“I concur,” Ms. Jones said. “But I still believe we are going to have to be surgical with our strike when the time comes. We don’t want word of this to get out. It would cause considerable consternation among the populace to learn there’s been a rogue nuclear arm to our military.”
“It would be a clusterfuck,” Mac said to Roland. The big man smacked the smaller man on the back of his head.
“I get it,” Roland said.
“Yes, Ms. Jones,” Nada said, “but we have to assume they’ve got a self-destruct. They had one in Nebraska. And I don’t think we’re going to get lucky again.”
“Mister Nada…” Ms. Jones began, but hesitated.
Everyone turned to look at the team sergeant. Ms. Jones never hesitated.
“Yes?” Nada prompted.
“I need you to get something from the Vault.”
Nada was on his feet. “Yes, ma’am. And that is?”
And when she told him, they all knew why she’d hesitated.
But Nada didn’t. He gestured at Eagle. “You drive.”
And the two of them headed for the Humvee parked nearby to drive into the bunker built in the side of Groom Mountain where the Vault containing the Nightstalkers’ support was located.
The breach team General Riggs sent down the tunnel to the basement of the White House outnumbered the Secret Service guards in hazmat suits three to one. They also had superior firepower. They also wore the uniforms of the US military, which caused the Secret Service agents to hesitate. The soldiers did not.
Within seconds the three agents were flex-cuffed to a pipe that ran along the wall, cursing at their fellow federal employees and warning of infection as they opened up the barricaded door. Standing on the other side was Major Preston, an unconscious Secret Service agent at his feet.
Preston stepped through and the door was shut again. The party made its way back to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center.
“General,” Preston said as he put the football on the conference table in front of Riggs.
Everyone in the room fixated on the case.
Riggs smiled and touched a blue button set into the tabletop in front of him. The entire wall along one side of the room split apart, each piece rumbling to the side to reveal a massive screen. It was currently dark.
“Good job,” Riggs said as he indicated for Preston to open the case.
Preston unlocked it and flipped the lid up. Riggs grabbed a cable from the interior of the case that came out of the transmitter and plugged it into an outlet on the edge of the conference table. The dark screen flickered and then came alive with an electronic map of the wall. Overlaid in “nonessential areas” such as the South Pacific, Antarctica, most of Africa, Greenland, and other places were boxes filled with data. The data indicated the number of nuclear platforms available at this exact moment: missiles, submarines, aircraft.
At the very top, in the whiteness of the Arctic, was a red digital display. It currently read:
0:00:00
“Seal the room,” Riggs ordered.
His sergeant major pulled a red lever just inside the door. Steel plates slid down with solid thuds.
Riggs sat down and pulled items out of the case: the black book, which he placed in front of him; the list of classified sites, which he tossed in the trash bin; and finally the three-by-five card with the authorization codes.
Riggs picked up the black book. Originally, when the first version was prepared, it was the size of a long screenplay, over 150 pages in very small type and so complicated even the team preparing it despaired of completely understanding all the options.
It was President Carter, the only president with a degree in nuclear engineering, who’d actually spent the time to try to read the black book one day. He’d thrown his hands up in disgust and ordered a simplified version, a “Denny’s breakfast menu” summary so to speak. In keeping with that theme, the target listing was broken down into three main categories: rare, medium, or well done.
Riggs wanted well done.
He flipped through and it didn’t take him long to find the meal he wanted — targeting all known nuclear launch sites in the world in nuclear powers considered “unfriendly” to the United States: Russia, China, and North Korea. Just for shits and grins, he also included Pakistan’s and India’s arsenals because those two prick countries were going to start World War III any day now and he might as well prevent that while he was at it.
At least that was Riggs’s reasoning.
Riggs rattled off the option numbers and the PEOC staffers went to work, fingers clattering on keys. Red triangles began flashing on the world map.
“Oh, yeah,” Riggs said, flipping through, searching. “Where the hell is Iran?”
Preston leaned over the general’s shoulder, almost apologetically. Like a good waiter, he flipped two pages and lightly rested his finger on the page. “Here, sir.”
“Let’s take out the ragheads too,” Riggs added. “Make a clean sweep of it once and for all.”
A similar red display in the Pinnacle bunker began to flash and then numbers came alive.
0:10:00
The display clicked to 0:09:59 and the countdown had begun.
Chapter 14
“Yucca Flats.” Neeley’s voice was tinny, being relayed from the top of Raven Rock in Pennsylvania through various scramblers and frequency hoppers to the Nightstalkers seated in the rear of the Snake, which was still parked on the ramp at Area 51.
“That’s close,” Eagle said, without having to check a map. “Inside the same restricted space we’re in.” He looked to the southwest and pointed in the dark. “That way.” There was just darkness hanging over the desert.
“That’s the dead zone,” Mac said. “The test area.”
Nada was peering at the display of his iPad, Googling the location, the team looking over his shoulder.
Neeley continued with what she’d learned from Brennan. “They’ve got at least forty warheads, ranging from over sixty years old to current technology hidden in what he called Icecap, whatever the hell that is.”
“Are they deployable by any means?” Mac asked. “Or just stored there?”
“That’s the bad news,” Neeley said. “He said there are three rail line spurs running right through this Icecap building. They’ve got three nuclear-tipped ICBMs loaded on three separate railcars as well as one in the building itself. The plan is if they are needed, they head out along the three spurs and launch at certain intervals. They stripped technology that had been used for Star Wars experiments for this setup.”
“Targets?” Nada asked.
“He didn’t know,” Neeley said. “There’s more.”
Ms. Jones’s voice cut in from the Ranch. “We must assume Area 51 is targeted at the very least since Pinnacle was started as a safeguard against Rifts.”
“Not much flight time from there to here,” Eagle observed. “Three minutes.”
Nada stood. “Then we better get going.”
“You just let him go!” It was more exclamation point than question mark as Moms learned about the military attaché breaking out to the PEOC with the nuclear football. And that the Keep had stood aside. They were in the pantry as the chief of staff and the Secret Service gathered everyone in the Entrance Hall at Moms’s order.
The Keep sighed. “It wasn’t my place to stop him. I thought the Secret Service would be able to, but I was unaware that General Riggs had taken over the PEOC and sent a breach team.”
“Frak,” Moms said. “He’s got the launch codes.”
“He won’t launch,” the Keep said.
Moms closed her eyes, a headache thrumming in her brain. She wondered if she’d missed something, if somehow she’d made contact with an infected person and this was the onset of Cherry Tree.