before. For the first time, he realized that there were actually two valleys down there, hidden by the high mountains, one sitting right next to the big air base. Inside this new place, Crunch spotted more military installations.
But they weren’t SAM emplacements or aircraft revetments or AA sites. Nor were there runways or hangars or fuel depots. Inside this valley next door were roadways that, from Crunch’s tremendous height, looked like dozens of figure-eights carved into the rugged, if flat, terrain. Inside these looping thoroughfares he saw hundreds of cylindrical objects, some long, some short, many apparently still inside packing crates and poorly camouflaged with netting and jungle flora. All of this was contained inside a miles-long extremely high fence.
Even for a veteran like Crunch, it took a few moments for him to realize exactly what he was looking at. The curly-Q roads, the large number of thin tubes, the crude attempts at camouflage—this was a weapons storage area he was looking down on. But it was not a typical one; it was one that seemed sinister by virtue of its rather elementary layout.
“Jeezus,” he breathed, “Can it be?”
Crunch desperately put his airplane into yet another orbit, now concentrating on the second hidden valley. Looking down through the dissipating mists and the moonless night, he switched on a device that had come already installed inside the Super Voodoo. It was an ACQ-167YV radiation threat detector, literally an aerial Geiger counter.
No sooner had he powered up this doodad when he heard a high-pitched series of staccato electrical bursts. The volume grew and grew until Crunch had to reach over and turn the amplification down and then finally off completely. Still his ears rang from the frightening sound for several seconds; it was echoing back and forth, up and down, as if it were bouncing around inside his skull and couldn’t get out.
Then he felt as if a giant hand had taken him by the chest and was beginning to squeeze him tightly. The ACQ-167YV had confirmed his worst fears. The weapons storage yard below was generating tremendously high amounts of low-yield radiation.
In other words, it was filled with nuclear weapons.
Crunch’s fuel bingo light popped on a second later, but he hardly noticed it. His heart was beating faster than he could ever remember. He was taking gulps of oxygen so deep, his eyes began to ache.
He suddenly felt as if he’d been transported back in time to the cockpit of a spy plane overflying Cuba more than forty years before—and finding just about the same thing below. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis had transformed the world, had brought it to the brink, and had run up the collective anxieties of just about everyone on the planet. Many wars had been fought since then, and more than once the earth had felt the nuclear glow.
But because they were so expensive and so hard to maintain, nukes were very rare these days—or at least, everyone thought they were. The UAAF had a stockpile of less than three dozen. The UA’s various enemies combined had fewer than that, or so the current intelligence said.
But right now, right below him, within about a square mile area, were at least forty nuclear warheads of all shapes and sizes, many more than he or anyone else in the UAAF thought still existed on earth.
The most frightening part was, all these nukes were just 90 miles from the American mainland.
Eleven
Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, UA Florida
I T WAS CALLED THE VAB.
The letters stood for “Vehicle Assembly Building,” but this did not come anywhere near to describing what the building actually looked like. Many people called it the VBFB—“Very Big Fucking Building”—and that was much closer to what it was: the largest freestanding one-room structure on the planet. Its front door was so monstrous, an entire space shuttle and its movable launch pad could fit through it with room to spare. It was by far the biggest
But they weren’t SAM emplacements or aircraft revetments or AA sites. Nor were there runways or hangars or fuel depots. Inside this valley next door were roadways that, from Crunch’s tremendous height, looked like dozens of figure-eights carved into the rugged, if flat, terrain. Inside these looping thoroughfares he saw hundreds of cylindrical objects, some long, some short, many apparently still inside packing crates and poorly camouflaged with netting and jungle flora. All of this was contained inside a miles-long extremely high fence.
Even for a veteran like Crunch, it took a few moments for him to realize exactly what he was looking at. The curly-Q roads, the large number of thin tubes, the crude attempts at camouflage—this was a weapons storage area he was looking down on. But it was not a typical one; it was one that seemed sinister by virtue of its rather elementary layout.
“Jeezus,” he breathed, “Can it be?”
Crunch desperately put his airplane into yet another orbit, now concentrating on the second hidden valley. Looking down through the dissipating mists and the moonless night, he switched on a device that had come already installed inside the Super Voodoo. It was an ACQ-167YV radiation threat detector, literally an aerial Geiger counter.
No sooner had he powered up this doodad when he heard a high-pitched series of staccato electrical bursts. The volume grew and grew until Crunch had to reach over and turn the amplification down and then finally off completely. Still his ears rang from the frightening sound for several seconds; it was echoing back and forth, up and down, as if it were bouncing around inside his skull and couldn’t get out.
Then he felt as if a giant hand had taken him by the chest and was beginning to squeeze him tightly. The ACQ-167YV had confirmed his worst fears. The weapons storage yard below was generating tremendously high amounts of low-yield radiation.
In other words, it was filled with nuclear weapons.
Crunch’s fuel bingo light popped on a second later, but he hardly noticed it. His heart was beating faster than he could ever remember. He was taking gulps of oxygen so deep, his eyes began to ache.
He suddenly felt as if he’d been transported back in time to the cockpit of a spy plane overflying Cuba more than forty years before—and finding just about the same thing below. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis had transformed the world, had brought it to the brink, and had run up the collective anxieties of just about everyone on the planet. Many wars had been fought since then, and more than once the earth had felt the nuclear glow.
But because they were so expensive and so hard to maintain, nukes were very rare these days—or at least, everyone thought they were. The UAAF had a stockpile of less than three dozen. The UA’s various enemies combined had fewer than that, or so the current intelligence said.
But right now, right below him, within about a square mile area, were at least forty nuclear warheads of all shapes and sizes, many more than he or anyone else in the UAAF thought still existed on earth.
The most frightening part was, all these nukes were just 90 miles from the American mainland.
Eleven
Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, UA Florida
I T WAS CALLED THE VAB.
The letters stood for “Vehicle Assembly Building,” but this did not come anywhere near to describing what the building actually looked like. Many people called it the VBFB—“Very Big Fucking Building”—and that was much closer to what it was: the largest freestanding one-room structure on the planet. Its front door was so monstrous, an entire space shuttle and its movable launch pad could fit through it with room to spare. It was by far the biggest
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