“To launch,” said Peter. “This is the only strategic installation in the United States with independent launch capability. There’s no point to taking it if you weren’t going to make the bird fly.”
“Why? What would be the point?”
“There isn’t one that I can figure,” said Peter. “Unless it’s sheer nihilism. Somebody just wants the world to end. It doesn’t make any kind of strategic sense; when the bird flies, the Sovs launch on warning. Then we all die. The beetles take over.”
“Some kind of crazy death wish, like the guy who took the gun into the airliner and shot the pilot?”
“More than that, but I don’t know what it is. But I guarantee you, there’s more, somehow. There’s some other aspect to the plan, some wit, some-theory, some long-range aspiration. This is only one part of it, that I can tell you. This is part of some larger scheme.”
“Goddammit, I thought you were supposed to be some kind of genius!”
“I am a genius,” said Peter. “But maybe that guy up there is too.”
“When you figure it out,” said Puller, “I want you to tell me first. Right away. It’s crucial. If I know what’s going on, maybe I can figure out who’s doing it. Now, can we get in?”
“No,” said Peter.
“Goddammit,” said Dick Puller.
“No, I don’t, think you can. I understand they have people up there.”
“Sixty well-armed men.”
“Military?”
“The very finest. From what I’ve been able to tell, their seizure op was very crisply handled. Very neat, very impressive. Right now they’ve thrown the goddamned thing under some kind of tarpaulin. We can’t see what they’re doing up there. Pretty damned smart. We’ve got zillion-dollar birds in the sky that can see through clouds and rain and tornadoes and tell us whether Gorbachev had his eggs up or over easy. But there isn’t a lens alive that’ll see through an inch of canvas. What do you suppose they’re up to?”
“I don’t know,” said Peter. “I don’t have any idea.”
“Worse than that, they sent a radio signal to somebody. Who do you suppose they were talking to, Dr. Thiokol? Another bunch of commandos, getting ready to jump us as we put our assault together, really mess us up? Maybe a group to hit our airfields, stop our goddamned Tac Air? Maybe a part of this other aspect of the plan. What, Dr. Thiokol? Any ideas?”
“I don’t know,” said Peter bluntly. “The only thing I know about is missiles. And missile basing. And I know this. You’re going to have a hell of a time getting up there, whether you get hit by another outfit or not. I had access to a computer survey of small-unit action in Vietnam and it suggests that all the advantages are with the defenders.”
“Jesus, you had to get a computer to tell you that?”
Peter ignored him, plunging onward to the dark heart of the matter. “But even, say, even if you kill the men on the hill, you’ve still got to get through that door to the elevator shaft in the LCF to get to the LCC. It’s the only way down. And the door is eleven tons of titanium. If you started cutting through last week, you wouldn’t get there by midnight.”
“What about just opening the door?” Puller asked.
Peter made an involuntary face that communicated the idea that he was talking to a child, then said contemptuously, “The door is controlled by a Category F Permissive Action Link security device. A multiple twelve-digit code with limited try. Three strikes and you’re out.”
“How did he get it? Inside job?”
“No, they change the code every twenty-four hours. But one of the wrinkles here is that the code is kept up top, too, in the security officer’s safe, in case SAC has to get down there. That’s the way we planned it. But nobody is supposed to know this. It was a secret. Anyway, they must have blown the safe, got the code, and rode the elevator down and jumped the guys in the hole. Easy.”
“Can’t we call SAC and get the code?”
Peter made another snotty face. “Come on,” he said. “This guy—”
“Aggressor-One, we’ve tagged him.”
“Yes, Aggressor-One,” Peter said, thinking, they certainly got that right, “he can reset his own code from inside.”
“Could we blow through it?”
“You’d need so much explosive, you’d blow the mainframe that runs the upper installation, including the door code. The doors would lock shut permanently, you’d never get in.”
“Hmmm,” said Dick Puller.
“Maybe, just maybe they don’t know about the key vault. If the guys inside had enough warning to use the key vault, then they’re sitting on the most useless piece of real estate in America. Because the key vault was a late modification. If we knew when they made their intelligence breakthrough, then we’d know how much they could know. That’s the prime question. Do they have a welder?”
“Let’s assume they do. They certainly knew everything else. They knew the codes, the procedures. They knew the Commo equipment.”
If it were possible, the skin on Puller’s face seemed to stretch tighter. He looked like a man with a massive headache. He lit another Marlboro. He turned back to the old man, who had been sitting abstractedly during his conversation with Thiokol, chewing on his dentures.
“Well, Mr. Brady,” he said, “you think we could get in from below?”
“No, no,” Peter interrupted impatiently. He hated stupidity. “No, the concrete is super-hardened to thirty-two thousand pounds p.s.i. It’ll stop everything except one of the old super H-bombs. And it’s surrounded by ten million square feet of rock.”
“So a man couldn’t get in from below? Or get close enough to plant a small-yield nuclear device. I mean, theoretically?”
“In twelve hours?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if he could get up there, I suppose … this is highly abstract, but theoretically, I guess he could get in through the exhaust vanes, tubes that will blow out if the bird fires. That would get him into the silo, and if he had a device or the knowhow, he could disable the bird that way. Theoretically, at any rate.”
“Now, Mr. Brady. These tunnels that may be in this mountain. What sort of shape would they be in?”
“Worse damn shape than you could imagine, Mr. Puller,” said the old man, pausing to hawk up a wad of phlegm. “Some of ’em may go nowhere. Some places they may narrow down so small a man couldn’t get his fist through ‘em. And black, Mr. Puller. So black you can’t imagine. You have to be underground for dark like that.”
“Could men operate down there?”
“Wooooo, Mr. Puller. You wouldn’t want to. It’d have to be a certain kind of man. Down there in the dark, you’re always scared. If the ceiling goes, there’s no help for you. You can’t see, you can hardly move. You’ve always got shit in your pants, Mr. Puller. A tunnel sits on top of your head something mighty heavy.”
Puller sat back. Outside he had one hundred twenty of the most highly trained military specialists in the world. Yet somehow he knew Delta Force wasn’t the answer. This called for someone who probably didn’t exist; a man who could slither up a hole in a mountain in the fetid shroud of perpetual night, a mile and a half with his fears bouncing around inside his head like a brass cannonball, and come out at the end sane and …
“I suppose I could get some volunteers from Delta. Mr. Brady, any coal miners around, men who’ve been underground?”
“Not in these parts, Mr. Puller. Not anymore. Not since the cave-in.”
“Hmmm,” Dick Puller said again. Peter watched him. Puller seemed to implode on himself as he thought, his face gray, his eyes locked on nothing. It was old Mr. Brady who spoke.