The Theory of Games (15 page)

“The heliport,” the Authoritarian Man said.

Yup, there was a big black Sikorsky Sea King warming up on the pad.

“Were there any markings on it, anything Jake?”

Not a thing; at least nothing I noticed. It was a midnight-black Sea King and the blades were slowly going
whoomp, whoomp
, I was trying to light another cigarette – which freaked everybody out, maybe there was fuel nearby – they just pulled the cig out of my mouth, ground it into the tarmac and hustled me inside the helicopter. Before I knew what was going on I was strapped in, my bag was at my feet, and we were lifting off.

It was like the ground was falling away from me. We banked sharply to the left and headed west by northwest. The sun was receding behind the Shenandoah Mountains; Washington to the east looked like the opening sequence for
The West Wing
or a movie with Denzel Washington except in reverse because we were flying away from the city and it was getting smaller and insignificant.

The Sikorsky banked to the right and we flew mostly north for the next hour. I could recognize some of the cities of Maryland as we passed over them; Frederick in particular. Due west was the battlefield of Antietam; the topography had been burned into my brain from all the simulations I had run of the 1862 campaign.

We continued north; in the west the hills gradually transformed into mountains. I could now make out the geography of the Gettysburg campaign. We had entered southern Pennsylvania. I was certain of it.

The Sikorsky banked sharply to the west, descended and threaded its way through a valley. We followed a two-lane road for a short distance and then banked to the left again to follow the curvature of a prominent ridge. We left the road and hovered for a minute over what appeared to be primeval forest before settling straight down on to a helipad that had been practically invisible in the woods. I had no idea where I was.

“Site-R,” the Authoritarian Man said. “You were at the Alternate National Military Command Center at Raven Rock Mountain, Pennsylvania.”

I had heard rumors of Site-R. “You mean the place where the president is supposed to go if there’s a nuclear war? That Site-R?”

“That Site-R,” the Authoritarian Man answered.

CHAPTER 4.4

“BRAC decommissioned Site-R in 1998,” the Authoritarian Man said.

“What’s BRAC?” I asked knowing full well it was the sound of Bill barfing up a rib bone he wasn’t supposed to be eating.

“The Base Realignment and Closure Commission. Site-R was mothballed and the support units, including ISEC-CONUS were transferred to Fort Detrick.”

“And what is ISEC-CONUS?”

“Information Systems Engineering Command-Continental United States.”

“So you’re telling me there’s a complete end-of-the-world doomsday mad-scientist hideout under a mountain in Pennsylvania – that was built with my hard-earned tax dollars – that has just been abandoned?

“You tell me,” the Authoritarian Man answered, “you were there last.”

There was a line of golf carts painted forest camouflage waiting for us at the helipad. Colonel Finley got in the driver’s side of the first one and indicated I was to take the passenger seat. An enlisted man grabbed my bag from the Sikorsky and put it in the next cart in line. Finley switched the cart to ‘on’ and with a quiet purr of the electric motor we trundled down a paved pathway that had been hidden from above by a canopy of ancient oaks.

I could hear birds calling to each other from deep in the forest and an adventurous squirrel darted out in the path before us and tried to stand his ground before Finley damn near drove the cart right over him. He skittered away back into the underbrush and Finley negotiated two sharp turns that brought us in front of a chain link fence topped with razor wire.

Two MPs - not in dress blues with chrome helmets but deadly serious this time, dressed in black and wearing body armor – emerged from a concrete pillbox that guarded the gate through the fence. One MP kept his M16 at the ready while the other examined Finley’s documents. The examiner motioned to the pillbox and an unseen hand must have pushed a switch because the gate retracted and we drove through.

Before us was a massive concrete blast door that had been labeled, in ubiquitous military stenciling: PORTAL A. The blast door swung open on colossal steel hinges and, as Finley drove the cart into the blackness of its maw, I turned around and saw the bright orange ball of the setting sun through the oak leaves.

That was the last time that I have seen the sun to this very day.

CHAPTER 4.5

Finley turned on the lights of the golf cart; behind us the enlisted man piloting the cart that carried my bag did the same. Our little convoy entered into the mountain through a twenty five meter diameter tunnel bored straight through the rock. I was reminded of the old ‘coal mine’ exhibit at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry and the way that it was nearly impossible to gauge how far we were traveling; we passed endless, uniform walls, the cart’s lights illuminating only what was immediately in front of us.

Perhaps two or three hundred meters in, the wall curved away to the left. Another fifty meters further on and we reached a ‘T’ intersection. Finley turned right. We now traveled down another dark and interminable tunnel until the cart’s lights reflected off a stainless steel blast door up ahead. To the left another tunnel intersected at a forty-five degree angle.

“That would be the tunnel to the blast valves,” the Authoritarian Man offered.

“Why does a bunker need blast valves?” I asked, “Are there missiles at Site R, too?”

The Authoritarian Man snorted a little laugh. “A nuclear weapon creates a shock wave when it detonates. After the shock wave passes over a bunker it creates a negative pressure behind it. The blast valves are designed to keep all the air from being sucked out of the bunker and the occupants’ lungs. So where did you go after you passed the blast valves?”

We drove through the open blast door. The corridor beyond was illuminated by fluorescent lights encased in metal cages suspended from the rock ceiling. Finley switched off the cart’s little headlamps and we continued on towards the center of the mountain.

I reached into my shirt pocket and withdrew a pack of cigarettes and showed them to Finley. The colonel just shrugged so I lit up and leaned back in the golf cart seat, enjoying the smoke. We were now passing doorways with signage: INDUSTRIAL WATER RESERVOIR, WEST POWER PLANT and WEST ELECTRICAL. I finished the cigarette, stubbed it out against the side of the golf cart and discreetly let it fall to the concrete floor. Whatever section of Site-R we were traveling through (presumably the west side) it certainly wasn’t populated.

We entered a latticework of passageways that intersected at 90 degree angles. Far down a hallway to the left I saw another green camouflage golf cart scuttling away into the distance. It was the first sign of life we had encountered since leaving the guard post at the entrance a good twenty minutes before.

Finley turned right into a warren of corridors; we passed more doors and signage: BARRACKS A, SHOWERS, MESS HALL (WEST).

Another turn to the left and then once more to the right and Finley stopped the cart in front of a door labeled COMMANDING OFFICER.

“We’re here,” the colonel announced. “He’s inside waiting for you.”

I got out of the cart and walked over to the other to get my bag but before I could grab the handle Finley and the enlisted man sped away down the corridor.

“Don’t worry about your stuff, it’ll be in your quarters,” Finley yelled back. And then as he was turning the corner into another passageway he repeated, “He’s waiting for you.”

A junior Authoritarian Man came in with a tube of rolled-up blueprints and handed them to the senior man who unfurled them and laid them across my bed. “Can you show me where this office was?” the Authoritarian Man asked.

With my finger I traced my route from the helipad, to the guard house, through Portal A and into the labyrinth of tunnels. When I got to the warren of cross connecting passageways I became lost. “I’m sorry, Jim,” I told the Authoritarian Man, “I think it was somewhere around here.” I motioned to a section on the west side of the underground complex.

The Authoritarian Man pointed to an office much further to the east on the map labeled ‘CO’, “Are you sure it wasn’t over here?”

I tried to mentally retrace my journey in the golf cart. “I’m pretty sure that wasn’t it. I really think it was over here,” and I indicated the area to the west that I showed him before.

“Okay,” the Authoritarian Man answered, “please continue.”

I knocked on the door labeled COMMANDING OFFICER and a voice I recognized barked, “Enter.” Stanhope in the uniform of a major general was seated behind a large metal desk; he was flanked by two flags: the American on the right and some corps or command flag I didn’t recognize on the left. He was smoking a pipe, which was a welcome sight, because I immediately fished another cigarette out of my shirt pocket and lit up.

“Professor Grant, it really is good of you to come on such short notice,” Stanhope began. He stood up, shook my hand and motioned to a green metal chair positioned before his desk. “I’ll come right to the point,” Stanhope continued, “we’ve got a big problem and we need your help. Intelligence from Homeland Security indicates that an all-out attack on the White House is imminent. Specifically the date is the Tuesday after next. That gives us ten days to prepare and our computer model is still pretty buggy.”

“General Stanhope,” I blurted, “my group has only had a couple of weeks to work on the project. We’ve made some great progress, but we’ve still got at least a month of hard coding ahead of us.”

“We know, you’ve done some exceptional work so far,” Stanhope answered, “and we know it won’t be done in time. That’s why we’ve flown you out here. We need you to debug our code. You’ve got to find the bug and fix it before the terrorists attack in ten days. In fact, given that we need at least a few days to wargame the problem, we’re really looking at you doing this in a week or less.”

The immediacy of this problem surprised me and I coughed up a puff of smoke.

“The country is depending on you,” Stanhope continued while pouring me a glass of water from a carafe on his desk. “We know this is going to be extremely difficult but you’re the best man for the job. We have a great deal of confidence in your abilities.”

I gulped down some of the water. “Can I have the rest of my team?” I asked. “I’ll need all the help I can get.”

Stanhope slowly shook his head from side. “Sorry, no. That won’t be possible. They don’t have the security clearances and we don’t have the time.” Stanhope got up from behind his desk and put a hand on my shoulder. “Son, I have faith in you. I know you won’t let us down.”

Just for the record, I hate being called ‘son’ and I didn’t have a lot of faith in myself at the moment. Or, more specifically, I didn’t have a lot of faith going through a rat’s nest of somebody else’s code. Inside I shuddered but I put a brave face on it. “Okay, general, show me what you’ve got. Let’s see what I can do.”

Stanhope patted my shoulder. “That’s the spirit,” he said and then repeated, “I know you won’t let us down.”

Stanhope opened the door to his office and motioned for me to follow him out into the hallway. At the first intersection we turned to the left and the next we turned right. I was thoroughly lost in the underground maze. We stopped in front of door labeled CONFERENCE ROOM B and Stanhope motioned me inside. One entire wall of the room was made up of a 4 x 3 matrix of plasma screens. A large oval table, no doubt constructed from an exotic and expensive wood, with matching chairs upholstered in leather filled most of the floor space. I have been in government-constructed conferences rooms like this before and I am no longer impressed by the extravagance. A wall of plasma screens may be necessary but the tables and chairs are just pissing away taxpayer’s money. I slumped into the nearest chair and Stanhope moved to the array of DVD players and sound components embedded in the back wall.

Stanhope powered up the system and each of the twelve screens showed what appeared to be a first person HUD display for a MMOFPS.

“What’s an MMOFPS?” the Authoritarian Man interrupted.

“Massively Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter,” I explained. “You know Massively Multiplayer means hundreds, even thousands, of players running around online together. Normally this for an RPG but there are MMO FPSs, too.”

“What’s an RPG? I assume you don’t mean a Rocket Propelled Grenade,” the Authoritarian Man asked.

“An RPG is a Role Playing Game; like Dungeons and Dragons. Probably the biggest MMORPG is World of Warcraft which is incredibly addictive. A lot of people go into the online world and they never really come out. It takes over their lives, they lose their jobs, and their marriages break up. It’s a totally immersive environment with its own laws of physics, magic, money, everything. There are also MMO First Person Shooters like Call of Duty and Modern Warfare where online teams run around in a virtual environment shooting each other up.”

“Okay, I understand. So you’ve seen multiple panel HUD displays before like you saw at Site-R?” the Authoritarian Man asked.

“Of course, it’s standard E3 bells and whistles.”

“E3?”

“The Electronic Entertainment Expo.” I answered. “It’s the big convention where new games are showcased. It’s also where young game developers trying to break into the market hope to hook up with a game publisher. Anyway, you’ve got a dozen or more people running around in a virtual environment and what each player sees is displayed on a big matrix of plasma screens. It’s kind of interesting because you can watch one player on one screen shoot at another player in another screen who is shooting at somebody else in another screen.”

“Okay, got it,” the Authoritarian Man said. “And the wall of plasma screens in the conference room in Site-R was showing a dozen HUD displays of a MMOFPS, right?”