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Area 51—the team gathered in the cargo bay of the Snake, which Eagle had landed just outside the front gate of the LCC compound. Roland was mournfully cradling his M249 squad automatic weapon, the bent barrel curving around his upper body like a devoted pet. If one kept lethal, metal snakes as pets.
    “Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” Nada said, and he meant it, as he pulled a pack out of his combat vest, took one, and passed it around.
    It was a sign of how frazzled they were that every member of the team took one, even Doc for the first time, and fired up. Doc’s parents had both emigrated to the States from India and his bookish appearance was out of place among the warriors of the Nightstalkers.
    “The clock ran out.” Roland said the obvious, because, well, he was Roland.
    “It’s never run out before,” Doc said, and this was his second startling thing of the day because Doc never stated the obvious.
    “There’s a first for everything,” Nada said. “We’re still here.”
    And that was almost a first, Nada being upbeat.
    Moms exhaled, the chill Nebraska wind taking the smoke and blowing it across the plains. “All right. Let’s figure out what happened. Mac. What was so funny when you got into the missile?”
    “You won the pool,” Mac said. He held up a handful of frayed wires. “This is the main firing component. Rats, or some other kind of vermin, chewed them all up. But we’ll go with rats.” He held up the sleeve of his hazmat suit where he’d written RATS and MOMS .
    “So we got saved by rats?” Eagle said.
    “Yep.” Mac dropped the cables. “I got the access panel open just as time ran out. If these wires had still been intact, I’m pretty sure the conventional implosion would have gone off and I’d be splatted inside that silo. As far as the nuke”—he nodded his head to a bunch of Acme and support personnel at work, calling in heavy equipment to rip off the concrete cap on top of the silo to get access and remove it—“they can figure that out. There was a gap at the base of the nose cone in the gasket. Rats must have come up through the engine into the nose cone.”
    “How could they lose track of a nuke?” Kirk asked.
    “This place is old,” Moms said. “Eagle told us they had over thirty thousand nukes at the height of the Cold War. We’ve all worked in the real world for the government. Anyone ever had any paperwork that got lost?”
    “Hell, they lost
me
,” Eagle said. “When I went into Task Force 160, all my paperwork was gone, just like that.”
    Nada snorted. “We’ve all disappeared as far as our original services are concerned. We only exist in our cover IDs.”
    “Nukes getting lost or misplaced has happened before and it will happen again,” Eagle said. “Back in ’07, a B-52 took off froman air base to deliver some cruise missiles for ‘retirement’ to another air base. Except the maintenance crews failed to remove the nuclear warheads in six of the missiles.”
    “Oops,” Kirk said.
    “Someone didn’t follow the checklist in their Protocol,” Nada said.
    Eagle continued, “In essence, the air force lost track of six nukes for almost two days and flew them over most of the country without the aircrew being aware they were carrying live warheads. Parked the plane on both airstrips without any guards and the nukes just hanging on the wing. Cost the secretary of the air force and the chief of staff their jobs. And it was all a paperwork error. As Nada noted, a failure of protocol.”
    “Speaking of failure of Protocol,” Nada said. “Why didn’t you shoot the civilians?” Nada was the only one who would dare raise the issue to Moms.
    “It didn’t cost us any time,” Moms said, a weak defense at best.
    “You had second shot,” Roland pointed out to Nada, “and you didn’t shoot the woman.”
    Roland’s logic ended Nada’s questioning. Another almost first.
    Moms shook her head. “We don’t shoot civilians unless we have to.