By the time the missile warning alarms sounded at the Hexagon, it was already too late. Damien knew the Shield was going down. He’d received a call from Danny—in the Anaheim Safe House—that missiles would probably be on the way tonight. Danny had hoped they’d have several more hours—giving Damien enough time to get someone up to the Shield transmitter. They didn’t even get an hour.
It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Keena wouldn’t drop the Shield until the missiles were already well on their way, until just before they started hitting Hawaii. That’s how Baker would have it set up. That’s how the Libyan commander would have wanted it.
Danny figured Keena had programmed them all—probably even individually—at gunpoint. She’d hold out on the launch codes as long as possible, but eventually she’d break. Anyone would have. Danny told Damien about the Qi Jia forces following them to the bunker at Disneyland—certain word of their escape had made it back to Colorado. Commander Boli would know time was of the essence to launch those missiles and would do what was necessary to break Keena immediately.
Damien had awakened Stacy and Dewey fifteen minutes ago. They were currently sprinting up the Stairway to Heaven to power the Shield back up manually—when it did go down. He sent them up there just in case they had enough time, but he was relatively certain they wouldn’t. Captain Baker would have taken their every measure into account. If Keena had done it “right,” they’d have a one-minute window at best between the Shield going down and the missiles striking—and Damien knew she’d have had supervision the entire time. She’d have done it right.
Sure enough, a few minutes later, Damien watched as the codes from NORAD flashed across his screen—almost a hundred nuclear missiles launching from silos all over the country. It seemed excessive for a few small islands, but they clearly weren’t taking any chances. At 15,000 miles per hour, the first ones would get here in five to ten minutes. Damien knew he could try to stop some of them—to essentially play a real-life game of Space Invaders—but he wouldn’t have time to do enough. The missiles were already screaming their way.
It was a little odd that Keena had programmed some from the East Coast too, given their maximum projected range was 3,500 miles or so—barely two-thirds of the way here—but Damien figured Baker had merely ordered them all launched. It wasn’t going to matter. The Shield would go down any minute now. Damien had to bunker them in.
It was Damien’s task to lock down Area 52 and seal it off—to take them deep and save as many lives as he could. He’d given Nicole exactly sixty seconds to get as many people as possible into this bunker before he had to close it off.
Nicole ran down the hall to the medical wing, screaming for Trigger and Twix to get everyone into the bunker immediately. Trigger picked up Tara while Twix and Deacon pushed Kate’s bed down the hall. Everyone made it in except the governor. No one knew where he was. Damien shouted that he had to close it and, despite a few objections, he sealed every door—and Area 52 slid down into its airtight nuke-prooof bubble.
Two minutes later, it was locked in place, safe from even the most direct of nuclear strikes. The thirteen of them huddled together in the control room—with two surgeons, three nurses and two security guards—watching the screens, waiting for them to go black, for the missiles to wipe out Hawaii—for the last American state to fall.
The missiles—as expected—decimated every city they hit. New York City, Miami, Dallas, Chicago, Anchorage, Toronto, Seattle, San Diego, Denver and Colorado Springs—the headquarters for each Qi Jia region and NORAD. Not a single missile made it to Hawaii. The Shield never went down. Inside the Area 52 bunker, the group watched in shock as missile after missile disappeared from the screen until there were none remaining. The ones that did head out over the Pacific fell well short of the islands. Something had gone wrong—terribly wrong. Or—rather—something had gone right—awesomely right.
As it sank in exactly what was happening, Damien frantically began hammering at his keyboard. He pulled up the screen of launch codes, trying to decipher the coordinates tagged in each. Nicole stood over his shoulder and searched the same numbers and letters, but even she couldn’t see it.
“I don’t know how she did it,” Nicole muttered.
“She?” Reagan asked. “Who did what?”
“Keena did this,” Damien replied. “I’m sure of it. Somewhere in here is an intentional programmer glitch—a routing “malfunction” with a trigger that would default all missiles to the targets she preset. What they see wouldn’t be what they hit. Without the book she would have had to memorize a specific code and program a “mask” and override on every serial entry. But—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa…” Tara raised her arm. “Slow way the heck down! You two are the only two who understand you two. In English… please.”
Nicole turned, nodding. “What he means is we think Keena somehow pre-programmed a majority of these missiles to strike certain cities—but she set it up before today. She would have only needed one code from Danny’s book—just one—some uniform sequence to put in every missile launch code… which was most likely the sequence she held out on until now. She could have gotten that code from Danny at any point in time.”
Reagan cleared her throat. “Uh… why would he give that to her?”
“He didn’t keep anything from them.” Damien gestured towards the Pack members. “She would’ve only needed to remember one code.”
“But how do you know she set it up before today?” Deacon asked.
“That was the ‘mask’ Damien referred to,” Nicole explained. “Keena would’ve had to bury the code of her intended target—say San Diego—somewhere in the sequence of the missile launch code for Qi Jia’s target—say… Honolulu—the place that they’d think the missile was going. On their screens they’d watch the missile close in on their target, while in actuality each missile would go to Keena’s preset target.”
“So they’d see it going to Honolulu and hitting Honolulu, but the missile would actually be hitting San Diego or something—wherever Keena set it to hit?” Tara tried to clarify Damien’s point.
“Exactly.” Damien nodded. “But she would have had to do it on every… single… missile. With her skills it might’ve taken only a few minutes per missile—but a hundred missiles times three or four minutes, that’s what…?”
“Five to seven hours,” Trigger answered immediately and everyone looked at him in surprise. “What? I like math.”
“That’s the problem,” Damien continued. “Where would she have gotten five to seven hours? She didn’t even get a half hour in there with Danny, and she couldn’t have done it around Baker. I could show you what I mean if I had a launch code. You can’t hide or skip any steps—every alteration would be obvious—and they would never have left her alone with the computer. Trust me… Baker would have seen what she was doing. Unless…”
“Unless what?” Reagan watched his face blanch suddenly.
“Holy shit!” Damien said, reaching out and putting his hand on Nicole’s shoulder beside him.
“What?” Trigger asked.
“Holy shit!” Damien said again, jumping up.
Emily and Abbey had heard plenty of cursing the past couple days but Tara still glared at Damien. “Come on.” She mouthed at him, nodding towards her daughter. She pointed at the members of the Pack. “These four are going to beat the holy mess out of you if you don’t—”