Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon
Sergeant Becker whooped and smacked a fist into the palm of his open hand. “Wipe Ivan off the map!” he shouted. Behind him, Captain Warner smoked a cork-tipped cheroot and impassively watched the radar screen through his good eye. A couple of other uniformed technicians monitored the perimeter radar. Across the room, Sergeant Schorr was slumped in a chair, his eyes glassy and unbelieving, and every once in a while his tortured gaze crept toward the main radar screen and then quickly moved back to a spot on the opposite wall.
Colonel Macklin stood over Lombard’s right shoulder, his arms crossed over his chest and his attention fixed on the green blips that had been moving across the screen for the last forty minutes. It was easy to tell which were Russian missiles, because they were heading southeast, on trajectories that would take them hurtling into the midwestern air force bases and ICBM fields. The American missiles were speeding northwest, toward deadly rendezvous with Moscow, Magadan, Tomsk, Karaganda, Vladivostok, Gorky and a hundred other target cities and missile bases. Corporal Prados had his earphones on, monitoring the weak signals that were still coming in from shortwave operators across the country. “Signal from San Francisco just went off the air,” he said. “Last word was from KXCA in Sausalito. Something about a fireball and blue lightning—the rest was garbled.”
“Seven bogies at eleven o’clock,” Lombard said. “Twelve thousand feet. Heading southeast.”
Seven more, Macklin thought. My God! That brought to sixty-eight the number of “incoming mail” picked up by Blue Dome’s radar—and God only knew how many hundreds, possibly thousands, had streaked over out of radar range. From the panicked reports of shortwave radio operators, American cities were being incinerated in a full-scale nuclear assault. But Macklin had counted forty-four pieces of “outgoing mail” headed for Russia, and he knew that thousands of ICBMs, Cruise missiles, B-l bombers and submarine-based nuclear weapons were being used against the Soviet Union. It didn’t matter who’d started it; all the talking was over. It only mattered now who was strong enough to withstand the atomic punches the longest.
Earth House had been ordered sealed when Macklin saw the first blips of Soviet missiles on the radar screen. The perimeter guards had been brought in, the rock doorway lowered and locked in place, the system of louver-like baffles activated in the ventilation ducts to prevent entry of radioactive dust. There was one thing that remained to be done: Tell the civilians inside Earth House that World War III had started, that their homes and relatives had possibly been vaporized already, that everything they’d known and loved might well be gone in the flash of a fireball. Macklin had rehearsed it in his mind many times before; he would call the civilians together in the Town Hall, and he would calmly explain to them what was happening. They would understand that they would have to stay here, inside Blue Dome Mountain, and they could never go home again. Then he would teach them discipline and control, mold hard shells of armor over those soft, sluggish civilian bodies, teach them to think like warriors. And from this impregnable fortress they would hold off the Soviet invaders to the last breath and drop of blood, because he loved the United States of America and no man would ever make him kneel and beg.
“Colonel?” One of the young technicians looked up from his perimeter radar screen. “I’ve got a vehicle approaching. Looks like an RV, coming up the mountain pretty damned fast.”
Macklin stepped over to watch the blip approaching up the mountain road. The RV was going so fast its driver was in danger of slinging it right off Blue Dome.
It was still within Macklin’s power to open the front doorway and bring the RV inside by using a code that would override the computerized locking system. He imagined a frantic family inside that vehicle, perhaps a family from Idaho Falls, or from one of the smaller communities at the base of the mountain. Human lives, Macklin thought, struggling to avoid decimation. He looked at the telephone. Punching in his ID number and speaking the code into the receiver would make the security computer abort the lock and raise the doorway. By doing so, he would save those people’s lives.
He reached toward the telephone.
But something stirred within him—a heavy, dark, unseen thing shifting as if from the bottom of a primeval swamp.
Sssstop! The Shadow Soldier’s whisper was like the hiss of a fuse on dynamite. Think of the food! More mouths, less food!
Macklin hesitated, his fingers inches from the phone.
More mouths, less food! Discipline and control! Shape up, mister!
“I’ve got to let them in,” Macklin heard himself say, and the other men in the control room stared at him.
Don’t backtalk me, mister! More mouths, less food! And you know all about what happens when a man’s hungry, don’t you?
“Yes,” Macklin whispered.
“Sir?” the radar technician asked.
“Discipline and control,” Macklin replied, in a slurred voice.
“Colonel?” Warner gripped Macklin’s shoulder.
Macklin jerked, as if startled from a nightmare. He looked around at the others, then at the telephone again, and slowly lowered his hand. For a second he’d been down in the pit again, down in the mud and shit and darkness, but now he was okay. He knew where he was now. Sure. Discipline and control did the trick. Macklin shrugged free of Captain Warner and regarded the blip on the perimeter radar screen through narrowed eyes. “No,” he said. “No. They’re too late. Way too late. Earth House stays sealed.” And he felt damned proud of himself for making the manly decision. There were over three hundred people in Earth House, not including the officers and technicians. More mouths, less food. He was sure he’d done the right thing.
“Colonel Macklin!” Lombard called; his voice cracked. “Look at this!”
At once, Macklin stood beside him, peering into the screen. He saw a group of four bogies streaking within radar range—but one seemed slower than the others, and as it faltered the faster three vanished over Blue Dome Mountain. “What’s going on?”
“That bogie’s at twenty-two thousand four,” Lombard said. “A few seconds ago, it was at twenty-five. I think it’s falling.”
“It can’t be falling! There aren’t any military targets within a hundred miles!” Sergeant Becker snapped, pushing forward to see.
“Check again,” Macklin told Lombard, in the calmest voice he could summon.
The radar arm swept around with agonizing slowness. “Twenty thousand two, sir. Could be malfunctioned. The bastard’s coming down!”
“Shit! Get me an impact point!”
A plastic-coated map of the area around Blue Dome Mountain was unfolded, and Lombard went to work with his compass and protractor, figuring and refiguring angles and speeds. His hands were trembling, and he had to start over more than once. Finally, he said, “It’s going to pass over Blue Dome, sir, but I don’t know what the turbulence is doing up there. I’ve got it impacting right here,” and he tapped his finger at a point roughly ten miles west of Little Lost River. He checked the screen again. “It’s just coming through eighteen thousand, sir. It’s falling like a broken arrow.”
Captain “Teddybear” Warner grunted. “There’s Ivan’s technology for you,” he said. “All fucked up.”
“No, sir.” Lombard swiveled around in his chair. “It’s not Russian. It’s one of ours.”
There was an electric silence in the room. Colonel Macklin broke it by expelling the air in his lungs. “Lombard, what the hell are you saying?”
“It’s a friendly,” he repeated. “It was moving northwest before it went out of control. From the size and speed, I’d guess it’s a Minuteman III, maybe a Mark 12 or 12A.”
“Oh ... Jesus,” Ray Becker whispered, his ruddy face gone ashen.
Macklin stared at the radar screen. The runaway blip seemed to be getting larger. His insides felt bound by iron bands, and he knew what would happen if a Minuteman III Mark 12A hit anywhere within fifty miles of Blue Dome Mountain; the Mark 12As carried three 335-kiloton nuclear warheads—enou
“Falling through sixteen thousand, Colonel.”
Five thousand feet above Blue Dome Mountain. He could feel the other men watching him, waiting to see if he was made of iron or clay. There was nothing he could do now, except pray that the missile fell far beyond Little Lost River. A bitter smile crept across his mouth. His heart was racing, but his mind was steady. Discipline and control, he thought. Those were the things that made a man.
Earth House had been constructed here because there were no nearby Soviet targets, and all the government charts showed the movement of radioactive winds would be to the south. He’d never dreamed in his wildest scenarios that Earth House would be hit by an American weapon. Not fair! he thought, and he almost giggled. Oh no, not fair at all!
“Thirteen thousand three,” Lombard said, his voice strained. He hurriedly did another calculation on the map, but he didn’t say what he found and Macklin didn’t ask him. Macklin knew they were going to take one hell of a jolt, and he was thinking of the cracks in the ceilings and walls of Earth House, those cracks and weak, rotted areas that the sonofabitching Ausley brothers should have taken care of before they opened this dungeon. But now it was too late, much too late. Macklin stared at the screen through slitted eyes and hoped that the Ausley brothers had heard their skin frying before they died.
“Twelve thousand two, Colonel.”
Schorr let out a panicked whimper and drew his knees up to his chest; he peered into empty air like a man seeing the time, place and circumstances of his own death in a crystal ball.
“Shit,” Warner said softly. He drew once more on his cigar and crushed it out in an ashtray. “I guess we’d better get comfortable, huh? Poor bastards upstairs are gonna be thrown around like rag dolls.” He squeezed himself into a corner, bracing against the floor with his hands and feet.
Corporal Prados took off his earphones and braced himself against the wall, beads of sweat glistening on his cheeks. Becker stood beside Macklin, who watched the approaching blip on Lombard’s radar screen and counted the seconds to impact.
“Eleven thousand two.” Lombard’s shoulders hunched up. “It’s cleared Blue Dome! Passing to the northwest! I think it’s going to make the river! Go, you bastard, go!”
“Go,” Becker breathed.
“Go,” Prados said, and he squeezed his eyes shut. “Go. Go.”
The blip had vanished from the screen. “We’ve lost it, Colonel! It’s gone below radar range!”
Macklin nodded. But the missile was still falling toward the forest along Little Lost River, and Macklin was still counting.
All of them heard a humming like a distant, huge swarm of hornets.
Then silence.
Macklin said, “It’s dow—”
And in the next second the radar screen exploded with light, the men around it crying out and shielding their eyes. Macklin was momentarily blinded by the dazzle, and he knew the sky radar atop Blue Dome had just been incinerated. The other radar screens brightened like green suns and shorted out as they picked up the flash. The noise of hornets was in the room, and blue sparks spat from the control boards as the wiring blew. “Hang on!” Macklin shouted. The floor and walls shook, a jigsaw of cracks running across the ceiling. Rock dust and pebbles fell into the room, the larger stones rattling down on the control boards like hailstones. The floor heaved violently enough to drop both Macklin and Becker to their knees. Lights flickered and went out, but within seconds the emergency lighting system had switched on and the illumination—harsher, brighter, throwing deeper shadows than before— came back.
There was one last weak tremor and another rain of dust and stones, and then the floor was still.
Macklin’s hair was white with dust, his face gritty and scratched. But the air-filtration system was throbbing, already drawing the dust into the wall vents. “Everybody okay?” he shouted, trying to focus past the green dazzle that remained on his eyeballs. He heard the sound of coughing and someone—Schorr, he thought it must be—sobbing. “Is everybody okay?”
He got a reply back from all but Schorr and one of the technicians. “It’s over!” he said. “We made it! We’re okay!” He knew that there would be broken bones, concussions and cases of shock among the civilians on the upper level, and they were probably panicked right now, but the lights were on and the filtration system was pumping and Earth House hadn’t blown apart like a house of cards in a high wind. It’s over! We made it! Still blinking to see past the green haze, he struggled to his feet. A short, hollow bark of a laugh escaped between his clenched teeth—and then the laughter bubbled up from his throat, and he was laughing louder and louder because he was alive and his fortress was still standing. His blood was hot and singing again like it had been in the steamy jungles and parched plains of foreign battlefields; on those fields of fire, the enemy wore a devil’s face and did not hide behind the mask of Air Force psychiatrists, bill collectors, scheming ex-wives and cheating business partners. He was Colonel Jimbo Macklin, and he walked like a tiger, lean and mean, with the Shadow Soldier at his side.
He had once again beaten death and dishonor. He grinned, his lips white with grit.
But then there was a sound like cloth being ripped between cruel hands. Colonel Macklin’s laughter stopped.
He rubbed his eyes, straining through the green glare, and was able at last to see where that noise was coming from.
The wall before him had fractured into thousands of tiny interconnected cracks. But at the top of it, where the wall met the ceiling, a massive crack was moving in fits and leaps, zigzagging as it went, and rivulets of dark, evil-smelling water streamed down the wall like blood from a monstrous wound. The ripping sound doubled and tripled; he looked at his feet, made out a second huge crack crawling across the floor. A third crack snaked across the opposite wall.
He heard Becker shout something, but the voice was garbled and in slow motion, as if heard in a nightmare. Chunks of stone fell from above, ripping the ceiling tile loose, and more streams of water splattered down. Macklin smelled the sickening odor of sewage, and as the water dripped all over him he realized the truth: that somewhere in the network of pipes the sewage system had exploded—perhaps weeks ago, or months—and the backed-up sludge had collected not only above the first level, but between Levels One and Two as well, further eroding the unsteady, overstressed rock that held the warren of Earth House together.
The floor pitched at an angle that threw Macklin off balance. Plates of rock rubbed together with the noise of grinding jaws, and as the zigzagging cracks connected a torrent of foul water and rock cascaded from the ceiling. Macklin fell over Becker and hit the floor; he heard Becker scream, and as he twisted around he saw Ray Becker fall through a jagged crevice that had opened in the floor. Becker’s fingers grasped the edge, and then the two sides of the crevice slammed shut again and Macklin watched in horror as the man’s fingers exploded like overstuffed sausages.
The entire room was in violent motion, like a chamber in a bizarre carnival funhouse. Pieces of the floor collapsed, leaving gaping craters that fell into darkness. Schorr screamed and leaped toward the door, jumping a hole that opened in his path, and as the man burst out into the corridor Macklin saw that the corridor walls were veined with deep fissures as well. Huge slabs of rock were crashing down. Schorr disappeared into whirling dust, his scream trailing behind him. The corridor shook and pitched, the floor heaving up and down as if the iron reinforcing rods had turned to rubber. And all around, through the walls and the floor and ceiling, there was a pounding like a mad blacksmith beating on an anvil, coupled with the grinding of rock and the sound of reinforcing rods snapping like off-key guitar notes. Over the cacophony, a chorus of screams swelled and
Filthy water showered down on him. A storm of dust and rubble crashed into the corridor, and with it was something that might have been a mangled human body; the debris blocked the control room’s doorway. Someone—Warner, he thought—had his arm and was trying to pull him to his feet. He heard Lombard howling like a hurt dog. Discipline and control! he thought. Discipline and control!.
The lights went out. The air vents exhaled a gasp of death. And an instant afterward, the floor beneath Macklin collapsed. He fell, and he heard himself screaming. His shoulder hit an outcrop of rock, and then he struck bottom with a force that knocked the breath out of him and stopped his scream.
In utter darkness, the corridors and rooms of Earth House were caving in, one after the other. Bodies were trapped and mangled between pincers of grinding rock. Slabs of stone fell from above, crashing through the weakened floors. Sludge streamed knee-deep in the sections of Earth House that still held together, and in the darkness people crushed each other to death fighting for a way out. The screams, shrieks and cries for God merged into a hellish voice of pandemonium, and still the shock waves continued to batter Blue Dome Mountain as it caved in on itself, destroying the impregnable fortress carved in its guts.
11
1:18 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time
ABOARD AIRBORNE COMMAND
THE PRESIDENT OF THE United States, his eyes sunken into purple craters in his ashen face, looked to his right out the oval Plexiglas window and saw a turbulent sea of black clouds beneath the Boeing E-4B. Yellow and orange flashes of light shimmered thirty-five thousand feet below, and the clouds boiled up in monstrous thunderheads. The aircraft shook, was sucked downward a thousand feet and then, its four turbofan engines screaming, battled for altitude again. The sky had turned the color of mud, the sun blocked by the massive, swirling clouds. And in those clouds, tossed upward thirty thousand feet from the surface of the earth, was the debris of civilization: burning trees, entire houses, sections of buildings, pieces of bridges and highways and railroad tracks glowing incandescent red. The objects boiled up like rotting vegetation stirred from the bottom of a black pond and then were sucked downward again, to be replaced by a new wave of humanity’s junk.