Phantom

Twenty-three

U.S. Missile Defense Agency Launch Site, Fort Greely, Alaska

Rain was still falling on the corrugated tin roof of the Red Onion saloon. Lightning flashed on and off, and thunder shook the wooden walls. The streets outside were rivers of mud lit by sulfurous yellow arc lights. The Onion was the only place where a man could get a drink in downtown Camp Greely, population 328, including military personnel, their families, and civilians. Whoever coined the phrase “middle of nowhere” coined it right here in Greely. Try to find it on Google Earth. Seriously. Good luck.

Since he was “going underground” at 0600 tomorrow for a forty-eight-hour tour, Lieutenant Colt Portis was in the mood to drink. Portis was a “push-button warrior.” He had command of a group of U.S. Army personnel whose responsibility it was to defend America from an attack by hostile nations. Specifically, an attack utilizing intercontinental ballistic missiles launched from North Korea, Russia, or China.

The good-looking young army lieutenant pushed his empty beer glass across the battered bar and said to the barkeep, “Only if you’re not too busy, Griz.”

“Never too busy for you, General,” the bearded codger in the filthy white apron told the good-looking young army lieutenant. He snatched up his sudsy glass and pulled another pint. Portis turned to his right and spoke to his watch partner and fellow “Guardian of the North,” namely, anyone manning the ABM, or antiballistic missile, base here at Greely.

“Ready to beat feet, Speed?” he asked his friend.

“What?”

“Vamoose. Amscray. Leave?”

“Hold your horses, okay?”

Art Midge, who hailed from Lower Bottom, Kentucky, had only two gears: slow and slower, thus his base nickname “Speed.” The night they’d met, in this very saloon, Speed had said to him, “Know where Lower Bottom, Kentucky, is?”

“Nope,” Colt had said.

“You don’t?”

“Hell, no.”

“Why, damn, Portis, you ought to. Everybody else does. It’s in a little holler just down the mountain from Upper Bottom.”

“Makes sense,” Colt said, trying not to laugh just in case Speed was being serious.

The rangy youngster was currently busy leaning over the bar, peering deeply into the half-empty bottle of tequila sitting in front of him, as if it held countless untold secrets. Judging by the level of concentration, Portis was half expecting a question on the true meaning of life.

“Why in hell do you s’pose they put a worm inside some brands of tequila anyway? What’s your thought on that?”

“I never thought about it.”

“Well, now I’m asking.”

“Called a gusano down in Mexico, where they eat them all the time. Says it makes your dick hard.”

“Yeah? I wouldn’t eat a worm even if it made my dick bigger.”

“If I were you I’d eat up then, little buddy.”

“You ain’t me.”

“I got lucky, what can I tell you?”

Portis downed a final shot of tequila and chased it with his last gulp of Moose Drool Brown Ale, a local microbrew. He slid off the stool and punched Speed’s bulging shoulder muscle.

“Last call for alcohol, little buddy of mine. Drink up.”

“You’re leaving? What the hell, Colt? See that little white T-shirt full of balloons over there in the corner?”

“Yeah. Hard to miss.”

“Girl has her eye on you, stud muffin.”

Portis glanced over his shoulder and winked at the girl. Nothing wrong with winking last time he checked. Maybe he was married with a brand-new set of twins, but, goddarn it, he wasn’t dead yet.

“Margie’s already wondering where I am. She’s got supper on the table ’bout now. I’m outta here, Speed. I’ll see you in the A.M. before we go down in the hole, all right?”

“Two whole days without liquor, sunlight, or women. Damn.”

“It’s an honor to serve, Speed. Don’t ever forget that.”

Midge saw the look on Portis’s face and decided to keep his wisecrack to himself. Colt was a smart guy, Stanford grad, then Caltech before he signed up. Always reading books about the military and American history and shit. The kind of guy who gave the word patriot a good name: an All-American American.

“Give my little Margie a hug for me, buddy, I’ll catch you on the flip side.”

“Later, man.”

T he Portis family lived in a small two-story, two-bedroom house in the residential section of the camp. Colt liked it because he could walk to work. Margie’d done a great job making the place feel homey, too. For base housing, it was pretty darn good.

Greely’s residential compound, called the Camp, was spread out around the military section, called the Fort. That meant dogs, armed guards, and concertina wire atop a fifteen-foot wall surrounded his little piece of heaven. Walking up his sidewalk, his umbrella blown sideways by the howling wind and rain, he was cheered by the pale golden glow in the windows of home.

He could see his wife silhouetted in the upstairs window, putting the twins down. His little angels, Merry and Anne. Margie’s mother’s name was Mary Anne and they’d planned to name their brand-new baby daughter after her. Then they up and had two, born on Christmas Eve, hence the “Merry.”

He let himself in the front door, went to the bottom of the staircase, and called up to let his wife know he was home.

“Hey, you,” she said five minutes later, walking into the living room. Colt was in his chair, staring into the fire like he always did. “You’re soaked to the bone. I thought you were coming straight home from the gym.”

“Aw, baby, don’t be a grouch. Speed and I are going in the hole in the morning for two whole days. I just needed to blow off a little steam at the Onion, y’know. Sorry I’m late.”

“Well, we can’t have the man who’s got his finger on America’s nuclear trigger building up a head of steam, can we? Nosiree bobtail. Go up and put on some dry clothes. I’ll put supper on the table.”

“Something sure smells good. What are we having?”

“Meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and lima beans.”

“My favorite.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.” She turned around and headed for the kitchen, swirling her pleated red plaid skirt, the one that said tonight would be one of their “special” nights. Colt smiled, proud of himself for being mature enough to ignore the pretty little balloon smuggler at the Onion and come straight home to mama. There had been a time, not so long ago, when he might not have done that. But he loved his wife, loved his kids, and he loved his country. Not necessarily in that order.

His late granddad had been Army Air Corps. Flown B-25s over in the Aleutians, an archipelago of three hundred volcanic islands that extended westward from the Alaska Peninsula and marked a line between the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska.

For taking out a forward Japanese naval base, Captain Colt Portis Sr. had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. It hung framed on the wall over Colt’s dresser, beside the Silver Cross and Purple Heart his dad, a West Pointer, had received as a young lieutenant in the First Air Cav during the horrific Battle of Ia Drang in Vietnam.

His gramps had come home from his war. His dad had not. Colt planned on coming home from his.

After dinner, he and Margie checked on the girls and fell into bed. After they made slow, whispery love, she was instantly snoring away, a sound he had come to find very reassuring. It meant the woman he loved was sleeping soundly, and peacefully, and would wake with a smile.

He lay on his back with his hands clasped beneath his head, staring at the ceiling. He didn’t have any money to speak of, never had, most probably never would. But he felt like the luckiest man in the world.

The tunnel entrance was well camouflaged. From the air, or an enemy satellite, it looked like a deserted barracks building. The wide entrance at the rear was disguised by two large boulders. Inside that huge empty building, a two-lane roadway angled sharply downward into the earth to a depth of fifty meters. Silent, electric-powered vehicles, each capable of carrying three men plus a driver, were constantly shuttling in one direction or the other.

Colt and his partner hopped on one and began what Speed always called their “journey to the center of the earth.” They traveled swiftly down a steep but smooth and well-lit incline. Eventually, the eerily silent transport slowed to a stop close to an entrance in the wall of the tunnel. They grabbed their forty-eight-hour kit bags and hopped off. A door slid open and they stepped inside a large elevator, perhaps ten feet square.

Judging by the initial acceleration, Colt had calculated this lift descended at a very rapid rate, maybe a thousand feet or more per minute. The trip was three minutes long, which put his workplace about three thousand feet below the surface of the earth. They emerged into a brilliantly illuminated corridor and followed it to an escalator that took them down to their guard stations.

They swiped their credentials cards and the glass doors hissed open. The two enlisted men currently manning the control panels immediately stood, saluting Portis, an officer, and stepping away from the panel. The senior man, a fresh-scrubbed kid from the Midwest, handed Portis an eight-by-ten metal box that contained records of his just completed six-hour watch, notated by hand, a new concept.

“Watch is yours, Lieutenant Portis,” the senior man said, officially relinquishing his team’s duty to the new men. Colt had to acknowledge responsibility.

“I have the watch. Anything interesting?”

“Must be something going on with one of the primary generators in this sector, sir.”

“Why?”

“We’ve been getting sporadic power surges. Nothing too close to the red zone, but I gave Engineering a heads-up. Looking into it. Other than that, there’s peace in Happy Valley, sir.”

“May it ever be so. See you guys at 0600 Monday, Sergeant. Try not to be late.”

“We’ll be counting the hours, Lieutenant.”

The two men left and the doors slid shut.

The new “Guardians of the North” immediately took their battle stations, two comfortable swivel chairs on wheels with padded armrests. Portis, the ranking officer, was on the right. Four men would rotate in six-hour shifts, the off-duty team using the time for recreation or sleeping or both.

“Don headgear,” Portis ordered, and the two men each picked up one of the “crowns of glory” the departing team had left behind on the console. The army had been looking into ways to make humans more machinelike through the use of stimulants, other drugs, and various devices. Portis had the feeling the earphones were designed to keep you alert through hidden audio signals.

An ABM operator’s life consisted of six straight hours of uninterrupted, mind-numbing tedium. Lacking stimulus, minds wandered. To the brass in Washington in charge of the Missile Defense Agency’s “Operation Vigilant Spirit,” that human flaw represented a threat to national security.

The “crowns” had been designed by army engineers to counter that threat. They were rigged with electrode fingers that rested on the scalp and picked up electric signals generated by the brain. Additional add-ons included devices for constant heart-rate and eye-movement monitoring.

Should a soldier exhibit fatigue, anger, excitement, or become overwhelmed in the event of an attack, signals were sent to a supervisor five levels up who could immediately shift control of the station to another operator. If an operator’s attention waned, he was cued visually and a magnetic or chemical stimulant was fired into his frontal lobe.

In the event of an actual enemy ICBM attack, both men would have to key in matching codes, then insert the keys that hung from chains around their necks and turn them simultaneously. This would initiate the firing sequence.

Arrayed in an enclosed perimeter in the center of Fort Greely were eight THAAD antiballistic missiles in their impregnable silos. The acronym stood for terminal high altitude area defense. Their sole reason for being was to destroy incoming ICBMs detected by the powerful GBR, or ground-based radar. GBR was employed for surveillance at ranges up to a thousand kilometers, target identification, and target tracking. Targeting information was uploaded immediately before launch and updated continuously during the flight.

These ABMs were powered by a single-stage solid-propellant rocket motor with thrust vectoring for exo-atmospheric guidance. The KV (kill vehicle) destroyed the target on contact. THAAD could intercept incoming ballistic missile targets at altitudes up to 125 miles. They were designed to intercept the enemy missiles in outer space, killing them before they even entered the earth’s atmosphere.

The difficulty with intercontinental ballistic missiles is their extremely high velocity. The first view of an incoming ICBM may be as it comes over the horizon. At first contact with the atmosphere it may be traveling at fourteen thousand miles per hour. By the time it reaches its target it will have slowed to seventy-five hundred miles per hour. This leaves the defender with very little time to react and requires extremely quick missiles to intercept, with very good guidance from the GBR.

J ust after 0900, Colt Portis heard his partner say, “Holy shit! Incoming!”

He looked at the display in front of him in sheer disbelief. Fear seethed through his brain like a strong tide surging through a narrow gate.

“You see this, Speed?”

“What the hell?”

“I’ve got eight, I repeat eight, unidentified objects traveling west to east at twenty thousand miles per hour, altitude one hundred miles.”

“Ain’t an ICBM in the whole damn world that fast. Estimate time of atmospheric reentry at nine minutes and counting. GBR plotting their course now… fuck me… they’re all headed this way!”

“Sir,” Portis said to his watch commander, adjusting his lip mike, “request permission to arm all eight ABM missiles!”

“Request granted. Light ’em up, Lieutenant. Shoot first and apologize later.”

“Hey, wait a second,” Speed said, staring wide-eyed at the rapidly moving dots converging on his screen, “nobody kills me till I say so.”

“Code sheets, Speed, now!”

Both men ripped open the sealed red manila envelopes and pulled out the code sheets.

“Code!” Portis said.

“Alpha. Alpha. Whiskey. Bravo. Zulu,” Midge said, keying in the code. “Response?”

Portis responded with the code on his own sheet. “Alpha. Alpha. Whiskey. Bravo. Zulu.”

Portis reached forward and toggled the switch that put the entire ABM site on a war footing.

Portis nervously readjusted his lip mike. “We have code match, sir. With your authorization we will now key in and initiate arming sequence.”

“Roger that. Affirmative.”

The two men inserted their keys into the twin arming mechanisms arrayed in panels before them and turned the keys simultaneously. A low, beeping tone could now be heard over every loudspeaker in the underground complex. The country was under attack. Hell, Greely was under attack.

“Missiles one through eight now armed and ready to launch, sir, awaiting GBR upload.”

“Affirmative, Guardian… incoming enemy missiles, or whatever the hell, now entering atmosphere. They should start slowing… Good God… they’re not slowing, they’re bloody well accelerating!”

“Roger that, sir, GBR readouts calculate speed increasing rapidly to thirty thousand… fifty thousand… now traveling on course zero-one-forty at one hundred thousand miles per hour!”

“What the hell?” Midge shouted. “U fuckin’ Os?”

Portis could hear his watch commander speaking heatedly to his superior officers at the Pentagon. “Yeah, Charley, we got incoming traveling at speeds in excess of 100K and climbing. UFOs is all I can say, sir. Request permission to take them out.”

“Permission granted.”

“Portis. We’ve acquired a sat fix on these birds. Never seen anything like it. What the hell are they, Guardian?”

“God knows, sir.”

“Maybe he knows, maybe not.”

“Take them out, sir?”

“Hell, yes, take them out!”

Portis said, “Silo crews, we are going to launch mode with all eight missiles. You are authorized to open all eight blast doors. Hatches open now!”

“Portis,” Speed suddenly said, “they’re gone! Screen is clear!”

“Gone?”

“Yeah. Disappeared. Wait a second. Jesus, now they’re back. Descending from eighty thousand feet… coming this way… decelerating…”

Portis stared at his screen in disbelief. He said:

“UFOs are now located directly overhead… uh, Command, and they, uh, they appear to be hovering. Just above us at twenty thousand feet. They are… I don’t know how to tell you this, sir… they appear to be stationary.”

“UFOs? I don’t believe in UFOs!”

“I don’t either, sir, but I swear to you that what I’m looking at are objects, they’re flying, and, by God, they are completely fucking unidentified.”

“Launch, goddamit! Light the candles! Pull the trigger. Blow those bastards out of the sky.”

“Confirm. Launching…” Portis said, fingers flying across his control panel, flipping open the red protective covers over each of the eight red toggles that would send eight of the most powerful antiballistic missiles on earth skyward. He thumbed each one in sequence, an act he thought he’d never live to see.

Portis watched his multiple display screens transfixed. There were live video feeds from inside each of the silos. The umbilicals detached themselves from each missile and dropped down against the inside of the silo walls. Brilliant fire and white smoke appeared at the base of the missiles.

“Abort, abort!”

“What?”

“This is Silo Control, you must abort! Silo hatch cover malfunction. Blast doors not responding to my commands…”

“We have ignition…”

“Abort! Abort! Abort!”

“Say again, Silo Control Center!” Portis said. Was this guy insane? It was too late to abort. If the silo hatches wouldn’t open, all eight missiles would explode in place and-”

“Abort! The fucking silo blast doors won’t open. A malfunction. They are still shut! Manual override dysfunctional.”

“What?” Portis said, feeling the needle in the crown pierce the top of his skull. “What do you mean? The hatch covers won’t open?”

“I mean the hatch covers won’t-”

He was thinking of Margie and the twins in the moments before he died. He knew the explosive power of the eight ABMs was enough to blow a hole in the earth’s crust half a mile deep and two miles across. No one living inside the perimeter of Camp Greely could survive this.

No one.

The very last thing Lieutenant Colt Portis saw before the multiple explosions vaporized Fort Greely and every living soul was the eight enemy intruders shooting straight up into the heavens. Traveling… at the speed of light.

What were these things? What the hell were Oblivion.