The Book of Truths

Chapter 3

And that was why the Nightstalkers were ten minutes out from drop.

Moms filled them in. “It’s an old launch control center. It was bought a few months ago by a couple of civilians. Since we’ve been airborne, Ms. Jones had her sources run their background: a pair of doomsdayers.”

“The end of the Mayan calendar must have bummed them out with no payoff,” Kirk said.

“They probably hit the wrong button,” Mac said. “But how can there still be a nuke there?”

“It’s a launch control center,” Moms repeated. “It has fourteen outlying silos. Ms. Jones just had a Key Hole satellite do a deep ground penetration and it picked up radiation from a cluster of silos. There’s still a nuke in at least one of them.”

“Nada wins,” Mac said, which wasn’t surprising since Nada always predicted the worst and Nada often won. Mac shook his head, the movement unnoticed inside his protective hood. He was a good-looking man, part young Tom Cruise, part more rugged than the actor from actually being a soldier instead of playing one. He was the best explosive ordnance man to come out of the army, which is why he was now a Nightstalker.

Partly.

Ms. Jones’s means of recruiting were a mystery, although it basically entailed combing the ranks of the elite, looking for those who had the added benefit of being unique in ways she felt the team needed. Often that uniqueness was something their former units didn’t really appreciate, or in fact rejected.

“No way it can go off,” Mac continued. “We’re talking—”

He was cut off by Doc. “I’ve broken apart the signal. It’s two overlapping transmissions. One is a countdown.”

“Fuck me to tears,” Nada muttered.

“What’s the count?” Moms asked.

“Twenty-two minutes, sixteen seconds, and dropping,” Doc informed them.

“Except there won’t be a launch,” Moms said, “because all those silo covers were welded shut and had concrete poured on top when the complex was closed.”

“That’s not good.” Roland stated the obvious, because Roland always focused on the obvious. It was irritating at times but very effective in combat.

Like Roland.

Moms ignored him and addressed Doc. “What’s the other transmission?”

Doc was frustrated. “I can’t make it out yet. Some old code that keeps repeating over and over.”

“Ten minutes out,” Eagle announced.

Ears popped in the cargo bay as pressure finished equalizing to fifteen thousand feet above ground level.

“All right,” Mac said. “The pool is now open as to cause.”

“Human error,” Nada said. Because Nada always thought it was human error. His faith in his fellow men was never above the half-full level, and usually pretty much near empty, and often he thought the glass simply didn’t even exist, but rather was a mirage, a cruel joke of an uncaring Fate.

“Of course there is some human factor involved,” Doc said, blinking behind his thick glasses and peering through the protective plate in the hazmat hood, focused on his keyboard. “It is part of my rule of seven.”

“Well, you gotta pick one, not seven,” Mac said. “The bet is on the primary cause.”

“Computer glitch,” Kirk said. Kirk always wanted it to be something to do with computers, because that made it his responsibility to fix the situation as the team communications man and computer specialist.

“Hardware or software?” Mac pressed.

“Hardware,” Kirk said.

Mac was using a felt-tip marker to record the bets on the arm of his suit. “I got Kirk with computer glitch, narrowed down to hardware malfunction. Nada with human error as primary. Doc?”

“I do not speculate,” Doc said, ending his participation.

“Sure it’s not a bug?” Mac chided him. Doc always wanted it to be a bug, the more exotic, the more interesting.

“Come on, Moms,” Kirk pressed.

Moms sighed, the sound echoing inside her hood, and for the sake of teamwork allowed herself to be drawn in. What most of the team, other than Nada, didn’t quite grasp was that she allowed the betting because it was an active way of getting everyone involved in “war-gaming” possibilities. The Nightstalkers often jumped into confusing and rapidly changing scenarios, and the more open their minds were to the range of problems they could face, the better they could face them.

She spoke: “Someone left an inspection plate open or an inner tube in the rocket from the engines fell apart and a rat got in and chewed through some wires. Or the doomsdayers were playing make-believe launch-the-missile, pretending they were actually ending the world not knowing they had a loaded silo.”

Mac whistled. “Now that’s specific. But you do remember that’s what happened in South Dakota when we went there two years ago?” He wrote R-A-T on his sleeve.

“Of course,” Moms said. “History has a way of repeating itself.”

Doc got up and waddled over to Roland to do one last check of the hazmat suit as per protocol. Moms did one more check of his parachute rig, not protocol, but she was a worrier. Doc tapped Roland lightly on one shoulder and Moms tapped him on the other, a mixture of reassurance and support, and they both sat back down.

“Keep working the second freq and code,” Moms said.

Doc was already back on his laptop.

“Five minutes,” Eagle announced. “Opening ramp.”

The Snake was a tilt-wing, jet-powered Black Ops aircraft, so experimental Eagle could have put in for test pilot wings with the air force. Except Nightstalkers never put in for badges, or awards, or wings, or any of that.

At the rear of the Snake, a crack of late daylight appeared as the back ramp lowered until it was horizontal. Very cold wind swirled in and the sound level increased accordingly.

Roland yawned and stretched his massive arms wide as he walked onto the ramp, stopping a foot short of the edge of the drop into potential oblivion. He’d been fast asleep at the Ranch when the Zevon alert came in, and he hated having his sleep cycle interrupted. Even for a nuke.

Especially for a nuke. You can’t shoot nukes and Roland lived to shoot things. Roland was a large man, four inches over six feet, with the build of an athletic middle linebacker. The scar that curved along the right side of his head from temple to behind his ear hadn’t been earned on a football field, though, but in combat during his first tour with the Eighty-Second Airborne in Iraq. Years ago and miles away.

“Eagle?” Mac asked.

“At the height of the Cold War, the United States had thirty-one thousand, two hundred and fifty-five nuclear weapons,” Eagle said, drawing on his vast reservoir of useless information. Useless until they needed it to save their asses. “It is not improbable that our government lost track of some. This is the fifth Bent Spear we’ve been on this year, which is a two hundred and fifty percent increase from last year.” The Bent Spear was a reference to a nuclear event that did not involve the possibility of nuclear war. “My summation,” Eagle continued, “is that there was a paperwork error and the missile and warhead were simply left behind.”

“Yeah, but that don’t explain why it’s going off now,” Mac said.

“It’s old,” Eagle replied. “Old things malfunction.”

“Like Nada,” Mac said with a grin no one could see but everyone knew he had. Mac liked to push everyone’s buttons. Usually for fun.

Nada was indeed old, in military terms, having passed his fortieth birthday several years ago, the oldest member of the team and the longest serving. He was of Colombian descent, although many mistook him for Mexican, with graying hair poking straight out his skull as if seeking to escape his head, and a pocked, dark-skinned face. He’d plowed through a stellar Special Ops career: Rangers, Special Forces, Delta Force, Black Ops freelancer… and now he was a Nightstalker. It was either the tip of the spear, or the shit depth of the ocean depending on which day of the week it was. Today it plunged toward the latter.

“Three minutes,” Eagle announced and Roland shuffled another inch closer to the edge of the ramp.

“O-L-D,” Mac spelled out as he wrote it on his sleeve. “Old what? You always say it’s old with nukes and there’s no way we can really pin that down. You gotta pick something specific.”

“That’s because pretty much our entire nuclear arsenal is old,” Eagle said. “Old and falling apart.”

“That’s the reason,” Moms said, “they’re going to sign the SAD treaty at the United Nations soon.” She was referring to the Strategic Arms Disarmament Treaty, in which all nuclear powers were pledging to work to zero weapons in ten years. At least those countries that acknowledged actually having nuclear weapons. It was what Reagan and Gorbachev had come within one word of achieving in Iceland in 1986.

“And pigs will fly,” Nada muttered.

“They do if you toss them out of a plane,” Mac observed. “It’s just the landing that ain’t pretty.”

“I’ll be glad when they get rid of all the obsolete material,” Doc said. “Both hardware and software,” he added.

“I’ll be glad when we don’t get called out on these anymore,” Nada said.

“I’ll be glad to get some dinner,” Eagle muttered from the cockpit.

“Roland?” Mac asked, ignoring all of them.

“Something broke,” Roland said simply. “And we’re going to fix it.”

“B-R-O-K-E,” Mac wrote on his arm. “I think Roland, once more, in his finite yet elemental genius, will win theoretically.”

“Did you just insult me?” Roland asked, a scowl crossing his ugly mug.

“It’s not just the aging arsenal,” Moms said, stepping into the banter because Roland and Mac sometimes went a bit too far turning banter into something darker. “Remember what’s in your nuke briefing book? The ’95 Black Brant scare?”

“Norwegian clusterfuck,” Nada corrected. “Fucking scientists launched a weather satellite and forgot to tell the fucking Russkies. It went right into the flight corridor a missile from a silo in North Dakota would be on to hit Moscow. Yeltsin had his nuclear football open and was ready to toss the damn thing by pushing all the right buttons.”

“Only time a world leader has ever activated its nuclear suitcase,” Eagle threw in, because Eagle always threw in knowledge… and history… and movies. “Never even happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

“We were lucky Yeltsin was probably drunk,” Mac said. “That’s one thing you can at least count on with the Russians. Remember in Albania with the biological—”

“Eagle,” Moms cut in, “inform the personnel on the ground we’re coming in and they can disperse.”

Mac snorted. “Run for the fucking hills more like it. They only took an outer perimeter, anyway.”

“One minute,” Eagle announced.

“Thirteen on the countdown,” Doc added, still typing away.

“Going to jump soon, Doc,” Moms said. “Secure the computer. Kirk, when we touch down, I want you working with Doc to figure out that second code.”

Roland moved to the very edge and looked down. The sun was setting in the west, casting long shadows across the high plains. Snowdrifts were piled here and there, but at least they weren’t at the height of winter, with Christmas not far away.

“Go!” Eagle announced as the green light flickered on above Roland in the tail section of the plane. The verbal prompt wasn’t necessary as, like Pavlov’s dogs, Roland was gone at the green.

Roland let gravity take charge. He spread his arms and legs to get stable. Then he pulled his arms to his sides, tucked his head into his chest, and missiled down toward the target.

“Clarence?” Peggy Sue knew exactly how to slide her husband’s name under his rib cage by putting the emphasis on the second syllable.

Her mother had taught her well.

But not well enough since she was living inside a practically unheated, no-flowing-water concrete bunker in the middle of Nebraska.

Clarence dropped the last case of water, frozen solid from sitting in the bed of his pickup during the two-hour drive back. “What?” he demanded in that tone men use to indicate to their wives, significant others, and even one-night stands that they don’t want to hear the real question following the question mark behind their name.

“I ain’t never seen this light blinking before.”

Clarence checked his irritation. “What light?”

“This here.” Peggy Sue pointed to an open metal cabinet next to the pipe she’d been using as a clothesline. “I just pulled that cupboard open to see if—”

“It ain’t a cupboard,” Clarence said. “I told you not to touch nothing.”

“What is it then?” Peggy Sue had picked up the uncertainty in his voice and twisted the dagger a little. “You don’t know what it is, do you?”

It was a flashing orange light. Anyone could see that.

On a piece of crumbling masking tape underneath it, someone had scrawled PINNACLE in black marker. The container had a metal door, which Peggy Sue had opened, and was four feet high by two wide. There were a lot of lights, but only one was active. An old keyboard rested at the base of the cabinet connected to the panel by a single cord. Another piece of masking tape, which had half-peeled over the years, was above it. The same hand had simply written, ENTER CODE — GOOD LUCK OR GOOD-BYE! If they’d used emoticons back in the day, there probably would have been a:) there. Below it in pencil, someone had added: Smoke ’em if you got ’em.

“Oh, crap,” Clarence muttered. “You sure done it now, Peggy Sue.” He slammed shut the door as if doing so solved the problem.

“You don’t even know what I done.”

“Get ready!” Moms called out on the team net as she staggered to the edge of the ramp, loaded down with weapons and gear. She was tall, though not as tall as Roland, spotting him a little over four inches. She had wide shoulders above surprisingly narrow hips, giving her a body a beach volleyball player would envy. Her short brown hair had streaks of premature gray, more coming with each op, and it had never occurred to her to get it colored. “Eagle. Stay at altitude, just in case.”

The rest of the team was startled at that last sentence.

“That’s not Protocol,” Eagle said, his voice carefully neutral to mask his concern. “I will descend to be on station overwatch at five hundred AGL to give you cover and provide exfiltration as needed.”

“Don’t hit us on the way down,” Mac added, because Mac always had to add something, but also to cover Moms’s gaffe.

“Follow me,” Moms said, shaking it off and stepping from the ramp. Without hesitation, the others followed.

The four got stable, then pulled, getting full canopies. The quick pull was because they were conducting a high altitude — high opening drop, designed to give Roland some time with feet on the ground before they touched down. It was Protocol, the way the Nightstalkers normally ventured into an unknown and abnormal situation. One team member on the ground first for the quick recon, and the rest following right behind. Protocol was what the team lived and breathed, what kept them alive, but lately, it had started to fray at the edges.

“Time hack on the countdown?” Moms asked Eagle.

“Ten minutes, thirty seconds,” Eagle responded.

Moms was focused on the mission ahead, listening to some last-second updates from Ms. Jones back at the Ranch; Mac was mentally running through nuclear warhead Protocol, cut the blue or red wire sort of thing; Kirk was monitoring Moms’s radio traffic and scanning local freqs to see if word of a problem had gotten out; Doc was focused on trying to fly his parachute and dreading the inevitable impact with the ground.

It occurred to Nada as he twitched his toggles to get his position above the rest of the team that they might see a mushroom cloud race up toward them as they descended. Such thoughts filled Nada’s dark mind when he was on an op.

It was why he was still alive and the longest-serving member on the Nightstalkers.

Roland could see the compound — a gray concrete blockhouse surrounded by a high fence with razor wire on the top. The gate to the compound was wide open.

He could also see the flashing lights of emergency vehicles from various government agencies racing away after having secured a far perimeter on Ms. Jones’s alert. The spear was bent, according to the official government code, but if it went to broken arrow or nucflash, they’d better be damn far away to survive.

For a moment, Roland pondered spears and arrows as weapons, because Roland always pondered weapons when he wasn’t actually using them. He decided he’d prefer the former, because while the arrow had the advantage of range, the spear gave a definite advantage close in.

These thoughts, however, did not stop Roland’s mind from processing the ground racing toward him. He’d done enough jumps to have a fairly good idea of altitude. Five thousand, five hundred feet give a hundred, he experience-estimated. He took a quick glance at the nav board on top of his ruck. Five thousand, six hundred. Off slightly, not important at this height, but fatal closer to Mother Earth.

Roland pulled his rip cord and the parachute blossomed above him. The opening shock pulled him upright and he did a quick check for full canopy and grabbed the toggle on each riser, a slightly more difficult task given the hazmat gloves encasing his fingers.

He hated hazmat suits, not for the same reason as the others — because it meant an NBC op: nuclear, biological, chemical — but because it restricted his movement and meant he had to leave his body armor in the team box lashed down in the Snake’s cargo bay. Roland felt naked without body armor.

He turned his attention back to the compound. He spotted a cluster of concrete-covered silos to the north. Another to the west. A few sprinkled to the east and south. “Moms, do we know which silo holds the nuke?”

“The satellite narrowed it down to area, but it could be any of four silos to the west of the facility.”

“I’m getting a schematic of the compound,” Eagle cut in. “All the silos were sealed and buried. You can’t get in from the surface. You’re going to have to use the access tunnel from the LCC to get to the right one.”

“Find out which is the right one ASAP,” Nada said. “Clock’s ticking.”

Moms and the rest of the team were passing through ten thousand feet, circling beneath their canopies. Doc was just above her, with Mac close by to make sure the team’s scientific expert didn’t do something stupid like “cut away” his main. Doc never liked jumping, but his desire to be on the Nightstalkers outweighed his fear of parachuting out of a perfectly good airplane.

Above Doc and Mac was Kirk, the team’s communication expert. He was also the latest addition to the team, joining them just in time for the “Fun in North Carolina” that had gone down six weeks ago. He was a lean, taut-muscled man whose main claim to fame prior to joining the team was that he’d successfully changed his scorecards in Ranger School in order to pass. His right earpiece crackled with an incoming message. He quickly let go of his toggles for a moment and tapped in the code on his wrist transmitter to open the secure link to Moms.

“The silo you want is number seven,” a voice with a Russian accent informed Moms over the radio. Ms. Jones was the voice from which all information flowed to the team. And all orders.

“The first responders only formed a far outer perimeter, unaware of what the incident is,” Ms. Jones continued. “My data says there are only two people in the vicinity. They are not of consequence. However, we cannot rule out that there is terrorist activity.”

“Roland will be down in a few seconds,” Moms replied. She took a quick glance up, counting chutes.

And above the team, keeping a careful eye on all of them like a good shepherd, was Nada, the team sergeant.

Two hundred feet above the target, Roland grabbed air with his chute, slowing his descent. He touched down on top of the LCC with a slight puff of dirt. He unbuckled from his parachute harness and readied the M249, even though this most likely was not a shooting op. One could always hope though, and Roland fantasized a wave of terrorists rushing out of the LCC.

He was rarely that lucky.

He ran down the side of the bunker and around to the front door. He glanced into the beat-up pickup as he went by, but there was nothing of interest. Roland tried the handle on the heavy steel door, but it wouldn’t budge.

He lifted the M249 and pounded on the door with the stock.

Eight stories down, Clarence and Peggy Sue snapped about and stared upward as the thuds on the door echoed down to them.

“This is my damn home,” Clarence said, heading for the weapons rack.

They had no running water but they did have a dozen assorted weapons. Clarence snatched an AR-15 off the rack and slammed home a magazine, pulling back the charging handle and letting it slide forward.

“Fill your hands, woman!” he barked at Peggy Sue.

She grabbed a pump-action shotgun and resignedly ratcheted a round into the chamber.

“Nine minutes,” Eagle informed them from his overwatch position, hovering five hundred feet above the LCC.

“The door’s locked,” Roland said. “Want me to shoot it off?”

“Negative,” Moms said. “Mac will blow it. We’ll be there in twenty seconds. Any sign of foul play?”

“Negative.” Roland lowered the machine gun with a sigh, which echoed inside his hazmat hood, and scanned the immediate area, hoping something would pop up that he could shoot.

The team touched down right in front of the bunker, all landing lightly.

Except for Doc, who made a sack of potatoes look graceful as he crumpled onto the ground. As he scrambled to his feet and out of his harness, he checked to make sure he still had suit integrity.

“Mac, get the door,” Moms ordered. “Everyone else, back up. Eagle, give us a rundown on how to get to silo seven once we’re inside.” With time running out, she made a command decision. “Suits off, people. We’re not going to need them based on the readings.”

Mac ran up to the old metal doors and opened up his rucksack, taking out a charge and placing it over the lock as the rest of the team stripped off the bulky hazmats.

“Back in the day,” Nada said, “I was on one of the last backpack nuke teams.”

“You mean when Eisenhower was president?” Eagle asked as he circled the Snake overhead. The chain gun mounted in a compartment in the nose of the aircraft was extended.

“SADM,” Nada continued as Mac jogged back toward the rest of the team, as best as one can jog in a hazmat suit, a remote detonator in his hand. “Strategic atomic demolition munitions,” Nada said. “I jumped with a live one on a training mission. That wasn’t fun. Heavy as shit.”

“Fire in the hole,” Mac warned, and then hit the toggle.

A brief flare of light and crack of explosion meant the doorway to the bunker was now unlocked. Eagle was relaying directions to them on how to proceed once they went inside.

Moms moved to the front of the team. “I’m taking point with Nada.”

Mac ripped off his hazmat suit.

Moms walked forward. “I’ll lose satcom in there,” she said. “Kirk, make sure you keep an open relay between me, Ms. Jones, and Eagle from here in the doorway. And use your own pad to work on that code. There’s got to be a reason it’s piggybacked on the countdown.”

“Roger that,” Kirk said.

Roland grabbed the edge of the heavy door and pulled. “Nobody’s oiled this sucker in a while,” he said as he grunted with effort. With a screech of protesting hinges, the door opened wide enough to invite them into its darkness.

There was an elevator directly in front crisscrossed with yellow warning tape, indicating it was nonfunctional. A set of stairs beckoned to the left. A dim glow seeped up from the depths of the LCC.

“Seven minutes,” Eagle said over the net.

Moms and Nada took point, a smoothly coordinated team, starting at the top of the stairs and clearing their way down. The countdown made them move faster than Protocol.

Thus they almost ran on top of Clarence and Peggy Sue on the landing just above the LCC Control Room.

“Who the fuck are you!” Clarence screamed, gesturing with the barrel of the AR-15 at Moms, his eyes wide with fear at the armed figures looming above him on the stairs.

Protocol was Moms should double-tap him right between the eyes while Nada took out Peggy Sue.

She broke Protocol by lowering her submachine gun, raising her hands in surrender, while still taking the last two steps and moving forward toward Clarence.

“Hey! I said—”

Before he got the next word out, Moms snatched the automatic weapon from Clarence’s hands, spun it around, and knocked him out with the stock. As Clarence crumpled to the steel grating, Moms turned to Peggy Sue. “Are you going to be a problem?”

Peggy Sue dropped the shotgun and the Nightstalkers shoved past her and took the last flight of stairs into the LCC.

“Six minutes,” Kirk relayed from above.

Moms paused in the LCC, getting oriented to the verbal directions Eagle had given her. She pointed. “That hatch. Mac, you take point. Roland, behind him for muscle. Nada, you make sure the two idiots don’t do anything and relay commo into the tunnel from Kirk. I’ll be behind Roland. Doc, keep working on that second code.”

They ran to the hatch and Roland grabbed the metal and tried to turn the handle. It resisted. Mac pulled a charge out of his pack, but didn’t have to use it as the wheel suddenly turned with a screech. Roland’s massive biceps bulged as he spun the protesting wheel, unlatching the hatch. It was slow going and Moms considered having Mac blast it, but decided against it; something was already wrong here and setting off a charge in the LCC wasn’t going to help. Mac put a headlamp on, as did the rest of them.

“Five minutes,” Kirk announced over the net.

The hatch began to open and Mac slithered into the three-foot diameter access tunnel for silo seven. Moms followed, then Roland.

Doc was seated at one of the consoles, typing away on his computer. Nada took up position at the open hatch. Peggy Sue timidly came down the stairs. “Who are you folk?”

“Shut up or I’ll shoot you,” Nada said.

Peggy Sue was used to that kind of talk, so she shut up.

In the tunnel, Mac moved as fast as one can move in a three-foot tunnel that doesn’t quite require you to crawl, but doesn’t allow you to run. He shuffled forward, his pack in front of him. His headlamp penetrated about thirty feet, but all he saw was more tunnel.

“How far?” he asked Moms.

“Eagle said three hundred and fifty feet.”

Nada’s voice crackled in their earpieces. “Four minutes.” A slight pause. “I got a stupid question,” he continued, “but is the countdown for a launch or for the warhead to detonate? And can that thing even initiate launch not having been serviced for so long? Eagle?”

“Wait one,” Eagle replied.

Mac spotted another hatch ahead.

Mac tried the handle, but it wouldn’t budge. Everyone flattened against the floor of the tunnel as Roland slithered over them, a torrent of muscle. He grabbed the wheel and grunted with exertion, but still nothing.

Behind him, Moms knew they were in a bind. There was no time to back out and have Mac blow the door. Nada’s voice delivered bad news as he relayed Ms. Jones’s information via Kirk: “The countdown is an Orange; a self-destruct for the warhead. In case the complex was ever compromised. The Area 51 nuke Acme tells her there’s a forty-two percent chance the bomb is still viable, plus or minus fourteen points. A ninety-one percent chance the conventional explosives will go off.”

“That’s not very precise,” Doc muttered.

“Frak me,” Moms muttered as she was forced into another razor’s-edge decision: Leaving the hatch shut would protect them from the conventional explosives going off and the resulting dispersal of radioactive material. But not the nuke going off. The rational odds said leave the door shut. “Roland?”

The weapons man contorted himself sideways in the tunnel, trying to get a better grip. Frustrated, he jammed his M249 into a spoke of the wheel, got leverage, and applied his entire weight.

The barrel bent as the wheel gave a shriek and moved a quarter of an inch.

“Faster please,” Moms said. “Doc? Anything on the second code?”

“It’s very old,” Doc said. “Not yet.”

“Kirk?” Moms asked.

“Negative.”

“Ms. Jones?” Moms asked, the message relayed via Nada to Kirk to the Ranch.

“The Acmes are on it,” Ms. Jones said, referring to the group of scientists across a wide spectrum of specialties the Nightstalkers had on call. The Acme moniker came from the company Wile E. Coyote bought all his gear from in the Looney Tunes cartoon. Given the gear rarely worked, like the Acmes’ advice, it was appropriate.

“Three minutes,” Nada announced.

In the access tunnel, the wheel creaked another quarter inch. Moms reached around Roland, barely able to get the tips of two fingers on the wheel, but it was better than nothing. They applied pressure and gained a half inch. Squeezed as tight as lovers, all Moms and Roland cared about was opening a door that was an invitation to an explosion.

“If there was an alert at the SAC museum,” Kirk said from the upper doorway, “then there has to be a live circuit between the two. Some sort of signal. How did this get triggered?”

In the control room, Nada turned toward Peggy Sue. “What did you guys do to set this off?”

“I didn’t do nothing,” Peggy Sue said. She rushed to continue the explanation because she’d learned growing up that words spoken quickly could sometimes stop the fists. “Clarence, he was bringing water down. Me, I was doing the wash. Hanging the laundry.” She pointed at the rubber tube, festooned with dripping clothes. “Swear, mister, didn’t do nothing. Was just—”

“Two minutes,” Kirk relayed from Eagle.

Moms paused in helping Roland. “Eagle, I want you to gain a safe altitude in case this thing goes off. Nothing you can do for us anymore. That’s an order.”

There were a few seconds of silence, then Eagle replied, “Roger.”

Nada followed the rubber pipe from its entry point in the wall to the metal casing. He was over there in seconds, throwing open the door.

“Oh yeah,” Peggy Sue continued. “That light ain’t never been on before, but I swear I didn’t do nothing.”

“I’ve got an orange light on a warning board,” Nada reported. “Reads PINNACLE on a piece of tape. There’s a keyboard below it. Someone wrote ENTER CODE — GOOD LUCK OR GOOD-BYE! with an exclamation point at the end.”

“Doc,” Moms said as she shoved her arm along Roland’s side to give him two fingers of extra effort. “The code?”

“It’s encrypted,” Doc said.

“Kirk?” Moms and Roland got another inch.

“Negative. One minute,” he added.

Roland let out a surprised grunt as the wheel spun. He shoved Moms’s arm out of the way and lifted the hatch open. The latch to lock it in the open position was rusted shut, so he bore the entire weight, muscles vibrating.

“Go!” Roland said.

Moms pressed to the side to let Mac into the silo holding the missile. Moms started to follow, but as Mac went by Roland, he punched the big man in the solar plexus and grabbed the inner handle of the hatch, adding his weight to it. Between the punch and the extra weight, Roland couldn’t hang on and the hatch slammed shut behind Mac, locking him in and Moms and Roland outside.

“What the hell!” Moms yelled.

Mac’s reply was barely audible on the radio even though they were only feet apart. “If only the conventional implosion goes off, no need all of us being in here.”

In the LCC Control Room, Nada was staring at the keyboard. “Someone give me a code. Something!”

In the silo, Mac had his power drill out and was working on opening the access panel on the nose cone holding the warhead.

“Thirty seconds,” Eagle relayed to Kirk, who relayed to Nada who relayed to Moms who relayed to Mac.

Who only had half the screws off. The analytical part of his brain knew he’d never have them all off in time.

He kept working.

“Twenty seconds.”

“Mister Nada, is there any date in that panel or on the board?” Ms. Jones asked.

Mac was down to four screws.

“Ten seconds.”

Nada picked up the keyboard attached to the panel by a single wire and looked at the bottom. A manufacturer’s name and date was stamped on it. “Nineteen sixty-two.”

“Five seconds.”

Mac was on the last screw. It came out and he slammed the tip of a screwdriver in the edge and pried the panel open.

“Time!”

Mac had wire cutters in each hand, but the bundles of wire were so twisted and knotted and numerous in front of him that at Nada’s announcement he couldn’t help but hunch over and shut his eyes, waiting for the conventional explosives, at the very least, to go off and blast him into nothingness.

But nothingness was what happened.

No conventional explosion.

No nuclear explosion.

“Ortsac,” Ms. Jones said. “O-R-T-S-A-C.”

Despite time being up, very aware that a nuke might have a hang fire as easily as a mortar, Nada typed the letters on the keyboard.

The orange light went out.

In the silo, Mac slowly opened his eyes and looked more carefully inside the nose cone.

Then he started laughing.