“Excuse me,” Speers said. “I’m looking for Corporal Hammond.”
“Check his bunk,” the Lieutenant said.
“Hasn’t been slept in. Last time I saw him, he was on his way to see General Wainewright. But that was hours ago.”
The officer didn’t look up.
“Mind if I check the exit logs?” Speers pressed.
“Don’t bother. Nobody’s left the facility.”
“Sure about that?”
“Nobody gets out without a signed authorization from General Wainewright. And nobody’s presented one on my watch.”
Speers grabbed the file folder and flipped through them. Among the pile, he found a series of blank authorization forms signed by the General himself. Speers waited until the duty officer was distracted. As he turned to answer a question from a fellow officer, Speers slipped one of the pre-signed forms into his jacket pocket in case he needed it later. Even if he could locate his phone, he’d need to get out of the bunker somehow to get a signal.
Somewhere across the command room, two men were arguing. Speers couldn’t see them, but it sounded intense. “Gotta call my family,” someone was shouting. “Gotta call my family. Gotta call my goddamn family.”
As if tossed by a giant, a metal file cabinet came crashing across the command room. Then an officer in a short-sleeve khaki uniform flew into the air. Speers saw him smash spine-first into a large monitor. He collapsed to the ground like a sack of oranges. Blood pooled around his head.
Speers ran to an aisle and, looking down the row of workstations, saw an enraged, acne-scarred Ulysses soldier whose biceps were so massive that Speers wondered how the man could wipe his own ass. “I got a family, man! Gotta call ‘em! Gotta call ‘em!”
It had been only a matter of time before someone snapped. The crew at Rapture Run was hundreds of feet beneath ground level, in a facility that only a small handful of outsiders knew about. They bore the burden of being the only people on the planet that knew that the POTUS was dead. They alone watched Iranian tanks as they moved unchecked toward Israel.
An MP appeared in the doorway behind the crazed soldier. He leveled his rifle and filled the soldier’s chest with a quick burst of lead. The shots echoed throughout the cavernous former nuclear missile silo, bringing all activity to a stop.
General Farrell burst into the room and walked toward the scene. All eyes were on him. There was absolutely no sound, and when the General stepped in a puddle of urine — it was pooling from the pant leg of a communications officer — everyone stopped breathing. Farrell looked at his shoes once, but did not single out the offender. He calmly proceeded toward the gory scene and said, in a measured voice, “Good enforcement, soldier. Now let’s clean it up.”
Everyone returned to their stations. A sense of normalcy — or at least Rapture Run’s extreme version of it — slowly resumed.
Speers wasn’t cut out for the kinds of things he’d seen in the past forty-eight hours, starting with Lieutenant Flynn’s interrogation in Georgetown, the car bomb in Monroe, and now this. He stumbled back down the long corridor to the enlisted barracks cavern. His senses felt muted. A growing numbness came over him. He wondered if this was what post-traumatic stress disorder felt like.
Secluded as the barracks were, Speers was astounded that neither the shots nor the shouting had awakened anyone there. Even so, he walked among the soldiers as if they were a den of sleeping rattlesnakes. He returned to Corporal Hammond’s bunk, knelt before it and slid his hands beneath the bed frame. There he found the briefcase full of confiscated cell phones. Speers opened it and located his phone among all the others. He realized he had no charger with him, so he quickly found two other phones of the same model and pulled the batteries from each.
As Speers closed the case, he heard footsteps behind him. He closed his eyes. He remained on his knees. His time was up.
“Won’t get a signal,” a whispered voice said. “Not down here.”
He turned and saw Major Dobbs, the CENTAF air traffic czar who had tipped him off about the President’s demise. But Dobbs didn’t look so friendly now. Although Speers had never been in a fight in his life, he often sized up other men by asking himself if he could take them down. Dobbs was a burly man who looked like he could manhandle just about anyone.
“Please, Major,” Speers whined softly. “This is more than just a phone. I have classified documents in here. For God’s sake, I work for the President.”
Dobbs leaned closer. “Worked,” he said. “You worked for the POTUS. He’s gone. He can’t help you now.” Dobbs exhaled a stinky breeze into Speers’ face. Speers tried not to throw up. “I’m the next officer on watch,” Dobbs said before turning away. “Come see me at oh-five-thirty.”
*
General Farrell stood watching as the MP pulled the slain family man’s body into a black body bag. Wainewright came up behind him, whistling so as not to spook either. He had seen the entire incident via camera from his quarters. He wasn’t concerned. It was to be expected.
“Report.” Wainewright’s request didn’t have anything to do with the dead man. He didn’t give a shit about the dead man. Wainewright was good about keeping his mind on his priorities. Farrell understood this.
“Abrams’ crew is rolling into Baltimore now,” Farrell replied as they walked through the command room. “They should have it pretty much done within an hour.”
“Good. And the withdrawals?”
They went into the adjoining conference room and shut the door behind them.
“Thirty C-130 transports landed in Kuwait City this morning,” Farrell said. “Ten more have already left Baghdad. Two strike units left Lebanon this morning. The secret bases in Israel bugged out this morning. The heavy armor-”
“There’s no time to pull out the armor. Destroy it and leave it in the sand. Syria opened up the border to Iranian armor divisions. There’s no turning back.”
Farrell lit a cigarette. “I’d feel better if we had some progress on the Allied Jihad situation.”
Wainewright pulled the cigarette from Farrell’s mouth and stamped it out. “Fact: elite Revolutionary Guard units are moving into Afpak right now. The Iranian Ambassador knows that if they don’t produce results within a week, the deal is off. We’ll have no choice but to send the Carrier Strike Group in to cut off the campaign in Israel.”
“How do we know the Iranians won’t seize the opportunity to invade Pakistan altogether?”
“We should be so lucky. Their economy can’t handle fighting a two-front war. As long as they keep the Allied Jihad busy for awhile, and give us the desalination technology, I’ll keep our end of the bargain.”
“You sure about that?”
“Trust me. We’re going to need the water.”
*
Speers’ stomach was a queasy ball of nerves as he entered the command room at oh-five-thirty on the dot, just as Major Dobbs had suggested. He clinched his last lollipop between his teeth. He had been rationing them.
Dobbs sat on the throne-like chair in the command room. Beside him, his deputy — a young Lieutenant who looked like he had been shaving for a year at most — talked through a list of bunker procedures. When Speers came into view, Dobbs turned to the Lieutenant and interrupted his monologue: “Take my shift, Lieutenant. Wainewright’s sending us offsite.”
The young Lieutenant looked puzzled. “Right now, sir? I wasn’t aware of a change in schedule.”
“We’re at DEFCON two,” Dobbs reminded him. “Information’s on a need-to-know basis. Get used to it.”
Dobbs led Speers toward the entrance. “Just go along with whatever I say,” Dobbs whispered. “You’ll live longer.”