A few minutes later, she was opening the metal-grated double doors of the elevator. The outside of the elevator had a big sticker with a picture of a red devil on it. A bubble quote coming from his mouth said, “See you down there!” Lucy loved the dark humor.
She closed the two metal grate doors behind her and pressed the button for the elevator to bring her fifty feet down to where two other officers were waiting, one of whom she was relieving.
The watch turnover took about twenty minutes. They went over schedules of topside transportation, maintenance and training. There were a few items that needed repair, but nothing mission-critical.
“Make sure you read the geopolitical intel brief. The CO said the stuff with North Korea is getting hairy.”
“Same old thing.”
“Maybe.” He shrugged. But Lucy noticed a funny look in his eye. They finished turnover, and he was heading up the elevator the second they were done.
Lucy stuffed her bag in her locker and sat down at the computer terminal where she would spend most of her time for the next twenty-four hours. She looked ten feet away, where another first lieutenant sat. He was about a year greener than her.
“Hello, Johnny.”
“Hello, Lucy.”
“You dump your girlfriend yet?”
“Nah.”
“You still trying to figure out the best way to do that?”
“Yup.” He grinned as he looked back down at the three-inch-thick binder on his lap. It was filled with highly classified procedures and maintenance information. “I figure that my not calling her anymore, not returning her emails, and blocking her from all of my social networks will do the trick.”
“Dude. Just sack up and tell her.” Lucy scanned the panels in front of her, checking the readouts and system status of the missiles under her control. “I mean, come on already. Be a man.”
Johnny laughed. “Says my female missile combat crew commander.”
Their conversation stopped as a loud two-toned alarm sounded throughout the room.
The two junior officers sprang upright in their chairs, Johnny practically throwing the binder onto the floor.
Lucy’s eyes scanned the information coming in to her on her screen. She yelled, “Stand by to copy the message.”
Over the encrypted communications channel in front of Johnny came the fast-talking voice of a senior enlisted Air Force man who was on base at Warren. “Alpha… Seven… Charlie… Foxtrot…”
Both Lucy and Johnny wrote down the verbally transmitted authentication code with rapid precision. When the transmission was finished, they both stood up and proceeded to unlock their separate locks on the safe. Inside was the launch key.
The next several minutes were spent communicating back and forth with two other officers in a separate launch facility, verifying the codes’ authenticity and the accuracy of their transcription.
Then Lucy heard the words she had never expected to hear.
Lucy made the man on the radio repeat it. “Say again, this is not an exercise.”
“Affirmative, this is not an exercise. This is real-world.”
Lucy and Johnny looked at each other, their faces confused. Lucy could feel her heart pounding in her chest.
“Come on, let’s go, Johnny,” she said.
“They said this was real-world…”
“We’ll talk in a second. Let’s enable the missiles.”
He nodded quickly, his face white.
They each inserted their separate keys into the large metallic sections on the wall where they were needed. Lucy had done this so many times she thought she could do it blindfolded. But now her arm turned to mush, and her body moved like it was weighed down with sandbags.
She began reciting the verbiage that would start the launch of her missiles, reading from the long checklist on the binder in front of her. “Unlock code inserted.”
“Stand by… unlock code is inserted,” replied Johnny. He glanced at her. “How is this real? Lucy, this can’t really be real? Who are we…?”
She ignored him. The red digital clock on the wall was ticking away. Closing in on ten minutes. They would need to hurry. “Enable switch to Enable.”
Johnny moved his hands over the knobs and dials. “Enabled…”
Almost there, Lucy thought. Almost there. Follow your training, Lucy. You’re a steely-eyed missile man.
Five stories above and one mile to the west, a farmer drove his Ford pickup truck along the outskirts of his property. He watched as the floodlights near the missile silo up on the hill came on. Well, that’s weird, he thought.
He stopped his vehicle and got out of the cab, squinting, trying to make out what he was seeing.
“Now what in hell is that?”
Steam or smoke of some type was coming out of the silo.
“Government fools… probably leaking radiation everywhere…”
It was a clear night, and the air was crisp. A beautiful canvas of twinkling stars overhead. The farmer turned to head back into his truck when the noise began.
A low rumble and a grating alarm, barely audible in the distance. He looked again at the hill. Now more smoke was coming out of the silo. Billowing white smoke. Then flame. Huge tongues of yellow-and-orange flame, shooting out of the exhaust openings.
The first missile launched upward in a rage of bright fire, its thick smoke trail following it into space. The farmer caught sight of another missile launching out of the corner of his right eye. The rumbles grew more intense and he could feel them in his feet. Or was that his knees shaking?
“God have mercy.”
He turned around in place, seeing a third missile take off on the horizon, several miles to the north. He continued turning round and round, scanning the sky. There must have been a dozen of them, all arcing upward and away. Giant white vessels of death, traveling to a distant land.
6
The war had only just begun, and Victoria Manning had already experienced the rush of combat. With the assistance of a P-8, she had scored a confirmed kill on an enemy submarine. It was likely one of the submarines that had attacked Guam with cruise missiles an hour earlier. Now it was cracked open, on the bottom of the ocean.
She had almost sortied again, right after landing. One of the young sonar technicians thought he got a sniff of a second Chinese sub. Instead, they had told her to shut down while the P-8 covered the area with buoys. It had turned out to be a false alarm, but she didn’t mind. There was going to be a lot of that, she realized. And she would rather launch on a false alarm than be on board when a submarine targeted their ship.
The battle of Guam had awakened the crew from any remaining vestiges of peacetime lethargy. Now every blip on the radar scope could be an enemy aircraft. Every odd noise heard through the sonar technician’s headphones might be a Chinese fast-attack submarine opening up its torpedo doors. Everyone was now high-strung. Lives were at stake. And there was no pressure on earth like the desire to keep her fellow members of the pack protected. No one wanted to let their shipmates down by missing something. But Victoria knew that this optempo would cause burnout.
As officer in charge of a helicopter detachment on the USS Farragut, steaming in the eastern Pacific on the opening day of war with China, Victoria would need to manage her men’s mental state as much as their workload. She needed her men to be at peak effectiveness.