“I hope this is important,” said a tired voice.
“Jack? It’s Reeves. Listen, I’ve got a file here you need to see, and soon.”
“Classified?”
“Oh, yeah, and then some. Looks like there’s a real nightmare headed our way… and this one’s right up your alley.”
One
Jack Forrest raised his head in Launch Control, cocking an eyebrow and listening as the heavy steel door above was pulled to and secured. A slight grin crossed his face as he returned his attention to a textbook on heavenly bodies.
Wayne Ulrich trotted down three stories of a steel staircase and crossed through the common areas into Launch Control, where he stopped in the doorway and stood watching unhappily as Forrest sat reading.
Forrest glanced up from the book just long enough to see the crease in his friend’s face. “What’s got your feathers in a ruffle?”
Ulrich crossed the room and tossed a clipboard onto the console near Forrest’s feet. “Three more names have magically appeared on the roster,” he said, hands on his hips. “Any idea how that happened?”
“I wrote them in with my magic pen,” Forrest said, dropping his feet to the deck and posturing up in the squeaky old government chair to stretch his back. A lean, muscular man of medium height, Jack Forrest was thirty-five, with a relentlessly sarcastic disposition. He had flinty blue eyes and chiseled features, thick brown hair cut high-and-tight in military fashion, and a two-inch scar on his chin where he’d been struck by a rifle butt years earlier during the Second Gulf War. “Got a problem with that, Stumpy?”
Ulrich was the exact opposite. A die-hard pragmatist, he and Forrest had made unlikely friends during their Special Forces training in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He walked with an almost imperceptible limp, having lost his left foot in Afghanistan to an IED during the summer of 2006. Tall and slender with wispy blond hair, pale blue eyes, and a thin mustache, he was dressed in digital-camouflage trousers and a black underarmor T-shirt.
“You’re damn right I do.” He pointed at the roster. “Do you realize how much extra food I have to come up with every time you add even a single name to that list? Two meals, every day, for eighteen months. Times three people, that’s 2,190 goddamn meals, Jack! Do you know how much food that is? I can’t just run down to the supermarket, fill up the family station wagon and call it a day.”
“So rent another truck,” Forrest said, tossing the heavy book on top of the roster, then lighting a Camel cigarette with a brass Zippo lighter. “Come to think of it, rent two and take Kane with you.” He tossed the lighter onto the book and rocked back in the chair.
“You’re missing the point,” Ulrich said. “People are going to notice. So when word finally gets out—and it’s gonna get out—somebody could remember us hoarding all that food. And they just might come looking for it.”
“Then drive to Colorado for the food,” Forrest said, taking a drag from the cigarette. “Hell, drive all the way to Vegas for all I care. Only do me a favor while you’re there and visit a hooker, will ya? You get cranky when you haven’t had your ashes hauled.”
“My ashes haven’t got anything to do with it,” Ulrich insisted, though both men knew that he would never cheat on his wife Erin, who was waiting back in North Carolina. “There are forty-eight names on that list. And that’s not counting the five of us and our families. How many more people do you plan on having down here? Eighty? A hundred? This old septic system’s only going to assimilate so much shit, you know.”
“What? You haven’t crunched the numbers on that yet?”
Ulrich bridled. “I haven’t got the slightest idea how much a single person shits in a year.”
“Then I suggest you call one of those septic pumper companies and find out.”
Ulrich hung his head with a weary sigh. “How many more names, Jack?”
Forrest shrugged. “I keep finding people I want to save.”
“You mean women. And how many of them are good-looking?”
“A few.”
“Jesus, you’re something else.”
Forrest stood up from the squeaky chair, exhaling a cloud of bluish smoke as he crushed out the cigarette in a brass ashtray cut from a 76mm cannon shell casing. “Who do you suggest we save, Wayne… if not women and children? Sweaty biker types who’d kill us all the first chance they got? Old men and women who’re gonna be dead in a few years? How about some asshole businessmen? I put single mothers on that list for good reason. We get too much testosterone down here and we’re asking for trouble.”
“Suppose none of these women are interested in repopulating?”
“Oh, that’s got nothing to do with it,” Forrest said with a wave. “Whether they are or not, their virtue will be a hell of a lot safer down here than it will up there once this shit kicks off.”
Ulrich rubbed the back of his neck, remembering the war-torn Middle East. Both men had seen the type of iniquities a woman could look forward to in the absence of law and order. “It just isn’t fair, that’s all. A pretty woman’s got no more right to—”
“Look, if I could save everybody, I would. So would you. We all would. But we can’t. People are going to die up there. They’re going to die by the bushel—men, women, children, ugly or not. And for the record, Stumpy, not every woman on that roster is a beauty queen. What do you think I am?”
Before Ulrich could reply, Marcus Kane came around the corner, having heard their voices echoing along the steel blast vestibule leading from one of the Titan missile silos. A six-foot African American, Kane was recruiting-poster handsome, with a shaved head, smooth skin, and gentle almond-shaped eyes.
“Y’all argue enough, you’d think you were married,” he said, taking a pretzel rod from a bag on the console.
“Anybody on that list happen to be black?” Ulrich asked, wanting to stir the pot.
“Don’t start,” Forrest said.
“You didn’t pick any sisters?” Marcus said. “Man, come on now.”
“As a matter of fact,” Forrest replied, “I’ve picked seven, all with kids.”
“Suppose these folks want to bring their extended families or friends along?” Ulrich asked.
“Tough shit,” Forrest said, shaking another cigarette from its pack. “Needless to say, anyone chosen will have some tough choices to make, and I expect most of them will choose to stay up there and face what’s coming.”
Ulrich nodded, looked at Kane. “How are the countermeasures coming?”
Kane considered. “Well, I figure we’d better count on them getting past the first blast door,” he said at length. “Somebody good could conceivably cut their way in with an acetylene torch. But if we bore some holes in the overhead concrete of the security vestibule, run a line for the accelerant, we can fit a flame nozzle into each hole. That way we can fill the entire vestibule with liquid fire, burn ’em to the bone like a goddamn dragon.”
“I don’t really see anybody getting past the first blast door,” Ulrich said. “The damn thing is ten inches thick with steel pins all around the jambs. Cutting off the hinges wouldn’t even get it open.”
“Marcus is right, though,” Forrest said. “Somebody good with a torch could cut their way through. It would take a hell of a long time, but remember, they’ll be desperate.”
Ulrich reached for the pretzel bag. “What I’m worried about is them poisoning the ventilator shafts.”
Forrest nodded. “It’s a definite chink in the armor. How about the topside silo doors?”
“Those are damn near impregnable,” Kane said.
“What about a torch?”
“Through three feet of solid steel?”