The Book of Truths Read Online Free PDF Page B

make sure he still had suit integrity.
    “Mac, get the door,” Moms ordered. “Everyone else, back up. Eagle, give us a rundown on how to get to silo seven once we’re inside.” With time running out, she made a command decision. “Suits off, people. We’re not going to need them based on the readings.”
    Mac ran up to the old metal doors and opened up his rucksack, taking out a charge and placing it over the lock as the rest of the team stripped off the bulky hazmats.
    “Back in the day,” Nada said, “I was on one of the last backpack nuke teams.”
    “You mean when Eisenhower was president?” Eagle asked as he circled the Snake overhead. The chain gun mounted in a compartment in the nose of the aircraft was extended.
    “SADM,” Nada continued as Mac jogged back toward the rest of the team, as best as one can jog in a hazmat suit, a remote detonator in his hand. “Strategic atomic demolition munitions,” Nada said. “I jumped with a live one on a training mission. That wasn’t fun. Heavy as shit.”
    “Fire in the hole,” Mac warned, and then hit the toggle.
    A brief flare of light and crack of explosion meant the doorway to the bunker was now unlocked. Eagle was relaying directions to them on how to proceed once they went inside.
    Moms moved to the front of the team. “I’m taking point with Nada.”
    Mac ripped off his hazmat suit.
    Moms walked forward. “I’ll lose satcom in there,” she said. “Kirk, make sure you keep an open relay between me, Ms. Jones, and Eagle from here in the doorway. And use your own pad to work on that code. There’s got to be a reason it’s piggybacked on the countdown.”
    “Roger that,” Kirk said.
    Roland grabbed the edge of the heavy door and pulled. “Nobody’s oiled this sucker in a while,” he said as he grunted with effort. With a screech of protesting hinges, the door opened wide enough to invite them into its darkness.
    There was an elevator directly in front crisscrossed with yellow warning tape, indicating it was nonfunctional. A set of stairs beckoned to the left. A dim glow seeped up from the depths of the LCC.
    “Seven minutes,” Eagle said over the net.
    Moms and Nada took point, a smoothly coordinated team, starting at the top of the stairs and clearing their way down. The countdown made them move faster than Protocol.
    Thus they almost ran on top of Clarence and Peggy Sue on the landing just above the LCC Control Room.
    “Who the fuck are you!” Clarence screamed, gesturing with the barrel of the AR-15 at Moms, his eyes wide with fear at the armed figures looming above him on the stairs.
    Protocol was Moms should double-tap him right between the eyes while Nada took out Peggy Sue.
    She broke Protocol by lowering her submachine gun, raising her hands in surrender, while still taking the last two steps and moving forward toward Clarence.
    “Hey! I said—”
    Before he got the next word out, Moms snatched the automatic weapon from Clarence’s hands, spun it around, andknocked him out with the stock. As Clarence crumpled to the steel grating, Moms turned to Peggy Sue. “Are you going to be a problem?”
    Peggy Sue dropped the shotgun and the Nightstalkers shoved past her and took the last flight of stairs into the LCC.
    “Six minutes,” Kirk relayed from above.
    Moms paused in the LCC, getting oriented to the verbal directions Eagle had given her. She pointed. “That hatch. Mac, you take point. Roland, behind him for muscle. Nada, you make sure the two idiots don’t do anything and relay commo into the tunnel from Kirk. I’ll be behind Roland. Doc, keep working on that second code.”
    They ran to the hatch and Roland grabbed the metal and tried to turn the handle. It resisted. Mac pulled a charge out of his pack, but didn’t have to use it as the wheel suddenly turned with a screech. Roland’s massive biceps bulged as he spun the protesting wheel, unlatching the hatch. It was slow going and Moms considered having Mac blast it, but