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decided against it; something was already wrong here and setting off a charge in the LCC wasn’t going to help. Mac put a headlamp on, as did the rest of them.
    “Five minutes,” Kirk announced over the net.
    The hatch began to open and Mac slithered into the three-foot diameter access tunnel for silo seven. Moms followed, then Roland.
    Doc was seated at one of the consoles, typing away on his computer. Nada took up position at the open hatch. Peggy Sue timidly came down the stairs. “Who are you folk?”
    “Shut up or I’ll shoot you,” Nada said.
    Peggy Sue was used to that kind of talk, so she shut up.
    In the tunnel, Mac moved as fast as one can move in a three-foot tunnel that doesn’t quite require you to crawl, but doesn’t allow you to run. He shuffled forward, his pack in front of him. His headlamp penetrated about thirty feet, but all he saw was more tunnel.
    “How far?” he asked Moms.
    “Eagle said three hundred and fifty feet.”
    Nada’s voice crackled in their earpieces. “Four minutes.” A slight pause. “I got a stupid question,” he continued, “but is the countdown for a launch or for the warhead to detonate? And can that thing even initiate launch not having been serviced for so long? Eagle?”
    “Wait one,” Eagle replied.
    Mac spotted another hatch ahead.
    Mac tried the handle, but it wouldn’t budge. Everyone flattened against the floor of the tunnel as Roland slithered over them, a torrent of muscle. He grabbed the wheel and grunted with exertion, but still nothing.
    Behind him, Moms knew they were in a bind. There was no time to back out and have Mac blow the door. Nada’s voice delivered bad news as he relayed Ms. Jones’s information via Kirk: “The countdown is an Orange; a self-destruct for the warhead. In case the complex was ever compromised. The Area 51 nuke Acme tells her there’s a forty-two percent chance the bomb is still viable, plus or minus fourteen points. A ninety-one percent chance the conventional explosives will go off.”
    “That’s not very precise,” Doc muttered.
    “Frak me,” Moms muttered as she was forced into another razor’s-edge decision: Leaving the hatch shut would protect them from the conventional explosives going off and the resultingdispersal of radioactive material. But not the nuke going off. The rational odds said leave the door shut. “Roland?”
    The weapons man contorted himself sideways in the tunnel, trying to get a better grip. Frustrated, he jammed his M249 into a spoke of the wheel, got leverage, and applied his entire weight.
    The barrel bent as the wheel gave a shriek and moved a quarter of an inch.
    “Faster please,” Moms said. “Doc? Anything on the second code?”
    “It’s very old,” Doc said. “Not yet.”
    “Kirk?” Moms asked.
    “Negative.”
    “Ms. Jones?” Moms asked, the message relayed via Nada to Kirk to the Ranch.
    “The Acmes are on it,” Ms. Jones said, referring to the group of scientists across a wide spectrum of specialties the Nightstalkers had on call. The Acme moniker came from the company Wile E. Coyote bought all his gear from in the
Looney Tunes
cartoon. Given the gear rarely worked, like the Acmes’ advice, it was appropriate.
    “Three minutes,” Nada announced.
    In the access tunnel, the wheel creaked another quarter inch. Moms reached around Roland, barely able to get the tips of two fingers on the wheel, but it was better than nothing. They applied pressure and gained a half inch. Squeezed as tight as lovers, all Moms and Roland cared about was opening a door that was an invitation to an explosion.
    “If there was an alert at the SAC museum,” Kirk said from the upper doorway, “then there has to be a live circuit between the two. Some sort of signal. How did this get triggered?”
    In the control room, Nada turned toward Peggy Sue. “What did you guys do to set this off?”
    “I didn’t do nothing,” Peggy Sue said. She rushed to continue the explanation because she’d