Assault on Alpha Base Read Online Free PDF Page B

up demons and unseen gargoyles. Nuclear wasas inciting then as pig, the man, or the heat was in the sixties.
    If it was nuclear, it was bad. It must be destroyed.
    Myopic technocrats tried to push nucleardown the people’s throats. They surged past reason, circumvented rational thinking, all in the name of the almighty dollar.
    It didn’t take Vikki long to introduce Harding to NUFA.
    The arguments advanced by Nuclear Free America were compelling, but Harding did not quickly become a sympathetic listener. He argued he didn’t build bombs, he just did research with quarks, gluons, and other elementary particles. Researching basic physics was not the same as designing bombs, bombs that killed without prejudice, vaporizing babies as well as soldiers.
    But it set Harding thinking.
    The Livermore protest proved that he was sincere.
    The annual protests at the nuclear weapons laboratory made for an ideal setting. Situated forty miles from Berkeley, the nuclear bomb factory permeated death. The computer center—home of the monstrous behemoths with mysterious names like Cray and ETA—whipped up a frenzy among the NUFA idealists. Weapons physicists with nicknames like the “Montana Madman,” “Raunchy Rhoades,” “T-T,” and “Jimmy L.” were the purveyors of death. And Harding knew that without their computers to design the nukes, there would be no nuclear weapons.
    Harding became obsessed with the death factory; NUFA incited him to the breaking point.
    So three grenades, whipped high over the fence on East Avenue, put a temporary stop to the nuclear madness, completely destroying the computer center. And drove Vikki and Harding into the underground.
    There wasn’t a challenge to bring them to the surface—nothing important to make them appear. Until now.
    Until Alpha Base.
    Harding needed it. Vikki needed it more. And she was willing to put up with anything to see it through.
    She’d slept with Harding before the Livermore protest to help bring him around to NUFA’s ways. Offering her body to him didn’t make him change his mind, change his philosophy about nuclear weapons; but it provided the motivation for him to listen.
    She did it once—she could do it again.
    Vikki nodded absently and murmured to Harding, “Don’t worry—I’ll do what I have to do.”

Chapter 4
    Wednesday, 1 June, 1900 local
    Wendover AFB Command Post
    Major McGriffin looked over his empire. It wasn’t much, but it was impressive as all get-out.
    The darkened command post resembled a futuristic stage set. Red lights reflected off the brows of the men and women seriously going about their jobs. McGriffin leaned back in his chair and reached for his cup of decaffeinated coffee.
    One hour into the first day on the job, and the boredom was already driving him bananas. Adding to it, this Wendover assignment still irked him.
    As chief of the prestigious Standardization and Evaluation team at McChord Air Force Base outside of Tacoma, McGriffin was one of the “best of the best,” charged with scrutinizing the flying abilities of the other pilots. He made sure that a USAF pilot was for real: precise, exacting, and meticulous.
    But Military Personnel Command decried that pilots couldn’t compete, and wouldn’t get promoted, unless they did something other than flying. His orders soon followed: an assignment to Wendover on a “rated supplement” tour—an assignment designed to supplement his rated, or flying, status.
    Now he could compete with the other officers when it came time for promotions. And Wendover would have a rated officer to operate its command post.
    Never mind that the nation would not have the use of an experienced pilot flying the Air Force’s workhorse cargo plane. And never mind that the experience level of combat-trained pilots was at an all-time low. Major William McGriffin was doing something much more important in the air force’s mind: filling a slot that anyone could do.
    McGriffin darkly suspected that the people