In that location.
Flickering. Not steady.
He’d been briefed verbally on this when he took the job, but he’d thought the old fart he was replacing had been a bit touched in the head to believe anything down here still worked. And word of mouth, from one generation to the next, was like playing telephone as a kid — the message eventually got garbled down the line. “Emily farts in class” became “The homily darts in the ass.”
He had to call someone. Of that he was certain. He went to the console right below the flickering light. There was a red phone. No buttons, no rotary. Just a phone with the word PINNACLE written on a piece of tape on the handle.
He’d heard whispers of Pinnacle and his hand hesitated for a moment, hovering over the receiver.
As he picked up the phone, his heart thrilled for a moment until the pacemaker slowed it down for him. Funny, he thought, catching a glimpse of Mrs. Floyd out of the corner of his eye as he put the handset to his ear. Now that he had a mission, and an important one, because saving the world or at least a chunk of it was important, he’d almost forgotten all about the woman.
Almost.
The phone was dead.
“What’s wrong?” Mrs. Floyd asked.
He didn’t hear her as he closed his eyes and focused his mind. He’d had another briefing years ago. A way to report an incident.
Egan ran, shuffled fast, to the elevator. Mrs. Floyd, being no fool, was right next to him as he shut the doors and the elevator accelerated upward.
“Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” Mrs. Floyd asked.
Egan smiled his confident smile, the one copilots had seen on his face as they flew through horrendous weather or dodged surface-to-air missiles or landed with a shot-up plane. Trust me, the smile said.
The doors opened and Egan made a beeline for the admin office on the side of the hangar, Mrs. Floyd still at his side. He entered and went to the landline. He picked it up and dialed: 666.
The earpiece crackled as circuits that hadn’t felt electricity in a long time made connections.
Egan was startled and almost dropped the phone when, instead of a voice answering, there was a blast of music and then a deranged man singing over and over:
“Send lawyers, guns and money!”
Chapter 3
And that was why the Nightstalkers were ten minutes out from drop.
Moms filled them in. “It’s an old launch control center. It was bought a few months ago by a couple of civilians. Since we’ve been airborne, Ms. Jones had her sources run their background: a pair of doomsdayers.”
“The end of the Mayan calendar must have bummed them out with no payoff,” Kirk said.
“They probably hit the wrong button,” Mac said. “But how can there still be a nuke there?”
“It’s a launch control center,” Moms repeated. “It has fourteen outlying silos. Ms. Jones just had a Key Hole satellite do a deep ground penetration and it picked up radiation from a cluster of silos. There’s still a nuke in at least one of them.”
“Nada wins,” Mac said, which wasn’t surprising since Nada always predicted the worst and Nada often won. Mac shook his head, the movement unnoticed inside his protective hood. He was a good-looking man, part young Tom Cruise, part more rugged than the actor from actually being a soldier instead of playing one. He was the best explosive ordnance man to come out of the army, which is why he was now a Nightstalker.
Partly.
Ms. Jones’s means of recruiting were a mystery, although it basically entailed combing the ranks of the elite, looking for those who had the added benefit of being unique in ways she felt the team needed. Often that uniqueness was something their former units didn’t really appreciate, or in fact rejected.
“No way it can go off,” Mac continued. “We’re talking—”
He was cut off by Doc. “I’ve broken apart the signal. It’s two overlapping transmissions. One is a countdown.”
“Fuck me to tears,” Nada muttered.
“What’s the count?” Moms asked.
“Twenty-two minutes, sixteen seconds, and dropping,” Doc informed them.
“Except there won’t be a launch,” Moms said, “because all those silo covers were welded shut and had concrete poured on top when the complex was closed.”
“That’s not good.” Roland stated the obvious, because Roland always focused on the obvious. It was irritating at times but very effective in combat.
Like Roland.
Moms ignored him and addressed Doc. “What’s the other transmission?”
Doc was frustrated. “I can’t make it out yet. Some old code that keeps repeating over and over.”
“Ten minutes out,” Eagle announced.
Ears popped in the cargo bay as pressure finished equalizing to fifteen thousand feet above ground level.
“All right,” Mac said. “The pool is now open as to cause.”
“Human error,” Nada said. Because Nada always thought it was human error. His faith in his fellow men was never above the half-full level, and usually pretty much near empty, and often he thought the glass simply didn’t even exist, but rather was a mirage, a cruel joke of an uncaring Fate.
“Of course there is some human factor involved,” Doc said, blinking behind his thick glasses and peering through the protective plate in the hazmat hood, focused on his keyboard. “It is part of my rule of seven.”
“Well, you gotta pick one, not seven,” Mac said. “The bet is on the primary cause.”
“Computer glitch,” Kirk said. Kirk always wanted it to be something to do with computers, because that made it his responsibility to fix the situation as the team communications man and computer specialist.
“Hardware or software?” Mac pressed.
“Hardware,” Kirk said.
Mac was using a felt-tip marker to record the bets on the arm of his suit. “I got Kirk with computer glitch, narrowed down to hardware malfunction. Nada with human error as primary. Doc?”
“I do not speculate,” Doc said, ending his participation.
“Sure it’s not a bug?” Mac chided him. Doc always wanted it to be a bug, the more exotic, the more interesting.
“Come on, Moms,” Kirk pressed.
Moms sighed, the sound echoing inside her hood, and for the sake of teamwork allowed herself to be drawn in. What most of the team, other than Nada, didn’t quite grasp was that she allowed the betting because it was an active way of getting everyone involved in “war-gaming” possibilities. The Nightstalkers often jumped into confusing and rapidly changing scenarios, and the more open their minds were to the range of problems they could face, the better they could face them.
She spoke: “Someone left an inspection plate open or an inner tube in the rocket from the engines fell apart and a rat got in and chewed through some wires. Or the doomsdayers were playing make-believe launch-the-missile, pretending they were actually ending the world not knowing they had a loaded silo.”
Mac whistled. “Now that’s specific. But you do remember that’s what happened in South Dakota when we went there two years ago?” He wrote R-A-T on his sleeve.
“Of course,” Moms said. “History has a way of repeating itself.”
Doc got up and waddled over to Roland to do one last check of the hazmat suit as per protocol. Moms did one more check of his parachute rig, not protocol, but she was a worrier. Doc tapped Roland lightly on one shoulder and Moms tapped him on the other, a mixture of reassurance and support, and they both sat back down.
“Keep working the second freq and code,” Moms said.
Doc was already back on his laptop.
“Five minutes,” Eagle announced. “Opening ramp.”
The Snake was a tilt-wing, jet-powered Black Ops aircraft, so experimental Eagle could have put in for test pilot wings with the air force. Except Nightstalkers never put in for badges, or awards, or wings, or any of that.