Eileen Reed - Ground Zero Part 1

GROUND ZERO.

Bonnie Ramthun.

I would like to thank Jerrie Hurd, who teaches fiction writing at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Not only is Jerrie a great teacher and a terrific writer (read The Lady Pinkerton Gets Her Man), but she treats every person in her cla.s.s with respect and dignity, as though we were all best-selling authors.

My friend Megan Silva gave me the services of her English professor father, Dr. John Reardon, as a Christmas present. He critiqued my book meticulously and skillfully. My other editors include my sisters Roxanne, Aimee, and Allison, my mother, Judith, and my father-in-law, Gary Ramthun. This book wouldn't exist without them.

My thanks to the Gamers. My time as a Gamer changed my life. I am still in awe that I had the chance to work within a group of people so brilliant and talented.

At the disk-drive manufacturing firm where I worked after Gaming, I finally admitted that what I really wanted to do was write novels, not program computers. Greg Matheny, Kathy Albrecht, Dean Price, Mark Lutze, Linda Chumbley, Ron Bishop, and my good friend Steve Filips made me realize Gaming was not the only place where brilliant and incredibly funny people worked.

Thanks to my lifelong friends Harold York, Susan Dunn, and Megan Silva; my brothers Nick, Pete, Alex, Dan, and Marc; my fathers Lee John and d.i.c.k; and my three beautiful sons Thomas, Ryan, and Jasper. Thanks to Emile Bisson for hiring the newest Gamer, Bill Ramthun, and seating him at the desk right next to mine. Finally, thanks to Bill, my husband and best friend. He's better than fiction.

For my sister, Roxanne Ailine Tomich.

1.

Colorado Springs Investigations Bureau.

"Hey, Rosen, see those?"

"See what?" Dave Rosen was hunched over his computer. He was typing rapidly with two fingers, but stopped and looked over at Eileen Reed.

"Those flashes up at NORAD," Eileen said. "What're they doing up there?"

Rosen looked, shrugged, turned back to his screen.

"Probably nothing," Eileen said. "But I wanted you to see it. You know, if we both get blasted into hash by The Big One about ten minutes from now. We'll be playing our harps, halos on our heads, and I'll turn to you and say-"

Rosen mistyped, cursed, and rested his forehead with a dull clunk against his computer screen.

"I'm going to kill you," he said. "If you don't shut up."

Eileen grinned.

"I went inside the Mountain once," she said. The North American Air Defense Base, called NORAD, was buried inside Cheyenne Mountain. The cavern had been carved out of solid rock sometime during the 1950s. The only remnants of that huge excavation were a length of road and a tunnel opening. Her office window faced the Mountain and she had been looking out the window instead of working on her own report.

"I know you did," Rosen said. He turned his head, his forehead still resting on the screen, and glared at her. "And I'm going to finish this report before Harben puts me back out clocking speeders on I-25."

Eileen pretended to be contrite. Rosen had been in the Special Investigations Division for only three months. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a firm nose and straight ink-black hair. He was originally from New York. To a lot of people in Colorado, he looked Navajo. Eileen suspected this was a source of amus.e.m.e.nt to him, having seen his reaction when people asked about his tribe.

"Okay, I'll shut up," Eileen said brightly, and tried to turn back to her own incomplete report.

But instead Eileen found herself looking at the flashes. There were more of them now, colored blue and red and white. Now she didn't feel like joking any more about The Big One. The pulse of lights from the tunnel that led to NORAD looked ominous. They looked serious.

She'd gone inside the Mountain, not on police business, but as a civilian on tour. Once she'd heard about NORAD, she had to go inside. Her mother told her she must be half cat on her father's side; Eileen poked her paws into everything. NORAD had a waiting list three months long for civilians. Eileen signed up and waited impatiently. She did not jiggle and hop from foot to foot when she finally boarded the NORAD bus that would take them down the entrance tunnel and into the base. She'd learned stillness long before. But if she had a tail, it would have been twitching back and forth when the ancient bus lurched and started down the tunnel.

The tour itself had been a bit of a disappointment. The cave was huge and damp and smelly, like old wet clay. The office buildings were sitting on monstrous metal coils, ready to hold steady under nuclear blasts. But they were drably colored and shabby. The buildings looked like old office structures just about anywhere. Then Eileen looked up, and saw the roof of the cavern. Rusty steel nets held back the crumbling rock. This sent a chill through her. There was solid rock over her head, hundreds of feet of it. She wouldn't even be a rust stain if some of that rock decided to come down. The nets looked as frail as cobwebs in the gloom of the cavern's ceiling.

Colorado seemed like such a safe place back in the early fifties, the tour guide explained. Eileen, standing at the back of the group with her hands shoved into her pockets and contemplating the roof, smiled. A mountain was no protection against hydrogen bombs. The tour guide went on to explain that Cheyenne Mountain still operated as the early warning center for any ballistic activity on the planet. The Mountain was not perfectly safe, but it was still the safest place there was. This, too, was chilling.

"Good thing the Cold War is over, right?" The guide laughed, and the tour group obediently laughed with him.

"Now here, these are water caverns. The excavators struck a spring when they were digging, so NORAD has an internal water supply..."

Eileen blinked and woke from her reverie as an enormous lightning bolt smashed down from the thunderclouds and danced across the rods at the top of Cheyenne Mountain. The entrance lights continued to flash.

She picked up the phone. She hesitated, wondering whom she could call to ask. She thought of Gary Hillyer. Hillyer was a journalist on the Gazette Telegraph. He would rib Eileen unmercifully if those flashes were some kind of standard Air Force drill. But Hillyer would know. He knew everything and everybody in Colorado Springs.

Captain Nick Harben saved her the call.

"Reed!" Harben could have used the phone's paging system, a simple matter of pressing a b.u.t.ton, but Harben just liked to yell. Eileen figured Harben would be much happier in a police office from the forties, smoky and grimy and full of atmosphere. Instead, the Investigations Bureau offices were offensively clean and full of sunlight. Plants cl.u.s.tered around large windows that framed a beautiful view of the mountains. Personal computers sat on every desk, linked by a communications network to the rest of the police department and, by special access keys, to the countrywide law-enforcement network. Eileen had a good desk, close to the windows and not too close to Harben. She headed for Harben's gla.s.s cube.

Harben looked at her, his narrow face expressionless. He was just hanging up the phone.

"A body was found out at Fort Carson just now. That AWOL soldier, Jerry Pendleton."

"Oh great," Eileen said. "Hey, did you see those lights up at NORAD?"

"I didn't," Harben said with a frown. He looked out his window, squinting a little, then shrugged. "I've seen them once or twice before, Eileen. They might be having some sort of war game."

"Okay," Eileen said, relieved. She'd lived in the Springs for six years. Harben had lived there all his life. "I was beginning to think there was something wrong up there."

"Well, if there was, we wouldn't have to think about it long." Harben didn't smile at his own grim joke. Colorado Springs was one of the first targets for any major nuclear attack, and everybody knew it. The common phrase was "Ground Zero." Colorado Springs was just about as ground zero as Washington, D.C. NORAD was the wartime command center, where the President was supposed to relocate if Washington, D.C, was destroyed. There was supposed to be another huge underground base somewhere in the Russian steppes, similar to NORAD, and undoubtedly targeted by American missiles. None of it made much sense to Eileen, but she had never worried much about it until this morning.

"So let's talk about Pendleton."

"Yeah, right, I know. Why did I get saddled with this a.s.signment?" Eileen dropped into a chair. She was the new Police Liaison for Fort Carson, Peterson, Schriever, NORAD, and the Air Force Academy, the five military establishments in Colorado Springs.

"You're the best person for the job," Harben said dryly. "You were in the Air Force once, as I recall."

"I don't want the Liaison job. I didn't want it. I hated the Air Force. I still hate it."

"You'll have to go talk to the new Air Force Medical Examiner. This is Army, by the way. The Air Force ME handles all the cases."

Eileen sighed. She was sarcastic around military people, and she had a tendency to be rude. Having been in the military, she couldn't help teasing the officers she met, like an unchained dog running outside a kennel. She just couldn't stop herself from barking through the bars.

"This is out at Fort Carson, so you can ask around and see if there are Games going on today," Harben suggested. "I'm sure it's nothing important, but that way you'll stop wondering about it."

Harben glanced at the faint flickerings from the hole in the side of the Mountain, and a puzzled crease developed in his forehead.

"Well, I guess it has to be some kind of drill," he said.

North of Bermuda.

The Unified German submarine Edelweiss dove hard, cutting through layers of cold seawater. She launched chaff, but the Subroc torpedo closed without hesitation. The USS Guitarro had been too close when the Edelweiss launched her missile. The German sub didn't have a chance.

There was a sound like the ringing of a bell, clearly audible to the frantically scrambling men inside the Edelweiss. Some hadn't even made it to their battle station when the bell rang through the hull.

The Subroc's motors stopped. A small flotational pack popped from the stern of the missile and it started to drift slowly to the surface.

"d.a.m.n," the German captain said. "We're dead." His crew was more eloquent in their disappointment, and for a few moments the air rang with curses. The crew of the Unified German sub hadn't even known that their own side in the Joint War Games was tracking them. They knew, of course, that they were to be the "rogue" submarine that unexpectedly attacks the United States, but security had been good. The crew hadn't even known their a.s.signment until they'd left port and were in the open sea.

"We avoided her for almost a minute," the Fire Control officer reported quietly when the volume dropped. "Pretty good for this old girl."

"I didn't know a sub was tracking us," the Radar officer said. He was wooden-faced but still clearly upset. "I'm sorry, Captain."

"We got our missiles off before they killed us," the Captain said thoughtfully. "We learn from them. When it is our turn to play the hero and theirs to play the rogue, we'll do better than they did."

The Captain nodded at his first officer. The command was sent. The Edelweiss stood down from battle stations. Her part in the Game was over.

Washington, D.C., and NORAD.

Washington received the signal while the Guitarro was still accelerating. The Secret Service hustled the President to his helicopter in thirty-seven seconds. Since everyone knew the drill was going to happen, the President's schedule was clear and he was sipping coffee in his office when the Secret Service notified him of the alert. Not a particularly realistic drill for the President, but he was, after all, the President. Air Force One was in the air twenty-four minutes later.

NORAD saw the missiles leave the ocean surface. The latest satellite technology sent the information to the computer screens just slightly slower than the speed of light. Air Force Major General Jeremy Kelton didn't change his usual calm expression. He was drinking from a can of soda. He put the can down carefully, reached over, and flicked open a plastic cover. He turned a key.

NORAD b.u.t.toned up. The outside lights, flashing for half an hour now in warning of a simulated attack, stopped. Whoever was inside would stay inside. Whoever was outside would not be able to get in until the emergency was over. A quiet tone sounded throughout the cavern. The outside air fans died. There was a faint, almost imperceptible flicker as the power system shunted over to internals. The only door to the gigantic tunnel swung shut with a crash. Air Force personnel raced to their positions. Some still had thick sandwiches clutched in their hands. The cafeteria at NORAD Air Force Base had a reputation for good food, and a number of the shift workers were eating lunch at the time of the alarm.

Colorado Springs Investigations Bureau.

"I'm going to try one more time to get out of this, boss," Eileen said earnestly. "I hate the military. I'll be rude. I'll spit in all the wrong places and I'll call colonels by their first names. I'll step on their shiny shoes and get them all muddy. I can't help it."

"I want you to step on shoes, Eileen," Harben said coldly. "That's the general idea. Congress pa.s.sed the law about civilian police being involved in military investigations just last year, and the military hates it. But there were too many scandals. Like what happened to your friend."

Eileen had told Harben about her friend Bernice when she received her promotion to detective. She figured Harben should know. Harben never showed any emotion, which Eileen thought a relief. She couldn't stand sympathy, particularly about Bernie.

Captain Bernie Ames was flying a standard training flight in Arizona when her A-10 broke away from the formation and headed north. She didn't respond on the radio to the increasingly frantic attempts to contact her. Search planes found the remains of her body and her A-10 two weeks later at the top of a Colorado mountain.

The resulting Air Force investigation concluded "pilot error." Worse, the gossip always added "female" to "pilot error." Eileen, feeling as shredded as Bernie's A-10, could do nothing about the verdict. The records were sealed. No real explanation was ever found for why Bernie decided to fly her plane hundreds of miles north and nose dive into a mountain. Her friend went into her grave as a bad, possibly suicidal pilot. A bad woman pilot.

"I don't want to deal with their garbage," she said heavily. "I doubt I can help. But I'll do it."

Harben regarded her for a moment. She couldn't tell what he was thinking. But then again, she never could. Harben was the definition of a closed book.

"Good. Thank you." Harben picked up a pen and wrote briefly. "Here's the access name for the Pendleton file." He looked up. "What is it?"

"The flashes," Eileen said. "They stopped. I guess it was nothing after all."

2.

s.p.a.ce Command, Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado.

From the highway the Air Force base looked like a fenced mile of prairie gra.s.s. A few dun-colored buildings dotted the gra.s.s. Schriever had been built so quickly there was still a prairie dog town within the fencing. There were no coyotes within the base, and none had yet figured out how to pa.s.s the electrified fence. The prairie dogs were very fat. One of the buildings was the s.p.a.ce Command Center, which ran the Ballistic Missile Defense program. The so-called Star Wars program had faded from the public sight, but the funding continued through discretionary, or "black," funds. Few people knew that the Ballistic Missile Defense program was still continuing. Fewer still knew that much of the proposed system was already in place.

Inside the building, the s.p.a.ce Command Center was hooked up to the same satellite feeds as NORAD, although its early warning systems weren't nearly as complex as those of its elder cousin. s.p.a.ce Command's computer screens, however, were greatly superior. Instead of Klaxon and a bright dot north of Bermuda on a black and white map of the earth, a huge screen showed earth's Northern Hemisphere from a lofty alt.i.tude. A blue map of the ocean was so precise it looked like a movie shot from the Shuttle. The computer marked concentric rings around the probable launch site. Tiny black lines were already starting to show at the center of the circle. The radars were picking up enough of a track to mark the flight path of the incoming nuclear warheads.

Colonel Olsen, Commander in Chief, s.p.a.ce, picked up the phone that connected him to NORAD. He was at the back of the Center at s.p.a.ce Command, and was a little nearsighted but refused to admit it. Consequently he'd been squinting at the computer map and had a headache.

"Give me validation of that launch!" he barked.

The other phone rang, the Gold Phone. Colonel Olsen scooped it up with his free hand.

"Yes, sir," he said into the Gold Phone. "Copy all," he said into the Blue Phone. "Get me impact," he said to his s.p.a.ce Director, who was sitting elegantly straight and seemingly relaxed at his left side.

"Washington, D.C., and surrounding area," she responded immediately. The glow from her computer terminal lit her expressionless face.

"Oh my G.o.d," murmured a member of the audience. He turned to his companion, a Marine colonel. The man was ashy pale. He lived in Washington, D.C., and had come out to Colorado for the Joint War Games. "What happened?"

The Marine looked at him in surprise. Then the officer leaned close to the other man's ear.

"This is a simulation," he said. "Those are unarmed missiles. Duds." The Marine looked at the enormous computer screen. The missiles were climbing skyward in the midst of flames and smoke. "The President is really on Air Force One, but this is his drill with the Secret Service. Those missiles are really aimed toward Washington, but they'll be detonated if the system misses."

"What if they don't detonate?" the other officer hissed.

"Then we'll surprise some fish," the Marine replied impatiently "They're aimed at the bay, and they're tiny. They could splash down next to a rowboat and they wouldn't capsize the boat, though I think whoever was rowing the boat would need to change his shorts. But they won't hit anything. Where were you this morning when the briefing was going on?"

The officer from Washington sat back in his chair in relief.