including the sheets from the master bedroom. Amy recalled feeling sad when she arrived home with something interesting to tell, like the dissection of a frog or how the teacher read her essay in front of the English class, only to find her mother in a darkened room lying in bed still in pajamas.
“I have a headache dear, tell me later,” she might say.
So, was Amy an exception to the rule? Cults never held any attraction for her, but she did end up marrying a military man who made and followed rules at work and at home. She had been comfortable with this, even a little cosseted, but the comfort was slowly wearing away as it rubbed against the man’s hardness over the years.
Chapter Fourteen
Edna made a cup of tea, placed it on a small side table, then plopped into her favorite chair, which had been her father’s favorite, later her husband’s. She pictured James in it, feet resting on a footstool, his boots exchanged for slippers, a newspaper held before him. It was almost as if they were both sitting in it together. This fantasy comforted her, but she was still grieving. Her sadness was worse. Her anxiety was worse.
She allowed her mind to wander. If it hadn’t been for her parents, she would never have met Jim. She was sixteen when her parents called her into this same room for “a little talk.”
“Your sister says she’s interested in farming, but she’s never shown it,” said her father. “You, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to drive a tractor. So, we think you should inherit the farm.”
“But that’s not fair to Fiona and anyway I want to be a doctor, not a farmer. And you’re not planning to die anytime soon, are you?”
They ignored this last remark.
“We’re going to help her buy a house when she’s ready,” said her mother, “and that may be soon if she and Ernie Schmidt get married.”
“Earnest won’t like it,” said Edna. “He’s had his eye on this place. I know.”
“We want to talk about your education,” said her mother, “not what Earnest wants. You know we’re going to be fair to your sister.”
“She should be here for this discussion.”
“Edna, please,” said her mother.
“So, your father and I have decided you need to learn about the business in an up-to-date way. We’ve done a little research—”
“But I want to be a doctor.
“Fine,” said her father. You can be a doctor after you get a degree in agricultural science.”
“But that’s not a pre-med major.”
“You can do a post-baccalaureate pre-med program.”
She was going to fight it, if it took a hoe and pitchfork, until they told her she could go to the University of California at Davis. The thought of spending the winters in California immediately melted all resistance.
And that’s where she me
t Jim. She’d known about Hiroshima, of course, but from him she learned a great deal more about the aftermath of the bombing which had killed an estimated 90,000 to 120,000 people, either instantaneously or over months from injuries or radiation sickness. And many more over the years as people developed leukemia and cancers of the stomach, lung, liver, and breast.
There was literally no one on campus who knew more about the bombing of Japan than James. Yet he, like she, was majoring in agricultural and environmental sciences.
He’d worked summers on his uncle’s strawberry farm in Southern California, unaccountably taking a liking to the work, or maybe it was just the strawberries.
Edna had waited about six months before speaking with Amy about a newspaper article. There was never a guarantee that it would be published. Well, she could do something more dramatic than just trespassing, although that whole drama had exhausted and frightened her. She was not strong like those civil rights workers who were undaunted by the thought of going to jail. That short time at the jail had intimidated her. And what did she expect from a visit to a small college in the summer? Her protests were incorporeal stones thrown into the water, which made no ripples. But she’d done so little. If she only had more umf. But wasn’t it futile?
She really did think the world was in danger. She really did believe what the Union of Concerned Scientists were saying, that the doomsday clock was now set at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest time to nuclear annihilation since the cold war, and what was most likely to trigger it was a simple accident leading to the launch of ground-based missiles, which could not be recalled if a mistake had been made.
Before she could even sip the tea, a big sobbing cry burst out, her eyes flooded, her nose running. She got a box of tissues.
Eventually the sobbing stopped. She’d gotten some relief, but still felt defeated. She arose from the chair, her tea now lukewarm.
Shadows Page 7
