The Book of Truths

Chapter 13

Of course, problems come in threes, or at least twos. Rarely onesies.

Major Truman Preston could hear the First Family screaming at each other and could care less. What worried him was that the White House was in lockdown, the president seemed a bit off his rocker, and he couldn’t get an outside line on his Department of Defense — issue cell phone. He needed to check in with his supervisor at the Pentagon, but neither cell nor landlines were working.

So he sat on the second floor of the Residence, tucked away in a corner, a position he was more than used to, and held the football on his lap. Forty-five pounds of deadweight, with the emphasis on the dead. The surface of the case was dinged and battered and bruised from years of traveling. The damn case was older than he was. You’d think someone would have made the decision to swap the old thing out for a new case. Although the interior was updated with the latest electronics, never the outside.

Tradition mattered, even in apparently trivial ways.

Despite the turmoil raging and the lack of communication, Preston was his usual calm self because they didn’t fob off forty-five pounds of worldwide destruction on people who panicked easily. He’d already had a Top Secret clearance from his work in the army. Then he had to get a Yankee White clearance in order to even be near the president, but that wasn’t that hard because it required an SSBI — Single Scope Background Investigation — same as his TS had.

But then had come the psych screenings. Don’t want a loon or potential loon carrying the football.

Don’t want someone who runs around the aisles of Air Force One screaming, “We’re all going to die,” when they encounter heavy turbulence. Or like that guy in Aliens who kept whining. Preston would have put a bullet in that fellow right from the start.

In essence, as the not very good joke went, they were looking for the human equivalent of yellow dog, a Lab that could sleep at the president’s feet with its tail in the fire and show no sign of concern.

Nope, nothing much bothered Truman Preston.

But the sight and sound of the First Family raging at each other made him a bit uncomfortable. The First Daughter, Debbie, had just stormed away from her parents, dragging a Secret Service agent by the tie into her bedroom, door slamming shut behind them. If he didn’t know better, he’d swear they were having loud, angry sex, with her parents still right next door accusing each other of all sorts of things — the stuff people really only said to each other in that last argument before divorce, when darkest feelings and truths were uttered that one could never come back from.

Except a lot of people in the House were confronting each other, just like the First Couple.

And people were running about. That was the most disturbing thing. No one ran in the White House. Not even children, although he’d heard that Kennedy’s kids had, but look how that turned out for all of them. It only took a few weeks here before everyone took on the slow, purposeful stride of power the White House exuded and they became part of the conveyor belt.

Yet he’d just seen a junior press secretary being chased by a pair of Secret Service agents as she tried to wedge open a window and climb out. They’d grabbed her, kicking and screaming, back to the others on the first floor.

So people running in the White House was not something Preston had planned for today and he, more than anyone else in the building, thought of life as a plan. A slow, deliberate relay in which he carried the baton for a while and then passed it off at the end of his shift and then got it back. Routine. Normal.

One thing he was certain of: It wasn’t going to hell in a hand-basket on his watch.

He heard the president scream at the First Lady that she was a castrating bitch. A vase came flying out of the open door to their room and Preston ducked as it shattered on the wall near him.

That, too, was not normal. Preston had been around the president and his wife for four years and the harshest thing he’d ever heard the old man say was, “Gosh darn, double toothpicks!” Preston had no clue where it came from, but it meant POTUS was upset. But now they sounded like two sailors on shore leave. And that vase had been around since Dolley Madison (he remembered every detail of his in-briefing to the building, another trait necessary to his job), so there was something up with that. The First Lady had a fit if it was even turned in the wrong direction, and now she had just smashed it.

Reluctantly but realistically, Preston got up and moved farther away, out of the thrown porcelain line of fire. (There was a lot in that room.) He wasn’t sure where was safe right now in the White House, but any place was better than where he had been. He felt a physical wrenching in his gut, a loneliness, as he moved away from the man whom he never left while carrying the football.

The football seemed heavier than usual and the room seemed to close in on him, but no one had prepared him for this. He took a seat farther down the hallway and fidgeted.

“Major Preston.”

A lesser man might have startled at the quiet voice just behind him, as if she’d snuck up on him. He recognized her and knew she always moved quietly. She had so little presence few ever noticed her, but she carried that big book, and because he carried the big briefcase, he’d felt a kinship from afar.

“Yes, ma’am?” There was also the fact that during that in-brief, he’d been told that she was the only person he was never, ever to interrupt when the president was with her.

“But what if—” he’d started to ask, and he’d been cut off at the knees.

“NEVER!”

So who the hell was she?

“Sit back down,” the Keep said as she settled into the chair next to his, placing the leather-bound book flat on her lap. “But please, make no attempt to touch me. Or anyone else for that matter. You haven’t had physical contact since you came into the House for your tour of duty, have you?”

“No, ma’am. The Secret Service already asked.” People never got close to him, even in normal times, he suddenly realized. As if he were a leper. “Why?” he added.

“Should you have passed your security check, Major?” the Keep asked.

Preston blinked. “Of course. Well, I mean, I did. So yes.”

“And the psych evals?”

“Yes.”

“What about ethics?” the Keep asked.

Preston realized he was now holding the football to his chest.

The Keep gave a sad smile. “It gets heavy when you’re no longer carrying it for someone else, doesn’t it, Major?”

Preston realized his palms were a bit sweaty and he tried to remember the last time they’d been like that outside of the gym. He was one of those who only sweat after extreme exertion. He really didn’t understand the intent of her question. What was comforting, though, was that despite the chaos in the White House, she seemed calm enough.

“What’s going on?” Preston asked.

“I have a message from Smedley Butler.”

“Who is that?”

“And you’re a marine.” The Keep seemed disappointed. “You’ve heard of Chesty Puller, right?”

He nodded, a warm feeling washing over him at the name of the famous marine general.

“John Basilone?”

Preston’s chest swelled. “Won the Medal of Honor and still went back into combat. KIA at Iwo Jima. A hell of a marine.”

The Keep nodded. “But Smedley Butler won two Medals of Honor as a marine, yet you’ve never heard of him. Interesting, don’t you think?”

Another piece of something shattered and the First Lady was cussing up a storm. Something about a lack of testicles on the president’s part. He supposed it was a follow-up to his comment about castration.

The Keep tapped a finger on her book. “War Is a Racket.”

“Excuse me?” Preston said.

“Smedley served in the marine corps for thirty-four years, got out in 1930. Then he wrote a book with that title: War Is a Racket. Old Smedley said he could give Al Capone some hints on how to conduct business since the gangster only ran three districts in Chicago and Smedley was part of rackets on three continents in his long and storied career. But you’ve never read the book, have you?”

“No.”

“Never heard of him.”

“No.”

“If you want to know who someone is,” the Keep said, “one of the easiest ways is to study what they read. What they study. What their hobbies are. Background checks are one thing. One can’t be absolutely right about everyone, but for your job, we do have to be right. So the best way is to know what people read in their downtime. E-books help a lot with that. No longer have to do those tedious inventories of who checks out Catcher in the Rye from the library or what you used your credit card for at Barnes and Noble. What people do when no one is watching is when you get to know who they really are. But someone is always watching, Major. Someone is always watching those people who hold something like that”—she indicated the case once more—“in their hands. And when you least expect it. Makes sense, doesn’t it.”

The last was not a question.

“Is there a point to this?” Preston asked.

“Just passing time, out of the way, like you,” the Keep said. “If we stay still and quiet, maybe everyone will ignore us.”

And that’s when the case buzzed in his hands.

“And you have the only outside line left here in the White House,” the Keep said.

Preston ignored her. He reached inside his shirt, pulled out the key on his ID tags, and inserted it in the lock on the case. One of the locks. The other had a code that changed with every shift. He was the only one who knew the code. He dialed it in.

“Smedley was the only marine ever to win two Medals of Honor,” the Keep said as Preston worked, “and the Marine Brevet Medal. Of course they don’t give that one out anymore. Yet after he retired, he, like Eisenhower a generation later, warned of the military-industrial complex and complained he’d just been a gunman for all the businessmen who got the government to send marines into places like Honduras, the Philippines, China, Mexico… a list so long, even he had trouble remembering all the countries he’d had boots on the ground in.”

Preston flipped the latch on the briefcase and pulled out the satellite phone, turning away from the woman. He listened to the brief instructions, then turned the phone off, stuck it back in the case, removed the pistol that was always in the case, and latched the case shut.

“You’re sweating,” the Keep noted.

Preston stood, the briefcase very heavy in his one hand, the pistol in the other. “Why are you giving me this history lesson?”

The Keep stood. “We’ve found that confronting someone, especially a soldier like you, usually reinforces their initial attack impulse and rarely, if ever, causes them to change their mind. I’m trying to get you to change your mind about what you’re about to do by telling you about one of the greatest marines there ever was who changed his mind.”

“You’ve said your piece.” He gestured with the pistol. “Now I have to do my duty.”

“To who?” the Keep asked, but he was already moving.

And that was how Major Preston abandoned his post at the order of the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, meanwhile, was leaving nothing to chance. While he waited for Preston to heed his call, he was typing on a keyboard hooked in the secure military Internet. The only problem was his fingers were almost too wide to hit only one key at a time. Other than that, he was just rocking along as the letters appeared on the laptop screen.

There was a pause, a couple of seconds too long in Riggs’s judgment, then a reply.

Riggs nodded. Finally, finally, finally, it was time. “Payback is a medevac,” he muttered as he began typing.

“Excuse me, sir?” the closest officer asked.

“Shut the fuck up,” Riggs muttered as he focused on his typing, never one of his stronger suits, even when his fingers were single-key-sized.

This time he slammed a fist onto the conference tabletop as it took at least five seconds for a response.

“No shit, dumb fuck,” Riggs muttered. He reached into his coat pocket where the flask used to reside and pulled out the acetate card that had been passed from general to general, starting with General Curtis LeMay in 1951. How it was passed, and whom it was passed to, was an intricate study of trust, paranoia, and patriotism with a bit of socio-pathology thrown in that could provide enough fodder for hundreds of PhD dissertations.

Except not a single word of any of this was in any report.

The only document regarding Pinnacle that ever existed was this authorization card.

It had never been sent out with the laundry.

Riggs knew he needed to be very careful. He’d only get one shot at this. No second chances allowed. He extended his right pinkie, small enough that it could tap a single key. He held his breath and typed:

So, okay, they had never been very imaginative from 1951 and forward through Ortsac. But the cursor remained blinking for ten long seconds and the response Riggs yearned for came:

But Major Preston wasn’t the only one who had a means of communication out of the White House.

Moms had to make a decision. This was like Whac-A-Mole with Cherry Tree. No matter how hard they tried to isolate those infected, the efforts to keep runners inside the White House was infecting more. There seemed a tremendous urge among those infected to get out, to tell someone the truth. Whether it was a spouse, a child, a parent, someone they had wronged, someone who had wronged them… whatever. That was more dangerous than Cherry Tree.

They had seventy-two people isolated in the White House and at last count, twenty-two were infected. The latest news from Ms. Jones, via Hannah, via some operative the Cellar had, was that Cherry Tree burned out in four hours.

Moms sat down in the Pantry on the first floor, as isolated as she could get, and reached in her pocket and called Ms. Jones on her satphone.

“Yes?”

“I need to talk to Doc,” Moms said without preamble.

“Certainly.” There was a series of clicks and then Moms heard Kirk’s voice.

“Moms! Are you all right?”

“Get me Doc. Hell, Kirk, put me on the team net so I can get feedback.”

“Wait one.”

A few seconds later, Doc’s calm voice came over the net and Moms realized how much she missed her team, not only for mission support, but just support.

“Everyone else there?” Moms asked.

“Roger,” Nada said, followed by Eagle and Mac.

“I need help here.” In her usual succinct manner, she laid out the problem in the White House ending with: “I don’t think we can keep a lid on this forever. Either someone is going to get out, or the story is going to go on so long that no one will believe it’s an exercise. Plus, even though the president and First Family should be through their four hours soon, it will look awkward bringing them out and yet continuing to isolate others.

“On top of that, we’ve got a bigger problem. There’s no way we can keep seventy-two people quiet after they come off of Cherry Tree. The shit is going to hit the fan. Thoughts.”

There was just static for a few moments, then Doc spoke. It only took him a minute to outline the solution to the spread of Cherry Tree, but Moms nodded when he was done. “Excellent idea. And for the second problem?”

And as she had hoped, it was Kirk, who had cheated his way through Ranger School, who had the answer.

“Outstanding,” Moms said. “Nada. What’s the status of your mission?”

“We’re waiting for target location,” Nada said. “Then we’ll go take care of our little problem.”

“Do you have enough support?” Moms asked.

“Definitely,” Nada said. “You need to take care of your bigger problem there.”

“Roger. Out.”

If there was a hell on Earth, the Nevada Test Site was it. It was definitely the deadliest location, with many places so radioactive, a human being wouldn’t last ten minutes. Large swathes were splattered with subsidence craters from underground nuclear explosions crowding each other out for space.

Seven hundred and thirty-nine nuclear devices had been exploded in the Nevada Test Site. Lagging way behind were Alaska (three), Colorado (two), and Mississippi and New Mexico duking it out with one each. The rest were places like the Marshall Islands where the US government had paid out $759 million so far to say, oops, sorry we nuked your islands. Even obliterated one.

The Department of Energy, which technically controls the site, likes to say devices and not weapons, because there were those who had tried really hard to harness nuclear explosions for things other than death and destruction.

Which was why the largest man-made crater was there: Area 10’s Sedan Crater, part of the Plowshare Program, was 1,280 feet wide and 320 feet deep. Plowshare’s concept was to use nuclear warheads for peaceful purposes, aka Isaiah 2:3–5: “And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

They tried. A Pan-Atomic Canal across Nicaragua was one concept. Detonating twenty-two nuclear bombs to clear the way for I-40 in the Bristol Mountains was another.

So they blew a 104-kiloton bomb on Yucca Flats that produced the Sedan Crater and also sent a radioactive dust plume across the country that reached the Mississippi River.

After $770 million spent, it was decided Plowshare sort of, kind of wasn’t the smartest idea a bunch of scientists had come up with.

But the weapons testing went on until 1992 when a treaty was signed halting all nuclear testing, the diminutive grandfather of SAD.

Left sitting out in this wasteland were the facilities and devices being prepared for further tests. Orphaned, they were snatched up by Pinnacle, which to that point had been using abandoned missile silos and a scattering of “retired” bombers kept in barely flyable condition at the Tucson “Boneyard.”

Pinnacle was consolidated at Icecap, a large tower that housed the drill needed to tear into the desert floor and position another device for testing. Alongside Icecap stood a warehouse with the gear needed to support the project. Three four-mile-long sections of rail track extended out from the tower, going nowhere in particular. Their purpose was to allow the three diesel engines in the tower to pull their flatbed carrying an ICBM missile out to launch. There was also a missile on the top of the drilling platform, just underneath the retractable roof.

That gave Pinnacle the ability to launch four missiles, which was double the number ever used in actual war. Which meant Pinnacle had the ability to start a war.

The entire facility was manned by three men but defended by an array of automated defenses that had been skimmed from developmental programs over the past decades.

The ultimate defense, of course, was the radiation. The three men were ensconced in a shielded bunker fifty feet under the desolate landscape. Housed above them were twelve other nuclear warheads, all primed with self-destruct. The men spent one month on, two months off, rotating with two other crews. They were all paid top dollar and they were all committed to the cause.

The really scary thing that Neeley had learned from Brennan was that this facility, while the heart of the Pinnacle, wasn’t all there was to it. There were other nuclear warheads wired into it, the exact number even Brennan or the men manning it didn’t know. The years had buried the locations and numbers with the men who’d held the secrets.

The one in Nebraska had been one of those. How many more were out there was anybody’s guess.

With General Riggs delivering the correct password, the tall doors on three sides of the drill house slid up. The automated diesel locomotives began powering up. At the top of the drill house, the roof slid aside, revealing an ICBM.

A button was pushed and the preparation for launch sequence began.

“With the White House compromised and the PEOC occupied by General Riggs,” Ms. Jones said, “we do not have our usual last-ditch backups.”

“She means cruise missiles armed with nukes,” Mac said to Roland by way of explanation.

“We should receive word shortly on the location of Pinnacle,” Ms. Jones continued, “and the optimal solution would be to wipe it out completely, unless, of course, it’s located among civilian targets.”

“I doubt that,” Eagle said. “They’ve hidden this stockpile somewhere deep and inaccessible would be my estimation.”

“I concur,” Ms. Jones said. “But I still believe we are going to have to be surgical with our strike when the time comes. We don’t want word of this to get out. It would cause considerable consternation among the populace to learn there’s been a rogue nuclear arm to our military.”

“It would be a clusterfuck,” Mac said to Roland. The big man smacked the smaller man on the back of his head.

“I get it,” Roland said.

“Yes, Ms. Jones,” Nada said, “but we have to assume they’ve got a self-destruct. They had one in Nebraska. And I don’t think we’re going to get lucky again.”

“Mister Nada…” Ms. Jones began, but hesitated.

Everyone turned to look at the team sergeant. Ms. Jones never hesitated.

“Yes?” Nada prompted.

“I need you to get something from the Vault.”

Nada was on his feet. “Yes, ma’am. And that is?”

And when she told him, they all knew why she’d hesitated.

But Nada didn’t. He gestured at Eagle. “You drive.”

And the two of them headed for the Humvee parked nearby to drive into the bunker built in the side of Groom Mountain where the Vault containing the Nightstalkers’ support was located.

The breach team General Riggs sent down the tunnel to the basement of the White House outnumbered the Secret Service guards in hazmat suits three to one. They also had superior firepower. They also wore the uniforms of the US military, which caused the Secret Service agents to hesitate. The soldiers did not.

Within seconds the three agents were flex-cuffed to a pipe that ran along the wall, cursing at their fellow federal employees and warning of infection as they opened up the barricaded door. Standing on the other side was Major Preston, an unconscious Secret Service agent at his feet.

Preston stepped through and the door was shut again. The party made its way back to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center.

“General,” Preston said as he put the football on the conference table in front of Riggs.

Everyone in the room fixated on the case.

Riggs smiled and touched a blue button set into the tabletop in front of him. The entire wall along one side of the room split apart, each piece rumbling to the side to reveal a massive screen. It was currently dark.

“Good job,” Riggs said as he indicated for Preston to open the case.

Preston unlocked it and flipped the lid up. Riggs grabbed a cable from the interior of the case that came out of the transmitter and plugged it into an outlet on the edge of the conference table. The dark screen flickered and then came alive with an electronic map of the wall. Overlaid in “nonessential areas” such as the South Pacific, Antarctica, most of Africa, Greenland, and other places were boxes filled with data. The data indicated the number of nuclear platforms available at this exact moment: missiles, submarines, aircraft.

At the very top, in the whiteness of the Arctic, was a red digital display. It currently read:

0:00:00

“Seal the room,” Riggs ordered.

His sergeant major pulled a red lever just inside the door. Steel plates slid down with solid thuds.

Riggs sat down and pulled items out of the case: the black book, which he placed in front of him; the list of classified sites, which he tossed in the trash bin; and finally the three-by-five card with the authorization codes.

Riggs picked up the black book. Originally, when the first version was prepared, it was the size of a long screenplay, over 150 pages in very small type and so complicated even the team preparing it despaired of completely understanding all the options.

It was President Carter, the only president with a degree in nuclear engineering, who’d actually spent the time to try to read the black book one day. He’d thrown his hands up in disgust and ordered a simplified version, a “Denny’s breakfast menu” summary so to speak. In keeping with that theme, the target listing was broken down into three main categories: rare, medium, or well done.

Riggs wanted well done.

He flipped through and it didn’t take him long to find the meal he wanted — targeting all known nuclear launch sites in the world in nuclear powers considered “unfriendly” to the United States: Russia, China, and North Korea. Just for shits and grins, he also included Pakistan’s and India’s arsenals because those two prick countries were going to start World War III any day now and he might as well prevent that while he was at it.

At least that was Riggs’s reasoning.

Riggs rattled off the option numbers and the PEOC staffers went to work, fingers clattering on keys. Red triangles began flashing on the world map.

“Oh, yeah,” Riggs said, flipping through, searching. “Where the hell is Iran?”

Preston leaned over the general’s shoulder, almost apologetically. Like a good waiter, he flipped two pages and lightly rested his finger on the page. “Here, sir.”

“Let’s take out the ragheads too,” Riggs added. “Make a clean sweep of it once and for all.”

A similar red display in the Pinnacle bunker began to flash and then numbers came alive.

0:10:00

The display clicked to 0:09:59 and the countdown had begun.