The Book of Truths (26 page)

“It was made into a film that premiered in ’64. Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas. The Pentagon opposed making it. Kennedy gave his approval.”

“Kennedy got killed in ’63,” Kirk said.

“No shit,” Eagle said, the profanity unusual for him. “If these Pinnacle people have been stockpiling nukes, what do you think their endgame is?”

“Their endgame comes tonight,” Nada said.

Neeley got into Raven Rock via the front door as she had told the Asset. She didn’t have to use the clearance she’d displayed at the Pentagon to see Mrs. Sanchez, but one that was a level below that. Even though she was rigged for combat, with body armor, MOLLE vest festooned with the weapons of death, an HK416 in her hands and a new thumper on a lanyard along her side, the
guards let her in. After all, she had placed her eye on the retina scanner and the light came back green.

That’s the way the government worked. She figured an orangutan in a clown suit would be allowed in if it passed the retina scan.

She had multiple magazines of 5.56mm ammo for the HK in the first row of pockets on the front of her MOLLE and a dozen 40mm grenades, special rounds she’d handmade, looped along the side of the vest.

“Deep Six?” she asked the two military police armed with just pistols. If the Asset thought this was tight security, he had never experienced tight security.

Before they could answer, an officer wearing silver oak leaves came striding up the tunnel leading into the mountain, a pained look on his face. “Are you here to deal with the incident?”

“What incident?” Neeley asked.

The officer was looking her over, not in a sexual way, but searching for rank, unit identifier, anything he could latch his military mindset on to.

There was none. Except for the weapons and the security clearance she obviously had.

“There’s been firing going on in Deep Six. The door is sealed.”

“Let’s walk and talk,” Neeley said, nudging him into the tunnel. One of the MPs followed, hand wavering uncertainly over his holster.

The lieutenant colonel filled her in on what little he knew. “They brought in someone not long ago, shut the door, and since then, we’ve heard firing echoing out.”

They turned a corner and the main cavern that made up the core of Raven Rock came into view. Several three-story office
buildings were packed into it. All the windows seemed to be blacked out.

“Anyone get an office with a view?” Neeley asked as they moved along the edge of the cavern.

“The interior of the windows are painted over with landscapes,” the officer said. “The shrinks say it helps.”

“Does it?”

“No.”

At the far end of the cavern another tunnel beckoned. They headed down the path and Neeley heard a distant shot.

“See?” the officer said, as if she had doubted his ability to hear shots. “It’s quieted down, but it sounded like a hell of a firefight for a bit.”

“Let’s hope it was,” Neeley said.

They came up to a steel door. A keypad was to the right.

“No one knows the code?” Neeley had to ask, because there were no stupid questions in covert ops. For all she knew the nighttime cleaning crew knew the code.

“Negative.” The officer shook his head. “They’re not even American in there—the guards. And we hear screams all the time. It’s muffled but…” He shook his head. “I sent a memo up the chain of command and got a phone call from a general in the Pentagon who reamed my ass and told me to mind my damn business. And—” He paused as something occurred to him. “You’re not from that general, are you?”

“No.” Neeley was looking at the keypad. One thing Gant had emphasized was that high tech often hid low tech. She slid her knife out of the sheath and jammed it between the back of the keypad and the door frame. She applied leverage and the pad popped off.

“Blue wire, green wire, or red wire?” she said to herself.

Another shot echoed through the door and the lieutenant colonel started nervously. “You don’t know?”

“Joking,” Neeley said. She slashed through all three wires with her knife, then stripped the ends off the green and red. She sparked them together and there was an audible click as the lock disengaged.

Neeley edged it slightly open, before turning back to the officer. “I assume they rely on Raven Rock for power?”

“Yes.”

“Cut it.”

The lieutenant colonel pulled out his radio and gave the order.

A drunken guard came staggering down between two clusters of cages, bottle in one hand, pistol in the other. He paused outside Wahid’s cage.

“No more black card,” he slurred. “Too bad for you.” He lifted the pistol.

“No!” Brennan cried out. “I am the assistant to the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I order you not to execute the prisoner. He has valuable information that is needed.”

The guard laughed. “You are in cage. You give no orders. I think I just shoot you first, then him.”

The muzzle of the gun turned toward Brennan and he’d never seen anything as large and threatening as the gaping hole at the end of the barrel.

What amazed him, and gave him the smallest moment of pride, was that when faced with death, infected with Cherry Tree, the honest core of himself was able to face it with open eyes. He
slowly got to his feet, the gun tracking him. He even took a step toward the guard.

“This place,” Brennan began, “is a disgrace to the United States. You, sir, are a disgrace to humanity.”

The guard blinked, surprised at the outburst from a prisoner. In the next cell, Wahid was also amazed.

The surprise didn’t last long. The guard’s finger curled around the trigger. “Fuck you.”

And then everything went dark.

“Stay back,” Neeley said. “Open it in five minutes with armed guards backing you up. If I’m not standing there, kill them all.”

“What—” The colonel didn’t get a chance to say anything else as Neeley flipped down her night-vision goggles and slid into Deep Six, the door shutting behind her.

The odor was the first thing she noticed. Dank, dirty air. Unwashed bodies. Through the night-vision goggles, she could see everything in a greenish tint: clusters of cages, shabby barracks at the far end, rock walls curving to a rock ceiling.

Move fast and hit hard
. Gant’s voice echoed in her brain and she did just that.

A pistol fired to the right, the muzzle flash like a flare in the goggles. Neeley swung the muzzle of the HK416 in that direction and fired twice and the figure crumpled. Voices cried out from the cages as she rushed forward, but she didn’t think prisoners were a threat.

She passed two bodies, automatic weapons in hand.

She was reminded of the battle of Cirith Ungol in
The Lord of the Rings
, how Gant had laughed when she read that part to him, the two types of orcs fighting each other and pretty much wiping out the place’s defenses.

When one employed scum, one got the results.

Neeley fired at a man running to her right, M4 in his hands. He crumpled to the ground.

The sharp crack of a pair of bullets passing close by caught her attention. She zigged to the right, putting some cages between her and the muzzle flashes. Sorry about that, prisoners, but whoever had fired had been moving also based on the spacing.

She sensed for a split second someone dropping from above—and then impact.

No one ever looks up
, she heard Gant’s voice in her memory as she was slammed down to the rock floor, dropping her rifle. She rolled with the impact, pulling her knife and slamming it home in the man’s chest. He grunted from the force of the blade, foul breath washing over her. She stabbed him again. She grabbed his balaclava-covered chin and sliced the knife deep across his throat, severing both carotid arteries. The last beats of the mercenary’s heart sprayed her with blood, but she was off him, searching for her HK.

She abandoned the search as two men came charging forward, shouting something.

Still kneeling, Neeley pulled up the thumper and fired.

The round was one she’d labored over: a mixture of small fléchettes and buckshot, in effect making the result a very large and lethal shotgun shell once fired.

Both men went down.

Neeley slowly got to her feet. She heard panicked voices calling out in a mixture of languages: Arabic, Pashto, and a range of others.

“Brennan!” she called out.

Someone fired from a window in the nearest barracks, the round wild and ricocheting off rocks. Neeley broke open the thumper and loaded a different shell, high explosive. She fired, the round going through the window, and the shooter wasn’t a problem anymore.

The resulting explosion blinded out the goggles for a moment.

“Brennan!”

“Here.”

Neeley followed the voice.

“Who are you?” Brennan asked. He was standing by the gate for his cage. “Let me out. Please.”

“Where is Pinnacle?”

“Oh,” Brennan wailed. He beat his fists against the side of his head as if he could smash the truth that was being forced out. “The Dark Side. It’s the Dark Side.”

“Dark Side of what?”

“Yucca Flats, Nevada. East of it. In the Nevada Test Site. No one can go there.” He giggled. “Actually, no one thinks they can go there, but you can.”

“What exactly is Pinnacle?”

And when she heard the answer, Neeley knew this was a much bigger problem than they’d thought.

Of course, problems come in threes, or at least twos. Rarely onesies.

Major Truman Preston could hear the First Family screaming at each other and could care less. What worried him was that the White House was in lockdown, the president seemed a bit off his rocker, and he couldn’t get an outside line on his Department of Defense–issue cell phone. He needed to check in with his supervisor at the Pentagon, but neither cell nor landlines were working.

So he sat on the second floor of the Residence, tucked away in a corner, a position he was more than used to, and held the football on his lap. Forty-five pounds of deadweight, with the emphasis on the
dead
. The surface of the case was dinged and battered and bruised from years of traveling. The damn case was older than he was. You’d think someone would have made the decision to swap the old thing out for a new case. Although the interior was updated with the latest electronics, never the outside.