At the outer gate to the parking lot/security perimeter around SAC Headquarters, a security guard had his M-16 rifle in one hand, and with the other hand he held up four fingers. Meers flashed the guard five fingers, then one finger, and the guard let him through. If Meers had added wrong and flashed the wrong number — he had to add the right amount of fingers to the guard’s fingers to equal ten, the security number that Dunigan had relayed to Tyler in the notification message and the one that she would have relayed to the gate guards — they would probably have had their tires shot out by two or three well-trained guards, and their noses would be pinned to the pavement a few seconds later. They had to pass through a second gate before reaching the building, and this time the guard was kind enough to flash eight fingers so Meers had to raise only two fingers in response.
Meers stopped the car just outside an enclosed doorway, guarded by a single security policeman. Tyler and Stone ran past him, not bothering to return his salute, and Tyler punched in the code to the Cypher-Lock beside the steel door. The door buzzed, and Tyler yanked the heavy steel door open, ran inside, flashed his security access badge to a guard in a bulletproof booth, and trotted to the private elevator that would take him four floors down, directly to the underground Command Center. The guards, Tyler noticed, all wore subdued smiles as he dashed by — it must be fun for them, he thought, to see a two- and four-star general in warmup suits running around the place. One more guard in a bulletproof booth checking ID badges, through a metal- detector device, another guard, two blast doors, past the Command Center weather station, and they were in the SAC Command Center itself.
The Command Center consisted of three areas, separated by thick soundproof glass and remote-controlled privacy shutters — the Battle Staff area on the main auditorium floor area, the Essential Elements area behind the main auditorium, and the Support Staff area in a balcony over the auditorium. All three areas could see the “big board,” the eight 5-by-6-foot computer screens in the front of the Command Center, but depending on the security classification of the activity and the occupants, the senior controller could seal off either area to prevent eavesdropping — an unclassified briefing could be going on in the Support Staff area while a Top Secret briefing could be given in the Battle Staff area, with complete security.
Tyler glanced up at the Command Post status board just inside the entrance and found red lights flashing near the signs that read “Battle Staff” and “Essential Elements” — the rooms were both classified Top Secret. Tyler pointed to a doorway to their right. “Take those stairs up to the Support Staff room, Rat,” he said. “They’ll direct you from there.” Stone did not argue or hesitate, but went through the door, which locked behind him. A set of stairs took him up to the glassed-in observation area overlooking the Battle Staff area, where a technician had him put on a pair of headphones as he sat down to watch. The shutters remained open, which meant he could watch the big board but not hear any of the conversation going on below.
The Battle Staff area below him resembled a small theater, with forty seats of three semicircular levels facing the big board in the front of the Command Center. Tyler took his seat in front row center, behind a director’s computer console with two phones, a keyboard, and four 19-inch color monitors. The seat beside him was already occupied by the Vice Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command, Lieutenant General Michael Stanczek. Around them were arranged the various deputy chiefs of staff of the Command, most of whom were already in place by the time Tyler had arrived from the tennis court. Each staff position had two flip-up color computer monitors, a small keyboard, a telephone, arid a microphone.
The first thing Tyler did after taking his seat in the Command Center was check the rows of digital clocks above the computer monitors. The first row of clocks had times in various places in the world — Washington, Omaha, Honolulu, Guam, Tokyo, Moscow, and London. London was labeled “Zulu,” the time along the zero-degree-longitude Greenwich meridian used by SAC as a common time- reference point. Below that were three event timers, and one was already activated — it read 00:15:23. The third row of timers and clocks were thankfully still reading zero — those were the clocks that set reference times used by American strategic nuclear forces to execute their nuclear strike missions. Two of those timers, the L-hour and A-hour, were set by Tyler himself, but the other one, the ERT, or Emergency Reference Time, could be set by the National Command Authority if the President himself ordered a nuclear strike.
Tyler hit the mike button on his console: “Alpha in position. Log me in, please, and let’s get started.”
