03 - The First Amendment (10 page)

Even the military escort helped a little, he had to admit. It got him in the
door, and he was used to working around restrictions. After all, this wasn’t the
sort of place one came to on the spur of the moment. It took at least two
months’ advance notice to arrange one of these dog-and-pony shows. So that group
of grade-school boys in Cub Scout uniforms, being herded about by a frazzled
adult doing a good imitation of a stressed-out Border collie, was most likely
here as a field trip. That was no challenge at all.

The couple billing and cooing in the corner had no earthly reason to be here
that he could see. They were obviously on a honeymoon, and Frank could think of
lots more interesting places to be than here. So… maybe they were really
spies in deep cover? Russia still had an intelligence service. They could be
Chinese recruits. Hmmm. Possible. He wondered how they’d been recruited. They’d
have secret meetings with faceless controls. That passion must hide a desperate
fear of being discovered.

Sometimes he thought he really ought to try his hand at fiction.

The coterie of middle-aged to elderly men sitting in the front row, all
leaning forward with their hands on their knees, had to be either UFO buffs or retired military. Maybe both. The
room was cool—air-conditioning hadn’t yet been changed over to heat—and the men
were still wearing their coats, as if ready to mobilize at a moment’s notice. If
he listened hard, he could hear the
click-click-click
of loose dentures
tapping.

The balance seemed to be just basically curious folks, although the three
middle-aged women walking up and down the levels, looking at the pictures on the
walls and occasionally whispering to each other and taking notes as they pointed
to one detail or another, had to be writers doing research. They had that Look
about them.

The pictures were standard public relations scenes. The entrance to the
Complex—the fence topped with rolls of razor-sharp barbed wire, the dozen or so
tall light poles, the roof of the guard station, and the short road leading to
the incongruous semicircle in the mountain. The actual entry to the facility
looked as if it could have been painted by Wile E. Coyote for the Roadrunner, it
was such a perfect, bland hole.

Above and to the right of that black entrance was an ancient fissure in the
rock, complete with straggling trees clinging desperately to the vertical edges.
The picture must have been taken in the springtime, because there were still
traces of snow here and there. Kinsey wondered if the crack was part of the
geological fault present in the mountain.

Other photographs purported to show scenes inside the actual complex. Intent
men and women seated at computers, their faces underlit by green and red
illumination, looking up at a giant display of unintelligible graphics on the
wall. A tunnel carved out of raw rock, with a forklift proceeding on its
mysterious way. The obligatory “We Track Santa Claus Every Christmas”
display—the Cub Scouts were very superior about that one. And of course, the
photographs of the current command, with U.S. and Canadian generals posed pointedly beneath their respective flags.

Beside Kinsey, Bert Samuels sat with his fingers laced over his belly and a
smirk on his face.

The audience was beginning to get restless; the Border collie had herded her
charges into the second row of seats, behind the intent men, and they were
beginning to pop up and down again. She was starting to get angry with them when
a tall young man in uniform stepped onto the stage. This managed to attract the
kids’ attention. He favored them with a small smile. One of the boys yipped,
“Captain! He’s a captain, see he has those bars on his shoulder.”

The captain cleared his throat, and if by magic, the audience calmed down.
“Yes, you’re right,” he said. “I’m a captain in the United States Air Force. My
name is Dave Weikman, and I’m here to tell you all about Cheyenne Mountain
Operations Center, or as we call it, CMOC. CMOC contains elements from NORAD,
USSPACECOM, and AFSPC. You may have noticed that the military tends to talk in
alphabet soup.”

The Cub Scouts giggled. The cooing-and-billing couple in the corner had taken
a break and were listening, too—definitely spies. The coterie frowned.
Definitely former military, Kinsey thought. No sense of humor at all.

“What all those letters mean is ‘North American Aerospace Defense’, ‘United
States Space Command’, and ‘Air Force Space Command’. Of course there’s a Navy
and Army Space Command too that’s part of USSPACECOM. All of us together exist
to give the President early warning of missile attacks—”

“Space aliens like in
Star Wars?”
one of the Cub Scouts asked. “Cool!”

Captain Weikman grinned. “Just like
Star Wars.”
He shared the joke
with the rest of the audience, most of whom, Kinsey noticed, didn’t get it. Or at least didn’t appreciate
it.

“We also track leftover space junk, such as obsolete satellites or even tools
the astronauts might have lost during space walks. We wouldn’t want one of those
to come streaking through the atmosphere and have the Russians or the Chinese
mistake it for a missile. And of course you all know that every year we track
the progress of Santa Claus from the North Pole.”

The adults grinned. The Cub Scouts groaned, clearly disappointed that the
captain thought they still believed in Santa Claus.

“Now, unlike what you might have seen in the movies, we can’t actually launch
a nuclear attack from CMOC—”

“Then it’s not really aerospace
defense,
is it?” one of the older men
challenged. “Why’d you call it that?”

Unfazed, Weikman nodded. “Excellent point, sir. When Cheyenne Mountain was
first established, back in the sixties, we actually did have an active role in—”

Kinsey sighed and closed his eyes. There was nothing here he couldn’t find in
some concentrated Web-surfing. Weikman wrapped up the briefing with a quick
question-and-answer period, mostly about what it was like to work in the
Mountain. The captain was suitably vague about the number of people involved,
and Kinsey could hear a snort of derision from his escort. However many there
were, some were Canadians and many lived in Fort Carson, the base at the foot of
Cheyenne Mountain. How utterly
fascinating,
Kinsey thought.

Once the captain was finished, the uniformed escort stepped forward again,
moving the tourists along in a not-too-subtle fashion back to their tour bus.
One stopped in front of Kinsey and Samuels. An indecipherable, wordless exchange
between the two military men resulted in the enlisted man moving on, leaving the other
two alone in the room.

Moments later they were rejoined by Weikman. “Well, gentlemen, I understand
that you’re supposed to get the full Cook’s Tour.”

“The what?” Samuels said.

Weikman smiled again, and Kinsey smiled back. Part of it, of course, was
sharing the joke that Samuels didn’t get; the rest was just responding to the
other man’s expression. When people smiled, you smiled back. A politician’s son
learned that sort of thing early. “Just an expression,” Kinsey informed Samuels.

Samuels looked skeptical.

“If you’ll come this way, I’ll take you to the Mountain,” Weikman said, and
led them out of the Visitors Center to a navy-blue van.

Minutes later, they approached the final checkpoint outside the plain
upside-down U that was the entrance to the complex. He verified one more time
that he had no recording devices of any kind on his person, no cell phone, no
PDA, no camera. He signed off on a form attesting to the fact that he would have
to rely solely on his own mortal memory, and fingerprinted it. Then they were
back in the van, on the road that led straight to the hole in the mountain, and
Weikman kept on going, straight inside, into the dark.

It was dark, of course, only by contrast to the brilliant fall sunshine
outside. The walls of the tunnel were smooth and well lighted, but Kinsey
couldn’t avoid a shudder of claustrophobia, and he found himself breathing more
deeply, as if somehow oxygen was consumed by the bones of the mountain around
them. Two flatbed trucks loaded with heavy equipment passed them, headed for the
outside world. The rumble of the engines echoed long after they were gone.

The sedan traveled perhaps a mile before pulling into a large cavern, the
roof vanishing above a network of catwalks and lights. The three men got out,
and Kinsey squinted upward, trying to estimate how high the cavern stretched;
the lights looked like stars. All around him, people and vehicles moved with
purpose and focus. Because of the size of the cavern, even the level of activity
around them didn’t make the room seem crowded.

Weikman led them to a large office and presented them to “the Joint Command
of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, General Pace and Brigadier Cassidy.” They
exchanged pleasantries, and the commanders offered him scones and coffee.

“You’ll receive our full unclassified briefing booklet before you leave,”
Pace assured him.

Kinsey smiled politely and thanked him. Bored or not, he was thinking about
the story, trying on different angles. He needed a hook, and so far he hadn’t
seen anything attention-grabbing that would compel a reader to follow along.

“I can handle the tour from here,” Samuels told Weikman once they were out of
the commander’s office.

The captain was in the unpleasant position of attempting to contradict a
superior officer who was not by any means in his chain of command? Not that it
would be any easier if Samuels
were
in his chain of command, Kinsey
thought, grateful that he was a civilian.

Having pushed the issue as far as he dared, Weikman stepped aside, and
Samuels turned to gesture to Kinsey. The reporter noted with amusement that
Weikman was already picking up a telephone, reporting no doubt to someone else
that a lieutenant colonel was running around loose with a civilian reporter in
tow.

But, somewhat to his surprise, Samuels followed the expected protocol. He wasn’t allowed to enter any of the control rooms
until Samuels notified the occupants that he had an uncleared civilian with him.
The radar screens and computer displays were curiously blank. The officers were
polite and pleasant and not too obvious about wishing he would go away and let
them get back to work.

So he was polite and pleasant back, and asked intelligent questions and found
out absolutely nothing new at all.

After the third or fourth such visit, as they headed for yet another
intersection of tunnels, Kinsey caught at Samuels’ arm.

“All right,” he said at last, “what is this all about? It’s all fascinating,
I’m sure, and if I were writing a history of this place I’d be just thrilled,
but really, Samuels,
who cares?
Today’s hot stories are
not
tucked
away in the systems of a facility that’s been around for more than thirty
years.”

Samuels glanced farther down the corridor, to an elevator guarded by yet
another armed guard sitting at a desk, and then smiled at him. “You just have no
idea what’s in this mountain,” he said.

“And I suppose you’re going to break security and tell me all about it?”
Skepticism dripped from every word.

“I would
never
break security,” Samuels said with a show of
indignation. “You don’t have to be insulting.”

“Then why am I here?”

“Maybe your father hoped that you’d see something that piqued your interest.”
Samuels took a couple of steps farther down the corridor and lowered his voice.
Kinsey had to follow in order to hear him.

The jerk was leading him, Kinsey realized. Coaxing him down the hallway
toward something Samuels wanted him to see. Something that Samuels couldn’t
mention directly—because it was classified.

Of all the incredibly stupid situations to be in, Kinsey thought, and how
completely typical of his father to set him up this way.

“Naturally, you wouldn’t betray anything secret,” he jibed. “Even though the
public has a right to know.”

A shadow crossed Samuels’ eyes, as if he were momentarily indecisive.
“Classified material doesn’t fall into that category,” he answered after a pause
that was a moment too long. “That’s just Need to Know.”

“Oh, screw it.” Kinsey pushed past Samuels, past the airman seated at the
desk, to the elevator door, and pushed the button.

The guard was already getting to his feet, un-snapping his holster, as
Samuels, pursued by second thoughts, moved between them. The airman opened his
mouth to protest.

The elevator door opened.

The next thing Frank Kinsey knew, the muzzle of a gun was in his ear,
someone’s arm was around his throat, and he had been pulled into the elevator.
The last glimpse he had of Bert Samuels was of the man’s shocked face—his mouth
opening and closing like a goldfish—through the rapidly closing elevator doors.

“Hey!” As a response to the occasion, it lacked something. Kinsey decided not
to get picky. He could always edit the story later, assuming he had the chance.
At least now he had his hook. “Hey, I didn’t mean to…”

The alarms had already started as the elevator doors were sliding shut—he
had to give somebody credit for fast response. By contrast, it was very quiet in
the elevator itself. He was surprised that power hadn’t been cut off, but the
little room continued its smooth descent. “Look, I don’t want any problems.” His
mouth was very dry.

“Shut up,” the voice behind him said. The arm across his Adam’s apple jerked,
and Kinsey reached up involuntarily to try to pull it away. The muzzle of the
gun nudged warningly at his earlobe. He could hear the harsh rasp of his
captor’s breathing, smell the tang of beer on his breath. “Just shut up. You’re
that reporter they’re all worried about, aren’t you?”