OTHER TITLES BY BRIAN ANDREWS
TIER ONE SERIES, COAUTHORED WITH JEFFREY WILSON
Tier One
War Shadows
Crusader One
OTHER TITLES BY BRIAN ANDREWS
The Calypso Directive
The Infiltration Game
WRITING AS ALEX RYAN
NICK FOLEY THRILLER SERIES
Beijing Red
Hong Kong Black
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Brian Andrews
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503954267
ISBN-10: 1503954269
Cover design by Mike Heath | Magnus Creative
For John Cook, whose integrity, generosity, and kindness have touched lives and made the world a better place.
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
AUTHOR NOTE
PROLOGUE
DAY ONE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
DAY TWO
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
DAY THREE
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
DAY FOUR
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
FOUR MONTHS LATER
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
DAY ZERO
Forty-Five Years in the Future
DAY ZERO 2.0
DARPA Zero-Day Technology Black Site
AFTERWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
GLOSSARY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
FOREWORD
Estimates vary, but most experts calculate that the human brain contains approximately 100 billion neurons. New research, using a high-resolution imaging technique called array tomography, has allowed neuroscientists to evaluate neuron density and connectivity at the synaptic level. The primary insight gained by this new finding is that the human brain is much more densely and broadly interconnected than previously thought—with each neuron linked to hundreds of other neurons. Consequently, the human brain contains an astounding number of synaptic connections—upward of a quadrillion.
Closer examination of these connection points has revealed that synapses themselves are more complex than simple junctions. We now know that synapses are designed to function like microprocessors, with a single synapse containing up to a thousand molecular-scale biological transistors. Taken all together, this means that a single human mind has more switches than all the interconnected computers and routers on Earth. With an organic memory capacity in the neighborhood of one hundred terabytes, and the equivalent processing power of one trillion bits per second, the human brain is the most formidable, self-aware computer in the known universe. It is adaptable, autonomous, and, unlike its machine analogs, unhackable.
Unhackable, that is, until now . . .
AUTHOR NOTE
The events and characters in this novel are fiction, but the biological and technological methods of mind control described are real.
An acronym glossary is located at the back of the book in the event you get lost in alphabet soup. And for anyone who is curious and wants to take a closer look inside Silo 9 as you read, I’ve posted diagrams from an actual HGM-16F Atlas Missile Silo Operation Manual online at my website: www.andrews-wilson.com.
PROLOGUE
November 1963
Rockland State Hospital
Orangeburg, New York
Captain Will Barnes, USAF, woke up from the dream.
It was a terrible dream.
He went to rub his eyes but couldn’t. He tried to sit up, but that was a nonstarter also. For some reason, his arms weren’t working properly. This had happened to him once before. He’d fallen asleep on his side after having too much to drink, and both his arms had gone completely numb from lack of circulation. He sighed with exasperation and then proceeded to flop around like an inebriated sea lion until he was on his back. Only then did he realize he was lying on the floor.
Gee-whiz, apparently I got so drunk, I actually fell out of bed.
At least he didn’t have a headache. He smiled a lazy, self-deprecating smile and opened his eyes. Staring at his bedroom ceiling, he blinked until the world slowly began to come into focus. Wait a minute; this wasn’t his bedroom. This was some other room. He lifted his head and looked at the unfamiliar, dirty fabric-covered walls. He tried to push himself onto his elbows, but his arms were still not working.
What the hell is going on?
His arms felt like they were wrapped around his chest, bound in some sort of self-inflicted, interminable bear hug. He looked down. What was he wearing? Was that a straitjacket?
Impossible.
“Diane?” he called, his voice a hoarse whisper. He tried to swallow but couldn’t; his mouth was as dry as parchment. He tried again: “Diane, can you get me a glass of water, please?”
He looked around the bedroom for his wife. Wait, he’d already established this was not his bedroom. He tried to sit up, but the straitjacket—yes, it really was a straitjacket—prevented him from doing so. Cursing, he rolled onto his stomach. He turned his head to the side, pressed his cheek against the floor to get the leverage he needed to arch his ass into the air, and then worked himself into a kneeling position. From there, getting to his feet was manageable, even without the use of his arms. The head rush hit as soon as he was vertical, but it subsided relatively quickly.
The vertigo did not.
He stumbled to the door and peered through the tiny square glass window into the dimly lit corridor beyond. “Hey,” he shouted. “Is anybody out there?”
No response came. The only noise was the monotonous, unsympathetic buzz of the fluorescent light fixture overhead.
“Help!” he shouted. “Somebody help me. Somebody help me! Is anybody out there? Can anybody hear me?”
A woman shrieked.
“Diane? Diane, is that you? Do they have you too?” he called, but the woman’s shriek turned into a maniacal laugh, and then he knew that creature was not his wife. More people began to stir somewhere along the corrido
r. A cacophony of sounds erupted. Shouting and sobbing, banging and screaming . . .
Will suddenly and desperately wished that he could cover his ears.
The hall lights flipped on, and the ruckus instantly subsided. He heard the sound of a door slamming closed, or maybe open, and then footsteps. He craned his neck to try to see down the corridor. The footsteps were coming closer . . . multiple pairs now . . . hard soles clicking on linoleum tile. Someone stopped in front of his door, but instead of a face in his window, a flashlight beam greeted him.
“Back away from the door,” a voice said. When he didn’t move the voice repeated the command, baritone and angry. “I said back away from the door, patient.”
Patient?
Confused and blinded by the light, he took a step backward. The vertigo kicked in, and he tripped on his heel. Without his arms to break his fall, he hit the ground hard. The landing hurt, but not nearly as badly as it should have, and that’s when he realized that the floor was padded.
Oh God, I’m in a padded cell.
He looked up at the square window, and the flashlight beam found his face again. He squinted but refused to look away.
“What is your name?” the voice asked.
“What?” he said, confused.
“We don’t have time for games. Tell me your name.”
“Will Barnes. I—I’m an officer in the United States Air Force,” he stammered.
The beam stayed fixed on his face for another few antagonizing seconds and then clicked off.
“He’s awake,” he heard another voice say. “Call the Colonel.”
He waited for hours, and still they did not remove the straitjacket. They did not answer his questions. They left him alone, in his padded cell, until dawn’s rays illuminated the hallway outside his room. Sometime after sunrise, they moved him to another room, this one without padded walls but nearly as Spartan. They served him a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and a glass of milk, fed to him by a nurse named Shirley as if he were an infant. When he asked for a cup of coffee, her eyebrows arched with surprise.
“Coffee?” she repeated.
“Yes, coffee,” he said, wondering why she considered this a strange request. “You do have coffee here, I assume.”
“What kind of hospital is this?” he asked, screwing up his face at her.
“Rockland State Hospital, in Orangeburg,” she said.
“Rockland? I’m at the funny farm? I don’t understand.”
She shot him a look that said it all: Normal fellas don’t wear straitjackets and get locked up in padded cells. You’re at the funny farm, mister, and you’re here for a reason.
He let her feed him the rest of his breakfast without making any further attempts at conversation. As he ate, the brain fog that had been plaguing him began to clear and his wits came back to him. The first priority, he decided, was to piece together the missing time between the last thing he remembered and waking up in the cell. He had no idea how much time he was missing, but to wind up in a place like this, with no recollection of how or why he’d come to be here, did not bode well. Had the stress of his job finally made him crack? He certainly didn’t remember falling to pieces. He didn’t remember having a psychotic breakdown, but maybe that’s how “going crazy” worked.
The door to the room opened, and in stepped two men in uniform and a powerfully built young orderly. Will popped to his feet and snapped to attention, save for his arms, of course, which were still bound in the straitjacket. Every minute he wore it, the sensation that his arms were being pulled out of his shoulder sockets seemed to intensify. He had to get out of this damn thing before he really did go nuts.
Will locked eyes with the taller of the officers. “Colonel Alexander,” he said with relief. “Thank God you’re here, sir. There must be some sort of mistake. You’ve got to get me out of here.”
Alexander was the Commanding Officer of the 556th Strategic Missile Squadron at Plattsburgh Air Force Base in upstate New York. Will respected him, and they’d always gotten along. But the Colonel glared at him with an expression Will had never seen from the man before: equal parts anger, disgust, and disbelief all rolled into one.
“Sit down, Captain,” the Colonel said, his voice hard and cold.
Will sat. His gaze ticked to the other man in uniform. Like Alexander, this officer wore silver eagles on his epaulets, except instead of Air Force blue, he was dressed in the Army’s Class-A, green service uniform. His name tag read “Schumaker,” and Will had never seen the man before in his life. Schumaker’s expression was hard but harbored none of the apparent disdain Will was feeling from Alexander.
“This is Colonel Schumaker,” Alexander began. “He works at ARPA, and he and I both have questions we need to ask you.”
Will had heard of ARPA, the Defense Department’s classified Advanced Research Project Agency, but he knew few details about the nascent skunkworks. ARPA’s charter was to ensure that the US military did not fall behind Russia in technological superiority. The Atlas F missile program was the crown jewel of the DOD’s strategic weapons portfolio, and the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on its development and deployment meant ARPA was involved.
“Sir, before we get started, can you just answer me one question, please?” Will said, turning his head to look at his CO.
Alexander nodded, but it was a conditional nod.
“Why am I here, sir?”
The Colonel’s eyebrows knitted together. “You don’t know?”
“No, sir.”
Alexander looked at Schumaker, and the two seemed to share some silent understanding.
“What’s the last thing you remember?” Alexander asked.
“Standing watch. I’m MCCC at Silo 9,” he said, then to Schumaker added, “That’s the Dannemora site.”
“The MCCC is the Missile Combat Crew Commander, the ranking officer at the silo, and he holds one of two launch keys,” Alexander clarified for the ARPA man.
“Understood,” Schumaker said with a nod. “You’re on a twenty-four-hour alert, correct?”
“That’s right. Twenty-four hours on, seventy-two off. SM-65 utilizes a five-man crew. We turn over at 0600.”
“Tell me, Captain, what do you remember about your last alert?”
“The first eighteen hours were uneventful. No drills or scheduled practice exercises. The guys did preventative maintenance on the diesel-gen sets and the refrigeration system. Lieutenant Bates was my Deputy MCCC. It was around 2300 hours, and we were working on paperwork in the launch control room when the lights started flickering. Then we get a liquid oxygen–tank low-pressure alarm—not a good thing, obviously. And then a second later we get a call from Staff Sergeant Lewis in the silo. Lewis was the MFT on duty.” Will paused, turned to Schumaker, and said, “Missile Facilities Technician. He’s in charge of the missile elevator, propellant tanks, refrigeration, hydraulics, ventilation system, and the like. Anyway, the LOX tank is on level eight, very bottom of the silo. I tell Bates to stay in the launch control room, and I’ll go check out the problem with Lewis. I take the utility tunnel over to the silo. The general alarm is wailing, and there’s white steam everywhere from the LOX boiling off. I work my way down the stairs and ladders as fast as I can to level eight, where I find Lewis in a panic trying to figure out what’s broken. After a little investigation, we determine that a relief valve is stuck open on the LOX tank. I order Lewis to shut the valve, which immediately stops the bleed-off. Once that’s done, I direct him to repressurize the LOX tank from the O2-topping tank, clearing the alarm. Problem solved, Lewis spent the rest of the alert replacing the faulty relief valve. By shift turnover, the system was restored and good as new. The details are all recorded in the logs.”
Colonel Alexander stared at him with eyes as cold and dead as a corpse’s. “That’s what you remember?”
Will nodded. �
�Yes, sir.”
“I find it strange that you failed to mention the anomaly you and Sergeant Lewis discovered in the silo. What can you tell me about that?”
“Anomaly? You mean the faulty relief valve?”
Alexander looked at Schumaker. The Army Colonel frowned. “Do you recall anything after the events in the silo?”
Events in the silo? It was just a stuck-open relief valve, guys. We fixed it.
He couldn’t understand why they were making such a big deal over this. He tried to rub his chin but couldn’t because of the straitjacket. “I briefed the oncoming MCCC about the repair, we conducted the 0600 turnover, and I left.”
“And after you left the facility, what did you do next?”
“I went home. The house was still dark. My wife, Diane, was asleep in bed. Sometimes she’s up when I get home; sometimes she’s not. I kissed her on the forehead, and then I . . . I made breakfast for us. Eggs and toast, I think.”
“And after that?” the Colonel asked, leaning in.
“After that I . . . uh, I really can’t . . . um, it gets foggy after that,” Will said. He squirmed in his seat, wriggling his arms under the sleeves. “Can somebody get me out of this damn thing?” he growled.
Alexander and Schumaker shared another glance. Then Alexander said, “Captain Barnes, I’d like to share a different account of what happened that night, based on sworn testimony from eyewitnesses and video footage recovered from the LCC closed-circuit security camera system.”
Will’s stomach went sour. It wasn’t what Alexander had said; it was the way he’d said it—with the hard, dispassionate certainty of a judge delivering a sentence to a criminal. Will had no idea what sort of bad news was coming, but he knew the next words out of the Colonel’s mouth would change his life forever.
He listened, without interruption, as Colonel Alexander launched into a very different telling of the night’s events. In Alexander’s version, Will and Sergeant Lewis went rogue and orchestrated a scheme to defeat the layers of redundant safeguards—both procedural and engineered—to take control of the launch complex and fire the Atlas ICBM.
In Alexander’s tale, Will murdered his fellow crew members.
In Alexander’s tale, Will tried to start World War III.