Assembly Command and Control Facility
Short Hill Mountain, Virginia
“Sir, we’ve got a security breach.”
Croft spun toward the senior controller. “What?”
“The escape tunnel hatch has been opened.”
He turned toward the wall of displays. “Show me.”
One of the panels switched to security camera footage showing two people, a man and a woman, climbing down the ladder. “How the hell did they find us?”
And how’d they find the hatch?
He had it installed two years ago in the unlikely event he needed to make an escape, though he never thought it would be necessary. Yet here were two people, armed, making their way into a facility that no one should know about. “Send a team. Kill them.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And get that off my screen.”
“Yes, sir.”
The image disappeared and he returned his attention to the launch. “Status on the missiles?”
A map of the United States appeared with green indicators, but too many yellows and reds.
“There has been some delays in compliance, sir. Follow up messages have been sent. We aren’t at the minimum threshold yet.”
Croft frowned. They had built redundancies into their plan, with enough missiles being launched to hit their targets multiple times in case some crews failed to launch, or some missiles failed. Their agenda required complete success, and without that being guaranteed, his orders were to not launch. There had been too many reports of failed tests, demoralized crews, untrained crews, and other unknowns, to leave things to chance.
“ETA?”
“We should reach minimum compliance within five minutes, sir.” The controller turned toward him. “There’s nothing they can do now, sir. We’ve already won.”
Croft admired the man’s confidence, but didn’t share it. He pointed at the screens. “Show me the targets that have confirmed so far.”
The map updated, hundreds of population centers circled. He shook his head slowly, a smile spreading.
Unbelievable.
The plan had been impossible to achieve until the last election, when the Vice President was brought into the loop. His codes were invalid unless the President was dead. That was easy to take care of, the hack they had installed at Offutt Air Force Base acknowledging their falsified message indicating the President’s death, and the Vice President’s succession, thus automatically updating the system to accept his codes.
Once received, their hack then had confirmed the orders as if the Secretary of Defense had acknowledged the “President’s” orders. The fail-safes were bypassed, and there was nothing that could be done now to stop it.
The controller was right.
They had already won.
By linking the internal and external networks at Offutt, they had complete access, and the military had no clue. By the time they did, by the time they broke the connection, it would be too late. The crosslink gave them direct access to the silo crews, who had no way of knowing the transmissions were fake.
And with the Vice President’s valid launch codes authenticated by the system, they had no reason to suspect anything was wrong. As far as the silo and sub crews knew, they had received completely authenticated launch orders with specific launch packages targeting the biggest problem area of the planet. The swath of Islam that stretched across Northern Africa, the Middle East, and southern Asia. The agenda here wasn’t to eliminate the problem, merely to thin it out.
Tens of millions would die instantly, hundreds of millions more over the coming months from radiation poisoning. Their brethren would take their revenge in the streets of the Western world, and the governments would be forced to act. The war would be won, and it would be over once and for all, but America would have lost the trust of the world.
A new Cold War would ensue, with all sides in an arms race to protect themselves from each other, and in the decades that followed, technology would advance so rapidly, the populations of all sides would become even more interconnected, to the point where they would demand rapprochement once again, demand an end to the new Cold War, and would unite, perhaps having advanced hundreds of years in mere decades.
And without the threat of a religion hell bent on dragging mankind back to the dark ages, a religion they hoped would finally be forced to confront its fundamental problems and experience its own reformation, humanity could finally realize its potential once and for all, no longer held back by radical fundamentalism and political correctness run amok.
He might just live long enough to see the result of their efforts, though he was prepared should he not. His children would, and their descendants would spread humanity through the stars.
He smiled as the compliance indicator continued to tick up, nearing the threshold needed to order the launch.
Any minute now.