8
Colorado Springs, CO
It had been an uncomfortably silent trip down Interstate 25, small talk being difficult when everything is classified. Quinn took their black government SUV onto a side road that meandered into the hills around Cheyenne Mountain, winding their way past nondescript suburbs up to the mountainside entrance to NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense command.
They drove past a parking lot that was notable for its complete lack of any cars, having been transformed into a hasty landing pad filled with heavy-lift helicopters and tiltrotors. A camouflaged military policeman kept one hand wrapped around the pistol grip of his M4 carbine as he checked ID’s and waved them through the open blast doors. The massive steel slabs were designed to shield the underground base from every conceivable threat, up to and including a nuclear strike.
Ryan had always harbored doubts about that, but then again the men who’d built it had presumably known what they were doing. Or so everyone had hoped. Walking through the corridors and anterooms as they descended deeper into the facility, he was struck by its Cold War anachronisms – the place might have been updated over the years, but there was no escaping its original purpose. For decades, America had been prepared to wage World War III from this location while fully expecting to have been directly targeted by multiple Soviet warheads. What a thing to know that somewhere in the world sat a nuclear bunker-buster with your name on it.
As they continued down into the mountain he came to appreciate exactly how big of a bomb they’d have needed, with plenty more coming after it. Supposedly the entire underground complex rested on gigantic shock absorbers; he could only imagine how that ride would feel as successive nukes plowed into the mountainside.
His thoughts turned to the neighborhoods they’d driven through on the way up. Nearly all were base housing, filled with the families of the people who worked here. And the city not far away – all civilians, all living under the threat of unspeakable destruction that could have been visited upon them within twenty minutes of Ivan pushing the proverbial big red button.
Ryan shuddered involuntarily. Simply having a family continued to turn his perspectives inside-out. Every experience was now weighed against its effects on his wife and son, and he found himself going through life with his head on a swivel. Turning into his father wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, though he dreaded the day when he’d inevitably blurt out “Because I said so!” in exasperation.
Ryan realized he’d barely paid attention during their quick courtesy tour. Once again he’d allowed his mind to wander, another byproduct of being a rookie parent.
. . .
Penny was caught up in her own meanderings. As they went deeper into the complex, she couldn’t escape noticing that a tremendous number of collapsible shipping boxes had been stacked up along the corridors. NORAD had supposedly been relocated to more civilized facilities at the base in town years ago while the mountain had been kept as a fallback site.
Obviously, someone had decided it was time to fall back.
As they passed a hallway with a “crew ready room” sign hanging above it, she sidled up to one of their escorts and gently grasped his elbow. “I’ll catch up in a second,” she whispered, flashing an embarrassed smile. It was all too easy for an attractive woman to throw a young man off guard, middle-aged or not. “I need to find the ladies’ room. Too much coffee on the way down.”
The sentry caught the attention of one of his partners and pointed down a side hallway. They soon found a restroom – latrine, she corrected herself – and she paused at the door. “You’re not following me in, are you?”
The young airman’s face flushed red. “No, ma’am. But I’ll have to wait out here for you.”
“Thanks. Sorry for the trouble,” she said, and pulled the door shut behind her. After a quick look around she found another door across the room. Fortunately things hadn’t changed much: it seemed like every facility was designed the same way. She pressed an ear against the metal door, listening for any noise on the other side. Hearing none, she inched it open into a locker room that was blessedly empty. She poked her head inside and quickly found what she was looking for: a good old-fashioned message board hanging on the wall.
She ducked inside and rapidly scanned the postings for anything about unit deployments or other mass movements. As expected, there were lots of references to Cheyenne: schedules, pickup times, planning meetings...so this had in fact been a recent move.
NORAD wasn’t the only command going to ground. There were references to other strategic sites being reactivated: she recognized the names of old underground missile facilities in Montana and the Dakotas, silos that had been mothballed for decades. Nothing about disposition of warheads or missiles, which she wouldn’t expect to find on an unclassified board anyway. But an awful lot of logistics and headquarters squadrons were on the move. Lots of big shots and all of their stuff.
Penny flipped over another stack of papers and found a penciled-in reference to coordinate something with Greenbrier. Greenbrier? In the bad old days it had been Washington’s fallback bunker, a duplication of Capitol Hill offices constructed beneath a mountain resort in West Virginia.
So the whole national command structure was digging in?
Raucous voices erupted from the other end of the room; another door opened as an outbound Osprey crew entered from the adjacent ready room. Crap. She spun around and found two solid rows of lockers between them and her. She stepped quietly back to the latrine door and slipped through with her back to them, just another chick in a blue uniform.
Safely on the other side, Penny leaned against the door and caught her breath. What did they have to do with any of this? She quickly straightened her hair then flushed the toilet and ran the sink for effect before stepping back out. She almost ran into her escort, who was standing squarely in the doorway about to knock.
“We have to hurry, ma’am. Briefing starts in five. The President doesn’t take kindly to stragglers.”
. . .
“At ease. Take your seats.”
They had been escorted into a small auditorium where a barrel-chested man in Air Force blues stood at a lectern in one corner of the stage. Ryan noted three stars on his shoulders and leafed through the briefing notes they’d given him at the door: that would be Lieutenant General Sam Nichols, Pentagon J2: the Defense Department’s chief intelligence officer. More brass was gathered behind him and most of them wore stars. There was a full-bird colonel in Marine green, and an Air Force major who was no doubt the general’s aide.
Nichols motioned to the major, who proceeded to boot up two of three widescreen monitors hanging behind them. One displayed a chart of the Earth-Moon system superimposed with different trajectories, which unsurprisingly looked to be exactly what Audrey had been working on. Another was a closed-circuit feed, showing a crowded conference table cluttered with tablet computers and surrounded by men in uniforms and suits. The seat at the head of the table was conspicuously empty.
A door closed quietly behind him and he turned to see Penny slip inside with a flustered junior officer escort in tow. She eased into the seat next to him. “That would be the White House situation room,” she whispered.
His eyes popped when he recognized who was taking the head seat just now. “You know something I don’t?” he asked under his breath.
“Not anymore.”
Ryan cast a furtive glance around the hall, sizing up the rest of the audience as they streamed in. Like the men up on stage, those in uniform all sported Colonel’s eagles or General’s stars. There wasn’t a low-level aide in sight. The few not in uniform looked deadly serious. Like Quinn, they moved with a quiet grace on athletic frames that their suits barely disguised. “More spooks,” Ryan muttered, “and you can’t swing a dead cat in here without hitting a three-star. This is big.”
“You’re more right than you know.”
Ryan could see the wheels turning behind her eyes. Before he could press her for details, they were cut short by a gruff voice from one of the monitors. “We’re ready when you are, General.” It sounded vaguely familiar until he recognized it as the Secretary of Defense.
“Thank you, Mr. Secretary.” Nichols looked directly at Hammond and their small group. “The security council has agreed to let us take the time to brief you in before we begin.”
The third screen flickered to life. An ungainly assembly of metal cylinders, insulating foil, and reflective panels appeared. Spacecraft held a different aesthetic than ships or airplanes, but this was by far the most unusual they’d ever seen.
It was like a mechanical butterfly. At its center were two cylinders joined to a central hub, which itself sported immense circular solar panels. What resembled an enormous, partially-folded umbrella sprouted from the opposite end: sunshields for insulating propellant tanks, he guessed. The picture was remarkably clear for something that must have been taken from a great distance.
“What you’re looking at is Gateway Station,” the general explained, “a manned complex at Earth-Moon Lagrange point two.” A region of deep space where Earth and Moon’s gravity essentially canceled each other out, space-exploration advocates had been begging NASA to build an outpost there for decades. The idea made sense: being out of a gravity well, EML-2 was a perfect location for a fuel depot and waystation for operations beyond Earth. It also explained all of the heavy-lift launches that had been wreaking havoc on their flight schedule for the last year or so. About every six weeks a new Jupiter III or Vulcan Heavy had gone up, shutting down the airspace along with it for hours.
Gateway had even taken Hammond by surprise. Whatever else the boss may have learned on his own, he hadn’t counted on this. “An outpost?” he asked. “You have people up there?”
“Not many, but yes,” the General said. “Four men, for about six months now.” So at least one of those boosters had been crewed – and keeping that under wraps would’ve been no mean feat. Too many external visual clues for a manned rocket, like the escape tower. Which meant they’d risked going without it.
They had been very busy...and very quiet.
“So this is a military outpost?” Hammond asked hopefully. Ryan could feel the anticipation animating him. Maybe there was already a rescue mission underway?
“Not quite, Mr. Hammond. Technically this is a National Science Foundation project.”
More details emerged as the station slowly turned on its axis. An Orion crew capsule rotated past, docked to the main hub. Penny leaned in and whispered impatiently: “so they changed their mind about canning that program? Why didn’t we hear about it?”
An ungainly craft appeared next, an assembly of foil-wrapped tanks with four spindly legs. From this angle, it took a minute before they recognized it as an Altair lunar lander. He nudged Penny back. “Didn’t they whack the budget for that thing a long time ago?”
“Not before they finished building one, apparently.” The deep-space exploration vehicles had supposedly died along with her first husband in the Orion I disaster years ago. This wouldn’t have been the first time a NASA project had been resurrected by the Air Force.
A third module slowly rotated into view: a gleaming silver and white cylinder sporting two long solar wings with its squat conical nose docked to the station. A blue POLARIS logo dominated one side.
Their missing flight module. His arm hurt from the squeeze Penny gave it.
Was this a live shot? If so, these guys could see a whole lot more than they’d let on. The image drifted slowly across the screen before shifting back to center. Ryan looked around the room for any telling reactions and found none. The government types had no doubt seen this before.
General Nichols gave them little time to absorb it. “Twenty-one hours after your vessel was declared missing, we lost contact with Gateway.”