“Negative.”
“Ms. Jones?” Moms asked, the message relayed via Nada to Kirk to the Ranch.
“The Acmes are on it,” Ms. Jones said, referring to the group of scientists across a wide spectrum of specialties the Nightstalkers had on call. The Acme moniker came from the company Wile E. Coyote bought all his gear from in the Looney Tunes cartoon. Given the gear rarely worked, like the Acmes’ advice, it was appropriate.
“Three minutes,” Nada announced.
In the access tunnel, the wheel creaked another quarter inch. Moms reached around Roland, barely able to get the tips of two fingers on the wheel, but it was better than nothing. They applied pressure and gained a half inch. Squeezed as tight as lovers, all Moms and Roland cared about was opening a door that was an invitation to an explosion.
“If there was an alert at the SAC museum,” Kirk said from the upper doorway, “then there has to be a live circuit between the two. Some sort of signal. How did this get triggered?”
In the control room, Nada turned toward Peggy Sue. “What did you guys do to set this off?”
“I didn’t do nothing,” Peggy Sue said. She rushed to continue the explanation because she’d learned growing up that words spoken quickly could sometimes stop the fists. “Clarence, he was bringing water down. Me, I was doing the wash. Hanging the laundry.” She pointed at the rubber tube, festooned with dripping clothes. “Swear, mister, didn’t do nothing. Was just—”
“Two minutes,” Kirk relayed from Eagle.
Moms paused in helping Roland. “Eagle, I want you to gain a safe altitude in case this thing goes off. Nothing you can do for us anymore. That’s an order.”
There were a few seconds of silence, then Eagle replied, “Roger.”
Nada followed the rubber pipe from its entry point in the wall to the metal casing. He was over there in seconds, throwing open the door.
“Oh yeah,” Peggy Sue continued. “That light ain’t never been on before, but I swear I didn’t do nothing.”
“I’ve got an orange light on a warning board,” Nada reported. “Reads PINNACLE on a piece of tape. There’s a keyboard below it. Someone wrote ENTER CODE — GOOD LUCK OR GOOD-BYE! with an exclamation point at the end.”
“Doc,” Moms said as she shoved her arm along Roland’s side to give him two fingers of extra effort. “The code?”
“It’s encrypted,” Doc said.
“Kirk?” Moms and Roland got another inch.
“Negative. One minute,” he added.
Roland let out a surprised grunt as the wheel spun. He shoved Moms’s arm out of the way and lifted the hatch open. The latch to lock it in the open position was rusted shut, so he bore the entire weight, muscles vibrating.
“Go!” Roland said.
Moms pressed to the side to let Mac into the silo holding the missile. Moms started to follow, but as Mac went by Roland, he punched the big man in the solar plexus and grabbed the inner handle of the hatch, adding his weight to it. Between the punch and the extra weight, Roland couldn’t hang on and the hatch slammed shut behind Mac, locking him in and Moms and Roland outside.
“What the hell!” Moms yelled.
Mac’s reply was barely audible on the radio even though they were only feet apart. “If only the conventional implosion goes off, no need all of us being in here.”
In the LCC Control Room, Nada was staring at the keyboard. “Someone give me a code. Something!”
In the silo, Mac had his power drill out and was working on opening the access panel on the nose cone holding the warhead.
“Thirty seconds,” Eagle relayed to Kirk, who relayed to Nada who relayed to Moms who relayed to Mac.
Who only had half the screws off. The analytical part of his brain knew he’d never have them all off in time.
He kept working.
“Twenty seconds.”
“Mister Nada, is there any date in that panel or on the board?” Ms. Jones asked.
Mac was down to four screws.
“Ten seconds.”
Nada picked up the keyboard attached to the panel by a single wire and looked at the bottom. A manufacturer’s name and date was stamped on it. “Nineteen sixty-two.”
“Five seconds.”
Mac was on the last screw. It came out and he slammed the tip of a screwdriver in the edge and pried the panel open.
“Time!”
Mac had wire cutters in each hand, but the bundles of wire were so twisted and knotted and numerous in front of him that at Nada’s announcement he couldn’t help but hunch over and shut his eyes, waiting for the conventional explosives, at the very least, to go off and blast him into nothingness.
But nothingness was what happened.
No conventional explosion.
No nuclear explosion.
“Ortsac,” Ms. Jones said. “O-R-T-S-A-C.”
Despite time being up, very aware that a nuke might have a hang fire as easily as a mortar, Nada typed the letters on the keyboard.
The orange light went out.
In the silo, Mac slowly opened his eyes and looked more carefully inside the nose cone.
Then he started laughing.
Chapter 4
As men wearing black suits and sunglasses hauled Clarence and Peggy Sue away in a black Lincoln Town Car — the infamous Men In Black, who were really support personnel for the Nightstalkers from Area 51—the team gathered in the cargo bay of the Snake, which Eagle had landed just outside the front gate of the LCC compound. Roland was mournfully cradling his M249 squad automatic weapon, the bent barrel curving around his upper body like a devoted pet. If one kept lethal, metal snakes as pets.
“Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” Nada said, and he meant it, as he pulled a pack out of his combat vest, took one, and passed it around.
It was a sign of how frazzled they were that every member of the team took one, even Doc for the first time, and fired up. Doc’s parents had both emigrated to the States from India and his bookish appearance was out of place among the warriors of the Nightstalkers.
“The clock ran out.” Roland said the obvious, because, well, he was Roland.
“It’s never run out before,” Doc said, and this was his second startling thing of the day because Doc never stated the obvious.
“There’s a first for everything,” Nada said. “We’re still here.”
And that was almost a first, Nada being upbeat.
Moms exhaled, the chill Nebraska wind taking the smoke and blowing it across the plains. “All right. Let’s figure out what happened. Mac. What was so funny when you got into the missile?”
“You won the pool,” Mac said. He held up a handful of frayed wires. “This is the main firing component. Rats, or some other kind of vermin, chewed them all up. But we’ll go with rats.” He held up the sleeve of his hazmat suit where he’d written RATS and MOMS.
“So we got saved by rats?” Eagle said.
“Yep.” Mac dropped the cables. “I got the access panel open just as time ran out. If these wires had still been intact, I’m pretty sure the conventional implosion would have gone off and I’d be splatted inside that silo. As far as the nuke”—he nodded his head to a bunch of Acme and support personnel at work, calling in heavy equipment to rip off the concrete cap on top of the silo to get access and remove it—“they can figure that out. There was a gap at the base of the nose cone in the gasket. Rats must have come up through the engine into the nose cone.”
“How could they lose track of a nuke?” Kirk asked.
“This place is old,” Moms said. “Eagle told us they had over thirty thousand nukes at the height of the Cold War. We’ve all worked in the real world for the government. Anyone ever had any paperwork that got lost?”