The Line

CHAPTER 16

Boomer and Skibicki trooped into Maggie’s house covered in mud. They’d spent the last several hours scouring the north coast, searching vainly for. any sign of where the previous night’s jumpers might have gone to earth. They’d finally called it quits after getting Skibicki’s jeep stuck on one of the countless back trails. They were both exhausted.

Maggie met them with a laundry bag to take their dirty clothes.

“Your friend Trace called an hour ago,” she informed them.

“Is she all right?” Boomer asked, pausing in the middle of unlacing his boots.

“She says she’s fine, but she thinks Colonel Rison is dead.”

“Dead?” Skibicki repeated, focusing all his attention on Maggie.

Maggie gestured for them to forget about the mud and follow her into the kitchen.

“She didn’t talk to me long.

She said that she talked to Rison at the game and he was shot while they were talking. She escaped. Before he got shot, Rison gave her an envelope with some information in it that says the Line exists. She’s on her way to West Point to get Rison’s proof.”

“West Point?” Boomer said.

“That’s going into the lion’s den. What kind of proof is she going for?”

“She didn’t say,” Maggie replied.

“Did she leave a number where I could call her?” Boomer asked.

“She said she didn’t think it was a good idea to give her location over the phone,” Maggie replied. She threw a newspaper down on the table.

“I just picked a copy of the evening paper. You might want to look at it.”

Boomer picked it up and scanned the front page. His eyes immediately focused on a story on the bottom left.

Boomer checked the rest of the article, but it yielded little information.

“The police have found the bodies from last night,” Boomer said, laying the paper down.

“Any ID?” Skibicki asked, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“Not according to the paper, but we don’t know what the police have.

What about the weapons we used?”

“I deep-sixed those,” Skibicki said.

“That’s one of the things I took care of while I was gone.”

Boomer was relieved that those pieces of evidence were gone.

Maggie wasn’t done.

“Trace also said for you to get the story about what happened to Colonel Rison in Vietnam from Ski.”

Boomer turned to the sergeant major.

“What does that mean?”

Skibicki wearily sank down into a chair.

“Rison was the best damn commander I ever served under. What it means is that Rison probably didn’t have the time to tell her about what happened to him when he ran afoul of The Line.”

“And you know?” Boomer demanded.

“Yes, I know.”

Boomer was agitated.

“Why didn’t you tell me everything you knew?”

“Because I didn’t have proof and I didn’t really know what was going on,” Skibicki snapped.

“Rison had the proof and the real knowledge. And now Trace is going after it. I also didn’t make all the connections with what happened back then with what’s going on now. It’s been a long time.”

Boomer sat across from him.

“Tell me what you do know.”

Maggie bustled over with mugs of coffee and sat on the other corner of the table as Skibicki gathered his thoughts.

“When you first came to me about The Line, I tried to blow you off. I didn’t know why you were asking me, and quite honestly, I thought you might be from them. They want that proof back too. They want it bad — bad enough to kill for. It was only when I realized who your dad was that I knew you probably weren’t from The Line, but even then I had to play it safe.”

Skibicki looked off, out at the ocean.

“I ran into The Line when Rison did — way back in Vietnam. Of course I didn’t know it was called The Line or anything about it.

That all came later. It was after the mission where your dad died. We were running operations constantly so there wasn’t any time to stand around and contemplate things. I got a new team. This time I was the team leader, we were so short of personnel.

“I also got a new assignment. Command and Control North, MACVSOG. We were also under B-57, Project Gamma, but we weren’t going west. We were going north, right into the little shitheads’ backyard and snooping around. We were also crossing into Laos to get earlier readings on stuff moving south through there and into Cambodia on what everyone called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but it wasn’t just one trail — it was a whole complex of trails and roads and supply depots and staging areas.

“You got to understand something else that was going at the same time, something that was affecting Special Forces throughout the theater. A lot of our A Teams in 5th Group proper were working with the Montagnards — had been for years. And that was a big burr under the skin of the South Vietnamese government. In 1964, the Montagnards in the Ban Me Thout region had actually rebelled against the government, and it was only with the greatest of diplomacy that the Special Forces advisors in the area were able to keep the peace.

The teams working with the Yards were always caught between a rock and a hard place. The Yards were damn good fighters, but they hated the South Vietnamese as much as they hated the North and if you remember rightly, our government’s policy was to support the South, not the Montagnards.”

Skibicki shook his head.

“I’m not sure about the exact political maneuvering. AH I know is what Colonel Rison told me afterwards and what I saw myself. Rison said that he was approached by someone sent by the MACV Commanding General in Saigon and told to back off on supporting the Montagnards. They wanted us to disarm over fifty percent of our indigenous forces. Rison refused to do that, so the regular Army assholes started doing whatever they could to screw with our operations. Since they also had the help of the CIA, you could tell that someone really high up was rocking the boat.

“In the middle of this bullshit we were trying to fight a war. And it was starting to go badly in B-57. We still had to deal with our counterparts in the LLDB — the South Vietnamese army — and sometimes it was hard to tell who was more of a threat, the LLDB or the VC. Our counter intel guy was picking up information that our fucking LLDB counterparts were selling ammunition and weapons to the North Vietnamese. So much for democracy and the free enterprise system.

“We tried tightening down the screws on security at CCN headquarters but we were still losing people on missions and it was obvious there was a leak. But it wasn’t like we could just call time-out and put all our energy into finding out where the leak was. Our counter intel guys went to work on it and we kept getting on board the choppers and going out not knowing if our mission was compromised from the word go. You want to talk about having a shit feeling in your gut, you try that someday, flying into the badlands not knowing whether your whole OPLAN has been compromised and the bad guys were waiting for you to get off the bird.

“Then my team, RT Texas, went on a mission in, well, let’s simply call it a classified area, although I can tell you now that it was north of the DMZ. We came across what had been an enemy base camp. It was empty. We searched the place, sometimes you’d be amazed what you can find left behind, and hit paydirt: we found some film negatives that had been discarded in a pile of trash that had been half burnt. We brought those back with us.”

Skibicki laughed, a low growl that held no mirth.

“We had the double-dealing motherfucker on film: one of our LLDB agents, Ta Chon, meeting with North Vietnamese in uniform. We brought the son of a bitch in and wired him up to the polygraph and he flunked it. Shit, he was sweating bullets and we knew that he knew we knew.”

Skibicki paused and Boomer and Maggie both impatiently waited for him to continue. The sergeant major took a deep breath, then picked up the story.

“I was ready to pop Chon right then and there. Hell, I’d lost friends on those teams he’d compromised. Rison was down in Saigon at some damn meeting, so he was out of the net. The FOB executive officer.

Lieutenant Colonel Killebrew, wasn’t authorized to make such a command decision, so he went to the CIA for instructions. In reality, he wanted to turn Chon over to them and he knew that would take care of that. We’d done it before. The spooks liked fresh meat. Plus there was always the possibility the Company could triple Chon and turn him back against his own people and we could scarf up the rest of his buddies.

“But what Killebrew didn’t know was that the CIA was wired in with The Line and they were waiting for something like this. I didn’t know it either when I went to the CIA safe house outside Nha Trang with Chon.

The asshole I talked to wouldn’t take Chon. He suggested to me that we’ eliminate Chon ourselves since we had such strong evidence. Hell, he didn’t suggest it, he practically ordered me to do it.”

Skibicki stretched out his massive arms and glanced at the other two occupants of the room. The only sound was the wind blowing off the porch moving a chime back and forth.

“We took Chon back to the FOB. Then me and another guy, we shot Chon up with morphine, took him out into the bay, cut a vein so that the sharks would find him, and I popped him twice in the head with my High Standard .22.

We weighed the body down with chains, and dumped him overboard.” Skibicki said it all flatly, like he was describing a trip to the laundromat.

“It was all said and done by the time Rison got back to the FOB from a MACV command and staff meeting in Saigon. I went in with Killebrew and briefed Rison on what had happened. I think he knew right away that something stunk about the way the CIA spook had reacted, but fuck the body was already a body. Couldn’t resurrect the son of a bitch. We made up a cover story to explain Chon disappearing.

We said we sent him on a cross-border op and we never heard from him again. And that wasn’t that far out because, like I said, we were losing lots of people over the fence.

“The shit hit the fan the next day. Somebody, and to this day I swear it was the CIA, even though they produced some low ranking, non-S-F Intel clink to go public, blew the whistle.

“That’s all the general in Saigon needed. He called Rison up and asked him what happened. Rison gave him the cover story. The general blew a gasket, since he already had heard the true story and had Rison arrested. In the middle of a war, our own people arrested a full bull colonel in the U.S. Army!

They also picked up Killebrew, me, and the other fellow who helped me, a guy named Harry Franks. We were charged with murder.” Skibicki shook his head, still incredulous after all these years.

“Here we were, in the middle of the most fucked-up war you’ve ever seen, and we’re getting charged with murder for wasting a double agent.

It was enough to make you cry.

“Well, even the general couldn’t keep a lid on it. The press got a hold of the story and it hit the headlines all over back in the states.

There was a big public outcry over Americans getting jailed, even if we did kill someone. Hell, John Wayne had made a movie about the Green Berets, people liked us. And by then most everyone was sick of the war and it looked like we were just being set up, which we were, except no one in the public knew the real reason.

“So it didn’t work out quite like the general wanted. He didn’t get to see Colonel Rison and the rest of us go to jail, but he did at least get the colonel out of the way. Rison’s career was over. Never mind the murder, there was still the fact that he had lied to the general when he gave him the cover story. After all,” Skibicki’s voice dripped sarcasm, “we were only supposed-to kill people, not lie about it.

“The real thing that got us off, though, was what had started it in the first place — the CIA. They wouldn’t allow their people to testify, so that sort of stalled the whole thing out. After all, my defense was that I’d been told to waste the little motherfucker by the spook. There was no way the Company was going to put one of their own on the stand under oath.

“The general didn’t waste any time in trying to get Special Forces in-country under his control, though. Rison was still in the brig down in Saigon when the general appointed some leg colonel from his staff to take over the FOB. The son of a bitch tried to put on a green beret and not only was he not S-F-qualified, he wasn’t even jump-qualified.

The FOB sergeant major, old Terry Hollihan, a good man, had a fucking fit. He told the sorry SOB to take the goddamn jump wings and beret off.

The colonel then tried to get around S-F by going down to the LLDB jump school and getting airborne-qualified by doing a few chopper blasts. It was a real shame when he broke his leg on the third jump.”

Skibicki grinned a wicked smile.

“Of course that might have had something to do with Hollihan’s jumpmaster inspecting the colonel’s gear just prior to the jump. I guess the man was lucky he was alive. I’d have cut his damn static line.”

Skibicki’s face turned serious.

“But all that’s a roundabout way to get you to what you really want to know. We got off. They dropped the charges. But Rison knew that he had to do something or The Line would kill Special Forces.

“So he came to me and Harry and Lieutenant Colonel Killibrew and we talked about it. We needed something on them. Something to act as a countermeasure. There wasn’t much the officers could do. Rison had to go back to the States. His career was over. Killibrew was reassigned in e country. But before he left, Rison pulled a few strings and Harry and I disappeared into the Studies and Observation Group under deep cover with one last mission assigned to us by our former commander: get something on The Line.

“We went after the only lead we had, the assistant division commander of the Americal who had come to Rison in the beginning of the whole mess. We went down to the Americal AO and followed that officer everywhere. Hell, that unit was so screwed up, we could have wasted the man and the rest of the Division staff and it would have taken them a couple of days to realize it. We just put on regular fatigues, sewed an Americal patch on the shoulder and meandered around the big shit pile they called Division headquarters.

They had so many ash and trash men there, it was amazing they could put a squad in the field. Everyone just figured we belonged and no one questioned us.

“It took us five weeks before we got what we were looking for. Some V.I.P from the States flew in to Saigon and then came up to the Americal. He went straight to the ADC — didn’t even talk to the Division Commander, who spent most of his time drilling holes into the sky in his command and control helicopter, getting his rocks off listening on the radio to people dying five thousand feet below.

“We knew this V.I.P was something special. He wore unmarked fatigues and he was old. And he wore a big-ass ring on his left hand. Ain’t no mistaking one of those Hudson High rings. So I left Harry with the ADC and followed this guy back to Saigon. He was staying at the MACV compound in V.I.P quarters. I did some checking and found out his name: retired Brigadier General Benjamin Hooker on special assignment from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I told you about meeting him in’nam,” Skibicki added defensively as Boomer glared at him.

“Officially, he was retired and working for the Joint Chiefs. But in reality he was checking up on The Line’s little war.”

Boomer stood up and walked over to the window, then came back, his mind churning.

“What happened?”

“I waited until Hooker was at a meeting at the MACV compound and I broke into his room. I was looking for anything. I still didn’t even really know about The Line or who Hooker was. I hit paydirt. Right there in his locked briefcase.”

“What did you get?” Boomer asked, unconsciously leaning forward.

“His diary. Starting from 1926, the year he entered the Academy through 1969.”

Boomer whistled.

“What did it say?” Maggie asked.

Skibicki held up a hand.

“Whoa, slow down. I only glanced at it to make sure it was something we could use.

I didn’t have much time. I got out of the BOQ and went over to a friend of mine who worked in an office there at one of the MACV buildings. I made a copy of the diary page by page, but I didn’t read it. I checked a few pages here and there and what I saw scared the shit out of me.

You won’t believe some of the stuff this guy was involved in.

“Anyway, that same day I packed the original in a secure pouch and gave it to a S-F guy I trusted who was rotating back to the States with orders to hand deliver it to Rison.

I sent the copy by FOB’ courier to Killebrew. Then I went back to the Americal headquarters, gathered Harry in, and we went back to CCN to our job fighting the real enemy.”

Skibicki fell silent.

Boomer waited a little bit, then felt compelled to ask questions.

“Is that what Trace is after? The original diary?”

“I don’t know,” Skibicki said.

“If Rison sent her for proof, I imagine that’s what he would send her after. It’s what he must have been using all these years to keep The Line off his back and from tearing Special Forces apart.”

“But why is it at West Point?” Boomer asked.

“The purloined letter theory,” Maggie suggested.

“You know, hide it in the last place people would look for it.

Right at the place it all started.”

“What did Rison do with the diary back in 1969?”

Boomer wanted to know.

“Why didn’t he expose The “Expose The Line?” Skibicki repeated incredulously.

“We were trying to save our ass and Special Forces’ existence. The best Rison hoped for was a truce. A Mexican standoff.”

“What about Killibrew? What did he do with his copy?”

“Killibrew didn’t do shit with his copy,” Skibicki said, and for a moment Boomer mistook the bitterness in Ski’s voice as being directed at his former executive officer.

“Lieutenant Colonel Killibrew is officially listed as missing in action. Two days after I got the copy of the diary to him, he disappeared while on a flight from Nha Trang to the FOB. I find it rather curious that the plane he was on was a contract one flown by a were in the employ of the Company.

The mere pilot was supposedly lost in the crash also, but I wasn’t very surprised when I just happened to spot him two years later in Bangkok while I was on R & R.”

“Did the mercenary tell you what happened to Killibrew?” ‘ Boomer asked.

“Before he died, he did.” Skibicki looked Boomer in the eyes.

“They killed Killibrew, and that’s one of the reasons we’ didn do’ anything. Rison took care of the original and took care of dealing with The Line. They backed off and we backed off and that’s the way it’s been for twenty-six years until you showed up here in Hawaii and Trace started writing her book. And now the Colonel’s dead too.”

Skibicki parked the jeep on Radar Hill Road, one street removed from the tunnel. In between the two streets a lava ridge separated Boomer and him from their destination.

“We’ll leave it here. I want to see if anyone’s in the tunnel first and going up a dead-end street isn’t my idea of going in smart,” Skibicki said.

“The fake DIA guys have to have our names by now from the cops so I wouldn’t be too surprised to see company waiting for us.”

Boomer didn’t say anything. His mind was occupied with thoughts of Trace and what had happened to her today. He was less than thrilled about her going to West Point tomorrow, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it and that was what rankled him the most. He had thought he’d be getting her out of harm’s way by sending her back to the States.

They went up the ridge, getting down on their bellies as they came up to the crest. Peering over the top, they could see that the parking lot in front of the TASOSC tunnel was empty. Skibicki scanned the surrounding terrain in the fading light.

“Looks clear. Let’s go.”

They stood and made their way down to the vault door.

Skibicki picked up the phone that was on the concrete wall to the left of the door.

“What are you doing?” Boomer asked.

“On the weekend and at the end of each duty day the tunnel alarm is activated by the last person to leave. I have to call the Provost Marshall’s office to have them turn the alarm off.”

Skibicki dialed the number and talked to the duty sergeant.

Then he punched in the code on the numeric keypad and pulled the door open. There was a rush of air as the pressure equalized and they stepped in, letting the door lock behind them.

Skibicki led the way to his desk where he pulled out a large keyring.

“Keys to everything in here,” he said.

“So the enlisted people can clean everyone’s office,” he added.

They went to the end of the first tunnel and he opened Colonel Coulder’s office. Boomer watched as Skibicki began spinning the dials on the secure filing cabinet behind the commander’s desk.

“You have his combination?”

“Vasquez is security manager for the tunnel. She has all the combinations,” Skibicki said as the tumblers clicked and he opened the top drawer.

“So, naturally, that means I have all the combinations.” He quickly began scanning the folders inside.

“Since Coulder was in on the brief with Decker, I have to assume he’s in on whatever’s going on.

He’s a ring-knocker, too.”

Boomer searched the colonel’s desk while Skibicki worked the files. He looked up when Skibicki slapped a folder down on the desk.

“The rest of the President’s schedule. What wasn’t in the OP ORDER in the conference room.”

“And?” Boomer asked.

“The night of the sixth. After the President attends the fundraiser downtown. A national command and control exercise is scheduled.”

Skibicki considered the information he had just read to Boomer.

“We’ve been focusing on the ceremony in Pearl Harbor, but that sounds like a good time for The Line to make its move. They’ll have the President on their turf.

Most likely on Looking Glass,” he added, referring to the modified 747, E-4B command and control aircraft.

“I heard one of them was flying in, but I assumed that was simply because the Joint Chiefs were coming.”

“Maybe,” Boomer said.

“But I’ve got to tell you, despite everything that’s happened the past several days, I find it hard to believe that there is a plot against the President.”

Skibicki threw down the folder.

“You’re the one who said your mission you were on in the Ukraine was a setup.”

“Yeah, but there’s a big difference between that and a plot directly against the President. In the history of our country there has never been—”

“Fuck!” Skibicki exclaimed.

“Listen, Boomer, get your head out of your ass. First off, we’ve had the military go against the government numerous times before. Remember MacArthur during the Korean War? Some of the generals during the Civil War?

“You may have been behind the fence at Bragg for the past couple of years,” Skibicki continued, “but I’ve been out here in the real Army. People are not happy. They haven’t been happy for years. In fact, they’re downright pissed. Our benefits are getting eaten up by fat cats sitting in Washington. They’ll cut our benefits but not their own.

“We don’t have a contract guaranteeing any of the things we enlisted for. If Congress wants to change retirement benefits for the Army, they simply pass a law. As they did a couple of years ago by changing the base pay computation for retirement pay. Not a big deal by itself, but when you start adding in all the piddly shit over the past ten years, it comes to a lot. There’s been a betrayal of trust.

We put it on the line for this country, expecting that the benefits we enlisted under would be there when we retired and they’re not.”

Skibicki was on a roll. Boomer had never seem him so agitated.

“The President’s flying out here to make a speech at Pearl Harbor, over the graves of men who died because their peacetime military had been cut to the bone after World War I. It’s not so different today.

“Add it up. Boomer. The cutbacks. Hard Glass getting sliced. The Backfire incident. The bullshit missions that have killed soldiers and kept thousands away from their families for months on end: Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti. Pile on top of all that the MRA and you have a pile of C-4 just waiting for a fuse to be dropped in and ignited.

“The thing you’ve got to accept. Boomer, is that people are scared,” Skibicki said.

“They will never admit it, but they are. They’re threatened — from the Joint Chiefs down to the lowest snuffy. Scared people don’t act according to logic. And sometimes they act in ways that are destructive all around. That’s what I think we’re seeing here.”

“You seem to have thought about this a lot,” Boomer said.

“I haven’t exactly been overwhelmed with work here the past year or so,” Skibicki said.

Both their heads snapped up as they felt the air pressure change.

Boomer had his Browning High Power out.

“It’s probably Vasquez,” Skibicki said, but he had a gun in his own hand also. They waited until a figure turned the corner at the end of tunnel one. They both relaxed as they recognized the newcomer.

Vasquez was wearing biker shorts and a sleeveless shirt, both of which accented the sleek lines of her sculpted muscles, but her tousled hair and drawn face looked like she had had a rough night. She had a can of soda in her hand and popped the top as she entered Coulder’s office.

She looked around, then settled into the colonel’s chair.

“What do you have?” Skibicki said without preamble, ignoring her breach of etiquette.

“This one is gonna cost you big time, sergeant major,” Vasquez said.

“I want off the duty roster for the next two months.”

Skibicki waved that aside.

“What have you got?”

Vasquez looked at Boomer. “First off, sir, you was right.

That Ethan Alien Class sub — the Sam Houston. It isn’t a current missile carrier. It works for Navy Special Ops.”

“The question is,” Boomer said, “is what is it doing now?”

“It’s heading for the unidentified sub and the Glomar Explorer” Vasquez said, laying out her Xeroxed maps.

“The other sub moved in and has been lying still for the past twelve hours, here, about 150 miles southwest of Oahu. The Glomar is steaming toward it and should rendezvous in about six hours. The Sam Houston is closing in on both of them very slowly and at its current rate of speed” should be in the immediate vicinity the afternoon of December sixth.”

“What about the other sub?” Skibicki asked.

“Anything on what it is?”

Vasquez took a deep breath.

“Sergeant major, what I’m about to tell you is classified Top Secret, Q Clearance.

Don’t ask me how I got the information. Just trust me that I got it and it’s true. If anyone finds out that I know, never mind that I told you, we’re both going away for a long time.”

Skibicki nodded and looked at Boomer who also nodded.

“The bogey sub is called the SHARCC. That’s SH-AR-CC,” she added, spelling out the acronym.

“It stand for Submerged Headquarters and Reserve Command and Control.

It’s the Navy’s version of Looking Glass, the post attack airborne command and control system for use in case all our fixed facilities get nuked.”

Boomer looked at Skibicki who returned the eye contact.

“We got Looking Glass coming in also for a command and control exercise.” Boomer said.

“Why both?”

Skibicki rubbed his chin.

“I never heard that we had an underwater system like that, but if you think about it, it makes sense. The airborne platforms were designed in case of nuclear war. That way the national command could take to the air and become less of a target. The only problem is that Looking Glass can only stay airborne for so long. Even with inflight refueling, they eventually have to land somewhere.

But this sub could probably stay out at sea for six months or more.”

Vasquez nodded.

“It’s a nuclear-powered boat, using the same keel as the Ohio Class missile subs, but set up totally different on the inside for command and control. My source tells me there are two of them, one in the Atlantic and this one in the Pacific. My source also tells me that since they were launched two years ago, they have never gone back into port.”

“What?” Skibicki said.

“How can they do that?”

Vasquez tapped the imagery she’d brought the previous day.

“The Glomar. It shuttles between the Pacific and the Atlantic. The SHARCC can dock with the underwater barge, then be brought up into the hold of the Glomar for repairs and maintenance. The crews are rotated then too.

Since the SHARCC never surfaces, it can never get spotted.”

“So maybe this C&C exercise on the sixth will be on board the SHARCC involving both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the President,” Boomer said.

There was a long pause before Skibicki spoke.

“Now it all makes sense,” he said.

“It’s not going to be Pearl on the morning of the seventh. They’re going to take down the SHARCC from the Sam Houston on the sixth while our friends from Okinawa take out the Vice President up at Turtle Bay.

“If that SHARCC is set up just like Looking Glass then once they have it, they can cut in and take over all command and control for the military and even use the emergency overrides to cut into all civilian satellite traffic. Since practically all television feeds through satellites nowadays, they can effectively control the media.”

“It’s perfect,” Boomer said.

“No one will even know.”

“We need to report this,” Vasquez said.

“To who?” Skibicki asked.

“Someone,” Vasquez said.

“We can’t just let this happen.”

“We don’t know for sure that it is going to happen,” Skibicki said.

“But we know something is going to happen,” Vasquez exclaimed.

“The problem is that we have no proof,” Boomer said.

“What about the men who attacked you at Kaena Point?” Vasquez asked.

“It was in the paper. The police have the bodies.”

“If we brought that up to anyone,” Boomer said, “it would only cause Skibicki and me to be thrown in jail.”

He looked at the phone on the colonel’s desk.

“No, what we need is solid proof that The Line exists, and Major Trace should be calling anytime.”

“How about if I go to the police?” Vasquez offered.

“I wasn’t involved in the shooting the other night and I can tell them all that has happened and what you all are afraid is going to happen.”

“We still have no proof,” Boomer replied.

“But at least the President could be warned,” she argued.

“He doesn’t have to go out to the SHARCC for the exercise and maybe the Vice President could leave Turtle Bay early or something. We wait for proof, we might be waiting a long time,” she added.

“Trace will come up with something,” Boomer said.

“We still have two days,” Skibicki reminded them.

Boomer thought about it. “Even if the information about the Sam Houston and the SHARCC is correct, and there is a plan to take down the SHARCC if these guys have planned this correctly, and there’s no reason to believe they haven’t, then I’m sure they have one, if not several, backup plans.”

Skibicki agreed.

“If the night of the sixth doesn’t work, they still can come into Pearl Harbor on the morning of the seventh off the Sam Houston using the SDVS. Those guys are trained on that kind of infiltration and they’ll be infiltrating their own back yard.” He made a decision.

“We don’t hear anything from Major Trace by tomorrow morning we’re going to have to take action regardless.”

“So what do we do in the meantime?” Boomer wondered aloud.

“We’re—” He paused as the air pressure changed again.

They all turned and looked. As the first person turned the corner.

Boomer drew his gun again. It was Decker and he wasn’t alone.

“Take them!” Decker yelled as he dove behind a desk.

Boomer fired once then hit the deck as the pair of men who had followed Decker opened fire with submachine guns. The glass that had separated Colonel Coulder’s office from the rest of the tunnel exploded inward.

Boomer stuck his hand up over the three-feet-high wall and fired blindly. He heard the roar of Skibicki’s gun a few feet to the other side and glanced over. The sergeant major was hunched behind the wall also, firing blindly to keep them from getting closer.

“You OK, Vasquez?” Skibicki yelled out.

“Yeah, but I wish I was smaller,” her voice came from under the colonel’s desk.

Chips splattered off the wall as the intruders fired again.

“They aren’t asking us to surrender,” Boomer hissed to Skibicki.

“I noticed,” Skibicki replied.

“What now?” Boomer asked as he fired another couple of rounds.

“We know the tunnels. They don’t,” Skibicki said.

“So?”

“Remember the locker where I was inventorying the scuba gear?”

“Yeah?”

“We go there.” Skibicki raised his voice.

“Vasquez, on three we head for the scuba locker.”

“Roger that, sergeant major.”

“Uh,” Boomer said, “what about the bad guys?”

“One,” Skibicki yelled.

“Two.” He rolled over, put his back to the low wall and fired at the antiquated fuse box in the corner of Coulder’s office. With an explosion of sparks the tunnel went dark.

“Three.”

Boomer stood and vaulted the wall, keeping low. He didn’t fire, nor did Skibicki.

The men with Decker fired blindly, bullets scattering all over the room. Their muzzles made bright flashes and Boomer took the opportunity to fire right at one of the stuttering lights. A startled yell of pain rewarded his effort and the firing stopped on both sides.

To the best of Boomer’s recollection the side tunnel was only about ten feet to his right. He duck-walked, bumping into a desk, recoiling, pushing right, breathing hard. He hit the wall, then felt it give way to open space. Someone brushed by him, moving quicker. He was in the side tunnel.

He stood up and moved quicker. He could hear light footsteps in front of him and followed.

“Damn!” Boomer hissed as he ran into a wall with his forehead leading.

“This way,” he heard Vasquez whisper. Boomer headed in the direction of the voice and a pair of hands grabbed him and pulled him into the scuba locker. They could hear Decker’s voice echoing through the tunnel they had left.

“You won’t get out! We have the front door covered.”

Boomer heard a screech of metal, then Skibicki’s voice explaining what was going on.

“There’s an air duct back here. It’ll be a tight fit. I know it comes out on the back side of the lava flow. I went up there one day and checked.”

“You ever been in the duct?” Boomer asked, tucking his High Power back in the holster, then feeling his forehead.

His hand came away wet with blood.

“No,” Skibicki grunted and there was the sound of something metal hitting the floor.

“So how do you know it’s a tight fit?”

“I’m hoping it’s a tight fit rather than no fit,” Skibicki said.

“I’m going in. Follow me.”

Boomer helped Vasquez up after the sergeant major.

Then he climbed up himself. He was in a four-foot-diameter ridged steel tube that angled up at almost sixty degrees.

Boomer began climbing, bracing his boots against the ridges. After what he estimated to be about twenty feet he bumped into Vasquez’s sneakers., “What’s the matter?” he asked.

“It’s getting tighter,” Vasquez’s voice was strained.

Boomer soon found out what she meant. The tube halved in size and jigged to the left before resuming its climb.

Boomer got stuck halfway into the jig-His hips were stuck.

He felt cloth and skin tear as he popped free.

Boomer blinked. Although Vasquez filled almost the entire width of the pipe, he could see a faint light seeping through around her. The light suddenly grew much brighter as Skibicki punched off the cap on the. air duct.

Boomer made the last few feet. Vasquez’s hands came down, grabbed his collar and pulled him out faster than he could move his feet. Boomer looked around. They were on the far side of the lava ridge from the tunnel just as Skibicki had promised.

“Let’s get to my jeep,” Skibicki said.

“This way.”