Second Nature

Chapter 61

61 

Col. Jack Eberhard sat at mission control inside an E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control Systems aircraft. The four-engine jet circled high above the White Sands Missile Range, northwest of Alamogordo, New Mexico. Its fuselage bore the insignia of the Strategic Air Command: an armored fist clutching a zigzag thunderbolt as if it were God's own dagger. 

Twenty-thousand feet below, a modified Humvee plodded along a utility road toward a concrete-walled vertical shaft sunk six stories deep in the sand at Omega Site: ground zero. At the base of the shaft, a steel-reinforced concrete vault held a thermonuclear bomb. The fusion device was designed to unleash, for a split-second, the identical force that powered the sun. 

The Commander-in-Chief of the United States of America, and her senior intelligence, military and science advisors, had ordered today's mission to delete a dangerous glitch in a bioweapons research program. The dangerous glitch was a young woman named Gen. The delete key was the 50-megaton hydrogen bomb waiting for her in the vault under the desert. 

The soldiers performing the mission referred to the woman as "the package." Right now, the package was hard-frozen in liquid nitrogen inside an isolation capsule fitted into the cargo bay of the modified Heavy Humvee. 

At 0600 hours, the package was scheduled to arrive at the test site and immediately be transferred by freight elevator to the bottom of the shaft, Humvee and all. At 0640, the helicopter evacuation of all personnel from the blast area was to be completed and final checklists were to proceed toward detonation. At 0700, the concrete vault, the Humvee, the package, and all proximate matter-mineral, vegetable, and animal-were scheduled to be vaporized. 

If the package attempted a breakout during the trip to the bomb site, Eberhard would remote-detonate a W80 nuclear warhead-a 250-kiloton mistake-eraser-carried within the capsule inside the Humvee.  

If the warhead failed to explode, a B-2 Stealth bomber, cruising in the stratosphere above Eberhard's aircraft, carried a W80-tipped cruise missile, radar-locked on the Humvee, ready to launch from its weapons bay.  

And as final failsafe, a trailer-launched Pershing II guided missile with a 400-kiloton punch hunkered in the dunes at the base of Salinas Peak, also radar-locked on the slow-moving Humvee.  

To carry out their delivery mission successfully, the two soldiers in the Humvee did not need to know any details about their frozen cargo. They did not need to know about the remote-controlled hydrogen bomb they straddled, or the guided nuclear missles that tracked their progress. Therefore, they did not know. 

* * * 

Airman Mick Colburn drove a lone Army Humvee toward Omega Test Site, in the god-forsaken middle of nowhere. Lieutenant Roger Henderson rode beside him in the cab. Both men wore camouflaged BWCS biowarfare combat suits, designed for dealing with Level Four hot germs in a battlefield environment.  

A sliver of moon hung low in the west like the fallen petal of a night-blooming cactus. Clear, pink lacquer overlaid the brightening eastern sky. Free-tailed bats by the tens of thousands were flitting home to red sandstone caves in the Valley of Fires. 

A paltry trace of dew already had evaporated from the stunted junipers and mesquite that dotted the scrubland. By midday, the sun would broil the white gypsum dunes until the oven-hot air bent light into mirages of rippling lakes. 

Inside his rubber-lined airtight suit, Colburn sweated as if he were locked in a steambox. He shifted for the hundredth time, trying to find a more comfortable position, but the Humvee's seat was not contoured to fit a former Clemson All-Star tackle dressed in a bulky, inflated spacesuit. He felt like a manatee trying to gain an easeful perch on a bar stool.