"We have to go up," Parker said. "We're cut off in here. We can try our emergency FM radios on the surface. Maybe get Barksdale Emergency Operations Center."
Lewis paused in fastening his vest. "My family lived on post!"
"It'll be all right," Parker said. "If we got a launch alert, they must have gotten some warning and they probably made it to the shelters."
"Shelters? You think those shelters on post can protect someone from a nuke?"
Parker tapped him on the arm. "Come on. Let's go and find out."
Lewis turned and flipped a switch. "I'm turning off the surface guns," he said. "We don't want to get shot by our own weapons," he added.
"I want Mom," Tommy cried out.
"We'll get her," Thorpe said. "But it will take a little while."
Thorpe had bandaged Maysun as best he could, using the first-aid kit from the chopper. He had been thinking about the mushroom cloud. If Barksdale was gone and there had been no warning, then that meant that Lisa had been searching for Tommy at the airfield when the nuke went off. He felt a crack widening in his chest and tried hard to focus on the task at hand. That there had been no answer to his radio call to the tower didn't bode well. Barksdale was easily within range of the survival radio.
"I'm going to check out whoever fired that shot," Thorpe said. "I'll get some help."
Maysun was lying on his back, staring straight up. "I don't think it's going to matter much."
Thorpe knelt at his side. "Hey, you're alive. Hang on to that. I don't know what's going on, but I'm going to find out. You keep trying your survival radio."
Maysun blinked. "I think I can see a little bit."
"That's good," Thorpe said. "I need you to look after my son while I get help."
Maysun turned his head toward the chopper and blinked hard several times. "Oh God." He broke down crying, tears flowing down his cheeks.
Thorpe stood, anxious to get going, but not liking the thought of leaving Maysun in this condition with Tommy. He glanced over at the body then back at Maysun. "Were you two. .?"
Maysun cut him off. "It doesn't have anything to do with her being a woman. She was the best damn pilot I've ever flown with. She was my friend!"
"I'm sorry."
Maysun shook his head. "Maybe I'll see if I can get the chopper's radio working once I can see better."
"Good idea. I'll be back in a little bit. Monitor your radio on that frequency." He knelt down next to Tommy. "I've got to go look for help. I'll be back as soon as I can. I need you to stay with this man and help him. Can you do that for me?"
Tommy blinked hard.
Thorpe reached into his pocket and pulled out the green beret he had stuffed in there. He pulled the Special Forces crest off the beret and pinned it just above the pocket on his son's shirt. "I need you to be brave, Tommy. I need you to take care of things here."
Tommy reached up and fingered the crest and nodded. "I'll take care of things, Dad."
"I know you will." Thorpe began walking in the direction of the shot.
The third stage stopped firing but did not separate. There was still fuel left, enough for the payload to be further maneuvered, if needed. The Peacekeeper was now in space, at a point above the middle of Kansas. Small thruster rockets fired as the on-board computer checked its position with various satellites to settle the rocket into a geosynchronous orbit.
After a few moments of firing they too fell silent and the Peacekeeper was in place.
Mass confusion raged inside the operations center in the Barksdale Tower as the duty crew regained their stations. Shattered glass covered everything and anything not fastened down had been blown about.
The duty officer and his crew were all dressed in yellow radiation suits and wearing full head masks. He looked out at the flight line and swore. Every aircraft he could see was damaged. Helicopters had been blown up against battered hangers; planes had been flipped like toys.
Emergency crews were racing around the flight line in their own protective suits, putting out fires. Fortunately, the damage seemed confined to the flight line. Looking around, the duty officer could see that some of the hangars were damaged, but the administrative buildings further away, along with the housing areas, seemed structurally undamaged. He had no doubt that windows had been blown out, but thanked God that the blast seemed limited. He could hear the whine of ambulances.
"Give me a reading." The duty officer's voice sounded distant coming out of his mask.
An enlisted woman held a suitcase-size device in her hand. "It's clean," she said.
"What do you mean clean?" the duty officer demanded.
The woman's shoulders rose in a shrug under the heavy material. "Normal reading, sir. No sign of any radiation."
"Try another counter," the duty officer ordered.
"I've tried primary and backup, sir. The air's clean."
The duty officer stared at her for a few moments, then slowly pulled his hood and mask off. "If there's no radiation, what the hell did that to the flight line? And where did the strike warning come from?"
An enlisted man called out from his console. "Sir, I've got Cheyenne Mountain on the horn. They want to know what's going on! They say the warning center has picked up a launch from one of our silos."
The duty officer ran over and looked at his status board. "Our link with the Omega Missile LCC is down. Everything else shows secure." He turned to the communications specialist. "Get me Omega Missile Launch on MILSTAR."
"I'm not getting an answer, sir."
"Status on Omega Missile LCC silos?
"Omega Missile silo is empty, sir! ICBM missile silos are still secure and in place."
The duty officer grabbed the mike. "This is Barksdale EOC. Did you transmit a missile strike warning to us?"
The voice on the other end from Cheyenne Mountain was succinct. "Negative."
"Did you track any missile incoming to our location?"
"Negative.
"Did AFTAC pick up any nuclear detonations at our location?" the duty officer demanded. AFTAC stood for Air Force Technical Applications Center. It operated more than fifty sites around the world in thirty-five countries. Its job was to tie seismic disturbances with information from the Nuclear Detonation Detection System, an imaging system aboard NAVSTAR satellites, to detect a nuclear explosion anywhere on the surface of the planet.
Cheyenne Mountain was on top of it. "AFTAC reports an explosion at your location but not, repeat, not nuclear."
The duty officer grabbed an orange phone. "Get me the War Room in the Pentagon!"
Down on the flight line, firefighters heard the sound of a woman calling for help. They followed the voice to the shattered wall of a hangar. The voice was coming from underneath the wreckage.
"We'll get you out," one of the men called from under his mask.
Beneath the wreckage, Lisa Thorpe could only grit her teeth as the pain from her broken legs kept her from passing out. Despite that, she called to the firemen to search for her son.
"I never thought it would be like this. They're all dead. All of them." Lewis's voice echoed inside the close confines of the elevator.
"We don't know what happened," Parker said, wishing the ride to the surface would go quicker. "Just hang in there."
"My wife never liked me doing this. She used to have nightmares about it. That's why I was going to graduate school, so I could get transferred out. But the money…" Lewis's voice trailed off.
"Just hold it together," Parker said. "We'll be able to check things out in a little bit."
The elevator came to a halt at the top and the vault door ponderously opened. Parker stepped out. Lewis paused. "I think one of us should stay in the LCC," he said.