The Book of Truths (7 page)

“That’s pretty cynical,” Kirk said.

“That’s Nada,” Mac said.

Nada ignored both of them. “Even if there was the delay, protocol dictated we keep sniper coverage on the nuke until detonation. It’s a pretty thin line between max sniper range and even a tac nuke’s blast radius, not to mention the rads. We weren’t packing hazmat suits in our gear.”

Ms. Jones’s voice came over the net. “In my former Soviet Union, we were all issued anti-radiation pills. Soldiers were assured that if they took the pills, they would not be affected and could fight on.”

“
They Were Expendable
,” Eagle said.

“They were. We were,” Nada said. “Still are.”

“It’s a movie,” Eagle explained. “About PT boats in early World War II. John Wayne. You get the idea.”

Nada snorted. “Ever notice how John Wayne never hooked up when he pretended to jump in
The Green Berets
? Splat.”

“It’s a movie,” Eagle pointed out. “Suspension of disbelief.”

“He couldn’t hook up?” Nada said. “How hard is that to do?”

“Pinnacle,” Kirk said.

Everyone turned to look at him. He had a penchant for noting what passed others by. “You said it was on the board with the warning light,” he said to Nada.

The team sergeant nodded. “Written in marker on brown masking tape.”

Ms. Jones spoke up. “It was also written on the warning light at the old underground bunker for SAC. In the same way.”

“What is it, Ms. Jones?” Kirk asked. “You told us about Ortsac. What does Pinnacle stand for? The fact it was in both places and seems to be written rather informally is significant. I think,” he added, hedging his position as the newest member of the team.

“We’re checking on it,” Ms. Jones said, “but an excellent observation.”

Mac pursed his lips at Kirk and imitated a smooch.

“And Mister Mac,” Ms. Jones said, as if she were watching them, “your effort with the hatch was noble. We had a man at Chernobyl who did the same. He died.”

Mac frowned, uncertain if he were being praised or reprimanded.

Ms. Jones continued. “As Ms. Moms has noted, there have been breaches of Protocol on this mission. There were breaches on your previous mission in North Carolina and all turned out well in the end. All has turned out satisfactorily here, but not due to your efforts. I would like everyone to take some time to reflect on what it is we do.”

Nada turned to Moms with a wry smile and everyone on the team knew what was coming: Why We Are Here in some version. It was to be expected after a failure and it was a mantra Ms. Jones repeated over and over to the team, not because she believed they forgot it, but because working in the black world of covert ops, it was easy to lose track of the larger picture.

“The missile you just dealt with, the entire complex, the nuclear arsenals of every country that has the technology, are part of man’s insanity and also the peak of our genius. Scientists were able to split the atom, to gain power over an elemental and powerful force and at the same time give mankind the capability to annihilate itself. It seems the nature of man that we can do both at the same time. It is not just in the field of nuclear engineering, but, as we have discussed, the same is being done in genetic engineering, where scientists will develop cures for many ailments and afflictions. Yet at the same time, we know there are those in
deep, dark labs who are working on genetically coded, biological weapons. They are the two edges of the same sword.

“We are here,” Ms. Jones finally got to her catchphrase, “because of that and more. We are here because as mankind advances scientifically, we also teeter farther and farther over the abyss of self-extinction.”

The sound of the lonely Nebraska wind filled the cargo bay for a few moments, and then they realized Ms. Jones was done.

“Let’s look at the bright side,” Moms said. “We have two weeks off when we get back.” She paused. “Correct, Ms. Jones?”

“Yes. After debrief. That’s two weeks away from the Ranch on two-hour recall,” Ms. Jones clarified. The only way Nightstalkers ever really got true time “off” was when they retired, were medically or mentally disabled, or died.

“Everyone enjoy the holidays,” Moms said, signaling for Eagle to get into the cockpit and power up the Snake.

“Bah, humbug,” Mac said.

“You know,” Kirk said. “Those carolers always sing about peace on earth, but they never say where it is.”

“Nowhere we’ve been,” Mac said.

“I celebrate Festivus,” Eagle said as he banked the Snake and gained speed, racing along just above ground level.

“Ah!” Nada was animated for once. “The airing of grievances! Feats of strength!”

“Forget I brought it up,” Eagle said.

“Hey!” Roland said, as if a major synapse had just fired.

Everyone in the cargo bay looked at him as he sang:
“Always look on the bright side of death. Just before you draw your terminal breath.”
He began whistling and it took a few seconds, but then they caught on.

As they flew away from the site where they had almost died, the Nightstalkers all pursed their lips and whistled away:
Always look on the bright side of death.

“We were lucky,” Pitr said. Ms. Jones sighed, which was difficult to do with all the tubes stuck in her body. Any movement brought discomfort; a lot of movement brought pain. She’d lived with the situation for years and she hoped, but did not pray, that she had several more years. Unfortunately, she was a realist and she knew time cared as little for her hopes as it would for her prayers. She kept the speaker on, and in the background they could hear the team whistling that part of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” but there was that edge to it. It was forced.

“Was it luck the warhead was activated?” Ms. Jones asked her assistant. “If we say there is luck, then isn’t one as likely to have bad luck as well as good luck?”

“It was those fools who bought the silo that caused the problem,” Pitr said. “More so, it was whoever left that warhead in the silo.”

“Which brings up an interesting point,” Ms. Jones said. Her office was dimly lit and was actually a room behind the office where she “met” each new Nightstalker and in-briefed them and held debriefings with Moms and Nada. She’d been impressed when Doc had quickly surmised that the shadowy image sitting in the dark shadow on the other side of the desk was usually just an image, not a person. Not that it mattered. She always said what she needed to and she could see and hear everything pertaining to the Nightstalkers from her hospital bed.

“And that point is?” Pitr pressed, making her realize her thoughts had drifted off, which concerned her as it was happening more and more. It was a luxury of the elderly, but a person in her position could not afford that luxury.

“What if the nuclear warhead being left there wasn’t a mistake?” she asked. In the background, the whistling had petered out and there was no sound coming out of the speaker except the muted roar of the Snake’s engines. Ms. Jones turned the speaker off. “Here in the Nightstalkers we are so used to ascribing incidents to mistake or oversight or scientific malfeasance, we rarely consider that often there are those who scheme and plot and act. Sometimes in ways counter to what we believe is in our country’s and mankind’s welfare.”

Pitr frowned. He glanced over at the machines helping to keep Ms. Jones alive, scanning their various lights and indicators. He’d been doing this for so many years that anything amiss would have screamed out at him. All was within normal parameters. Pitr spoke with less of a Russian accent than Ms. Jones, but that was because he left Area 51 and interacted with other Americans. Ms. Jones had not left the Ranch in eight years. Pitr was a former Russian helicopter pilot whose life Ms. Jones had saved by stopping him from overflying Chernobyl, telling him it was a one-way mission even while she risked her life to save the man who’d started the chain reaction of that disaster back in 1986. Pitr was a tall, rugged-looking man with graying hair. He had perfect teeth that he revealed often when he smiled.

That was why Ms. Jones knew he could never replace her: the smile. The person who ran the Nightstalkers rarely had anything to smile about. He was good at his job as her assistant, but the mantle of leadership was not something she could drape around his shoulders.

That a former Soviet nuclear engineer was in charge of the Nightstalkers and had a former Soviet helicopter pilot as her aide was as improbable as an actor who had played the Gipper in
Knute Rockne, All American
becoming the fortieth president of the United States.

Probably less so.

“You suspect a plot?” Pitr asked, intrigued. Ms. Jones was not given to idle speculation.

“This weapon was listed as destroyed,” Ms. Jones said. “That’s not a simple oversight of forgetting it in the silo. Someone also deliberately wiped out any trace of it by recording it as having been dismantled. One event is an oversight. Two is a plan.”

“If it is a plan,” Pitr said, “it is a very old plan.”

“When I heard the year, 1962, I knew right away what the code name was,” Ms. Jones said. “Operation Ortsac is in the Nuclear Protocol binder. What is
not
in the binder is what
didn’t
happen. General LeMay was the chief of staff of the air force at the time. He advocated preemptive nuclear warfare from the moment he had any voice in the matter. Even after the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved, he pressed for an invasion of Cuba anyway. His deepest desire was to take advantage of the missile gap.

“While publicly the military and CIA were claiming our former country was far ahead in terms of nuclear warheads, the truth was the opposite. If the United States had initiated a first strike in the fifties or sixties, the result would have been devastating to Russia. Indeed, Pitr, I would have to say if the generals in our old country had had the same advantage, many would have advocated the same thing. What good is such power if it is not wielded?” She did not wait for an answer.

“The first mention ever of a so-called ‘missile gap’ was by JFK in 1958 when he was up for reelection to the Senate. He then ran
his presidential campaign based on trying to catch up to the Russians, when he didn’t know the United States was actually far ahead. That is how effective the propaganda of the CIA and the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex was. Only after he was in office and briefed by the Keep about the reality did he change his views.”

“You bring up an interesting point,” Pitr said. “If this warhead was kept there as part of a plot to secret away nuclear weapons in the face of mandated drawdowns due to the various treaties over the years, we are facing another critical era with RAD. You mentioned the Keep. Perhaps you should consult with Hannah? She might know something about this.”

“She might,” Ms. Jones conceded, but it was clear she was not warm to the idea. One did not go to Hannah with anything unless absolutely necessary.

“My thoughts,” Pitr said carefully, “are that this is more than just a mistake or an oversight.”

“Mister Kirk, of course, drove to the heart of the matter,” Ms. Jones said. “Pinnacle. It is not a term we have run across.”

Pitr glanced at his phone. “The Acmes haven’t reported back on it, which means it’s either completely black, completely forgotten, or worse.”

“I fear worse.”

“You always do.”

Ms. Jones did not respond, which Pitr took to mean she was considering his recommendation. They’d been together for so long they could read all the little signs in each other.

“They’re almost back,” Ms. Jones said, raising a single finger off the bed toward one of the many monitors that lined the wall.

One of them displayed the image from a video cam on the top of Baldy Mountain, which was fifteen miles northeast of Area 51.
The Snake was flying fast and low, treetop level, except there were no trees to top here in Nevada.

In fact there was pretty much nothing here other than the government facility known to most as Area 51. Which is why it was out here. Founded in 1941 as an auxiliary base to Nellis Air Force Base, adjacent to massive bombing ranges, Area 51 gained its moniker by the simple fact that’s what the location was labeled on a map. There was an Area 50 and an Area 52 and so on in either numeric direction, but 51 held the distinction of having a dry lake bed that was perfectly flat and hard packed. On that lake bed was built a landing strip that currently held the distinction of being the fifth longest in the world at 23,270 feet, or almost four and a half miles. Why it needed to be that long, no one knew anymore, although it had been a backup landing strip for space shuttles and the lake bed made going longer easier. It was built in the days when the US government definitely believed bigger was better.

Interestingly, the officers’ club wasn’t built before the runway at Area 51.

Actually, there was no o’club at Area 51.

Nor was there a golf course.

That was because it wasn’t the air force that was pumping in the dollars, but rather an organization called Majestic-12 via a massive black budget.

As the years went on, more and more land in the emptiness of Nevada was gobbled up by various government agencies for various reasons. The Department of Energy grabbed over a thousand square miles to the west of Area 51 in 1951 to test nuclear weapons, and test them they did—over seven hundred. Many of those black-and-white reels of soldiers watching a mushroom cloud in the distance were filmed there.