The Book of Truths (4 page)

“That’s because pretty much our entire nuclear arsenal is old,” Eagle said. “Old and falling apart.”

“That’s the reason,” Moms said, “they’re going to sign the SAD treaty at the United Nations soon.” She was referring to the Strategic Arms Disarmament Treaty, in which all nuclear powers were pledging to work to zero weapons in ten years. At least those countries that acknowledged actually having nuclear weapons. It was what Reagan and Gorbachev had come within one word of achieving in Iceland in 1986.

“And pigs will fly,” Nada muttered.

“They do if you toss them out of a plane,” Mac observed. “It’s just the landing that ain’t pretty.”

“I’ll be glad when they get rid of all the obsolete material,” Doc said. “Both hardware and software,” he added.

“I’ll be glad when we don’t get called out on these anymore,” Nada said.

“I’ll be glad to get some dinner,” Eagle muttered from the cockpit.

“Roland?” Mac asked, ignoring all of them.

“Something broke,” Roland said simply. “And we’re going to fix it.”

“
B-R-O-K-E
,” Mac wrote on his arm. “I think Roland, once more, in his finite yet elemental genius, will win theoretically.”

“Did you just insult me?” Roland asked, a scowl crossing his ugly mug.

“It’s not just the aging arsenal,” Moms said, stepping into the banter because Roland and Mac sometimes went a bit too far turning banter into something darker. “Remember what’s in your nuke briefing book? The ’95 Black Brant scare?”

“Norwegian clusterfuck,” Nada corrected. “Fucking scientists launched a weather satellite and forgot to tell the fucking Russkies. It went right into the flight corridor a missile from a silo in North Dakota would be on to hit Moscow. Yeltsin had his nuclear football open and was ready to toss the damn thing by pushing all the right buttons.”

“Only time a world leader has ever activated its nuclear suitcase,” Eagle threw in, because Eagle always threw in knowledge… and history… and movies. “Never even happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

“We were lucky Yeltsin was probably drunk,” Mac said. “That’s one thing you can at least count on with the Russians. Remember in Albania with the biological—”

“Eagle,” Moms cut in, “inform the personnel on the ground we’re coming in and they can disperse.”

Mac snorted. “Run for the fucking hills more like it. They only took an outer perimeter, anyway.”

“One minute,” Eagle announced.

“Thirteen on the countdown,” Doc added, still typing away.

“Going to jump soon, Doc,” Moms said. “Secure the computer. Kirk, when we touch down, I want you working with Doc to figure out that second code.”

Roland moved to the very edge and looked down. The sun was setting in the west, casting long shadows across the high
plains. Snowdrifts were piled here and there, but at least they weren’t at the height of winter, with Christmas not far away.

“Go!” Eagle announced as the green light flickered on above Roland in the tail section of the plane. The verbal prompt wasn’t necessary as, like Pavlov’s dogs, Roland was gone at the green.

Roland let gravity take charge. He spread his arms and legs to get stable. Then he pulled his arms to his sides, tucked his head into his chest, and missiled down toward the target.

“Clarence?” Peggy Sue knew exactly how to slide her husband’s name under his rib cage by putting the emphasis on the second syllable.

Her mother had taught her well.

But not well enough since she was living inside a practically unheated, no-flowing-water concrete bunker in the middle of Nebraska.

Clarence dropped the last case of water, frozen solid from sitting in the bed of his pickup during the two-hour drive back. “What?” he demanded in that tone men use to indicate to their wives, significant others, and even one-night stands that they don’t want to hear the real question following the question mark behind their name.

“I ain’t never seen this light blinking before.”

Clarence checked his irritation. “What light?”

“This here.” Peggy Sue pointed to an open metal cabinet next to the pipe she’d been using as a clothesline. “I just pulled that cupboard open to see if—”

“It ain’t a cupboard,” Clarence said. “I told you not to touch nothing.”

“What is it then?” Peggy Sue had picked up the uncertainty in his voice and twisted the dagger a little. “You don’t know what it is, do you?”

It was a flashing orange light. Anyone could see that.

On a piece of crumbling masking tape underneath it, someone had scrawled
PINNACLE
in black marker. The container had a metal door, which Peggy Sue had opened, and was four feet high by two wide. There were a lot of lights, but only one was active. An old keyboard rested at the base of the cabinet connected to the panel by a single cord. Another piece of masking tape, which had half-peeled over the years, was above it. The same hand had simply written,
ENTER CODE—GOOD LUCK OR GOOD-BYE
!
If they’d used emoticons back in the day, there probably would have been a :) there. Below it in pencil, someone had added:
Smoke ’em if you got ’em.

“Oh, crap,” Clarence muttered. “You sure done it now, Peggy Sue.” He slammed shut the door as if doing so solved the problem.

“You don’t even know what I done.”

“Get ready!” Moms called out on the team net as she staggered to the edge of the ramp, loaded down with weapons and gear. She was tall, though not as tall as Roland, spotting him a little over four inches. She had wide shoulders above surprisingly narrow hips, giving her a body a beach volleyball player would envy. Her short brown hair had streaks of premature gray, more coming with each op, and it had never occurred to her to get it colored. “Eagle. Stay at altitude, just in case.”

The rest of the team was startled at that last sentence.

“That’s not Protocol,” Eagle said, his voice carefully neutral to mask his concern. “I will descend to be on station overwatch at five hundred AGL to give you cover and provide exfiltration as needed.”

“Don’t hit us on the way down,” Mac added, because Mac always had to add something, but also to cover Moms’s gaffe.

“Follow me,” Moms said, shaking it off and stepping from the ramp. Without hesitation, the others followed.

The four got stable, then pulled, getting full canopies. The quick pull was because they were conducting a high altitude–high opening drop, designed to give Roland some time with feet on the ground before they touched down. It was Protocol, the way the Nightstalkers normally ventured into an unknown and abnormal situation. One team member on the ground first for the quick recon, and the rest following right behind. Protocol was what the team lived and breathed, what kept them alive, but lately, it had started to fray at the edges.

“Time hack on the countdown?” Moms asked Eagle.

“Ten minutes, thirty seconds,” Eagle responded.

Moms was focused on the mission ahead, listening to some last-second updates from Ms. Jones back at the Ranch; Mac was mentally running through nuclear warhead Protocol, cut the blue or red wire sort of thing; Kirk was monitoring Moms’s radio traffic and scanning local freqs to see if word of a problem had gotten out; Doc was focused on trying to fly his parachute and dreading the inevitable impact with the ground.

It occurred to Nada as he twitched his toggles to get his position above the rest of the team that they might see a mushroom cloud race up toward them as they descended. Such thoughts filled Nada’s dark mind when he was on an op.

It was why he was still alive and the longest-serving member on the Nightstalkers.

Roland could see the compound—a gray concrete blockhouse surrounded by a high fence with razor wire on the top. The gate to the compound was wide open.

He could also see the flashing lights of emergency vehicles from various government agencies racing
away
after having secured a far perimeter on Ms. Jones’s alert. The
spear
was
bent
, according to the official government code, but if it went to
broken arrow
or
nucflash
, they’d better be damn far away to survive.

For a moment, Roland pondered spears and arrows as weapons, because Roland always pondered weapons when he wasn’t actually using them. He decided he’d prefer the former, because while the arrow had the advantage of range, the spear gave a definite advantage close in.

These thoughts, however, did not stop Roland’s mind from processing the ground racing toward him. He’d done enough jumps to have a fairly good idea of altitude. Five thousand, five hundred feet give a hundred, he experience-estimated. He took a quick glance at the nav board on top of his ruck. Five thousand, six hundred. Off slightly, not important at this height, but fatal closer to Mother Earth.

Roland pulled his rip cord and the parachute blossomed above him. The opening shock pulled him upright and he did a quick check for full canopy and grabbed the toggle on each riser, a slightly more difficult task given the hazmat gloves encasing his fingers.

He hated hazmat suits, not for the same reason as the others—because it meant an NBC op: nuclear, biological, chemical—but because it restricted his movement and meant he had to leave his body armor in the team box lashed down in the Snake’s cargo bay. Roland felt naked without body armor.

He turned his attention back to the compound. He spotted a cluster of concrete-covered silos to the north. Another to the west. A few sprinkled to the east and south. “Moms, do we know which silo holds the nuke?”

“The satellite narrowed it down to area, but it could be any of four silos to the west of the facility.”

“I’m getting a schematic of the compound,” Eagle cut in. “All the silos were sealed and buried. You can’t get in from the surface. You’re going to have to use the access tunnel from the LCC to get to the right one.”

“Find out which is the right one ASAP,” Nada said. “Clock’s ticking.”

Moms and the rest of the team were passing through ten thousand feet, circling beneath their canopies. Doc was just above her, with Mac close by to make sure the team’s scientific expert didn’t do something stupid like “cut away” his main. Doc never liked jumping, but his desire to be on the Nightstalkers outweighed his fear of parachuting out of a perfectly good airplane.