Scareforce by Charles Hough Page B

the fleet. After that I knew the meaning of real fear. Sometimes the known is worse than
     the unknown.
    What’s the scariest place you can think of? Think it’s an old, ramshackle
Psycho-like
mansion with an infamous past and an unsavory present? The kind that you joke about with your friends at school, scaring
     and daring and parading your courage? But your bragging freezes in your imagination as you pass the house on the far side
     of the street. You know that the undoubtedly haunted hovel will star in your dreams. Is that your idea of frightening?
    Maybe you grew up on splatter flicks and movie special effects creatures. No scary old house for your nightmares. You need
     alien claws and technoshock surroundscare to get your teeth chattering. Only Freddy’s smile can call up your chills.
    Let me tell you of a scarier place. A place that demands your attention and can steal your breath and your heartbeat in a
     fraction of a whimper. How about living and working in the exact center of a bull’s-eye? It’s not visible and it’s not always
     the same size but it’s always there and it’s very real. One more thing. It’s got the most powerful, deadly, devastating weapon
     ever dreamed of aimed right at its heart.
    This place is an Air Force base in the heart of the heartland. That means it’s in a place that’s not very populated and definitely
     not a must-see on the jet set tour.
    Grand Forks Air Force Base is located near the Red River Valley of that great and frozen state of North Dakota. The “Forks”
     is not a major base as military bases go, but it has major standing in another league. It’s a senior stalwart in the coldest
     of battles. It is armed with weapons of Armageddon proportion. Its nuclear arsenal is formidable. An astute observer noticed
     that North Dakota, given sovereign status, would become the third largest nuclear power in the world.
    Generations of warriors assigned to this base went about their careers and their lives in the middle of this bull’s-eye. The
     enemy knew of them and their power. They were required by command and by law to feign ignorance of their own power to the
     public. “I can neither confirm nor deny that,” was the only statement they could make. But they knew the weapons were there.
     And their enemy knew that the weapons were there. And they knew the enemy had trained his own doomsday device at them. So
     they lived and worked and played and slept in the bull’s-eye, never certain of anything except their duty.
    The fear was there. It was a constant undercurrent that seasoned their lives. And it wasn’t just the fear of what their enemy
     would do if given the chance. It was also the fear of what they could do to themselves if they weren’t very careful and very
     good.
    They knew they were living on time not borrowed but wrested from a cruel fate. Years before, when the weapons were new and
     the threat was new and computers were new and filled whole buildings, a private company was asked to look at the fledgling
     nuclear force. The brass were concerned about the growing number of accidents involving nuclear weapons.
    They went outside their carefully groomed force to a company famed for objectivity and analytical skill. They asked them to
     study, delve, question, and observe. And they asked them to ask their big-as-a-house computing machine two questions.
    The first was, “Will we have an accident resulting in a nuclear detonation?” And the second was only to be asked if the first
     resulted in a yes. It was, simply, “When?“
    The company dug and worked and gathered and finally fed all their careful study to the computer. And they asked the first
     question. Without hesitation the electronic oracle said, “Yes.“
    The company personnel who fed data into the new thinking machine suddenly lost some of their celebrated objectivity. The machine
     that they served and to some degree worshiped, had just predicted death on a monumental