Chilgers climbed into the limousine’s back seat and let his chauffeur close the door. Teke stepped back off the steel section of the floor on which the car rested and watched the platform begin its rise toward ground level.
Chapter Thirty-six
Chilgers’ watch ticked past ten P.M. as his limousine returned to the front gate of the COBRA complex. This was to be the greatest day in his professional career, yet he showed no signs of excitement or anxiety. All told, he had never felt calmer or more in control. He leaned back, with a sigh he smothered and a smile he didn’t, reviewing the elements of his strategy which had made Vortex possible from the beginning.
Government minds were too fickle to rely on for the completion of Project Placebo; he’d known that all along. The key was completing delivery of the thirty-six MX missiles with the Vortex generators installed. While one half of the delivery team was fitting the missiles into the silos, the other half was putting into place a series of devices that, together, would jam all computer signals coming into Bunker 17 from Washington and Colorado. The signals into the SAFE interceptor were replaced by those emanating from a COBRA transmitting station here on the base. Coming up with the correct binary code to trigger Red Flag seemed a mathematical impossibility until COBRA’s responsibility for implementing the SAFE system to begin with was considered. Chilgers had had the system designed with a built-in backdoor which would allow him to enter and gain control, knowing someday that might be necessary. It had been a tall order, taking nearly three years to perfect. But Vortex had taken over twenty. The key was patience.
The end result was to place Chilgers in total command of Bunker 17. When Washington made contact to confirm status, they spoke with COBRA personnel on a signal beamed first to Montana, and they had no reason to believe it was anything but legitimate. The officers at the Bunker, meanwhile, had no call to suspect that the continuance of their Yellow Flag status was a product of anything other than a world-crisis situation or elaborate drill. Either way, they would obey their orders without question because that was what they were trained to do. And when Chilgers bumped the status up from Yellow to Red Flag, the buttons would be pressed and the missiles hurled irrevocably at their targets inside Russia.
NORAD headquarters and monitoring boards all over the nation would be aware of the launch. Before any abort or destruct systems could be triggered, however, Vortex would become operational and the missiles wouldn’t be there anymore. A hundred-billion-dollar fail-safe system would be rendered useless. Confusion would result. Men would grope and struggle for answers. Their search would end after twenty-one minutes when the 360 individual warheads detonated over their Soviet targets, catching the Russians utterly by surprise and effectively wiping out both their attack and retaliatory capabilities.
Chilgers allowed his smile to broaden as his limousine wound down the COBRA drive and into the private bay that would lower five stories underground to the complex’s most secure level. Bunker 17 was his. There had been a number of confirmation requests from the base commander over the past twenty-four hours, and since voice contact was technologically impossible, he had no choice but to abide by the computer signals he received in return because they were precisely what they should have been. Bunker 17 was powerless. Washington was powerless. The national-defense war room at NORAD in Colorado was powerless.
The power was all his.
But Vortex was just the beginning, Chilgers thought. A great axiom of weapons research was that a new weapon was obsolete the first time it was used. No matter. Work would be beginning momentarily on the brain of Davey Phelps, and a newer and greater weapon would soon belong to him.
The elevator-car bay came to rest on underground level five. Chilgers checked his watch again. The operation would be underway within a half hour surely. He would contact Teke once inside the complex and find out if there were any new developments. He would watch the operation, a portion anyway, and then retire to his office where the activation button of Red Flag at Bunker 17 had been rigged. He had insisted it be set up that way so that his ultimate moment of control could be enjoyed in total solitude. His vision had been solitary and so, too, would be his success.
His chauffeur pulled open the door and Chilgers climbed out wordlessly. When he hit the blue button on the side wall, the front section slid up, not unlike the simple opening of a garage door. Funny thing about technology, Chilgers reckoned, it was often adapted but seldom changed.
With a taut smile on his lips, the colonel made his way down the red-lined COBRA corridor, hearing the door to his private bay seal closed behind him.
When Bane heard the large door close from his cramped position in the trunk, he knew Chilgers had entered the COBRA complex. Then an extra opening and closing of the driver’s door of the limousine told him the large, muscular chauffeur was staying put, making him Bane’s last obstacle to overcome before entering the top secret underground level.
He went to work on the trunk latch.
Bane’s original plan had been to head off one of the arriving limousines before it reached COBRA and somehow change places with the man in the back seat with the King taking the wheel. Then when a different model limousine left COBRA with a man he recognized from Janie’s picture as Colonel Chilgers in the back, he knew a different strategy was called for.
He followed Chilgers’ car all the way into downtown San Diego, to a Hilton Hotel where some sort of civic function was being held. At that point he toyed briefly with the notion of incapacitating the chauffeur and taking his place behind the wheel. From there, he could kill Chilgers at will but that wasn’t the answer. After all, he had no way of knowing if the colonel was the only one able to trigger the final stage of Vortex. Perhaps there were numerous fallback measures in place. If so, by killing Chilgers Bane would, first, lose his ticket into COBRA and, second, strip himself of a known single quarry.
So when the chauffeur went across the street and into a drug store, Bane chose that moment to work the trunk open, climb in, and wait. The waiting was over now. It was time to enter the complex.
The latch came free. He had only to raise the trunk lid to exit the limousine.
Bane checked his watch: 10:10. If the King was able to gain access to COBRA, and Bane had no doubt he would, his explosive charges would begin at midnight sharp. Bane would have to time everything with that in mind.
His thoughts turned to Davey. Getting himself out of the complex when all hell broke loose would ordinarily be something he’d consider only when his mission was completed. Escape was tangent to success and until such success had been achieved, considering it was more a diversion than anything else. Not this time, though. With Davey to think of, escape had to be regarded as a primary objective and not taken for granted.
Bane started to raise the trunk lid slowly, not worried about sight so much as sound. If the chauffeur picked up a squeak or a metallic tang, his eyes would be alerted and he would catch Bane at a most vulnerable time. As it was, Bane could hear the shuffling of thin pages, evidence the chauffeur was reading the newspaper he had bought at the drug store, its contents hopefully distracting enough to shield Bane’s exit.
Bane continued to push, even more slowly at the end when the danger of vibrations and sounds was greatest. Then came the most difficult part of alclass="underline" lifting his 200-pound frame from the trunk without causing the car to sway and lean. Bane angled his body to the side and eased his right leg out first as a balance point. It was badly cramped, and as he stretched it down pain exploded through every tendon. He swallowed the agony with a grimace and finally found relief when his foot reached the floor. He shifted his weight a pound at a time, feeling the back of the car rise ever so slightly as more of his bulk left the trunk.