Bob smiled at him and then without another word pushed forward. John noticed that the two snipers had held back a bit and were obviously working hard to tramp down the snow to form a path, as was Sergeant Major Bentley, who came along, invited or not—he had to be by his general’s side. None spoke to the general or dared to offer a hand, but it was obvious they were keeping a sharp eye on him as they climbed the last few hundred yards up the steep slope.
John, walking by his side, found even he was breathing hard, a memory flooding back of when he was a boy and had actually run up this hill in his eagerness to reach the crest.
And indeed there was the crest just ahead, crowned by an iconic statue.
Bob was breathing so hard it started to worry John as they came nearly to the crest and turned off on to a walking path that wove its way through the heavy boulders.
Lee was already up atop one of the boulders, shading his eyes against the wind, looking west. “Down there, straight down there, one of my great-great-grandfathers came in with Hood’s division.” Then he swung his arm to the northwest. “Another one of my great-great-granddads was in the thick of it up there by the Seminary on the first day.”
Lee’s voice thickened. “My God, on the third day, he went in with Pettigrew and lost his arm. Oh my God.” He turned away and tears flowed. “Why did you bring us here?” Lee asked of Bob, who smiled.
John was brimming with the same question, having recognized where they were within seconds of touching down. They had landed behind Little Round Top on the battlefield of Gettysburg.
Bob motioned for all to gather round, unable to speak for a moment, still breathing hard, coughing and spitting. “It sucks to get old, gentlemen. My first time here, I was twelve and ran my parents into the ground.”
John was smiling and nodding as his mentor spoke.
“Colonel Matherson and I must have hiked—or should I admit driven it—a dozen or more times together for staff rides while we were at the War College up in Carlisle, which is only thirty or so miles off that way.” He pointed to the north.
“I’m not getting it, sir,” Kevin Malady said. “I’ve always wanted to visit this place, but why now?”
Bob turned and pointed out toward the west. “Site R is over there,” he announced. “That is why we are here, gentlemen.”
“Site R?” Lee asked, but it all came to John in a stunning rush of realization.
When Linda had first mentioned it, that they were monitoring some personal traffic back and forth from a Site R, it had not registered with John since he had assumed it was some government site out west. It wasn’t until he saw the lines drawn on Bob’s map that it finally had clicked. It explained why Bob had put a full clampdown on everyone in his command as to their destination and why he had made some obvious choices to leave certain personnel behind, while letting it appear he was personally delivering John to Bluemont and asking some of John’s team to come along as well. To throw off anyone within his own command who might squeal to Bluemont after he lifted off, the game of luring in some of John’s top people to be handed over as well hopefully worked.
Bluemont was far behind them now, and Gettysburg sixty miles farther on—as Bob adroitly put it, a few days’ march away for Robert E. Lee. Site R was not much more than six miles away from where they now stood and clearly visible from Gettysburg’s Little Round Top.
“Site R was built back in the early 1950s,” Bob began, and John smiled. It was almost like the start of one of his lectures delivered at the War College.
“It was built as the fallback position for the Pentagon and civilian government in case of nuclear war. At the time it was built, the thinking was that the commies”—he paused with an ironic smile—“excuse me, I mean our good friends the Russians, if they launched an attack, it would come in with bombers, and we’d have six to eight hours’ advance warning. So the military decided they needed a bunker, a damn big bunker to house upward of twenty-five thousand personnel. It had to be far enough away from D.C. not to be caught in the blast radius of a twenty-megaton warhead and the resulting fallout, but close enough that it could be reached by ground within two hours, by air within twenty minutes.
“Thus Site R. That’s why a modern four-lane highway was built from D.C. to Frederick, Maryland, back in the 1950s. Convenient as well that, with Eisenhower as president, it was damn near in his backyard with his farm just down there on the other side of Seminary Ridge. Whenever things were looking hairy, Ike could always just go to his farm for a while without triggering a panic and be just a few minutes away from the biggest shelter in the country. Same with Camp David less than five minutes’ air time away from here.”
As he spoke, almost like a tour guide, he pointed to the west, but for the moment the snow squalls obscured the view.
“All the times I was visiting here, I never knew about it,” Lee offered.
“Well, it was kind of a secret that wasn’t a secret. Impossible to hide something like that, not like some of the sites out west. It’s just we never talked about it, even with officers getting trained up at Carlisle just thirty miles from here.
“Anyhow, work crews that had been drilling all the tunnels for the Pennsylvania Turnpike, coal miners from the fields north of here, a couple of thousand of them were brought in and hollowed out an entire mountain. I’ve been in it. You go down half a mile deep, a regular three-lane highway, and come out into subterranean caverns that just seem to go on forever. They put up hundreds of recycled World War II barracks, officers’ quarters, rather nice private trailers for high-rank civilians, mess halls, a giant cistern fed by artesian wells, storage areas, years’ worth of survival food, and a meeting room that looks like it came straight out of that movie Dr. Strangelove. It’s something like a time capsule down there actually. I was part of an emergency evacuation drill back when the Cold War was still on but winding down. Of course we all thought it absurd. It wouldn’t be bombers hitting us anymore. It would be sub-launched ballistic missiles from off the coast, launch to impact on D.C., little more than five minutes.”
He laughed sadly, shaking his head.
“During that surprise drill, just herding us onto the buses took an hour before we were even out of the parking lot. Your typical snafu. Kind of sad and creepy actually how we laughed about it on the drive up here. At least it was an overnight away from the Pentagon.”
“When was it still operational?” Maury asked.
“I think that exercise we were in proved how futile it all was. If the shit hit the fan without warning, we were all toast, so why sweat it? Got mothballed back when everyone was told the Cold War was over. Rumor is it was reactivated and the vice president was parked in there for a while immediately after 9/11. But since then?”
He sighed and shrugged. “I know this. On the Day, there was no mention of it whatsoever to anyone in my wing of the Pentagon.”
He turned to look back to the west and walked over to where the two soldiers who had been lugging heavy backpacks had already shucked off their loads and were pulling them open.
“But in a few minutes, we’ll find out the real truth of it all.”
Bob leaned over, pointed to the west, both of the men nodding, and as John watched, they began to unfold and open up a couple of portable dishes and several other antennas. They then pulled out of their packs a couple of high-grade military laptops and turned them on while the other trooper, squatting down, secured the dishes, aimed them west, and began to slowly adjust them while listening to directions from his companion with the computers hooked into the antenna arrays. Bob walked away and came back to the rest of the group.