with very good guidance from the GBR.
J ust after 0900, Colt Portis heard his partner say, “Holy shit! Incoming!”
He looked at the display in front of him in sheer disbelief. Fear seethed through his brain like a strong tide surging through a narrow gate.
“You see this, Speed?”
“What the hell?”
“I’ve got eight, I repeat eight, unidentified objects traveling west to east at twenty thousand miles per hour, altitude one hundred miles.”
“Ain’t an ICBM in the whole damn world that fast. Estimate time of atmospheric reentry at nine minutes and counting. GBR plotting their course now… fuck me… they’re all headed this way!”
“Sir,” Portis said to his watch commander, adjusting his lip mike, “request permission to arm all eight ABM missiles!”
“Request granted. Light ’em up, Lieutenant. Shoot first and apologize later.”
“Hey, wait a second,” Speed said, staring wide-eyed at the rapidly moving dots converging on his screen, “nobody kills me till I say so.”
“Code sheets, Speed, now!”
Both men ripped open the sealed red manila envelopes and pulled out the code sheets.
“Code!” Portis said.
“Alpha. Alpha. Whiskey. Bravo. Zulu,” Midge said, keying in the code. “Response?”
Portis responded with the code on his own sheet. “Alpha. Alpha. Whiskey. Bravo. Zulu.”
Portis reached forward and toggled the switch that put the entire ABM site on a war footing.
Portis nervously readjusted his lip mike. “We have code match, sir. With your authorization we will now key in and initiate arming sequence.”
“Roger that. Affirmative.”
The two men inserted their keys into the twin arming mechanisms arrayed in panels before them and turned the keys simultaneously. A low, beeping tone could now be heard over every loudspeaker in the underground complex. The country was under attack. Hell, Greely was under attack.
“Missiles one through eight now armed and ready to launch, sir, awaiting GBR upload.”
“Affirmative, Guardian… incoming enemy missiles, or whatever the hell, now entering atmosphere. They should start slowing… Good God… they’re not slowing, they’re bloody well accelerating!”
“Roger that, sir, GBR readouts calculate speed increasing rapidly to thirty thousand… fifty thousand… now traveling on course zero-one-forty at one hundred thousand miles per hour!”
“What the hell?” Midge shouted. “U fuckin’ Os?”
Portis could hear his watch commander speaking heatedly to his superior officers at the Pentagon. “Yeah, Charley, we got incoming traveling at speeds in excess of 100K and climbing. UFOs is all I can say, sir. Request permission to take them out.”
“Permission granted.”
“Portis. We’ve acquired a sat fix on these birds. Never seen anything like it. What the hell are they, Guardian?”
“God knows, sir.”
“Maybe he knows, maybe not.”
“Take them out, sir?”
“Hell, yes, take them out!”
Portis said, “Silo crews, we are going to launch mode with all eight missiles. You are authorized to open all eight blast doors. Hatches open now!”
“Portis,” Speed suddenly said, “they’re gone! Screen is clear!”
“Gone?”
“Yeah. Disappeared. Wait a second. Jesus, now they’re back. Descending from eighty thousand feet… coming this way… decelerating…”
Portis stared at his screen in disbelief. He said:
“UFOs are now located directly overhead… uh, Command, and they, uh, they appear to be hovering. Just above us at twenty thousand feet. They are… I don’t know how to tell you this, sir… they appear to be stationary.”
“UFOs? I don’t believe in UFOs!”
“I don’t either, sir, but I swear to you that what I’m looking at are objects, they’re flying, and, by God, they are completely fucking unidentified.”
“Launch, goddamit! Light the candles! Pull the trigger. Blow those bastards out of the sky.”
“Confirm. Launching…” Portis said, fingers flying across his control panel, flipping open the red protective covers over each of the eight red toggles that would send eight of the most powerful antiballistic missiles on earth skyward. He thumbed each one in sequence, an act he thought he’d never live to see.
Portis watched his multiple display screens transfixed. There were live video feeds from inside each of the silos. The umbilicals detached themselves from each missile and dropped down against the inside of the silo walls. Brilliant fire and white smoke appeared at the base of the missiles.
“Abort, abort!”
“What?”
“This is Silo Control, you must abort! Silo hatch cover malfunction. Blast doors not responding to my commands…”
“We have ignition…”
“Abort! Abort! Abort!”
“Say again, Silo Control Center!” Portis said. Was this guy insane? It was too late to abort. If the silo hatches wouldn’t open, all eight missiles would explode in place and-”
“Abort! The fucking silo blast doors won’t open. A malfunction. They are still shut! Manual override dysfunctional.”
“What?” Portis said, feeling the needle in the crown pierce the top of his skull. “What do you mean? The hatch covers won’t open?”
“I mean the hatch covers won’t-”
He was thinking of Margie and the twins in the moments before he died. He knew the explosive power of the eight ABMs was enough to blow a hole in the earth’s crust half a mile deep and two miles across. No one living inside the perimeter of Camp Greely could survive this.
No one.
The very last thing Lieutenant Colt Portis saw before the multiple explosions vaporized Fort Greely and every living soul was the eight enemy intruders shooting straight up into the heavens. Traveling… at the speed of light.
What were these things? What the hell were Oblivion.
Twenty-four
Iran, Present Day
“Can’t sleep,” Darius said to his captain of the Guards in passing. “Nightmares, you know.” He nodded at the surprised uniformed guards lining either side of the approach to his boudoir as he floated swiftly by them. He giggled at the looks on their faces. Usually the master of the house didn’t appear in the morning until the crack of ten.
The “Special Division” uniformed Revolutionary Guards snapped to attention in sequence but the lord and master was already long gone from the residence. Dawn was just breaking as he raced along under the vast open air portico, finally making an abrupt ninety-degree turn and careening through one of the long rows of tall, south- facing portals opening directly onto the Persian Gulf.
The air was full of sound: the cries of gulls riding the winds, the hiss of waves crashing and receding on the
