Kilo-29 (Damned of the 2/19th, Book 15)

Part 44

"That won't be a problem if we don't get out of here." Donaldson said.

The file opened up and I shook my head. The file wasn't even encrypted, and I jotted down the login and passwords I'd need for root access on the server in front of me and the secondary systems. The second file I opened show me that the backup system stored backups on a different system, but the same room, which fit perfectly with what we needed to do.

"Shit, I don't know about everyone else, but I'm getting out of here." Kincaid said. "Hell, I'm even going to do my best to get everyone else out of here." He paused for a moment. "I might even try to save that little punk Purret and fucking Wilkins." Donaldson chuckled at that.

The file closed and saved, and I logged back out and relogged in again as the admin instead of technical staff. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, and when I looked down, there was a small brown rabbit sitting next to my chair.

"Hi, little guy." I said, leaning down slowly and scratching between his ears. He pushed against me in silent pleasure. Martin ooked, and I petted his head and both of us watched as the bunny sped off and vanished between the mainframe racks. "Didja see the bunny, Martin?"

"Uh-oh." Donaldson said.

I glanced at Martin, who was looking up at me with his big innocent eyes. I hugged him and went back to the computer. A handful of keystrokes, and it brought up the file I wanted. When I typed in the commands and fired up the program I wanted, the system immediately warned me.

***WARNING***
SYSTEM WILL BE UNAVAILABLE UNTIL TEST IS COMPLETED
BACKUP SYSTEMS WILL BE UNAVAILABLE UNTIL
AFTER FILE INTEGRITY VERIFICATION IS COMPLETE
PRIMARY SYSTEM WILL BE DISCONNECTED FROM SECONDARY
SYSTEM WHILE TEST IS ONGOING
ENSURE ALL USERS ARE LOGGED OFF AND ALL FILES ARE SAVED
REBOOTING SYSTEM WILL RESULT IN FILE DAMAGE
DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE (Y/N): __

"You wanna push it, Martin?" I asked, looking down. Martin shook his head no, so I reached out, hit "Y" and watched as the backup system acknowledged the handoff, started the operations, hardware, and file tests, and broke connection.

"All right, we've got an hour or so to handle the other mainframe set." I said, standing up. "I'm pretty sure that this is the main server slash mainframe running the entire site right now."

"Right." Donaldson said, Kincaid smiled, popping the igniter while he finished. "So what do we do?"

I lurched over and leaned against the front cover of the mainframe, pulling my leatherman out and checking where the front cover met up with the sides.

"So how long will it take you hack the system or upload a virus, or whatever it is you going to have to do to keep this thing from launching?" Donaldson asked.

Kincaid laughed.

"We aren't going to do any of that." Kincaid laughed. "We don't have to hack the computer or some shit like that to stop this." He popped the igniter again.

"Then how do we stop the launch? Keys or something? Defuse the weapons?"

"Fuck no." I told him. "We hit the weakest link." I used the Phillips to start removing the screws.

"So, what?" Donaldson asked.

"We just wreck up the fucking thing." I told him. "Hell, it isn't rocket science. One of the lessons of the Vietnam War is that a fifty million dollar piece of equipment can be put out of service, hell, it can get wrecked all to fuck, by a pissed off guy with a rock."

The last of the screws came off of the side, and I worked my hand under the sheet metal cover, getting a good grip on it, and tore the cover off with one yank. The screws popped, and the whole thing tore free to expose old mid-80's computer equipment, hard drives the size of a pair of VCR's stacked on top of each other, and old style ribbon cables. I moved to the next one, just undoing one side and letting the other two men pull the covers off of them.

"Now, we shut down the system." I grinned, walking to the one I'd figured was the primary mainframe running the whole shebang.

"Wait, you're just going to..." Donaldson started.

I leaned back slightly and kicked into the massive computer, the heel of my boot hitting a chip laden board and breaking it into about six pieces. Computer chips popped out, bouncing on the tile floor.

"SYSTEM FAILURE! SYSTEM FAILURE! ALERT! SYSTEM FAILURE!"

"Hit 'em, Kincaid." I said, stepping back.

"Fuck yeah!" Kincaid said, stepping up to the one he was standing in front of. "Burn, bitch!" He triggered the flamethrower, holding the flame inside the heavy steel box of the computer case. "Fire now, motherfucker!"

He laughed while he cooked the components inside the cases into slag.

I started grabbing the magnetic tape reels and ripping them right off. Across the room from me Donaldson was using the butt of his rifle to smash the huge VCR tapes or the massive video disks in platters of 8 or 12.

"SYSTEM FAILURE! WAR-" the recording suddenly cut out when Donaldson smashed up a set of video disk platters.

"What about the reactor?" Donaldson asked when we started working on the third and last wall of computer equipment.

"That thing has its own system, completely separate and isolated from this system or any other to keep it from being tampered with. About all that can be done from here is start it up or shut it down." I told him, pausing for a moment. "The environmental controls will all be run by the redundant systems that were set up in case an EMP check blew all this shit out. The doors and everything else run off of secondary systems and redundant backups. If worse comes to worse I can open the doors on purely mechanical systems."

"OK." Donaldson said, pulling one of the chairs up and sitting in it, rubbing his chest. "What about the main door."

The next were racks of huge hard drives, about the size of snare drums, that I just started by kicking the stabilizer rod free and then grabbing one side of the rack and pulling on it. When the hard drives fell to the ground after a few moments of effort I'd made a decision.

"If the main door controls shut down, if there aren't any backup systems, then the plan is simple." I told him, stepping back and reaching into my pocket for a pain pill and a booster. He waited till I ground them up between my teeth and took a swig of water to wash them down. "The entrance tunnel is what is knows as a blast deflection tunnel. The curve is to force the explosion to spend some of the force going through the curve. There are blast vents every hundred feet or so to dissipate more of the force."

"Right. Blast and shockwaves are like water, I remember that from school." He said. I tossed him the painkillers. "Thanks." He started opening it.

"All right, at the far end of the tunnel there are four big steel plates, outlined in yellow with X's across them. Those are overpressure sensor plates done the brute force way, since they have to stand up to the overpressure wave of a possible direct hit on the doors." I watched him take the pill and waited till he finished swallowing it and tossing the bottle back to me before continuing. "All you need to do is rig up small charges, say a half inch slice off of a C-4 brick like the ones I put in your ruck, to each of the plates and fire them all off at the same time."

"What happens then?" Donaldson asked. Behind us, Kincaid was laughing as he torched the mainframes and servers.

"It triggers the emergency charges, which will blow out a chunk of the mountain the size of the tunnel, to allow the blast to exit out of the opposite side, preventing it from creating the overpressure it would need to breach any of the doors." I told him. He nodded. "If anything happens to me, you know the last resort way of getting out of here."

"How do we get down?" He asked.

"You blow out that side of the mountain, it's going to be picked up by something. Satellite, seismic, and every town for 50 miles is going to hear those charges go off. They'll call the cops, and there'll be someone her to rescue you pretty soon after." I told him, moving back over to the next one.

The lights dimmed, then came back on, pale and low and yellowish. The steel plates retracted and the emergency lights popped out but didn't come on.

"Systems on local control. All systems on local control." It was a new voice. Female with a slight southern accent, speaking calmly. She repeated it once while I started snapping cards free of the case without bothering to try to remove them properly. One of them zapped me pretty hard and I cursed and waved my hand, trying to get the pain to quit.

As soon as the tingling quit I went back to wrecking computer equipment that probably cost the American taxpayers millions. It had worked, but decided to keep my doubts to myself. It might not have. The reactor, I was sure, had it's own operating system, probably firmware on heavily shielded chipsets, but I hadn't been that sure about the rest of the systems.

There wasn't any way I could really explain to Donaldson that I'd taken a risk with the computers, running a massive risk of sealing us up inside the mountain. Kincaid, yeah, I could tell him. He got the reason it might have to be, but I wasn't sure about Donaldson yet. The kid had leadership potential, yeah, but you needed something extra to run in the same circles I did.

Hell, the shit I did bugged some of the operators I knew.

I wasn't sure yet that that he had what it took to make some of the nasty decisions.

Decisions like I knew I was going to have to do the minute we finished "seizing control" of the systems, how I was going to handle the survivors in the facility, and most of all, what I was going to do about all of us. My crew, and the Major's men. I know the protocols, knew the decisions that had to be made, and I knew I could make them.

Kincaid could, but I wasn't sure if he was stable enough to be trusted with that kind of authority yet.

Donaldson, though, Donaldson had potential.

I finished smashing the inside of the last of the computers as Kincaid worked on another one of the mainframes, playing over the inside with his flamethrower, and I turned to Donaldson and held out my book to him.

"In this is all the protocols you'll need to know." I told him, wincing as a stabbing pain rippled through my brain. "I'll write them down before we leave. If I die, you need to follow the protocols exactly."

"Or they'll shoot us on sight and burn the bodies." Donaldson said.

"Yeah." I put the notebook back in my pocket as Kincaid clicked off the flamethrower and started clomping over to us.

"All right, Sergeant, this is done. What's next?" He asked.

"We do the same to the backups and finish off the survivors of the CIA's Operation Bed Check." I told them. "After that, well, we'll figure out what happens next."

"Hey, Sergeant, there's something I want to ask you about." Kincaid said, motioning to me to come closer. I moved over next to him. "I'm, uh, not exactly comfortable with using this thing on the guys if they're still alive."

I smiled at him. "I'm glad to hear that."

"I can't take my helmet off again, can I?" He asked.

"No, K-Bar, you're in it until I say otherwise." I told him.

"I alone remain to tell thee?" He asked.

"Something like that." I answered.

Donaldson shook his head. "What's the chance we aren't infected?"

"Not sure. I want to run some blood tests and check." I said. "You feel ready to head back upstairs?"

"Yeah, I'm ready." Donaldson said, and pushed himself to his feet.

When we went back upstairs, everyone that had been left up there was staring.

"Is... is it going to happen?" One of the Meatheads asked.

"Not when we finish taking care of the other section. We have a couple hours to get there and wreck the joint up." I told them.

"So we're like saving the world?" Michaels the Meathead asked.

I laughed at that, then lit a cigarette. "No." I told him flatly. "The minute those fuckers launched, NORAD would send the self-destruct codes and blow them out of the fucking air." I told them, putting the pack away. "More than likely because of a lack of maintenance and pre-flight checks the thrust system would fail and drop a goddamn nuclear tipped rocket onto some fucking school and kill a bunch of kids."

They all looked at me strange.

"I... wasn't right... a little bit ago. I'm feeling better." I said, half telling the truth.

My head was still pounding, and my vision kept tunneling slightly for a few moments before returning to normal.

But I didn't want the launches to happen. I didn't want revenge on the whole world for something that... that...

never happened.

"At the most, they'd be detonated and there would be an outcry over it, massive investigations, and someone would be thrown under the bus. Probably us. At the least there would be a massive public outcry and someone would get thrown under the bus. Again, us." I said. "All we're doing is preventing an international incident and the chance that we end up being tried for launching the weapons through action or inaction."

They all just stared.

"So if you ladies are done standing around, let's take care of the problem, and get Jacobs to medical before he fucking dies." I snapped.

With that, we headed to secondary control.

Once we were done with that, it was time to take care of Jacob's bullet wound, do blood tests, and make my decision on what to do.

Hopefully, Kincaid and his baby wouldn't be used on our own men.

But my experiences with life had taught me that it was far more likely that Tandy would catch us and eat us all after we found out we were infected and all going to die.