The Forge of God (35 page)

He dressed quickly, putting on climbing boots and pulling two hundred-foot lengths of nylon rope from a knapsack in the trailer's corner. Rope in hand, he looked down, brows knitted, at the small desk and telephone. Then he dropped the ropes on the bunk and sat in the chair to write a letter to his wife and son, in case he did not make it back. That took five minutes. He was still ahead of schedule, so he spent five more minutes carefully shaving, making sure every long bristle on his neck was scraped off: military clean. He brushed his teeth and combed his hair meticulously, glancing at the letter. Unhappy with the wording, he quickly recopied the message onto a fresh piece of paper, signed it, folded it into an envelope, and posted the envelope on his message board with address and instructions.

At four-thirty he descended the trailer steps and stood in the bitterly cold desert darkness, a steady wind dragging at his coat and pants legs. At the east end of the camp was Senator Julio Gilmonn's car, in a fenced-off square reserved for the munitions locker. Gilmonn himself stood with two aides, a handsome, stern—looking middle-aged black woman and a young white male, bulky and clean-cut, near the inner gate leading to the rock.

"Good morning," Rogers said as he approached. Gilmonn extinguished a cigarette after taking one last frowning, concentrated drag and shook Rogers's hand.

"There are still a few Forgers out there," the senator said, pointing to the outer-perimeter fence. "Have you made any plans for clearing them?"

Rogers nodded. "In fifteen minutes we'll set off a siren and announce an emergency situation. Nothing specific. Then we'll evacuate the camp through the corridor. If the Forgers haven't cleared out by then…" He shrugged. "The hell with them."

"That could alert the… bogey," the young aide said.

Rogers acknowledged that possibility. "It hasn't done anything for months that we know of," he said. "We'll just take the risk. There are about a thousand people out there now."

The woman regarded Rogers with an expression between severe doubt and motherly concern, but said nothing.

"Who else is involved?" Gilmonn asked.

"I'm having two of my staff officers help me carry the weapon to the entry. They'll evacuate at that point. And there's your expert, of course. Where is he?"

Gilmonn pointed to a figure walking through a spot lighted area a few dozen yards away. "He's coming now."

The "expert" was a young naval lieutenant, lean and of middle height, with thin, precise eyebrows and short-cut tight brown hair, dressed in civvies and carrying a large bag and a briefcase. He greeted the others quietly and asked to be taken to the weapon. Gilmonn opened the gate with the key Rogers had entrusted to him, and then lifted the trunk lid. Within was an orange-striped silver cylinder about a foot and a half wide and two feet long, lying in an aluminum cradle. The radiation-warning trefoil was prominently featured at three points on the cylinder.

"We don't have a presidential authorization code," the lieutenant explained matter-of-factly. "So I've had to take an unarmed, stockpiled missile warhead and remove the PAL—the permissive action link, the code box. This causes a fatal mechanical failure in the detonator and proximity fuse-fatal to the mechanism, not to me. So I've had to engineer my own time fuse and detonator and match them with the warhead. With higher authorization, I've taken a Navy plane wave generator and klystron and the necessary black boxes and cobbled them together. I can guarantee that it will work." He smiled almost apologetically and turned to Rogers. "Sir, you will be able to deactivate this weapon, should you encounter something unexpected, right up to the last second before it goes off. So pay close attention."

Rogers listened carefully as the lieutenant removed a cover plate from one end of the cylinder and explained the procedure. He then explained it all over again, cheeking Rogers's face at each crucial point to make sure he understood. "Got that, sir?" the lieutenant asked.

"Yes," Rogers said.

"I apologize we couldn't find a backpack nuke—a SADM—for you, sir," the lieutenant said. "But they've been out of stock for about twenty years. They've all been scrapped or dumped. This only weighs about a third again as much as a SADM-special atomics demolition munition," he explained for the benefit of the senator's aides. "But you should be able to haul it up with no difficulty if the shaft is as smooth as you've said. Then push and pull it for the next leg, and when you can stand, haul it into position using your backpack. You seem to be in good shape, sir, and you should be able to complete the mission…" The lieutenant shook his head. "Sorry. I don't mean to tell you your business, sir."

"No problem," Rogers said.

"Just one question. Nobody back home was able to answer something for me. How strong is this bogey, internally?"

"We don't know," Rogers said.

"Strong enough, possibly, to have survived a descent from orbit," Gilmonn said.

"If it offers even token resistance to the weapon, then I can't estimate the effect on the surrounding countryside," the lieutenant said. "Unless it stays integral, which I really doubt, there's going to be hot rock and shrapnel all over this valley. I don't know how far away you'll have to be, sir."

"I'll have a Jeep," Rogers said.

"Drive like hell," the lieutenant recommended. "And another thing. What sort of drive mechanism might it have?"

Rogers shook his head. "There's no outlets, no nozzles or… Nothing we've seen."

"If there is a drive mechanism—which seems logical, if we think of it as a spaceship—then the explosion could set it off."

Rogers took a deep breath. "I've thought about that," he said.

"We've detected no radiation in or around the bogey," Gilmonn said. "If there's any drive mechanism, I doubt very much they use rocket fuel."

"Yeah, but what
do
they use?" the lieutenant asked.

"Everything we do here involves some risk," Gilmonn said. "And if they think we can be bamboozled by our own imaginations… How much stronger does that make them? What has that kind of thinking done to us already?"

The sirens began to wail, echoing back from the mountains, painful and terrifying. Loudspeakers around the perimeter announced:

"This is an emergency. This is an emergency. Evacuate all personnel immediately."
The message repeated, louder than the sirens, until Rogers felt he might jump out of his skin. Around the site, car horns began to honk. Headlights flashed like the eyes of wary animals. Gilmonn held his hands to his ears. "Are we going ahead, or are we going to stand here and waffle?"

Rogers nodded. "We're on."

The lieutenant reached into the bag and pulled out a white jacket with a crotch strap. "Residual radiation protection, sir. Put this on now," he shouted over the din. He pulled out another and donned it himself, connecting the crotch flap to a loop on the back.

The jacket weighed perhaps twenty pounds and seemed reasonably flexible, with overlapping sheets of leaded plastic sewn into its fabric.

"You do me, and I'll do you." Rogers helped secure the straps and the lieutenant reciprocated.

"Let's go, sir," the lieutenant said. Together, they lifted the weapon from its cradle in the car's trunk onto a hand truck. It weighed at least sixty-five pounds, perhaps seventy. "No need to be delicate, sir. It's made to withstand missile launch and ocean impact. We'd have to take a sledgehammer to it to do any damage."

Rogers opened the inner perimeter gate and they pulled the hand truck a hundred yards across the pounded sand and gravel trail to the entry hole.

The lieutenant lifted the cylinder from its cradle by himself and lowered it on one end into the sand. The sirens continued to scream and the loudspeakers repeated the evacuation order, over and over, painfully monotonous.

The first suffusion of dawn outlined the Greenwater Range in ghostly purple. Bouncing headlight beams still cut through the air around the site, but fewer in number now.

"Looks like they're moving out," Gilmonn said.

"Time for the camp to evacuate," Rogers said. "I'll need the lieutenant and one other, that's it."

"I'm staying until you're in the tunnel and the arrow's up there with you," Gilmonn said.

"We call it a 'monkey' now, sir, not an arrow," the lieutenant corrected him.

"Whatever the hell," Gilmonn said.

"Monkey on my back," Rogers said.

The lieutenant pulled an inch-thick Teflon sheet from the weapon's accessory kit and wrapped it tightly around the cylinder, belting it with three straps and a clasp. The top and bottom of the sheet projected over the ends of the cylinder, blunting any sharp edges that might hang up inside the tunnel. He then attached two ropes to sunken eyebolts in the upper end, on each side of the cover plate. "All set, sir?"

Rogers nodded. "Let's go."

The lieutenant removed the cover plate and set the timer. "You have forty minutes, sir, from the time I flip this switch. We'll stay down here for fifteen minutes. You'll have your Jeep to drive clear after we leave."

"Understood," Rogers said.

He climbed into the hole, paying out the ropes from loops in his belt, and scrambled to the first bend, then braced himself there. "Bring it up," he said. The lieutenant flipped the switch, closed the plate, and hefted the weapon up into the hole. Rogers pulled it up the length of the first segment of the tube, hand over hand on the rope.

He then called down to the lieutenant and Gilmonn. "Around the first bend," he said. "I'm climbing the vertical shaft."

"Thirty-five minutes, Colonel," the lieutenant replied.

Rogers glanced up the shaft and held his rasping breath momentarily, trying to hear something. Surely the bogey wouldn't just let him haul the weapon in, without some resistance?

He coiled the ropes and secured them to his belt, then suspended the monkey on a rope secured to a stake he hammered into the lava. He climbed the chimney as he had before, bracing back against one side and feet against the other, inching his way. That took an additional five minutes. Twelve minutes had passed and he was tiring, but not yet winded.

Crouching in the low, almost horizontal tunnel, he jerked free the slipknot attaching the monkey to the stake, and began to haul it up the chimney as fast as he could. The cylinder weighed at least seventy pounds and the effort made his arm muscles knot.

With the cylinder almost over the edge, he heard Gilmonn's voice echoing from below.

"How are you doing, Colonel?"

"Almost there," he answered. His arms were twin agonies. The radiation jacket chafed and was becoming a major irritation.

"We're going now."

"You have twenty-five minutes," the lieutenant added.

"Gotcha."

He switched on the electric torch, placed the warhead perpendicular to the tunnel, and rolled it ninety feet to the lip of the antechamber. Resting his arms for only a moment, he scrambled over the weapon, detached the ropes, then lifted it and waddled ducklike to deposit it in the center of the cylindrical space. He placed it on its end and opened the cover plate to see that the timer was still working. It was. He closed the cover plate.

As he shined the torch at the larger chamber beyond, a grin flickered on his lips. The impassive gray faceting reflected the beam back in a myriad of dull gleams. "Here's thanks for you," he murmured.

Twenty minutes. He could be down the tunnel and two miles away. He pulled a knife from his trouser pocket and sliced away the crotch strap on the jacket, then shrugged it off and flung it aside. He slid along the horizontal tunnel, ignoring the heat of the friction on his elbows and butt, and stopped long enough to take a deep breath and prepare to shinny down the chimney. Instinctively wary of heading into even the most familiar darkness, he played his torch beam down.

Three yards below, the beam met a dead end.

Rogers stared at the blockage in disbelief.

It might have been there through all eternity, a flat plug as dark and featureless as the walls of the chimney itself.

"Holy Christ," he said.

Eighteen minutes.

He was out of the horizontal tunnel and beside the bomb before he could even think. With amazing dexterity, he had the cover plate open and his finger on the cutoff switch. And then he froze, his face wet with sweat, salty drops stinging his eyes.

No way out. Even if he stopped the timer on the monkey, he could not think of any way he could escape. A dozen unlikely possibilities lined themselves up in panicky parade. Perhaps another opening had been made elsewhere. Perhaps the bogey was coming alive, finally, even preparing to lift off.

Perhaps a bargain was being struck.

Deactivate the bomb, and we'll let you go.

He backed away from the cylinder, his torch swinging back and forth on the floor nearby.
Why did it close up? Has it been active all along, watching us, guessing everything we'd do?

He propped himself against the curve of the antechamber near the horizontal tunnel. Sixteen minutes.

In five or six minutes, it probably wouldn't matter whether he got out or not. He wouldn't be far enough away from the bogey to survive the hail of shrapnel. He could not conceive of any vessel, even the size of a small mountain, withstanding an internal blast of three kilotons.

Rogers shook his head slowly, trying to concentrate, keep his mind from wandering. He could turn off the weapon and see if the way was opened again.
Tit for tat. Scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Sorry, it was all a big misunderstanding.

Kneeling beside the monkey, he again reached out for the switch.

You know, this is the first time we've actually gotten a reaction.

He thought that over, biting his lower lip, fingers tensing and relaxing over the switch.

"Maybe you feel threatened," he said aloud. "Maybe for the first time we're getting through to you."

Somehow, that wasn't convincing.

He could not bring himself to flip the switch. He would not be able to reset the timer if he shut the weapon off; the lieutenant had not shown him how to do that.