“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.