CHAPTER 3
The end of world had begun while Brigadier General Matthew Davis was on leave visiting his sister and brother-in-law in Denver. This morning he was rushing back to his post as Director U.S. Space Command Center at NORAD’s underground military complex near Colorado Springs. Racing his Lincoln Town Car down the empty freeway south of Denver, he gripped the wheel tightly and occasionally hit one hundred miles an hour. He was trying to rejoin his staff, or what was left of his staff, after the morning’s sudden attacks had caught NORAD only half-prepared in its all-but-mothballed base beneath Cheyenne Mountain.
The 5-am telephone conversation with his base Communications Officer had been brief and frantic. If he had the story right, those flashes from the moon were more than just glittering lights. They were the emanations of a powerful energy weapon that could demolish an aircraft, a building or a nuclear missile silo in a single hit. They were eerily reminiscent of the Death Star in the movie Star Wars, now made real. Watching the flashes as he raced southward, he was relieved his car must seem an insignificant target to whomever was up there and not worth the effort of a shot. He was also thankful the local civilians were obeying the President’s admonition to stay home, if only because the empty freeway let him lead-foot it toward NORAD at an ungodly speed.
Before leaving his sister’s home he had taken the time to iron the pants of his uniform, shave and brush back his head of tightly kinked, wavy graying hair. Standing at the bathroom mirror, he’d buffed the single stars on the epaulettes of his blue Air Force uniform and straightened the many campaign bars and the Purple Heart pinned on his chest. These preparations had produced a look of more composure than he felt entitled to, but composure was what he needed to radiate if he were to successfully take command of the chaos he expected at NORAD.
His job up to now had been to oversee America’s surveillance satellite network, to monitor foreign activities in space, and to keep the nation safe from airborne or spaceborne attack. It was amazing how quickly the scope of his duties had changed. According to the Comm on the phone this morning, he was—she hadn’t known exactly—at least the ranking officer at NORAD and perhaps the ranking officer in the entire armed services of the United States. Not much was known with certainty, but it appeared that most or all of the joint chiefs were missing in mid-air. Their evacuation plane had been an early target of the ray as they flew out of Dulles for the safety of NORAD’s underground bunkers. And as to the President, other than the fact that the White House itself had come under attack by the beam, nothing was known.
It wasn’t just the magnitude of his new responsibilities that made Davis’s dark skin crawl. A larger question loomed. Was this attack accompanied by an invasion? The Comm Officer had had no answer for that one, primarily because there was so little information available. The spy satellites that were Davis’s usual sources had been methodically swept out of near-earth space. Precious little information-gathering equipment was still available and few communication lines remained open. His cell phone lay useless beside him in the passenger seat.
As the satellites had winked out one by one, they had gathered enough information to convince him that the military he now commanded was well on its way to extinction. From reports received early in the attack, the Comm was able to tell Davis that military facilities everywhere were being hit hard, and that the beam’s destructive capacity was diabolically swift and efficient.
Now his own eyes confirmed what he had been told. Moving south past Colorado Springs he looked east at a cloud of black smoke rising over Peterson Air Force Base and streaking off to the northeast horizon. Beneath the cloud, Peterson’s long line of B-1 bombers had been reduced to a charred landscape of black and twisted metal. Worse, his superior officer, the Commander in Chief of U.S. Space Command, was somewhere under that pall of smoke. He and fully half of the senior officers of NORAD had gone missing this morning when the airbase was hit.
As Davis turned off the freeway onto NORAD’s entrance road, he saw another pall of smoke to the south, this one rising from the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment base at Fort Carson. Yesterday the base could have easily carried out its mission of protecting NORAD from ground-based threats. Yesterday, hundreds of tanks and tracked vehicles had been arrayed beside a mile-long semicircle of garage buildings. Today there was only a mile-long arc of smoking rubble and melted metal.
“My God,” Davis muttered. “It looks like Pearl Harbor on land.” Fort Carson’s vast military power would be no help to NORAD. It had already been destroyed where it sat.
Davis was surprised that the barracks and family housing areas of the base looked untouched. Even that realization made a qualm run through him. The accuracy of the attack had been incredible. The enemy, whoever they were, commanded an unbelievable source of military precision and deadly effectiveness. If things continued this way, all earthly military capability would be eliminated by deftly shaving it away from everything else. But why? What fate awaited the civilians and troops who were being spared? By any military standard of any war, there ought to be an invasion accompanying such a massive barrage, but where was it? Davis wanted desperately to know what was coming next.
As he drove up the approach road through the scrubland at the base of Cheyenne Mountain, he was dismayed to see the entire surface of the mountain burnt to cinders. The beam had visited here early and often. On the mountain’s crest where an array of communication antennas and towers had stood the day before, there was nothing but twisted, melted metal. As he drove the last winding stretch of road to the portal entering the mountainside not far below the wreckage, he pondered the greatest and most terrifying mystery of all. Who are they?
He knew as much as anybody and still he couldn’t say. He was privy to everything known about Phaeon Crater, but that didn’t mean he knew the answer. He was certain this attack emanated somehow from that dark place, but beyond the light flashing from the lower horn of the moon he had nothing to go on except some ominous clues. He knew every knowable detail of the Recon mission, the secret military expedition to the south pole of the moon two years before. He’d looked on amazed, along with other top brass at NORAD, as the President issued an executive order installing Colonel Paul MacIlvain as a new member of NORAD’s hierarchy and making him chief of the Recon Mission. He’d watched Mac orchestrate the clandestine moon landing from NORAD. Houston types with NASA badges and civilian clothes had overrun the facility for a time. Davis had also been forced to stand by perplexed as MacIlvain had given the astronaut explorers of Phaeon Crater clearance to restore part of the vast alien complex’s power system. They’d powered up a solar energy station atop the central pyramid. Then, several months after the power had been reconnected, all communications from the ten-person exploration crew had ceased. Davis also knew the second Recon expedition, launched a year later, had vanished in near-moon space before ever reaching its objective. Beyond that, no one knew anything about the situation at Phaeon. Not Mac, not anyone. Nothing for two years, and now this. Davis thought ruefully that the re-establishment of Phaeon’s power would rank as one of the biggest tactical blunders of all time, if anyone were left alive to record history.
Who or what was coming was unknowable. But the Recon mission had left a legacy of just one tantalizing clue, a mind-boggling one. As the astronauts had explored the airless corridors of the smashed facility, they had come upon several banks of equipment they thought might be computers, although the design had been altogether alien. They had retrieved some small metallic chips from one of the devices and sent them back to earth on an unmanned shuttle. Analysis had confirmed they were printed circuits possessing an incredibly dense array of information. The data encoded on the chips had been hard to decipher, being composed in an alien language and alphabet. Nevertheless the decryption team had managed to determine that the bulk of what was encoded on the chips used only four of the twenty-seven alphabet characters. These were repeated over and over in a seemingly random fashion. Random, that is, until someone pointed ou
t that there was another code known to have only four characters—the genetic code.
A team of biological scientists recruited just two months ago from the National Science Foundation had quickly—and incredibly—matched certain parts of the alien code with genes from earthly organisms; no exact matches but greatly similar to crocodiles and birds, of all things. According to the scientists the alien genes were somewhere right in between. What that meant and how the code had come to be data-banked on the moon remained obscure. It had been cold comfort when someone pointed out the great age of the facility at Phaeon and speculated that the code might belong to some creature out of the age of dinosaurs. Finally, the scientists had conceded there was little they could do with the data. Despite the great volume of code on the chips, it represented no more than a fraction of a single chromosome. They were unable to even guess at the size, shape or appearance of the creature. There was just too little information.
It all gave Davis the worst of grinding pains in his guts as he pulled up to the train-sized portal leading into Cheyenne Mountain. Helmeted guards behind sandbagged, razor-wired checkpoints just inside the tunnel covered his Lincoln with automatic rifles as he approached. The lieutenant in charge came out to look over his ID.
As he waited, Davis looked up at the mountain face towering above him. Yesterday it had been semi-barren reddish granite rock rising several thousand feet above the portal, studded with pine trees and scrub brush. Now the vegetation was reduced to ash, the soil was blackened, and the exposed granite was seared to a whitish gray. The whole mountain surface had been burned and pulverized by the heat of the beam, which had obviously paid special attention to this particular target. He looked once more at the moon high above him in the jaundiced sky. Whoever was directing the beam, which continued lancing this way and that as he watched, had not neglected America’s strongest and last defense line drawn here at this mountain.
“Welcome back, sir,” said the lieutenant, saluting and waving him forward.
Davis returned the salute and pressed the accelerator, proceeding inside the tunnel on the two-lane road that penetrated a third of a mile into the heart of the mountain. He stopped his car at the inner checkpoint of barbed wire, cyclone fence and sandbags, watching the blast door ahead of him begin to open. The huge rectangular metal structure, 25 tons of steel, was the first of two such barriers guarding the inner entrance to NORAD. Set in the tunnel wall at right angles to the roadway, it swung out slowly, leaving Davis time for a melancholy thought: it would soon swing back to seal him inside with his staff of several hundred soldiers and civilians. They could stay there for months if necessary in a self-contained underground city that might be the only place on earth safe from attack—if it was safe.
Motors droning, the door slowly opened until the gap was sufficient to allow a single individual to pass, and then it stopped. A woman in a blue Air Force uniform strode out and quickly approached him. The tunnel lighting overhead was dim, but he could see right away this was Major Holly Lewis, his Communications Officer and the person he most wanted to see right now. Davis opened his door and got out, handing his keys to one of the checkpoint troopers. Lewis saluted.
“Glad you made it, sir. We were worried about you being out under that beam.”
Davis returned her salute and asked glumly, “Any news of General Allen or General Martin?”
“Dead, Sir. They were caught outside in one of the first attacks. You’re still the ranking officer as far as we know.”
“I see. Holly, I want you to fill me in on everything you’ve got.”
“What little I’ve got, you mean.”
“Whatever you’ve got.”
Davis glanced at Lewis as they moved inside the blast door. Her demeanor was as stiff and straight as that of any military man he’d met, and right now that outward calm was a welcome sight. A person had every right to come apart under the kind of pressure that was building inside Davis’s own chest. He did his best to reflect back to Lewis that same solid outward appearance: straight backbone, level eye.
“First of all,” he asked, “is there an invasion yet?”
Lewis nodded. “Yes, sir. We don’t know much, but before the equipment was knocked out we confirmed more than two dozen incoming bogeys.”
“Where from?”
“Trajectories indicated they’re coming from the moon.”
“Where to?”
“Every continent, including North America. Odd thing though, all nine incoming on this continent were headed for Montana before we lost track of them.”
“Why Montana? There’s no military objective there worth nearly as much as NORAD or a dozen other places I can think of.”
“We’ve all been scratching our heads, sir.”
“What’s left of our communications?”
“Our first casualty was information. We’ve lost just about every kind of communication, from satellites to ground-based to sea-based systems. We’re nearly deaf, sir. In fact, the first inkling we had that something was wrong was when communications satellites started disappearing like mad. The enemy has our information systems at the top of its priority list.”
“Smart. Neutralize your opponent’s communications and you’ve neutralized his ability to fight back.”
“Exactly, sir. It’s like they’ve been studying us for the last couple of years. Like they catalogued every possible target on earth and they’re just going down the list.”
They moved past the gigantic door and its hydraulic cylinders reversed with a clunk and whined as they closed the aperture. Davis felt his brain straining every bit as hard as the hydraulic pistons as he tried to get some inkling how to fight this war and what his options were.
As if to underscore the limitations to those options, a glaring blue light illuminated the tunnel shaft behind them, accompanied by a terrific humming noise. It was the beam, laying down another salvo of heat at the tunnel entrance. It lit up the tunnel interior for several seconds and then vanished, leaving behind a hollow roar that echoed within the tunnel’s concrete walls. Davis and Lewis hurried past the inner blast door, a second rectangular behemoth that was open and waiting for them.
Once inside the central corridors of NORAD Davis could feel and hear, rather than see, the continued attack of the beam. A series of ground-rocking thuds rumbled down through the granite of the mountain and reverberated beneath his feet as he and Lewis moved through the branching tunnels on their way to the command center. She did her best to fill in the details Davis needed.
“The attacks started in the Eastern Hemisphere about seven hours ago. The beam neutralized every military base from Australia to Siberia to Europe to South Africa. Not just ours, everybody’s. The Eastern Hemisphere was facing the moon at first, but the attack spread westward as the earth turned. That put the East Coast of the U.S. under the beam only two hours after the whole thing began, which wasn’t enough time for the Pentagon to figure out what was going on, let alone react.”
“Any missiles fired?”
“Our nuclear missiles, sir?”
“Yes.”
“No. They were taken out in their silos, every last one, as far as we know. No nuclear detonations, just fuel explosions. The warheads are probably still sitting in the rubble.”
“How is this facility doing, Holly?”
“Some of the upper levels have caught fire and we get a lot of vibration down here every time the beam hits us up above. But we’re holding together pretty well in the command center.”
Davis saw dust pouring from cracks in the whitewashed concrete tunnel arch overhead as the sounds of muffled detonations rumbled down from above. As if to add to his doubts, a rock fragment dropped from the ceiling and smacked on the floor near him.
When they reached the command center Davis got his first look at the top echelon of his staff, such as it was. It shook him to see just how junior most of them were. Among the young men and women standing or sitting in front of the dozens of computer consoles in the
room were captains, majors and colonels, but not a general among them. He sank into a seat at the head of the boardroom table with an ice-water feeling in his guts. They came silently to join him, taking places around the table. Never, thought Davis as he looked at the young, scared faces, have such inexperienced people been given such tremendous responsibility.
At the far end of the room were several backlit display maps of the world with oceans in blue and continents in tan. Normally, they would have shown dozens of white light-points indicating radar facilities, red lines denoting satellite trajectories, yellow tracks for incoming bogies when drills were in progress, and a hundred other bits of numerical data and position markers for objects of interest. But right now the displays were empty except for the dimly illuminated continents and oceans.
“What’s wrong with the displays?” he asked Lewis as she sat down on his right.
“Nothing, sir,” she replied. “The displays are fine. There’s nothing to display on them.”
“Yes, of course. I should have guessed.”
“Sir,” a male voice said, “we’re all taken by surprise.”
Davis eyed the speaker, who was just taking a place at the foot of the table. It was Colonel Paul MacIlvain. Not necessarily a face Davis was glad to see, given Mac’s role in bringing this all about. It didn’t sit entirely well with him that MacIlvain seemed to be the second rank here, after himself and before Major Lewis. Something about the man inspired less than complete confidence. Maybe it was how he had shoved his way into the middle of NORAD’s hierarchy without working his way up. But there was no denying that his intimate knowledge of Phaeon was critically important now. Davis would have to learn to like the man, because they would be working very closely for the foreseeable future.
The other faces around the room, fifteen in all, were too young and green to inspire much confidence. They looked scared—downright petrified—to Davis’s practiced eye. He drew a deep breath. This was one of those crucial command moments. What he was about to say had to sound convincing.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to win this engagement. Somehow, I don’t know quite how just yet, but I am confident you will help me find a way. Just the simple fact that NORAD is still here tells me no matter how powerful our enemy is, he can’t get at us down here. And we have something here at NORAD that he wishes he could destroy—” Another detonation far above shook the room. “—but he clearly does not have the means to do that.” Davis silently thanked fate for the timing on that hit. He could see a few heads rising taller.
“Their inability to reach us makes me certain that we can hold out for the time being. Then it will become a question of mounting a resistance to this attack. To do that, the first thing we’ll need is information. I want to see some data on that map and you’ve got to give me a way to get it. We need a ground-based mobile communications grid to replace what we’ve lost. I want to find a way to use hand-held radios and the communications capabilities of the vehicles that are inside here with us. I know the main antennas are down, but I want to start transmitting on anything that’s left ASAP. Car radios, ham radios, whatever. There have got to be people out there with small equipment. We need to contact them and establish a nationwide network of small operators, and we need it yesterday, but I suppose tonight or tomorrow will have to be soon enough.”
“Excuse me sir,” a Navy lieutenant spoke up, “but if there’s an invasion force already coming at us, how long do we really have until they’re knocking at our door?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Davis admitted. “Days? Maybe hours.” He looked again at the blank world map. The knot in his guts tightened.
Lewis suggested, “If there were some way of neutralizing that beam.”
Davis glanced at MacIlvain. The man had been silent, apparently content to ruminate about what he was hearing without adding anything.
“Damn it, Mac,” Davis grumbled. “What I’d give to have a look into your crater right now.”
Dinosaur Wars: Earthfall Page 3
