The War Cloud Read online

  “You sure about that?” Ethel said, clearly unable to help herself. “I’ve served more than a few strangers in recent—”

  The cups and saucers on the counter started shaking again. The whole diner started to shake.

  “Lordy, here we go again,” Ethel said.

  But Sachs knew there wasn’t another Air Force One about to make an emergency landing outside. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a flame trail on the hor

  Koz and Captain Li had already burst outside through the plastic sheet.

  She ran out to join them and stopped cold at the sight of a 60-foot Minuteman III ICBM missile lift off into the sky at 15,000 miles per hour like a space shuttle launch. The ground quaked from the Boeing first-stage rocket’s 200,000 pounds of thrust.

  “Oh, no,” Sachs said. “Marshall.”

  Another Minuteman blasted off.

  And another.

  And still another.

  Sachs counted ten flame trails lifting off from the fields in a ring of fire that turned the evening into day.

  51

  1600 Hours

  Bailey Family Farm

  Launch Control Center

  Marshall’s large, dome-shaped canopy, made from a single layer of triangular cloth gores, blossomed under the clear night. Marshall let the cold wind blow him across the desolate winter fields toward the lonely clapboard farmhouse below.

  He looked over at Banks, Harney and Wilson, all doing fine on the descent. His jellyfish chute — the MC1-1C round parachute favored by U.S. paratroopers — had been packed and ready aboard Looking Glass.

  Special cuts in sections of the gores gave his chute more speed and greater steering capabilities, enabling him to avoid the grain silo on his right and turn into the wind to minimize horizontal speed as he landed.

  He hit and rolled, then quickly detached from his chute. Then, with the others close behind, he pulled out his M9 and headed for the farmhouse.

  The MP on the front porch, a grandpa-type in a parka, looked surprised to see visitors and whipped out an M-16. He was talking to somebody through an earpiece but froze when none other than General Brad Marshall walked up the steps. He relaxed and lowered his gun to salute.

  “General Marshall,” he said with relief when Harney leveled his own M-16 and spat out a round. Blam! Blam! Blam! And grandpa was blow right through the front door.

  • • •

  Sixty feet beneath the farmhouse in the launch control center, red warning flashes lit up the consoles like the Fourth of July. The two launch officers in blue uniforms and yellow ascots sat tight in their aircraft-style seats, trapped by their shoulder belts designed to keep them from being thrown by the shockwaves if they ever launched ICBMs.

  “Shit,” said the first launch officer as elevator cameras showed four armed and unfriendly figures on their way down.

  Both launch officers desperately tried to unhook their belts as the vault door opened and Marshall entered with his crew. Wilson and Harney unloaded two shots, and the launch officers slumped in their chairs. Then Banks followed up by relieving them of their launch keys.

  The second launch officer was still alive, barely, and Marshall glared at Harney. Too many video games for these younger officers. They shot at faces to save bullets, but the effect was dehumanizing the enemy. And these launch officers were anything but. They w American patriots, and he needed at least one of them alive.

  The launch officer groaned in his seat. “General Marshall?”

  “It’s OK, son,” Marshall said. “We’ll get you some help. Don’t worry.”

  The launch officer relaxed in his chair, blood draining out of him. Marshall knew he had only a minute if that with the kid.

  “OK,” Marshall said. “We’ve got ten Minutemen III missiles. Each can be sent to any one of four preset targets. Now where are these warheads targeted?”

  “Don’t know,” said the launch officer. “Didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to dream about the impact area.”

  Marshall was disappointed. “I understand, son,” he said and then popped the kid in the head with his M9 pistol. The launch officer went limp.

  Marshall told the rest, “He was useless anyway. How long will it take you to retarget, Major Tom?”

  Banks looked at her console. “Thirty-six minutes using the Command Data Buffer system.”

  “You have ten,” Marshall told her. “Harney and Wilson, you’ll need to strip some equipment here. I saw an Explorer parked outside. See if old grandpa has the keys in his pockets.”

  As they left, Marshall hovered impatiently as Banks calculated the retargeting information.

  “You’re taking too long, Major Tom.”

  “More than two hundred attack options have been programmed into this computer, sir,” she replied. “We just need to dial up the right war scenario. Those missiles that are supposed to go, go. Those that aren’t, don’t.”

  “You don’t get it. I want them all going.”

  “Oh, the than won’t even take a minute then — if you can live with collateral strikes.”

  “The Chinese can’t, but I can, Major.”

  Marshall pushed the launch officer he had killed off his seat and strapped himself in. Banks did likewise in the other chair and then made the final adjustments.

  “Missiles are retargeted,” she announced.

  Marshall gave the order, “Insert launch keys.”

  Banks inserted her launch key into her console at the same time he did.

  “On my mark,” he told her. “Three…two…one…turn.”

  They turned their keys simultaneously.

  The shaking began, and Marshall tightened his belt with satisfaction. Missiles on screen filled the silo cameras with their exhaust flames.

  Finally, thing were going according to plan.

  52

  1625 Hours

  Bedford Country Club

  Jennifer had decided she had had enough of herself crying over her mother and the end of the world. If this was the end of all things, she didn’t want to go out like a scared rat in a crap shack. She would face the future full-on, it was a mushroom cloud.

  She rose to her feet with the old beach blanket around her shoulders for warmth. The floorboards creaked as she walked to the front door. She paused at the door and took a deep breath. She wrapped herself tighter in the blanket with one hand and flung open the door with the other and shrieked.

  Standing inches from her face was one of the Green Berets, so close they shared each other’s frosty breath. There was alcohol on his. She then saw the open bottle in his hand.

  “We knew you were here and were just waiting for you to come out,” he told her, pushing her back inside and slamming the door shut. “But now that your mom is dead, I thought you could use some comfort.” His lips twisted into an ironic smile. “You see, I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.”

  Jennifer was terrified. “Where’s the other guy?”

  “Ran home to mommy and the kids, seeing as this is the end.” There was a wild look in his eyes. He believed it, and this terrified Jennifer even more. “It’s a terrible thing when discipline in the ranks break down in a crisis. But I’m getting one last hurrah before we pop.”

  She took a swing at his face but he caught her hand and twisted it back until she cried out in pain. Then he pulled her head back by her hair and started dragging her kicking and screaming across the floor.

  “Stop it!” she screamed. “You’re hurting me! Stop!”

  He turned her over and thrust the neck of the bottle into her mouth painfully so that she choked as the fiery liquid poured down her throat. He laughed again, his eyes on fire as she struggled to breathe, feeling like she was drowning.

  53

  1625 Hours

  Ethel’s Truck Stop

  Sachs stared at the ten missiles as they arched into the twilight. Disbelief dissolved into despair as she recognized the world as she knew was ending. A black hole seemed to open up under
her feet and suck the soul out of her, leaving her void of hopes of a tomorrow.

  “God, no,” she breathed.

  Koz, standing next to her, sounded flat and distant. “Minutemen out of the Nekoma missile field. It was supposed to be inactive.”

  Sachs simply could not believe what she was seeing. “They’re going to China, aren’t they?”

  “Can’t tell you until they explode,” Koz said, looking grief-stricken. “But at fifteen thousand miles per hour, they can reach their targets in less than 30 minutes.”

  She said, “We have to destroy them.”

  The look on Koz’s face didn’t inspire hope. “Only way to abort is from the launch control center. We could try our sea-based AEGIS ABM systems with the Seventh Fleet, but they can’t take out all 10 Minutemen. Our best bet would have been the Tier 1 Defender complex in Alaska.”

  Sachs grew icy calm. “What about this abandoned Safeguard complex nearby that you talked about? What did that use to be for?”

  “It was the original Defender system,” Koz said. “Safeguard was designed to deMinutemen silos around here from a Soviet or Chinese counterforce attack during the 1960s.”

  “By ‘counterforce’ you mean nukes like the ones the Chinese are about to launch in answer to the Minutemen that Marshall just fired?”

  “That’s right,” Koz said. “The Safeguard missiles would hit the incoming Soviet or Chinese nukes, giving us the all clear to launch a second wave of missiles.”

  “Punishing them even harder.”

  “A nice option for us to have now, huh?” Koz said. “But it was operational for only about four months before they shut it down. Been abandoned for decades.”

  Sachs said, “You mean like those Minuteman silos we just saw shoot off?”

  Koz stared at her like she was either crazy or brilliant or crazy brilliant. “You think he rebuilt the Defender system on top of Safeguard?”

  Sachs nodded. “Marshall isn’t a lunatic. He wouldn’t let those missiles off unless he had some degree of confidence he could shoot down those DF-5s the Chinese launch back at us.”

  Koz’s face fell. “It’s at least 40 minutes to Nekoma. We’ll never make it in time on these roads.”

  “Stop telling me what we can’t do!” Sachs lost it there, punching him squarely in the chest with her fist. “You dumb bastards!” she screamed, pummeling him again and again. “You’ve got to blow up the world with your pissing contests.”

  Koz took the blows stoically, waiting for her to stop.

  Sachs calmed down, the missile roar faded, and there was only a ghostly cold wind until she heard the unmistakable snap of gum and turned to see Ethel standing behind them.

  Ethel said, “I know how you can get there in 20 minutes.”

  Sachs stared at her, daring her. “Tell me.”

  “Same way me and Rusty got here to the diner.”

  54

  1635 Hours

  Pembina Trail

  The icy Pembina trail wound past several forgotten small towns and rivers toward Nekoma’s infamous Safeguard complex. The snow-covered prairies glittered under the sparkling night skies. Sachs had her hands wrapped around Koz’s waist as he leaned forward and kicked up the speed of Ethel’s four-stroke Yamaha snowmobile. She looked back at Captain Li, further behind on the trial, trying to keep up in Rusty the waitress’s two-stroke Thundercat.

  “This sucker can go 110 mph and stay there all day long,” Ethel had promised them back at the truck stop, and Koz was determined to max the 145 horsepower to reach the Safeguard complex inside of 20 minutes.

  Sachs felt herself slipping and tightened her grip on Koz, but her hands were too numb to feel. Her face was a frozen mask in the wind. But she could feel her heart pounding out of her chest. The stillness before the coming nuclear storm was ghostly, and she and Koz were just vapors in the night.

  “The land that time forgot,” Koz told her, and she was surprised how clearly she could hear him. “That’s one of the reasons the Safeguard complex closed down. Not much around to support it in terms of people or any kind of economy this far out from the Grand Forks base, which itself is nowhere to the rest of the world.”

  In another world, she thought, they could make a life together. But not this one.

  They went over a snowdrift and there was the bleak Safeguard complex, a 435-acre missile field dominated by amysterious pyramid structure 80 feet tall and a dozen Stonehenge-like monoliths. It looked positively evil, like the technological ruins of some Cold War Giza plateau.

  She said, “What are those spooky towers?”

  “Intake and exhaust stacks for the missile site’s power plant,” Koz said.

  “And that giant pyramid thing with the weird circles on each side?”

  “The radar building,” Koz said. “The control center for the whole Safeguard system. It housed the computers and radar that could track incoming ICBM warheads and hit back with 30 long-range Spartans.”

  She said, “But it looks so sinister.”

  “It was the era,” he said. “But, yeah, it’s got a 1960’s Dr. Strangelove vibe.”

  The drove right through the open gate in the chainlink fence, where two slain U.S. Army guards lay in the stained snow, beneath a sign that said: “Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex.”

  “Vibe?” Sachs repeated. “The era is now, Koz, and Marshall is Dr. Strangelove.”

  “Then he’s probably inside the pyramid,” Koz said and followed the SUV tracks in the snow to the tunnel entrance to the pyramid, where they climbed off the snowmobile and Koz pulled out his M9.

  An SUV sat just outside the tunnel.

  “It’s from the launch control center Marshall hit,” he said, inspecting the vehicle as Captain Li pulled up on her Thundercat.

  Li had the schematics ready on her phone’s display. “The radio room is inside the turret at the top of the pyramid. Marshall and his radio gal Banks are most likely up there. The other two officers missing from Looking Glass, Harney and Wilson, are his muscle. We’ll probably encounter them before we ever get near Marshall. By the way, the first two levels inside are probably flooded from a few years back when contaminated PCB chemicals were cleaned out. So we’ll have to wade through.”

  Sachs hid her alarm at this matter-of-fact description of the hell she was about to enter. Swimming through toxic waste wasn’t exactly at the top of her life bucket list. But in this moment, such concerns weren’t even worth bringing up.

  “Let’s go,” she said when Koz blocked her.

  “You’re going to need this,” he said, and handed her a loaded M9 pistol, just like his own and Captain Li’s. “The safety is off. So know that when you point and shoot, a bullet is going to go flying out. Squeeze slowly, be ready for some kickback.”

  Sachs nodded as she felt the gun. It looked like one of Jennifer’s toys, but there was enough weight to it to betray its authenticity.

  They started through the tunnel into the subterranean levels of the pyramid. At first it was just ice on the ground they had to watch out for. Then the hardness loosened to liquid the furt they got inside, rising from ankle-deep to knee-deep to waist-deep.

  Sachs could barely make out oil storage tanks and industrial waste sumps in the dark of the basement level. And she had to take it on faith from the dim glow of Captain Li’s screen that they were passing the oil pumping room and transmitter cooling area of the pyramid.

  Sachs said nothing and slogged through the foul-smelling chemical swamp until she was almost neck-deep. Never in her worst nightmares had she ever pictured herself in a place like this. They made it to a narrow concrete stairway and, dripping industrial ooze behind them, climbed one crumbling step at a time.

  Sachs slipped and almost fell off. Were it not for Koz’s hand, she would have surely plunked into the inky cesspool below, never to come up again.

  “That was close,” he whispered.

  “You’re telling me,” she breathed as they finally reached the second level
of the pyramid — the empty and thankfully dry shell of the abandoned command and control areas.

  No Marshall.

  Koz pointed up into the turret above.

  Oh, God, she thought, not another level. Each one seemed more sinister than the last.

  The third level occupied the lower portion of the turret, and it, too, was an empty tomb. This seemed to bother Koz and Li.

  “See,” Koz pointed out to Li. “The Duplexer area is gutted of its microwave devices associated with the radar receivers. Marshall would have had to have replaced them to make this active again.”

  All that remained was the fourth floor in the upper portion of the pyramid’s turret. But because all 16 sets of stairways and elevators were removed when the building was salvaged, there was no way to reach it.

  They skirted along the concrete wall until they reached a new steel ladder running up the wall to the fourth level. Koz pointed up to the dim square of light way up at the top, where a shadow flickered past the light.

  Mashall was up there.

  Koz started climbing the ladder with one hand while his other held up the M9. Sachs started right after him, but Li held her back until he was almost out of sight above her. Then she gave her the go ahead, and Sachs put her boot on the ladder and pulled herself up.

  As she did, one of Marshall’s men emerged from the shadows like a phantom, moving quickly toward the base of the ladder. She heard a cry and looked down in time to see Captain Li fall away, shot in the back, dead.

  Glowing eyes — night vision goggles — looked up at her from below and a red target dot began to move up her body. She struggled to find the gun on her hip, but couldn’t get it out of the holster. A shot rang out and the green eyes exploded in front of her and the phantom sank back into the dark.

  She looked up at Koz, hanging on with one hand, the M9 in his other hand. “Look out!” he shouted as he aimed his gun at her.

  Sachs flung herself to the side of the ladder, hanging on for her life while Koz pumped several bullets straight down the ladder at a second phantom. Sachs heard a groan and saw a fleeting shadow before she heard a loud kerplunk three level below.