STERLING

 

Wednesday January 15 - 0010 MST

Two hours and twenty minutes until Turbocharger activates

 

A hundred faces looked up at me as I stood there collecting my thoughts. Gone were all the blue office uniforms replaced by woodland green and desert camouflage just as I had asked them to. Gone also was the look of fear I saw in those faces. Now they were looking for answers and marching orders. They were SFs, electricians, IT techs, analysts, cooks, and fire fighters…all kinds of skills and backgrounds. They were anxious, they were unsure. But there was one thing they all had in common.

They were still here.

At any time they could have hopped in a van or a humvee and headed for the hills. No one would have stopped them. Instead, they embraced duty. Duty to protect millions of civilians from the horrors we kept stockpiled under the desert. These civilians would never even know what they were being protected from and would never even have a chance to say thank you.

These Airmen had the will to fight and enough arms and ammunition to invade a small nation. Now all they needed was direction.

I had climbed onto the hood of the nearest humvee while they all circled around me to hear.

"Folks, we've lived and worked with the knowledge that one day the worst case scenario might happen."

A staff sergeant offered me a megaphone but I waved him off. These people—my people—needed to hear my voice, not an electronic facsimile. And if a man couldn't speak to his troops like this he had no business being their leader.

"Well today it's happened. And I won't lie to you. It's a doozy. But as I look out among you, I see the faces of the people best equipped to handle this challenge. No one else in the world knows the Underground like you. No one else in the world has even half the experience dealing with our adversary. The monster has come out of the closet and it's running around the base. We have an entire battalion of US Army Rangers mobilizing to back us up. I'm sure you've heard the F-16 circling the skies above us and there are more on the way. They're most certainly formidable examples of US military might. But those Rangers won't get here for several hours. Those war planes cannot go inside the base to put the genie back in its bottle. No one knows this place as well as you do. No one knows this job as well as you do."

"Folks, this is your base. And we're going to take it back. Tonight, we're going to make the exos have nightmares about us!"

I had more to say but my words were drowned out by the sudden onset of cheering. My people just got their mission and were no longer afraid. Their cheers sent chills down my spine. They'd gotten their direction and were now ready to go to war.

I handed the floor over to one of my senior non-coms who would hand out assignments. We would be mobilizing every available body to roll out within the next fifteen minutes. Every one of Sergeant Madarasz's CE troops was grouped into engineering teams that would be restoring power and communications to the Underground. Everyone else was organized into security teams that would be protecting them while they worked. Every last one of them was going in armed and ready to tangle.

One of the things General Basser had questioned me on was my decision to only bring in people that were comfortable around firearms. He didn't understand why an electrician or intelligence analyst needed to be well versed in the use of a M4 carbine. I could not imagine a better answer to his doubts than the bucket of trouble we'd been dropped into tonight.

More humvees pulled into the hangar as people broke into their teams. One for each security team. Unfortunately, we'd found out early on there weren't enough of them for everyone. So my folks started scavenging the base for anything that could carry people. We ended up with work trucks, buses, and passenger vans. It was a motley assortment of vehicles but it would have to do.

As the assignments were shouted out I found my way over to Dave Grider and his crew. Without needing a prompt from me he had assembled his soldiers. It was one of the reasons I liked working with Special Forces troops. They did what needed to be done and didn't wait to be told. Captain Priestley was there as well with a couple of his CCTs. That was all that he could round up. Several of them had gone on Captain Hamilton's ill fated mission into the CTTC to find our missing people and now it was just the three of them.

That would have to be enough for what I had in mind.