“I wish he’d call back,” said Romano ten minutes later.
Dad was struggling with the spare tire. He crouched next to the vehicle just off the snowy roadway beyond the gate of the installation. The voices of impatient children lashed out from within the interior of the van.
“Dammit, settle down in there,” he bellowed. “This isn’t easy.”
Master Sergeant O’Malley of the Air Force Combat Security Police watched him from the guardhouse. Even from where he stood he could hear the children inside the van.
“This guy is making me nervous,” he said to the two policemen with him. All were dressed in the uniforms of a private security service, in keeping with the sign that stood above the gate house: SOUTH MOUNTAIN MICROWAVE PROCESSING STATION/ AT&T/ PRIVATE PROPERTY/ NO ADMITTANCE.
“You want us to frisk him?”
O’Malley vacillated. He looked again at his Alert Status board, and saw no change in the OZ and IZ lights. He gave a quick visual sweep of the mountain slope below him, and saw nothing but white snow and black stubble. He blinked, swallowed. He looked around. Where was his three-man Primary Security Alert Team? Jesus, those guys were slow!
Finally, he said, “No. We’re supposed to keep a low profile. I’ll just go help him along. I don’t want him spending the morning here.”
O’Malley drew his parka on and stepped out into the roadway, wincing at the brightness even through his aviator sunglasses. He walked across the hard, cold road.
“Sir, I have to ask you to move on,” he said. “This is private property. You aren’t even supposed to be back on this road.”
The dad looked up. He was a suntanned man with very white teeth. He looked, to the sergeant at any rate, like some kind of athlete, a boxer maybe. He had a broken nose.
It was a vivid morning, just a little after eight. The sun spread through the valley. The sky was flawless, dense blue. The chill in the air rubbed on O’Malley’s skin; he could feel the mucus in his nose freezing.
“I’m sorry,” the dad said. “I thought there was a McDonald’s up this way. I must have taken a wrong turn, and now I’ve got a flat. Just let me get this tire fixed and I’m gone.”
“Sir,” said O’Malley, “if you like, I can call a garage and they can send a tow truck up here.”
“I think I can get it,” said the man. “If I can just find the lug wrench in the toolbox.” He reached into the box, which was old and battered. In the background the kids began to cry.
The young sergeant was by nature suspicious — his profession demanded it — but when the dad brought out a silenced Heckler&Koch P9 in 9mm, his first impulse was not to reach for the Smith&Wesson.38 he carried on his belt, or to cry out. Rather, he was stunned at the incongruity of it, the sheer, appalling absurdity of such a weapon, here and now, in the man’s hand. But he had no time to react.
The major dropped to one knee, and, aiming from a two-handed isosceles position, shot O’Malley twice through the center chest from a range of seven feet, firing 115-grain Silvertips, which blossomed like spring tulips as they tumbled crazily through the young man’s chest, knocking him to the earth inside a second.
The major stepped back from the van and its rear double doors sprang open. Inside, two men fired a long burst from a bipod-mounted M-60 into the guardhouse, which shivered, its glass splintering with the impact of the 7.62-mm rounds. Inside, the two air policemen died almost instantly amid a spray of glass chips and wood bits.
The major jumped onto the running board of the van, whacked it with his gun butt, and the driver gunned it. It slithered, kicking up the dust, and whipped through a ninety-degree turn and smashed through the gate. Before him, the major could see three nondescript corrugated tin buildings inside the complex, one of which boasted a red and white radio tower of perhaps fifty feet.
According to plan, they had thirty seconds from the first shot until they took out the above-ground communications center.
Romano called back Security Alpha. There was no answer.
“I wonder what that guy is doing?” he said.
“Those cops. You never know.”
“Donny, take your key off your neck.”
“Huh?”
“Do what I say, Donny.” He dialed Communications. There was no answer. He went to the teletype. No messages had come through on their watch.
“Shit,” he said. “I wonder if—”
“Hey, Rick, ease off, man. So the guys haven’t answered the phone. What does that mean, nuclear war? You know as well as I do nobody’s getting down here unless we say so. We control the elevator.”
The post’s entire defensive response to the attack consisted of an air security man from the Primary Security Alert Team with a Winchester twelve-gauge pump. The man with the shotgun fired one shot from behind the Commo building at the major, who clung to the van as it rushed through the compound, but he hurried, missed him, spattering his burst against the van door. Then the van disappeared in a swirl of dust as it reached and slammed into the communications building.
The air security man rethrew his pump and waited for a target to emerge from the confusion. He had a queer sense, however, of being watched, and turned to peer at the Cyclone fence to the left of the gate. He had an impression of someone scurrying away, but as he brought his weapon to bear — it would have been a long shot, anyway, for a shotgun — five charges went off under the fence. It lifted and twisted in the concussions. The explosive was plastique, French-manufactured, detonated by a U.S. Army M-1 Delay Firing Device with a fifteen-second delay.
The young man was blown backward and down by the blasts. When he regained his senses, he could see troopers in snow smocks with automatic weapons moving very fast up the hill and through the gaps in the fence. He was amazed at how many there were, and with what precision they moved. He wondered where the hell they’d come from, how they’d gotten so fucking close. He understood, too, that he was probably doomed, that the post was overwhelmed, that unless the guys in Commo got an emergency message out to SAC that it was all over. His own inclination was to run, but he realized he couldn’t. A piece of shrapnel from the fence burst had torn into his knee. Then he realized he’d been hit in the chest too. There was blood all over the snow, flooding down around his combat boot. The shotgun slipped from his grip. He wished he’d killed one of the bastards.
There were three strong points in the compound. The first was the barracks, where the installation’s complement of air policemen was headquartered. One unit of the assault team broke off from the general rush and dashed toward it. Fifty yards out, the four men dropped prone as they deployed their chief weapon, a Heckler&Koch HK-21. The gunner pumped a three-hundred-round tracer belt into the building. The tracers flicked out and kicked through the corrugated tin walls. As the gunner was changing belts and his loader and one other man were supplying suppressing fire, the fourth member of the team dashed forward with a three-pound plastique package with a four-second time-delay mechanism. He primed it and hurled it through the window. The detonation was tremendous, blowing out three of the four walls and collapsing the roof. The barracks team moved through the wreckage of the building, shooting everything whether it moved or not.
The second strong point was the launch-control facility itself, with its elevator to the capsule beneath. Generally staffed by three men, it was this day staffed by only two: They died in the first seconds after the fence burst, when one superbly trained raider kicked the door open and fired a long burst from his Uzi.