Free The Ten Thousand by Harold Coyle Page A

to fire. “Yeah. Aim low. Got it.”
    While Pape and Ilvanich were preparing to engage, First Lieutenant Zack climbed out of a rear window of the guard shack, which was still being chewed up by 14.5mm bullets from the BTR , and low-crawled over to the entrance of the tunnel where the company’s 60mm mortar section was beginning to go into action. Excited and upset by the sudden attack, Zack urged the sergeant in charge of the mortar section to get a move on and start firing. The sergeant ignored Zack as he continued to direct the men manning the two 60mm mortars. Only when they were ready did the sergeant order his mortars to fire. With his right ear covered by the radio’s hand mike, and the index finger of his left hand stuck in his left ear, the sergeant listened for corrections from the 1st Platoon, shouting orders when he got them.
    When he heard the sergeant yell to his mortar crews that they were on target and to start pouring it on, Zack relaxed. Standing up, he brushed away the dirt and fragments of cinder block that covered his parka. There was nothing, he thought, that he needed to do at that moment. Turning, he looked down the long tunnel and wondered how his commander and the rest of the company were doing. He was about to begin walking down the tunnel to find out when the earth beneath his feet began to tremble. Believing that the Ukrainians were bringing up tanks, Zack turned away from the tunnel to walk away.
    He did not, however, get far, as the ground beneath him seemed to heave up. Not understanding what was happening, Zack turned back toward the tunnel opening and watched in horror as an immense, bright yellow fireball, propelled by a series of low-yield nuclear detonations, was forced up the elevator shaft, through the assembly chamber, and out the access tunnel straight at him.

CHAPTER 3
7 JANUARY

    The casual early-evening business-as-usual attitude that had dominated the operations center of the Air Force’s Space Command buried deep inside of Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs, was gone. It had evaporated the instant that data from the DSP East satellite and the Nuclear Detection System sounded the alert that a nuclear detonation had taken place in the Ukraine. If anyone in the facility that night had been able to detach themselves from their duties and step back and watch, they would have noted two things. First, they would have taken great pride in the manner in which the event was handled.
    The equipment and systems responded without a problem. Information came into the operations center from satellites, remote sensors, and subordinate units where it was electronically routed to the appropriate Air Force men and women of Space Command in timely manner. Staff officers, given that information, analyzed it, made their assessments, and passed those assessments on to their superiors, both inside the Mountain and around the world. Everything, equipment and people, responded as programmed. It would, in fact, have been difficult for the unattached observer to tell the difference between this event and numerous drills conducted if it were not for the oppressive silence.
    That silence, not obvious at first, spoke of the seriousness of the situation. For the first time since a bomb called “Fat Man” had been detonated above Nagasaki, a nuclear device had been set off in anger.
    Though initial information indicated that it had been only a small device, the size was immaterial. The nice clean surgical strike that the Pentagon briefers likened to the sure, precise prick of a rapier had turned into a radioactive bludgeon.
    From his observation booth, the commander of Space Command sat looking down at the legion of staff officers and airmen as they went about their tasks in almost complete silence. Even the atmosphere in the observation booth, where senior officers normally congregated and held lofty discussions on world strategy during drills and training exercises, was heavy with gloom and apprehension.