The old UH-1 Huey came in close over the officer’s neighborhood at the base of Cheyenne Mountain. General Eugene Lunde gripped the straps of his safety harness. Cold winds intruded through the open cabin door. The homes below were dark the same as the rest of the Springs. The nuclear glow in the sky had begun to fade, surrendering to overcast clouds. The battlefield detonations from the plains asserted themselves even over the howl of the helicopter’s turboshaft engine. The other senior officers who had overseen Colorado’s defense from Peterson all sat across from him. They were loyal to the Committee, not the Directorate, not even to the mission of rebuilding the country. Even Alan Harrison, who Hank had chosen as their successor, had turned into a figurehead taking orders from Agent Ellzey. Strange that General John Martin, sitting quietly beside him, was the one person in the aircraft he trusted.

They crested the base of the mountain, bypassing the empty helipad and continuing up along the sidewinder road leading to the main portal. As they came in for a landing at the upper parking lot, he saw a crowd huddled near the checkpoint. He and the other passengers unstrapped themselves as soon as the helicopter touched the pavement. The pilot powered down the engine, and the turbine howl lessened as the rotor slowed and the downwash gave way to the mountain breeze. Lunde hopped out of the helicopter. The officers followed, ignoring Martin and departing quickly. Lunde offered Martin his hand as the general stood and came to the cabin door.

“Thank you. I’m all right.” Martin managed to climb awkwardly out of the helicopter.

The crowd approached. A few carried flashlights. One of the beams shined into Lunde’s face and then pointed to the ground. “General!” The voice was familiar but he could not immediately place it. Then Tech Sergeant Raymond Paul resolved from the shadows, stopped in front of Lunde, and saluted.

“What’s going on?” Lunde said. “Why are all of these people outside?” The other officers from Peterson and some of the personnel from the crowd gathered close to listen.

Paul looked uncertainly at Martin.

“It’s fine,” Lunde said. “Tell me what happened.”

Paul nodded slowly. “Everything shut down. Systems are gone. We’re locked out.”

“I was told this facility was safe from the EMP.”

“It’s not the EMP. We still have power.”

“Where’s General Harrison?”

“Still inside, sir.”

“Did he order an evacuation?”

“No, sir, but everything’s down. Lights, air conditioning, ventilation.”

“You said the power is running.”

“Right. There’s nothing wrong with the generators or the electrical system. I checked myself. It’s like… someone just turned everything off and broke the switch.”

“When did it happen?”

“After the detonation. The last thing we heard in the control room was a report the Valkyrie was taking off from Peterson.”

“General Harrison didn’t order it?”

“No, sir.”

“I need to get through to the crew. Is there anything you can do?”

“My laptop’s in the control room. It has some power but I’m cut off from everything. I don’t have access. Neither does General Harrison.”

“Take me there.”

“Yes, sir.”

Paul turned and pushed his way through the crowd. Lunde and Martin started to follow. Then Lunde heard Colonel Dawes say, “What do we do?”

Lunde hesitated. He saw the frightened looks. They all knew there was nowhere to go. They all stood trapped between the New England Alliance and the Rocky Mountains, and if the Valkyrie reached the East Coast and launched its payload, not even the operations facility would protect them against the NEA’s wrath. He thought of Alex. He wished he had ordered her onto the helicopter. They could have flown somewhere safe, to the outskirts of the Directorate as far north or west as the tiny outposts in Alaska and Hawaii. He remembered the last thing Hank had said to him: Gene. Make sure… you keep her safe. Don’t… Don’t let them find out. But he had sent Alex into Kansas City, had let her fall into the hands of the Committee and then the NEA. Now she was putting herself in danger to try to end the mess that was ultimately their responsibility.

To Lunde’s surprise, Martin spoke up in a quiet and sincere voice, “I suggest all of you pray.”

A few people in the crowd murmured to one another, but most remained silent. Martin limped off after Paul. The crowd made way for them, leaving Lunde standing alone in the center. He knew he should say something. He was Hank’s face, his voice – or had been. It was his job to improve morale and to moderate Bedford’s often-volatile moods. He knew the names of every person here. He spoke to them daily, worked with them through the long shifts late into the night. He attended their marriages, was there for the births of their children, and even stood and spoke at Little Arlington following the deaths of their loved ones. Now, he could think of nothing to say; Martin had said it all. Lunde departed, trying not to look into the eyes of the crowd, the eyes he knew were watching his every step and movement. When he emerged from the gauntlet, he hurried to catch up to Martin and Paul.

Paul twisted the tail cap of his flashlight and shined the beam through the entrance portal into the tunnel. “Bit of a walk.”

“Will you be able to make it, John?” Lunde said.

“I don’t have a choice,” Martin said.

They entered the portal with Paul in the lead moving at a brisk pace. Somehow, Martin kept up with them. The only sounds in the otherwise empty tunnel were the metallic thuds of Martin’s brace and his heavy breathing. Soon, they came to the blast door, which stood open with only darkness beyond. Lunde had often thought that after so many years of working in the complex, he could navigate its tunnels and corridors blindfolded. He was no longer so sure. Martin went through the door without stopping. Paul glanced at Lunde, shrugged, and followed.

The cold air soon turned hot and stagnant. The facility was like a tomb. He tried not to think about what would happen if the blast doors closed and locked. They would never be able to open them again. They would never be able to escape. He shook away the notion and focused on the beam from Paul’s flashlight.

Lunde stopped when they arrived at an intersection of corridors that led in one direction to the command center and the other to the medical facility. He realized he had not seen Hank or his hospital bed outside. “Did anyone evacuate General Bedford?” he asked Paul.

“Sir,” Paul began hesitantly, “we evacuated him before the EMP.”

“What?”

“General Harrison’s order. An Osprey came and picked him up. I saw Agent Ellzey leaving the facility with him.”

“Where did they take him?” Martin said.

Paul glanced at Lunde, who nodded. “Hard to say. They were on our radar for a while going south. They didn’t file a flight plan.”

“What color was the aircraft?” Lunde said.

“Black,” Paul said.

Lunde clenched his hand into a fist. He almost struck the steel wall. He looked back into the darkness. The Huey was still out there. If he left now and… But no, even if he knew the Osprey’s destination, he could never catch up in the old Huey.

“What is it?” Martin said. “What’s happened to Hank?”

“The Committee,” Lunde said quietly, more to himself than to Martin. “There’s nothing to do about it for now. Let’s go.”

They heard General Harrison’s voice long before they arrived at the operations center. The words were indistinct at first, then louder as they approached the open door. He was cursing loudly, and every few seconds there was a metallic crash as if he were throwing some piece of equipment against a wall or to the floor.

“Damn it!” Harrison shouted as the three of them entered the room. The computer terminal monitors and the massive displays that usually portrayed satellite images and situation maps of the country were dark. An electric lantern sat on a desk near Harrison. He stood over a keyboard and stared at one of the blank monitors. He slammed his fist into a keyboard. The keyboard flipped into the air as several of the keys broke loose and bounced off into the shadows. “Those bastards!”

“Alan,” Lunde said.

Harrison spun to face them. “Gene. What are you doing here? Why aren’t you at Peterson? And…” His voice trailed off as he looked at Martin. “Who is that?”

“This is General Martin. He came here with Alexandra.”

Harrison squinted. “She’s here? Where?”

“She’s out doing what we should have done from the start. She’s trying to put an end to this fight.”

“Why are you here? Why is he?”

“I’m here to stop the Valkyrie.”

Harrison stared at Martin. Lunde expected an outburst. Instead, Harrison only shook his head and then looked down at the broken keyboard. “It’s useless. I’ve tried. The system is down. They shut us out.”

“Who?” Lunde said.

“Who the hell do you think? The Committee. They planned this from the start – all those renovations to our systems. They put a kill switch in there somewhere, and they hit it the second the Valkyrie received clearance to launch. You wasted your time coming here. There’s nothing we can do.”

Paul stepped around Harrison and went to a cluttered terminal in the corner of the operations center. He removed a laptop from a drawer, set it down, then crawled under the desk. He grunted and cursed a few times before emerging holding a network cable. After plugging the cable into his laptop, he sat and lifted the screen. Lunde and Martin approached Paul’s terminal but Harrison held up his hand. “No,” he said and gestured at Martin. “I don’t know what the hell you were thinking bringing him here, Gene, but I want him out of this facility and taken into custody.”

“I’m already in your custody,” Martin said wryly. “You don’t have anything to worry about from this old cripple.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I need to warn my people what’s coming.”

“And give your forces a chance to retaliate? No. It isn’t going to happen.”

“If one of the Valkyrie’s missiles explodes over our territory, we’ll retaliate whether or not I send a message. If you can’t turn that bomber around, there’s only one option if you want to preserve the lives of all the people here in Colorado.”

“And what is that?”

“Surrender.”

Paul broke in before Harrison could reply. “I hate to be the pessimist here, but… I think we’re screwed.” They gathered around the terminal. The command prompt on the laptop’s screen demanded a username and password. Another window showed a list of Cheyenne Mountain’s systems: the network, communications, the air conditioning and ventilation, the power to individual facilities. The systems were either offline or locked. “I could try to brute force the login but it’s going to take forever without support from the servers. I just don’t have the processing power on this thing.”

Paul stepped aside as Lunde moved in front of the laptop. Lunde stared at the screen, at the blinking cursor next to the line that read: “enter username.” He knew Hank’s login information by heart; Hank had forced him to memorize it. But it was not the normal account Hank had used for everyday network use. The account was one he had buried away, a failsafe that could gain complete control over Cheyenne Mountain’s systems. He only hoped the Committee hadn’t found and purged the information during the renovations.

Carefully, Lunde typed the twenty random letters, symbols, and numbers of the username and then pressed enter. The cursor shifted to the next line down: “enter password.”

Again, he typed, this time entering a string of thirty keystrokes.

Again, he pressed enter.

The window disappeared, and another command prompt opened, flooding the screen with line-after-line of code.

Paul leaned in and smiled. “Nice.”

Lieutenant Colonel Allison Depardieu stretched and turned her neck, listening to the cracks from her sore vertebrae. Ever since the outbreaks, the pilot’s seat had been the one place in the world where she could still make sense of things. She had served as a bomber pilot her entire adult life save for that brief stint at Peterson right before everything had gone to hell. Back then, she had considered the reassignment from flight duty to a desk as the end of the world. Except then the world actually did end.

During the chaos, the NORAD operations center had transferred to Cheyenne Mountain. She had gone with them, one of the last groups to arrive before the giant doors inside the complex sealed shut. The cramped facility was worse than her office and desk. Each night, she dreamed about the bombers rusting and withering across the country in tomb-like hangars. But eventually, she and the other survivors emerged from the mountain and set about the long task of rebuilding the country.

She considered herself forever in debt to General Henry Bedford; he had ordered the Directorate to recover a B-1B from Dyess Air Force Base in Texas and haul it to Peterson. Naturally, her name came up to pilot the bomber, which the Directorate soon named the Valkyrie. After the aircraft’s maiden flight under the Directorate’s command, Bedford met her on the tarmac and shook her hand. He reminded her of her father who had died during the outbreaks. Over the long years since then, Allison had spent every day checking over the bomber, running diagnostics, and flying training missions to keep her skills honed. This was the first time she had flown the aircraft into combat.

“Crossing into Pennsylvania,” Major Mike Takashi, the defensive systems officer said from behind.

“Roger.” Allison looked over at her copilot, Gerald Dutch. They were good friends and had been more than that for a while. For a few months, she had thought she might be Mrs. Allison Dutch instead of Ms. Allison Depardieu. But things didn’t quite work out. Still, they remained close. The two of them had been with the Valkyrie since the start.

Gerald met Allison’s glance and said solemnly, “Two minutes until we let the first one go.” Allison nodded. Gerald broadcast to the communications officer further back in the aircraft, “Anything from Cheyenne Mountain or Peterson?”

“Negative,” came the reply over their headsets.

“What do you think happened?” Gerald said.

“God knows,” Allison said. “Maybe the NEA brought a nuke with them and launched after the EMP.”

“I never thought they’d actually send us out. You’d think they’d work something out before it came to this. We’re going to be hitting American cities. Boston? I went to school in Boston.”

There was a long silence in the cockpit before Allison said, “We all read the orders.”

“Yeah. We sure did.” Gerald slumped in his seat and closed his eyes. “You know, I didn’t even get a chance to call Martha before we took off.”

Allison said nothing. Martha was Gerald’s wife. Beyond the cockpit windows, low-hanging clouds obscured the moon.

“One minute,” Gerald said without opening his eyes.

“Is everything set back there?” Allison broadcast.

“Yes, ma’am,” Takashi said. “Nothing’s detected us yet.”

“Bill?” Allison said, referring to Bill Canon, the officer in charge of the eight nuclear-tipped cruise missiles on the rotary launcher in the weapons bay. During Allison’s service under the old Air Force, B-1s had never carried nuclear missiles. A little ingenuity and a lot of trial and error on the part of the Directorate had turned the Valkyrie into something more akin to a B-1C than the old B-1Bs. If nothing else, the military-industrial complex had kept right on trucking through the outbreaks.

“Final diagnostic’s complete,” Canon said. “Strike coordinates loaded. She’s ready when you are.”

Allison nodded to herself and checked her instruments and avionics. They were within range of their first target. She pulled back on the control stick, gaining just enough altitude for the cruise missile to drop away and activate instead of slamming into the ground.

“Launch,” she said.

The Valkyrie lurched as the weapons bay opened. Allison felt the almost imperceptible change in the aircraft’s weight as the first of the cruise missiles dropped free from the launcher. She flipped on the autopilot, which immediately veered them north toward their next weapons release. Gerald sat quietly next to her, staring down at his lap. She did not look at his eyes, afraid she might see tears rolling down his cheeks. Seeing that would make her cry, too.

“Valkyrie,” an urgent voice said over her headset. “This is General Eugene Lunde. Authentication is Echo Zulu Echo One Eight Eight. Do you read?”

Allison and Gerald sat upright in their chairs. They looked at each other and then back toward the rear compartment at Takashi, who reported, “Authentication verified. It’s Cheyenne.”

“General, this is Lieutenant Colonel Depardieu. I read you. Thank God, we thought—”

“Abort immediately,” Lunde said. “I repeat: Abort immediately. How copy?”

“Oh Jesus,” Gerald murmured at the same moment Allison felt a cold chill down her shoulders.

“General, we… I copy, but… We launched. The first missile’s already gone.”

“Send the disarming code!” Lunde said. “Do whatever it takes.”

“Bill!” Allison yelled.

“Yeah, on it!” Canon shouted. There was a brief pause before he spoke again, but now he sounded confused and worried. “It’s not taking the code. It isn’t working.”

“Try it again!”

“I just did. It won’t disarm. I can’t stop it.”

Over the background roar of the Valkyrie’s engines, she recalled the words of an old song she and Gerald had once enjoyed: These little town blues, are melting away / I’ll make a brand new start of it - in old New York / If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere / It’s up to you – New York, New York.

The AGM-86 Air-Launched Cruise Missile glided through the night at over five hundred miles per hour. Few radars left in the old Continental United States could track the missile, and the only systems capable of shooting it down had long since rusted into inoperability or fallen victim to scrap hunters and equipment cannibalization. Few people would have found the ALCM’s appearance menacing – thin wings and control surfaces, a slug-shaped fuselage, and bulbous protrusions at the aft for propulsion. The AGM came in low over Newark and Jersey City. The only creatures aware of its presence were wildlife, all of which scattered upon hearing the howling scream of the turbofan. At five miles out, the missile started to ascend. Thirty-six seconds later, on the 3rd of November at 5:23AM Eastern Standard Time, 2032, the missile reached its target.

The warhead detonated over New York City with a yield eight times greater than Hiroshima. The flash turned the city in white. Skyscrapers imploded and burned as if they were paper cutouts. Those who looked toward Manhattan from miles away saw what resembled a ray of sun on the horizon. They went blind an instant later when the pigments in their retinas bleached away. The few people who were awake and out in the city, the reconstruction and cleanup crews finishing late night shifts, experienced only a white glare and a burning sensation before the overpressure and heat blasted their bodies into ash. Most died in their beds as the hurricane shockwave tore their buildings apart. Soldiers died in their prefabricated barracks and tents. Their weapons, armor, and equipment melted with them. Civilians died in apartment buildings and high rises. Those who survived the heat and the collapse found themselves trapped under tons of rubble. They would die soon from suffocation or radiation exposure.

Steam boiled from the Hudson River as the blast expanded out over the waters. Smoke, dust, and swirling debris reached as far out as Jersey City’s western shore and the southern end of Central Park. Building-by-building, the skyline of Lower Manhattan toppled like a set of dominos. The skeletons of the steel giants vanished beneath a towering orange and red fireball that grew and broiled into the atmosphere. The blasting winds howled through the charred and torn steel valleys, mimicking the sound of a dying, screaming animal.

Soon, the shockwave slowed and receded, bringing with it earth and smoke to the epicenter of the blast. The mushroom cloud became a towering black-grey specter as its inner glow faded. The cloud continued to build upon itself, rising far above the ruined skyscrapers. Fires burned on the outskirts of the blast. Central Park became an inferno. Soon, the flames spread uncontrolled far up the island. When the morning sun rose an hour after the explosion, Downtown Manhattan remained beneath a thick, smoky layer that clung to the ground like a black fog. The mushroom cloud slanted toward Staten Island as the winds pushed it and its bands of invisible radiation out to sea.

One hundred and eighty miles northeast of New York City and deep underground, President Michael Resnick stared at the contents of an open briefcase. He looked at a black book with a list of options printed in red and labeled: rare, medium, or well done. Next to the book sat a three-by-five card encased in hard plastic. The card showed a six-symbol alphanumeric designator, the same code stored with every one of the New England Alliance’s nuclear assets. President Michael Resnick closed his eyes and picked up the phone.