T he Portis family lived in a small two-story, two-bedroom house in the residential section of the camp. Colt liked it because he could walk to work. Margie’d done a great job making the place feel homey, too. For base housing, it was pretty darn good.
Greely’s residential compound, called the Camp, was spread out around the military section, called the Fort. That meant dogs, armed guards, and concertina wire atop a fifteen-foot wall surrounded his little piece of heaven. Walking up his sidewalk, his umbrella blown sideways by the howling wind and rain, he was cheered by the pale golden glow in the windows of home.
He could see his wife silhouetted in the upstairs window, putting the twins down. His little angels, Merry and Anne. Margie’s mother’s name was Mary Anne and they’d planned to name their brand-new baby daughter after her. Then they up and had two, born on Christmas Eve, hence the “Merry.”
He let himself in the front door, went to the bottom of the staircase, and called up to let his wife know he was home.
“Hey, you,” she said five minutes later, walking into the living room. Colt was in his chair, staring into the fire like he always did. “You’re soaked to the bone. I thought you were coming straight home from the gym.”
“Aw, baby, don’t be a grouch. Speed and I are going in the hole in the morning for two whole days. I just needed to blow off a little steam at the Onion, y’know. Sorry I’m late.”
“Well, we can’t have the man who’s got his finger on America’s nuclear trigger building up a head of steam, can we? Nosiree bobtail. Go up and put on some dry clothes. I’ll put supper on the table.”
“Something sure smells good. What are we having?”
“Meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and lima beans.”
“My favorite.”
“Really? I didn’t know that.” She turned around and headed for the kitchen, swirling her pleated red plaid skirt, the one that said tonight would be one of their “special” nights. Colt smiled, proud of himself for being mature enough to ignore the pretty little balloon smuggler at the Onion and come straight home to mama. There had been a time, not so long ago, when he might not have done that. But he loved his wife, loved his kids, and he loved his country. Not necessarily in that order.
His late granddad had been Army Air Corps. Flown B-25s over in the Aleutians, an archipelago of three hundred volcanic islands that extended westward from the Alaska Peninsula and marked a line between the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska.
For taking out a forward Japanese naval base, Captain Colt Portis Sr. had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. It hung framed on the wall over Colt’s dresser, beside the Silver Cross and Purple Heart his dad, a West Pointer, had received as a young lieutenant in the First Air Cav during the horrific Battle of Ia Drang in Vietnam.
His gramps had come home from his war. His dad had not. Colt planned on coming home from his.
After dinner, he and Margie checked on the girls and fell into bed. After they made slow, whispery love, she was instantly snoring away, a sound he had come to find very reassuring. It meant the woman he loved was sleeping soundly, and peacefully, and would wake with a smile.
He lay on his back with his hands clasped beneath his head, staring at the ceiling. He didn’t have any money to speak of, never had, most probably never would. But he felt like the luckiest man in the world.
The tunnel entrance was well camouflaged. From the air, or an enemy satellite, it looked like a deserted barracks building. The wide entrance at the rear was disguised by two large boulders. Inside that huge empty building, a two-lane roadway angled sharply downward into the earth to a depth of fifty meters. Silent, electric- powered vehicles, each capable of carrying three men plus a driver, were constantly shuttling in one direction or the other.
Colt and his partner hopped on one and began what Speed always called their “journey to the center of the earth.” They traveled swiftly down a steep but smooth and well-lit incline. Eventually, the eerily silent transport slowed to a stop close to an entrance in the wall of the tunnel. They grabbed their forty-eight-hour kit bags and hopped off. A door slid open and they stepped inside a large elevator, perhaps ten feet square.
Judging by the initial acceleration, Colt had calculated this lift descended at a very rapid rate, maybe a thousand feet or more per minute. The trip was three minutes long, which put his workplace about three thousand feet below the surface of the earth. They emerged into a brilliantly illuminated corridor and followed it to an escalator that took them down to their guard stations.
They swiped their credentials cards and the glass doors hissed open. The two enlisted men currently manning the control panels immediately stood, saluting Portis, an officer, and stepping away from the panel. The senior man, a fresh-scrubbed kid from the Midwest, handed Portis an eight-by-ten metal box that contained records of his just completed six-hour watch, notated by hand, a new concept.
“Watch is yours, Lieutenant Portis,” the senior man said, officially relinquishing his team’s duty to the new men. Colt had to acknowledge responsibility.
“I have the watch. Anything interesting?”
“Must be something going on with one of the primary generators in this sector, sir.”
“Why?”
“We’ve been getting sporadic power surges. Nothing too close to the red zone, but I gave Engineering a heads-up. Looking into it. Other than that, there’s peace in Happy Valley, sir.”
“May it ever be so. See you guys at 0600 Monday, Sergeant. Try not to be late.”
“We’ll be counting the hours, Lieutenant.”
The two men left and the doors slid shut.
The new “Guardians of the North” immediately took their battle stations, two comfortable swivel chairs on wheels with padded armrests. Portis, the ranking officer, was on the right. Four men would rotate in six-hour shifts, the off-duty team using the time for recreation or sleeping or both.
“Don headgear,” Portis ordered, and the two men each picked up one of the “crowns of glory” the departing team had left behind on the console. The army had been looking into ways to make humans more machinelike through the use of stimulants, other drugs, and various devices. Portis had the feeling the earphones were designed to keep you alert through hidden audio signals.
An ABM operator’s life consisted of six straight hours of uninterrupted, mind-numbing tedium. Lacking stimulus, minds wandered. To the brass in Washington in charge of the Missile Defense Agency’s “Operation Vigilant Spirit,” that human flaw represented a threat to national security.
The “crowns” had been designed by army engineers to counter that threat. They were rigged with electrode fingers that rested on the scalp and picked up electric signals generated by the brain. Additional add-ons included devices for constant heart-rate and eye-movement monitoring.
Should a soldier exhibit fatigue, anger, excitement, or become overwhelmed in the event of an attack, signals were sent to a supervisor five levels up who could immediately shift control of the station to another operator. If an operator’s attention waned, he was cued visually and a magnetic or chemical stimulant was fired into his frontal lobe.
In the event of an actual enemy ICBM attack, both men would have to key in matching codes, then insert the keys that hung from chains around their necks and turn them simultaneously. This would initiate the firing sequence.
Arrayed in an enclosed perimeter in the center of Fort Greely were eight THAAD antiballistic missiles in their impregnable silos. The acronym stood for terminal high altitude area defense. Their sole reason for being was to destroy incoming ICBMs detected by the powerful GBR, or ground-based radar. GBR was employed for surveillance at ranges up to a thousand kilometers, target identification, and target tracking. Targeting information was uploaded immediately before launch and updated continuously during the flight.
These ABMs were powered by a single-stage solid-propellant rocket motor with thrust vectoring for exo- atmospheric guidance. The KV (kill vehicle) destroyed the target on contact. THAAD could intercept incoming ballistic missile targets at altitudes up to 125 miles. They were designed to intercept the enemy missiles in outer space, killing them before they even entered the earth’s atmosphere.
The difficulty with intercontinental ballistic missiles is their extremely high velocity. The first view of an incoming ICBM may be as it comes over the horizon. At first contact with the atmosphere it may be traveling at fourteen thousand miles per hour. By the time it reaches its target it will have slowed to seventy-five hundred miles per hour. This leaves the defender with very little time to react and requires extremely quick missiles to intercept,
