STERLING

 

Wednesday January 15 - 0328 MST

Two minutes until Turbocharger activates

 

The sound of a dozen M4 carbines going off at once in the corridor threatened to bring back the ringing in my ears. But that's what happened when you had a dozen Airmen that now understood that they could fight back and win against the exos. No longer was running and hiding the only option. Now they were hungry for victory, and my ear drums were paying the price. But I would gladly pay that price today.

"Okay I think we got it." Joe Morgan waved his still smoking rifle barrel at the carcass of the thing we had just mauled.

I'm not sure what it was in life, but now it was a chewed up blob of blackened meat oozing blood all over the Underground's floor. The sound of howling filled the corridor as more its kind became aware of our presence. Time was short and we had to move. I waved everyone on and found we didn't have to go far.

The hatch to storage room 92 was wide open and the ethereal purple light coming out of it left no doubt that this was the source of all our troubles. That strange glow only came from transient activity. I went first around the edge of the hatch with my rifle leveled, taking measured steps to cover tiny slices of angle into the room with each footfall. It was a technique Alpha team had shared with me known as "slicing the pie" that gave a waiting ambusher the least amount of opportunity to fire on me first.

While there weren't any shooters in the room waiting to fire on me there were things much more nightmare inducing. 92 was the massive, warehouse-sized storage cell for the monoliths that were known as the Summoning Stones of Baal'bek. The big circular disk in the middle was something we always assumed to be the focus for a portal into another world. That was the way just about any nightmare creature came to Earth. But what I was seeing unfold before my eyes shattered that long held belief.

As our lights cut back and forth across the hellscape that stretched across cell 92 we didn't see a tear in reality leading to an alien world. All we saw was the impossible. The granite face of the big central disk was melted like a chocolate bar left on a summer sidewalk. And within its liquefied depths we saw the alien forms of things not native to our planet groggily thrashing about as if they were waking up from a thousand year slumber.

I remembered seeing this thing for the first time and marveled at how lifelike the sculptures looked. Now I realized why. They weren't sculptures but live exos trapped in the stone like flies in amber. The Praetorians had set them free, and now one by one the things imprisoned in the massive stone disk were waking up and all of them were angry and starved.

There was a five legged monstrosity in the corner that was more awake than the rest and it was rubbing against the wall to get the liquefied stone off its body. I wasn't sure how long we had before it noticed us and attacked.

I flicked a "come here" gesture at Captain Hamilton. "Ham, do you still have those C4 blocks?"

Hamilton was already unslinging his backpack and digging for the blocks of explosives he'd brought along for his earlier mission. "Yes, sir. How many do you need?"

"All of them." To my surprise he didn't even blink and just started handing out the soft bricks as he went over the procedure on priming the detonators with his helpers. "As soon as you've got those ready just toss 'em in. Something's waking up in there and it isn't pretty."

Thirty excruciatingly long seconds later a half dozen bricks of modern explosives went through the open hatch. Then the hatch was slammed shut behind it all. We spun the locks and then beat feet the hell out of the Nineties corridor. We didn't know if that much explosive would cause a collapse. Frankly, I didn't care if the whole desert above us caved in on that room. However, I was worried it might take us with it.

As we got to the Hole's command bunker I looked over at Hamilton. "How long did you set the timers fo—"

Then the Underground groaned around us like it was having the biggest case of indigestion ever witnessed by man, and we were trapped inside its belly. After a few tense seconds the vibration under my feet came to an end. The unnerving sound of the bedrock shifting above and around us also came to an end. We were left staring into the gloom in silence with only a few streams of settling dust as the only evidence that the Earth had violently moved.

I jumped when my radio came to life with the sound of C.J.'s voice. "Iron Shack Actual. Iron Shack Actual. Come in, please!"

Her voice sounded strained with a hint of hoarseness like she'd been talking non-stop without a break for quite some time. She probably had been and I just couldn't hear it because the repeaters in C-Watch had been down. Apparently, they were working again. "Iron Shack Actual here. Go ahead."

"Sir, I don't have time to explain. We've been trying to reach you and—"

I'd never heard C.J. get as excited as she was now. That set my hair on end. "What is it? What's wrong?"

"Sir, I need the abort code for FAILSAFE. He's been ordered to drop his ordnance in less than a minute if we can't get him the abort code."

Now that was serious. Part of FAILSAFE's protocol was to deliver his nuclear bomb if contact was lost with the command authority in the Underground. That command authority was me and with the radio repeaters out they had no way of talking to me. Not until now. I had no idea I'd been out of touch so long. Then again when you're running for your life from an alien monstrosity you tend to lose track of time.

"Tell him One-Alpha-X-ray Iron Shack is secure. Repeat, One-Alpha-X-ray Iron Shack is secure."

She dutifully repeated it back to me and then the radio went silent as she rushed to get word to FAILSAFE's pilot. Just a moment ago we worried that the Underground would come down on top of us. Now we looked on as the seconds counted down to a nuclear bomb blast disintegrating us.

Normally, being underground was the safest place to be during a nuclear attack. But the Underground had a secret feature built in that negated that safety. A shaft was built into the bedrock that led down two hundred feet into the heart of C-Watch. Both ends were sealed with ten feet of reinforced concrete, just enough to keep anything from crawling out. Yet not too thick to stop a bunker-buster from penetrating. The F-16 flying the FAILSAFE mission would initiate a pre-planned dive towards the shaft's entrance—it was easy to spot from the air since it had several circular roads around it making it into a giant bullseye—and then release the weapon at close to the speed of sound. Tests of the weapon have shown that it would blast through the two layers of reinforced concrete and keep sailing at over two hundred miles per hours. The blast from the weapon would vaporize everything in C-Watch and then collapse thousands of tons of Utah desert into the ensuing hole that it would create. Anything that survived the detonation would be buried for eternity.

That included us if that code wasn't delivered in time. As the seconds ticked by everyone with me looked anxiously at the walls around us. At any moment they could come crashing in on us. Our one minute of time passed and I felt the foreboding weight of doom press down on my shoulders.

Then C.J.'s voice crackled on the radio. "Sir, FAILSAFE is going home. We got the message to him just in time."

Every voice in my group cheered in unison and it felt like a colossal weight had been lifted off my chest. Hours—no days now—of worry was lifted. It was like an iron vice had been wrapped around my lungs and now I could finally breathe again. I clicked onto the net as several hands slapped me on the back in congratulations. "Have you gotten any word on Alpha team's mission?"

"Not yet, sir. I'll keep trying to raise them."

That was the last piece to this puzzle. Once we knew for sure that they had succeeded then we would know for sure if the world had been saved.