DEADLY DILEMMA by Dan Stratman (story read aloud .txt) 📗

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“Shut the hell up!” Cyndi drew her pistol and blasted the speaker.

The creepy female voice fell silent.

“Thank you. Now what?” Lance asked.

Miles of ancient wiring—coated in plastic—had been shorting out and overheating after Lance blasted the rogue console. Unseen fires, fueled by melting plastic, had erupted behind the panel. Smoke, toxic fumes from combustion, and the repulsive smell of burned plastic poured out of the console.

Lance blinked, trying to wash away the stinging sensation in his eyes. His lungs burned with each breath. He began to cough uncontrollably.

It didn’t take long for Cyndi and Lance to realize they were trapped in a concrete tomb sixty feet underground that was rapidly filling with poisonous air.

“Smoke hoods!” Cyndi commanded.

They rushed to pouches attached to the wall and pulled out their only chance at survival. Cyndi and Lance knelt on the floor to get under the cloud of lethal smoke while they unpacked their hoods.

They spread the elastic neck seals apart and slipped the hoods down over their heads. Activated charcoal filters did their job and cleansed each gasp for air.

Cyndi crawled on all fours to a nearby fire extinguisher and yanked it off its wall mount. She aimed the hose, squeezed the trigger, and blanketed the console with white extinguishing agent. Then she put the tip of the nozzle inside a hole in the panel and hosed down the internal fires until the extinguisher was empty.

The fires died out, but toxic smoke had filled the LCC.

“Open the blast door!” she yelled from behind the copper-colored face pane on the hood.

Lance pressed the door button on the console. Their only pathway to safety, a four-foot-thick reinforced blast door, remained tightly sealed shut. “Crap, the door circuit must be fried!” He felt his way across the smoke-filled room until he found a small metal door on the wall. Lance opened it and pumped the handle inside the box. At an excruciatingly slow rate, hydraulic pressure built up in the alternate door opening mechanism. It took thirty minutes of nonstop pumping to get enough pressure to open the eight-ton door halfway.

Poisonous smoke drifted out from the LCC and spread across the ceiling in the hallway. The air below had an acrid smell but was mostly safe to breathe.

Cyndi and Lance removed their hoods but kept them within arm’s reach.

“We have to find a way to contact the base. Try the high-frequency radio,” Cyndi suggested.

Lance lifted a microphone from its cradle. The end of the coiled cord swung freely. He’d shot right through the cord while preventing the computer from starting World War III.

“This isn’t going to do us any good.” He tossed the microphone onto the desk. Lance gestured dramatically at all the carnage. “Well, this sucks.” He looked at Cyndi with a mischievous smirk. “You think they’re going to dock my pay for the damage?”

Unimaginable amounts of stress, adrenaline, and fear had suddenly found a convenient reason to leave her body. At hearing Lance’s lame joke Cyndi burst into hysterical laughter. She laughed harder than she had ever laughed before. A few moments later, with the immediate danger over, she decided to chime in with her own attempt at humor. “I’ve got bad news for you, steely eyed missile man, you’re going to be making payments on this mess for the next two million years.”

Lance didn’t care how corny her joke was. He cracked up laughing.

They traded more jokes and laughed like giddy children until the artificial euphoria had faded away. Then reality set in.

Cyndi plopped down in her seat, let out a deep breath, and shook her head. “We are so screwed.”

“We didn’t screw up anything. I’m positive something went wrong with this new system.” Ever the optimist, Lance said, “We followed our hearts. That’s got to count for something.”

“I’ll be sure to mention that at our court-martial. Maybe the Air Force will just forget the whole thing, pat us on the head, and wish us well in our civilian lives.”

The view from a topside camera aimed at the front gate and helipad was displayed on a monitor on the wall. Snow covering the ground suddenly came alive. It gently swirled around in the Wyoming wind. Then the snow erupted like it had been caught up in a tornado.

The shape of a helicopter appeared in the center of the snow tornado. It hovered one foot above the helipad for a moment then touched down on the right side.

Without any sound accompanying it, the scene on the monitor had a dreamlike feel to it. The classic whap-whap-whap sound from the helicopter blades—or any other sound, for that matter—could never penetrate that far underground. A nuclear bomb could explode topside, and the only indication in the LCC would be momentary flash of light on the screen.

Lance gestured toward the monitor. “The maintenance crew is here.” He glanced back at the smoldering console. “Looks like they’re going to be here for a while.”

“That’s great,” Cyndi replied with sarcasm dripping from her voice. “Goodbye, freedom.”

The rotors on the helicopter slowly spun down and stopped.

Rather than settle gently back down to earth, the snowflakes erupted again in another cloud of white. A second shape appeared.

Lance tilted his head and pointed at the monitor. “Why are there two helicopters?”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Lance walked closer and tapped the screen. “That’s weird. Those aren’t Grey Wolf helicopters.”

After the snow had settled, two AH-6M Special Operations helicopters were visible on the screen.

Both were heavily armed.

The lead helicopter was missing a Stinger missile from its left pylon.

Major Pierce stepped out of the first helicopter and slipped on a pair of stylish Oakley sunglasses. Just because he was a trained killer, that didn’t mean looking cool wasn’t important. The sunglasses also provided a more practical operational benefit: They prevented the enemy from seeing his eyes and gleaning any hints of his intentions. Pierce scanned the desolate landscape. Not a single building or home was in sight. He nodded and almost smiled. “Perfect.”

His copilot and the two men from