John chuckled softly. “Of course not.”
“For enlisted personnel, their oath includes that they are only required to obey orders that are lawful and are held morally and even legally accountable if the order is immoral or violates the military code of justice and/or the Constitution. That became important post-Vietnam, after the M? Lai Massacre.
“That is not specified in the oath for an officer, but it is clearly implied because we have an option enlisted personnel do not have; we can resign our commissions in protest and are expected to do so.” Another puff on the cigarette followed by a moment of silent thought.
“Are you going to resign?” John finally asked.
Bob looked over at him. “Your thoughts, John?”
“Is it about here?” John asked. “The fact that someone—in fact, quite a few—knew on the morning of the Day that we were going to get hit, took care of their own, and said the hell with the rest of us?”
“In part.”
Bob was silent for a moment. He took another drag on his cigarette and sighed.
“So damn much is clear now. We knew a practice drill was going on the day we got hit and most of the personnel that took over after that day by chance had been in Bluemont. At least I and others believed it was by chance. Hell, drills like that are being pulled all the time. We just came to assume that a few more that took over made it to Bluemont in the weeks afterward.”
He stood and looked out the window of the room to the open floor of what had been built in the 1950s to serve as the War Room to keep on fighting from if Washington was destroyed. “This was built to fight a nuclear war from. Once ICBMs with flight times of but minutes came online in the late 1950s and warning time went from hours down to just a few minutes, those of us working in the Pentagon knew we’d all be gone in those first few minutes and this place was all but forgotten. A relic of a different type of war from a different time. And now to find it was activated and running with families stashed here?”
He looked back at John, tears in his eyes. “Six hours’ warning and I could have gotten Linda out of Florida. All of us could have done something. For that matter, we could have scrambled everything we had and perhaps even targeted the container ships in the Gulf of Mexico and off the California coast before they hit us. It’s all too much to absorb, John.”
“I spoke to a woman who said her husband claimed that a select few knew something was coming but assumed it would be just a nuclear strike on D.C., and I would guess maybe New York.” John wearily shook his head. “Just D.C. and New York,” John whispered again. “Just ten to fifteen million dead. My God, what kind of mentality thinks such a loss would be a small number and that would reset the political paradigm in their favor.”
“There’s intelligence chatter all the time.” Bob sighed. “If one believes all of it, every day you go crazy. You know that. Maybe they thought that it was just a mid-level alert. I guess we’ll never know for sure. Bastards who would sit back for that think of themselves first. I doubt if we’ll ever get the truth from them.”
“By the way,” John said, breaking the tension of the moment with a sad smile, “it was her husband sending those love notes, not to his wife but to his mistress stashed away in the highly secured other end of this facility, that gave us the clue about Site R. I told her you have the letters. She is so pissed off I’m certain she’ll sing like a canary for us if we need more info later.”
“Typical,” Bob said softly, wearily shaking his head. “So typical of so many moral scum we all had to salute at one time or another.”
“But to the core question, sir?” John asked. “Is it about what they did to us all or what they are going to do to us next?”
“Go on.”
“I see one side of the dilemma that you are dwelling on being what happened. But, sir, the more pressing issue is what they’re going to do next and how you will reply.”
“Keep talking.” Now Bob lit his third cigarette.
“All of this started to unravel when you received orders—when was it, not much more than a day ago?—to pull your entire command back to Roanoke. It meant that Bluemont was preparing to pop an EMP to destabilize Atlanta, take out communities like mine that are resisting them, and I guess send a message to China as well not to push beyond the Mississippi. It comes down to the fact that they are willing to hold and execute power whatever the cost. I just heard someone quote Milton: ‘Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.’ They scrambled to protect themselves when all hell cut loose and then seized the reins of power afterward. Whether that was their plot beforehand or not we most likely will never know. But since the Day? What they’ve done, what they are planning to do next? That, sir, is the issue of the moment to focus upon.”
Bob closed his eyes. “‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion … If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning … If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth…’”
He looked over at John. “The 137th Psalm,” he whispered. “I dwell on it often when I think of all that has happened.”
“And you are saying we cannot let our tongue cleave to the roof of our mouth or our right hand forget its strength.”
Bob made no gesture of reply.
“Enemies, foreign and domestic—it all turns on that, sir. Not just what they did but what they are about to do to hold on to their power. To protect the Constitution, it is therefore right for you to act.”
His gaze was no longer fixed on John, as if he was staring off to some distant place
“And to not forget the Jerusalem that they allowed to be destroyed,” John interjected, “Whether they thought it would be—forgive me for even saying it—just a strike on Washington and New York that would reset the political paradigm and power structure or some suspected it would be a full-scale EMP strike, it happened. Now they’re ready to do it themselves against the southern United States. Why?”
“A message to the Chinese, for one,” Bob said softly. “If we’re now willing to do such against our own territory still in rebellion against them as they see it, the message would be clear. They’re so desperate that they will order the same against everyone else in this world if they think they’re about to go under. Second, it was to knock out people like you who were beginning to rise back up and put things together and who at some point would look at Bluemont and start asking questions.”