The Book of Truths Page 4

  “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.

  As men wearing black suits and sunglasses hauled Clarence and Peggy Sue away in a black Lincoln Town Car—the infamous Men In Black, who were really support personnel for the Nightstalkers from Area 51—the team gathered in the cargo bay of the Snake, which Eagle had landed just outside the front gate of the LCC compound. Roland was mournfully cradling his M249 squad automatic weapon, the bent barrel curving around his upper body like a devoted pet. If one kept lethal, metal snakes as pets.

  “Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” Nada said, and he meant it, as he pulled a pack out of his combat vest, took one, and passed it around.

  It was a sign of how frazzled they were that every member of the team took one, even Doc for the first time, and fired up. Doc’s parents had both emigrated to the States from India and his bookish appearance was out of place among the warriors of the Nightstalkers.

  “The clock ran out.” Roland said the obvious, because, well, he was Roland.

  “It’s never run out before,” Doc said, and this was his second startling thing of the day because Doc never stated the obvious.

  “There’s a first for everything,” Nada said. “We’re still here.”

  And that was almost a first, Nada being upbeat.

  Moms exhaled, the chill Nebraska wind taking the smoke and blowing it across the plains. “All right. Let’s figure out what happened. Mac. What was so funny when you got into the missile?”

  “You won the pool,” Mac said. He held up a handful of frayed wires. “This is the main firing component. Rats, or some other kind of vermin, chewed them all up. But we’ll go with rats.” He held up the sleeve of his hazmat suit where he’d written RATS and MOMS.

  “So we got saved by rats?” Eagle said.

  “Yep.” Mac dropped the cables. “I got the access panel open just as time ran out. If these wires had still been intact, I’m pretty sure the conventional implosion would have gone off and I’d be splatted inside that silo. As far as the nuke”—he nodded his head to a bunch of Acme and support personnel at work, calli
ng in heavy equipment to rip off the concrete cap on top of the silo to get access and remove it—“they can figure that out. There was a gap at the base of the nose cone in the gasket. Rats must have come up through the engine into the nose cone.”

  “How could they lose track of a nuke?” Kirk asked.

  “This place is old,” Moms said. “Eagle told us they had over thirty thousand nukes at the height of the Cold War. We’ve all worked in the real world for the government. Anyone ever had any paperwork that got lost?”

  “Hell, they lost me,” Eagle said. “When I went into Task Force 160, all my paperwork was gone, just like that.”

  Nada snorted. “We’ve all disappeared as far as our original services are concerned. We only exist in our cover IDs.”

  “Nukes getting lost or misplaced has happened before and it will happen again,” Eagle said. “Back in ’07, a B-52 took off from an air base to deliver some cruise missiles for ‘retirement’ to another air base. Except the maintenance crews failed to remove the nuclear warheads in six of the missiles.”

  “Oops,” Kirk said.

  “Someone didn’t follow the checklist in their Protocol,” Nada said.

  Eagle continued, “In essence, the air force lost track of six nukes for almost two days and flew them over most of the country without the aircrew being aware they were carrying live warheads. Parked the plane on both airstrips without any guards and the nukes just hanging on the wing. Cost the secretary of the air force and the chief of staff their jobs. And it was all a paperwork error. As Nada noted, a failure of protocol.”

  “Speaking of failure of Protocol,” Nada said. “Why didn’t you shoot the civilians?” Nada was the only one who would dare raise the issue to Moms.

  “It didn’t cost us any time,” Moms said, a weak defense at best.

  “You had second shot,” Roland pointed out to Nada, “and you didn’t shoot the woman.”

  Roland’s logic ended Nada’s questioning. Another almost first.

  Moms shook her head. “We don’t shoot civilians unless we have to. We’re not merks.”

  “That we are not,” Nada echoed.

  “Eagle,” Moms said. “Did you gain altitude when I ordered?”

  Eagle dropped his cigarette and ground it out on the metal floor of the Snake, the only one who was allowed to do that since the aircraft was his turf. He was a tall black man, a scroll of scars on the left side of his face a testament to a fiery IED incident years ago. He had not a hair on his head, making his large skull even more prominent. “No, I did not. If it were a conventional explosion there was a good chance someone would need medevac and I wanted to be close.”

  Mac snorted. “Those conventionals had gone off, you’d still be scraping pieces of me up.”

  Moms shook her head. “We’re a mess. Violating Protocol, then violating orders about violating Protocol. What’s next?”

  “Dogs and cats living together?” Eagle ventured, earning a weak smile from the team, including Roland, as Ghostbusters was one of the few movies he’d seen.

  “I’ll be happy when they sign the arms treaty,” Moms said.

  “Won’t change much,” Kirk pointed out. He glanced at Eagle. “How many nukes do we have now?”

  “Approximately five thousand, one hundred and ten,” Eagle said without a pause or pulling out a cell phone and Googling it. “That’s all combined: strategic, tactical, and mostly nondeployed. Ready to fire, drop, or sneak in? A little under two thousand.”

  “And how long,” Kirk continued, “will it take to tear most of them apart?”

  Eagle laughed. “We’re still backed up from the last treaty, but SAD gives everyone ten years, although the inspection and enforcement part is a bit lacking.”

  Kirk shrugged. “So the treaty is a show, with no teeth.”

  Ms. Jones’s voice crackled out of the speaker hanging in the cargo bay. “Oh, SAD has teeth, Mister Kirk.”

  As the newest member of the team and still not acclimatized to the ways of the Nightstalkers, Kirk jumped to his feet and snapped to attention at Ms. Jones’s voice.

  “Relax, Kirk,” Nada said to him.

  “Is Mister Kirk showing some respect?” Ms. Jones asked. She almost sounded pleased.

  “He still thinks he’s in the Ranger Batt,” Nada said.

  “The treaty is important,” Ms. Jones continued, “because it keeps us headed in the correct direction. More importantly it sends an important message to the rest of the world about the intentions of the United States.”

  “I got a question,” Kirk said, relaxing as best he could. “Was this nuke one of those in the numbers Eagle counted?”

  “It was not,” Ms. Jones said. “And that is the disturbing thing. We’ve run the serial number on the warhead. It was supposed to have been dismantled and destroyed after a reorganization and update back in the mid-1960s. The records say it was.”

  “Paperwork glitch, Ms. Jones?” Moms asked.

  “I earnestly hope so,” she responded.

  “What else could it be?” Nada asked, catching something in her voice. He knew Ms. Jones better than anyone on the team by virtue of being the longest-serving member. “Knowing” her though was a misnomer, because no one on the team could actually claim to have seen her. They all “met” her during the in-brief to the team, a shadowy figure seated in a large chair on the other side of a large desk. Doc still claimed the figure was a hologram and Doc was not prone to much speculation. But Nada had heard her voice more than any of the others.

  “I would prefer not to guess,” Ms. Jones said.

  “How did you get the code?” Nada asked, switching the subject since her tone indicated he should switch the subject.

  Ms. Jones laughed, which sounded like a mixture of a death rattle and a desperate gasp for air. “Operation Ortsac. The year 1962 was the key since that was when it was planned and almost implemented. If someone hooked up an override in the silo and added in that comment, that meant the world was quite close to the nuclear brink. It’s quite a simplistic code name if you think about it.”

  Eagle, as usual, was quickest to the mark. “Castro backwards.”

  “Indeed,” Ms. Jones said. “History is not as most people believe. Ortsac was the plan to take out the missile sites and invade Cuba. Most Americans still believe the blockade turned away the Russian missiles. Not true. They were already in place in Cuba and ready to be fired at the height of the crisis. Even more astounding is that operational control of the nuclear warheads on the island had been given to the Russian officers there in the field. Any invasion would have been met with tactical nuclear weapons with tremendous loss of life, most likely precipitating World War III and a wider strategic exchange.

  “I remember it quite clearly,” Ms. Jones added. “We all expected our world to end. We knew Khrushchev would take West Berlin if the Americans invaded Cuba. We knew the Americans had already used nuclear weapons on Japan—only seventeen years earlier. We were quite convinced that the imperialistic Americans were going to kill all of us. It is strange how Americans rarely understand how the rest of the world perceives it as a nuclear power.”

  “It’s amazing that Khrushchev released control of those weapons to the officers on the ground,” Moms said.

  “It’s amazing we’re still alive,” Eagle muttered.

  “That’s very out of the norm,” Nada said. “Nuclear protocol is usually written by someone who never has to actually do what the protocol says. Control is almost always kept at the highest levels. When I was on the SADM team, we were told we could set a three-minute to a three-hour delay on the nuke once we emplaced it and hit the arm. Our theory was that there was no delay. The moment we armed it, it went off. What’s four guys when you consider it had to be a target worth a nuke?”

  “That’s pretty cynical,” Kirk said.

  “That’s Nada,” Mac said.

  Nada ignored both of them. “Even if there was the delay, protocol dictated we keep sniper coverage on the nuk
e until detonation. It’s a pretty thin line between max sniper range and even a tac nuke’s blast radius, not to mention the rads. We weren’t packing hazmat suits in our gear.”

  Ms. Jones’s voice came over the net. “In my former Soviet Union, we were all issued anti-radiation pills. Soldiers were assured that if they took the pills, they would not be affected and could fight on.”

  “They Were Expendable,” Eagle said.

  “They were. We were,” Nada said. “Still are.”

  “It’s a movie,” Eagle explained. “About PT boats in early World War II. John Wayne. You get the idea.”

  Nada snorted. “Ever notice how John Wayne never hooked up when he pretended to jump in The Green Berets? Splat.”

  “It’s a movie,” Eagle pointed out. “Suspension of disbelief.”

  “He couldn’t hook up?” Nada said. “How hard is that to do?”

  “Pinnacle,” Kirk said.

  Everyone turned to look at him. He had a penchant for noting what passed others by. “You said it was on the board with the warning light,” he said to Nada.

  The team sergeant nodded. “Written in marker on brown masking tape.”

  Ms. Jones spoke up. “It was also written on the warning light at the old underground bunker for SAC. In the same way.”

  “What is it, Ms. Jones?” Kirk asked. “You told us about Ortsac. What does Pinnacle stand for? The fact it was in both places and seems to be written rather informally is significant. I think,” he added, hedging his position as the newest member of the team.

  “We’re checking on it,” Ms. Jones said, “but an excellent observation.”

  Mac pursed his lips at Kirk and imitated a smooch.

  “And Mister Mac,” Ms. Jones said, as if she were watching them, “your effort with the hatch was noble. We had a man at Chernobyl who did the same. He died.”

  Mac frowned, uncertain if he were being praised or reprimanded.

  Ms. Jones continued. “As Ms. Moms has noted, there have been breaches of Protocol on this mission. There were breaches on your previous mission in North Carolina and all turned out well in the end. All has turned out satisfactorily here, but not due to your efforts. I would like everyone to take some time to reflect on what it is we do.”