“Mrs. Floyd.”
“I never imagined these planes were so big.”
“Size isn’t everything, Mrs. Floyd.”
She glanced at him, a single, perfectly maintained eyebrow, arched.
“Where would you like to start?” Egan asked, gesturing with a flourish at the sprawling facility.
“Why don’t you wait ten minutes?” Mrs. Floyd responded.
“Why?”
“For my husband. The tour is really for him, isn’t it?”
“I suppose, but I’m sort of getting over the idea, if you know what I mean.”
A spark lit in his mind when she responded to the obscure reference.
“There’s a speed limit in this town, Colonel. Forty-five miles an hour.”
Egan grinned as he made the run toward first base, which in his case was more like a shuffle. “How fast was I going?”
“I’d say around ninety.”
So she wasn’t just a pretty face and tight body. “Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.”
Mrs. Floyd smiled and stepped away from the hand on her back. “Suppose I let you off with a warning this time?”
First base seemed a little farther away. “Suppose it doesn’t take?”
“Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles?”
“Suppose I burst out crying and put my head on your shoulder.”
“Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder.” And then she went off script. “Really, Colonel. He’ll be here shortly.”
“But he’s not here now.” But Egan stopped, about two-thirds to first, called out, but keeping it in mind.
“Remember what happened to Fred MacMurray by the end of that movie.” She turned from him and looked about the museum. “Only planes?”
“There are some missiles in here.” Egan stepped next to her and pointed. “Over there.”
“Ah yes. Missiles. Men love their missiles.”
He put his hand once more on her back. She didn’t step away. He let his fingers spread a bit so he could feel the slight arch of her spine as it curved outward from her tight bottom. He assumed it was tight, not being that forward yet, because women these days all worked out more than any physical drill the air force had ever pressed upon him. Sometimes he missed the softer, rounder girls of his youth. He often reflected that Marilyn Monroe would never have lasted long with today’s standards. He’d seen her in a USO show once in Korea. Or was it Alaska?
He couldn’t quite remember.
“Planes and missiles,” Mrs. Floyd said. “That’s it?” And once more she stepped away from his touch.
“No, that’s not it,” Egan said. “This hangar was built on top of the war room for SAC — the Strategic Air Command.”
“Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” she said, and Egan tensed. He hated that movie.
“We kept the peace,” Egan said. He strode toward a concrete bunker in the middle of the hangar, not caring if she kept pace.
She did, looking at her cell phone. “I’m not getting a signal. I can’t check on when my husband will get here.”
“The entire building is Tempest-proof,” Egan said. “Shielded. Everything in and out goes via landline.” He reached the bunker. “When nuclear weapons go off they release an electromagnetic pulse, which fries most electronics. So, naturally, we shielded our command post.”
“Battlestar Galactica stuff,” Mrs. Floyd said. Egan was getting tired of the media references as they weren’t heading toward first base anymore but rather the fog covering the outfield. He opened a heavy steel door. Metal steps beckoned on one side, descending into dark depths. Large elevator doors were directly ahead.
“This isn’t part of the normal museum tour,” Egan said as he walked up to the elevator and pressed a button. The two doors rumbled open, exposing a freight elevator. The paint was gray and peeling. The museum wasn’t high on the air force’s budget priority list, although most military personnel knew how that worked. The longstanding joke was that when the air force opened a new base, they built the officers’ club first, then the golf course, then asked Congress for more money to build the airstrip and hangars.
Those in the other armed services had a lot of respect for the air force’s base priorities — as long as they were officers and played golf.
Mrs. Floyd hesitated at the hatch. “Perhaps we should wait for my husband?”
“I don’t need his shoulder,” Egan said. He looked back at her. “Do you?”
Mrs. Floyd got into the elevator. Egan hit a button and the doors shut with a solid thud. The elevator lurched and then descended, faster and faster.
“How deep are we going?” Mrs. Floyd asked.
“Five hundred feet, and passing through forty feet of reinforced concrete. This place could take a direct nuke strike and continue functioning.”
“What about the people in the hangar above?”
Egan didn’t answer because one simply did not think of the people above. The elevator came to a jolting halt. The doors slid open, revealing a yawning darkness. A musty smell wafted over them. One could almost smell the cigarette and cigar smoke from generations of men watching screens, on edge for entire tours of duty, the fate of the world in their hands.
“Maybe we should go back up?”
Egan took two steps forward, turned left, took one and a half paces, reached out, and pressed an unseen button.
Banks of fluorescent lights flickered on. They revealed descending rows of consoles facing a stage on which there were several large Plexiglas boards. The tables were wood, and even the consoles had wood framing. There were numerous empty holes where monitors and other gear had been ripped out. Phones were scattered about, some rotary dial. All had red warning stickers on them. There were toggles and buttons and there was almost nothing digital about the place at all except some boxy clocks, their red numbers long dead, along the top edge of the walls.
It was a war room from an age when the United States could put a man on the moon using a computer less powerful than the average “smart” phone and bring them back when things went wrong using slide rulers and ingenuity.
“It’s old,” was Mrs. Floyd’s only comment from the safety of the elevator.
“My dear, it worked,” Egan snapped. He waved a hand. “The men in here controlled the fate of the world. They controlled power beyond what you can imagine.”
Mrs. Floyd shook her head. “Men and power.”
“It kept you safe.”
“From other men and their power.”
Egan snorted. “I’ve got a theory. You want to know how I think the first war started?”
She sighed, knowing she shouldn’t respond, but playing along. “You’re going to tell me anyway.”
And he did. “Back when we were in caves, armed with clubs and spears, some woman from a tribe saw a woman from another tribe and she had this here bowl. And the first woman wanted that there bowl. And, by God, she was gonna have it. So she harassed and henpecked her husband until he got his buddies together and they went over to that tribe in the next valley and they got that bowl for her. And that was the first war.”
“Women start wars?” Mrs. Floyd was incredulous. “Over a bowl?”
Egan shrugged, but didn’t reply. He gestured. “Over there is where the launch control—”
“Should that thing be blinking?” Mrs. Floyd asked, her hand pointing to the right with a large, expensive diamond reflecting the cheap lighting.
Egan followed the flow of the elegant finger. An orange light was flickering on a large panel full of dead lights.
He was finally speechless as his aging neural network tried to process what was happening. Everything he was seeing was important and he struggled with the logic flow.
Orange.
On that panel.