Carlson was almost cheerful, or perhaps hysterical. “I won’t ask you to give your word. Word of honor? What good’s the word of a bunch of thieves and killers? No, I’m appealing to something a lot more solid. Good common sense. You know what I say is true. That’s my insurance policy and it’s better than all the solemn vows in Creation.”
“It is if you can do what you say you can do. Otherwise…Well, get to it.”
“Done. We’re powered up so let’s start inputting the codes.”
The electronic arena was alive. Outside, in its protective housing, the generator was humming. Inside, green on lights glimmered on the faces of instrument boards and panels. Electronic machinery clicked, buzzed, droned.
Dr. Hugh Carlson sat at the main computer console like a virtuoso instrumentalist getting set at the keyboard of a concert piano. He selected a coded desk from the metal box and fed it into a slot. The machine’s plastic tongue retracted.
“Takes time to input the correct coded disks,” he said. “Just the purely mechanical act of feeding them in one at a time. Luckily we’ve got the right hardware with the proper specs. Well, luck has nothing to do with it. I selected the machines myself and Scourby followed my orders to the letter.”
He input another disk. “It’s all a matter of proportion. With these codes I could launch an ICBM and hit Moscow or Beijing. Impressive, but we don’t want that. We don’t want to start World War III. No money in Armageddon. What we want is an incident. Something to show we can do what we say we can do, convincing all buyers of its potential worth.
“We want to sell these codes to the highest bidder. It’s possible that that might be Uncle Sam. Not entirely likely, considering the state of the dollar and the national debt, but possible. So we want deniability. In case Uncle wants to pay to hush up the whole mess.
“So — we want an incident. Something that’s too big to ignore but not so big that it triggers a worldwide nuclear holocaust. What we do, we light up a candle someplace far away from here. A nuclear missile silo somewhere up north. I was thinking Montana first but I decided on North Dakota. It’s a wasteland anyway and nobody’s going to miss a few hundred square miles of it if they go boom. Of course they’ll stay hot for the next several hundred years or so.
“What I’m going to do, I’ll detonate the atomic warheads of a Minuteman missile in a silo in North Dakota. I’ll touch it off so it blows in the silo. The blast will create an electromagnetic pulse that will screw up communications and everything else for that part of the country and Canada, too, but that won’t be so bad. The confusion will aid our getaway. Just make sure we go south.
“There’ll be several thousand people dead from the blast, tens of thousands more from the radiation, fallout, and related phenomenon. The whole north Midwestern tier will probably go dark from the EMP. No power, TV, cell phones, computers, nothing. Back to the Stone Age. Washington will claim it’s a terrible accident. To save face. If they can pay, fine. If not, the codes — and my services — go to the highest bidder.
“Once the codes are loaded into the computer, they’ll be uploaded through our satellite transceiver to an orbiting communications satellite. The comsat will download them into the preselected missile silo. The override will negate all their controls, rendering them useless. I’ll be controlling them from here. I’ll arm the warheads and detonate them on the ground in the silo. After that, it’s all over but the getaway and the payday.”
Being a missile man is a study in futility. It takes on much of the aspects of being a night watchman. There’s an inherent contradiction. The silo is loaded with one of the most potent and deadly weapons in the world, an instrument of awesome megadeath potential. The other side of the coin is that nothing ever happens.
For the United States Air Force missile technicians serving out their duty shift, there are things to do. Routine maintenance programs. Drills. Occasional exercises.
Above ground is the flat, steppelike appearance of barren North Dakota flats, a sprawling emptiness of vast grasslands stretching out to all corners of the globe.
Below ground, beneath a hinged sealed camouflaged hatch cover, lies the silo, a concrete-lined, steel-reinforced vertical pipe sunk deep in the ground. It’s well-named, this silo. Like an aboveground grain silo, only inverted. A sheath for an atomic-warheaded dart.
The vehicle, a Minuteman missile topped with an MIRV warhead. Multiple (targeted) independent reentry vehicles. Based on the principle of “bigger bang for a buck.” Containing not one but several atomic warheads, each programmed to strike a different target in the area.
Today, like all the other days, all the other duty shifts, the USAF missile techs — a two-man crew — face another dreary round of exquisite boredom. Atomic war? Not a chance, brother. The superpowers have grown up. They stay away from no-win nuclear showdowns. The real threat today comes from nuclear “suitcase” bombs and dirty bombs made by rogue states and disseminated into the hands of terrorists.
The missile techs on duty in Silo 14 go through the motions by routine turned near robotized.
Suddenly—
Things started happening. Red lights flashed. Buzzers sounded. Somnolent, lazy readouts were suddenly goosed into spitting out masses of digits. Machinery switched on.
After a moment’s disbelieving paralysis of mind and body, the techs started throwing switches, pressing buttons, trying to regain control of the system. To arm an atomic weapon is a two-man operation. Both missile techs must simultaneously insert their keys and use the day’s PAL codes to arm the warheads.
Now, while they have done nothing at all to initiate a launching sequence, a phantom force has reached in, punching past their fail-safes and switched on the system, arming the atomics.
The nuclear warheads are alive and counting down.
Ignition is only minutes away. There is nothing they can do to stop it.
24. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 10 A.M. AND 11 A.M. MOUNTAIN DAYLIGHT TIME
Mission Hill was a fortress. Max Scourby made it so. Torreon and Marta Blanco, its new masters, have reinforced it. The boundary wall was already a foot thick, its ten-foot height hardened with rows of black iron spikes with spear blade points. The main gate, made of motorized wrought-iron grillwork, has been reinforced by the simple expedient of parking a rented delivery truck inside the gates, blocking them lengthwise.
The grounds are patrolled by a small army of Blanco gunmen armed with assault rifles, machine guns, and shotguns. A smaller but equally well-armed cadre guards the inside of the mansion on every floor.
There was a flaw in the hardened defense system, however, a failure to think in dimension. Jack Bauer launched his assault by air. A long, slim, needlelike yellow helicopter with black trim hovered over the roof of the Mission Hill mansion. Pilot Ron Galvez was at the controls. In the cockpit were Jack Bauer and Tony Almeida. They’d armed themselves with weapons from the top of Bluecoat Bluff. The heaviest firepower they could find.
Earlier, Jack Bauer had used the cell phone to contact Ron Galvez at his home base at Black Eagle Airfield. Galvez had been dozing off on a cot in the hangar, where he’d set up station the night before, standing ready to respond to Jack Bauer’s summons.
The helicopter had been serviced and fueled, and stood ready to go.
When Jack’s call came, Galvez rose from the cot, gulped a paper cup of cold coffee that had been standing for hours on a nearby desk, and hustled out to the helicopter. After a preflight check, he’d lofted the copter into the sky, arrowing toward Bluecoat Bluff.