Influx by Suarez Daniel

Author:Suarez, Daniel [Suarez, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-02-19T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

Rogue Agency

The Raven Rock Mountain Complex was intended to deal with end-of-the-world scenarios. For that reason it always put Bill McAllen on edge. Known officially as Site R, it was a continuity of government (or COG) bunker complex in the hills of eastern Pennsylvania, not far from the Maryland border. One of many such bunkers built during the Cold War, it had been augmented and expanded over the decades. It was now sometimes called the Underground Pentagon because it served as an emergency command center for various U.S. defense agencies, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the event of a major national crisis.

As McAllen drove down what seemed like miles of concrete-lined tunnels in an otherwise empty, chauffeured twelve-seat electric cart, he couldn’t stop thinking that this was where some of the last humans might remain alive in the event of global thermonuclear war. Or an asteroid strike. Or a pandemic—name your Armageddon, they probably had a standard-operating-procedures binder for it on a shelf somewhere down here. But the four times he’d been here in the past had been for COG training.

Today wasn’t training.

The cart stopped in the tunnel next to an open three-foot-thick steel blast door, flanked by armed sentries. He stepped off and was met by a female army lieutenant from the U.S. Army’s 114th Signal Battalion. “This way, Deputy Secretary.”

Without waiting for him, she moved quickly through bunkeresque office corridors devoid of people. He hurried to keep up. After walking past dozens of identical metal doors marked with numbers and letters, she finally turned a corner where a podium with the Pentagon seal stood on a dais before dozens of chairs. Several generations of television broadcasting equipment were mothballed against the back wall, but sitting in the chairs were lots of sharp-looking young men and women in suits, tapping away at laptops. None of them so much as glanced up.

The lieutenant gestured for McAllen to follow her as she approached a conference room flanked by two more armed sentries. She knocked and after a moment entered, moving aside for McAllen.

“Deputy Secretary McAllen is here, Madam Director.”

“Bill!”

In the concrete-walled boardroom McAllen could see several senior representatives of the DHS, NSA, CIA, and Defense Department sitting around a huge and absurdly durable-looking oak table. At its head sat their penultimate boss, Director of National Intelligence Kaye Monahan, a petite woman in her sixties who nonetheless had a commanding presence. McAllen was well aware this small woman had, as U.S. ambassador, more than held her own in brass-knuckle dealings with the Chinese senior leadership. She’d been in the intel community long before that. And she was principled—which McAllen found appealing in a longtime D.C. political player.

The army lieutenant departed, closing the door behind her. There was a vigorous debate already under way around the conference table.

Director Monahan motioned for him to sit in an open seat next to her. “Come here and help me talk some sense into these guys.”

McAllen took his seat while the raucous discussion continued.

“Kaye, you know damn well no one has the complete picture.

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