“Hell, they lost me,” Eagle said. “When I went into Task Force 160, all my paperwork was gone, just like that.”
Nada snorted. “We’ve all disappeared as far as our original services are concerned. We only exist in our cover IDs.”
“Nukes getting lost or misplaced has happened before and it will happen again,” Eagle said. “Back in ’07, a B-52 took off from an air base to deliver some cruise missiles for ‘retirement’ to another air base. Except the maintenance crews failed to remove the nuclear warheads in six of the missiles.”
“Oops,” Kirk said.
“Someone didn’t follow the checklist in their Protocol,” Nada said.
Eagle continued, “In essence, the air force lost track of six nukes for almost two days and flew them over most of the country without the aircrew being aware they were carrying live warheads. Parked the plane on both airstrips without any guards and the nukes just hanging on the wing. Cost the secretary of the air force and the chief of staff their jobs. And it was all a paperwork error. As Nada noted, a failure of protocol.”
“Speaking of failure of Protocol,” Nada said. “Why didn’t you shoot the civilians?” Nada was the only one who would dare raise the issue to Moms.
“It didn’t cost us any time,” Moms said, a weak defense at best.
“You had second shot,” Roland pointed out to Nada, “and you didn’t shoot the woman.”
Roland’s logic ended Nada’s questioning. Another almost first.
Moms shook her head. “We don’t shoot civilians unless we have to. We’re not merks.”
“That we are not,” Nada echoed.
“Eagle,” Moms said. “Did you gain altitude when I ordered?”
Eagle dropped his cigarette and ground it out on the metal floor of the Snake, the only one who was allowed to do that since the aircraft was his turf. He was a tall black man, a scroll of scars on the left side of his face a testament to a fiery IED incident years ago. He had not a hair on his head, making his large skull even more prominent. “No, I did not. If it were a conventional explosion there was a good chance someone would need medevac and I wanted to be close.”
Mac snorted. “Those conventionals had gone off, you’d still be scraping pieces of me up.”
Moms shook her head. “We’re a mess. Violating Protocol, then violating orders about violating Protocol. What’s next?”
“Dogs and cats living together?” Eagle ventured, earning a weak smile from the team, including Roland, as Ghostbusters was one of the few movies he’d seen.
“I’ll be happy when they sign the arms treaty,” Moms said.
“Won’t change much,” Kirk pointed out. He glanced at Eagle. “How many nukes do we have now?”
“Approximately five thousand, one hundred and ten,” Eagle said without a pause or pulling out a cell phone and Googling it. “That’s all combined: strategic, tactical, and mostly nondeployed. Ready to fire, drop, or sneak in? A little under two thousand.”
“And how long,” Kirk continued, “will it take to tear most of them apart?”
Eagle laughed. “We’re still backed up from the last treaty, but SAD gives everyone ten years, although the inspection and enforcement part is a bit lacking.”
Kirk shrugged. “So the treaty is a show, with no teeth.”
Ms. Jones’s voice crackled out of the speaker hanging in the cargo bay. “Oh, SAD has teeth, Mister Kirk.”
As the newest member of the team and still not acclimatized to the ways of the Nightstalkers, Kirk jumped to his feet and snapped to attention at Ms. Jones’s voice.
“Relax, Kirk,” Nada said to him.
“Is Mister Kirk showing some respect?” Ms. Jones asked. She almost sounded pleased.
“He still thinks he’s in the Ranger Batt,” Nada said.
“The treaty is important,” Ms. Jones continued, “because it keeps us headed in the correct direction. More importantly it sends an important message to the rest of the world about the intentions of the United States.”
“I got a question,” Kirk said, relaxing as best he could. “Was this nuke one of those in the numbers Eagle counted?”
“It was not,” Ms. Jones said. “And that is the disturbing thing. We’ve run the serial number on the warhead. It was supposed to have been dismantled and destroyed after a reorganization and update back in the mid-1960s. The records say it was.”
“Paperwork glitch, Ms. Jones?” Moms asked.
“I earnestly hope so,” she responded.
“What else could it be?” Nada asked, catching something in her voice. He knew Ms. Jones better than anyone on the team by virtue of being the longest-serving member. “Knowing” her though was a misnomer, because no one on the team could actually claim to have seen her. They all “met” her during the in-brief to the team, a shadowy figure seated in a large chair on the other side of a large desk. Doc still claimed the figure was a hologram and Doc was not prone to much speculation. But Nada had heard her voice more than any of the others.
“I would prefer not to guess,” Ms. Jones said.
“How did you get the code?” Nada asked, switching the subject since her tone indicated he should switch the subject.
Ms. Jones laughed, which sounded like a mixture of a death rattle and a desperate gasp for air. “Operation Ortsac. The year 1962 was the key since that was when it was planned and almost implemented. If someone hooked up an override in the silo and added in that comment, that meant the world was quite close to the nuclear brink. It’s quite a simplistic code name if you think about it.”
Eagle, as usual, was quickest to the mark. “Castro backwards.”
“Indeed,” Ms. Jones said. “History is not as most people believe. Ortsac was the plan to take out the missile sites and invade Cuba. Most Americans still believe the blockade turned away the Russian missiles. Not true. They were already in place in Cuba and ready to be fired at the height of the crisis. Even more astounding is that operational control of the nuclear warheads on the island had been given to the Russian officers there in the field. Any invasion would have been met with tactical nuclear weapons with tremendous loss of life, most likely precipitating World War III and a wider strategic exchange.
“I remember it quite clearly,” Ms. Jones added. “We all expected our world to end. We knew Khrushchev would take West Berlin if the Americans invaded Cuba. We knew the Americans had already used nuclear weapons on Japan — only seventeen years earlier. We were quite convinced that the imperialistic Americans were going to kill all of us. It is strange how Americans rarely understand how the rest of the world perceives it as a nuclear power.”
“It’s amazing that Khrushchev released control of those weapons to the officers on the ground,” Moms said.
“It’s amazing we’re still alive,” Eagle muttered.
“That’s very out of the norm,” Nada said. “Nuclear protocol is usually written by someone who never has to actually do what the protocol says. Control is almost always kept at the highest levels. When I was on the SADM team, we were told we could set a three-minute to a three-hour delay on the nuke once we emplaced it and hit the arm. Our theory was that there was no delay. The moment we armed it, it went off. What’s four guys when you consider it had to be a target worth a nuke?”
“That’s pretty cynical,” Kirk said.
“That’s Nada,” Mac said.
Nada ignored both of them. “Even if there was the delay, protocol dictated we keep sniper coverage on the nuke until detonation. It’s a pretty thin line between max sniper range and even a tac nuke’s blast radius, not to mention the rads. We weren’t packing hazmat suits in our gear.”
Ms. Jones’s voice came over the net. “In my former Soviet Union, we were all issued anti-radiation pills. Soldiers were assured that if they took the pills, they would not be affected and could fight on.”