The Book of Truths by Bob Mayer

that warhead in the silo.”
    “Which brings up an interesting point,” Ms. Jones said. Her office was dimly lit and was actually a room behind the office where she “met” each new Nightstalker and in-briefed them and held debriefings with Moms and Nada. She’d been impressed when Doc had quickly surmised that the shadowy image sitting in the dark shadow on the other side of the desk was usually just an image, not a person. Not that it mattered. She always said what she needed to and she could see and hear everything pertaining to the Nightstalkers from her hospital bed.
    “And that point is?” Pitr pressed, making her realize her thoughts had drifted off, which concerned her as it was happening more and more. It was a luxury of the elderly, but a person in her position could not afford that luxury.
    “What if the nuclear warhead being left there wasn’t a mistake?” she asked. In the background, the whistling had petered out and there was no sound coming out of the speaker except the muted roar of the Snake’s engines. Ms. Jones turned the speaker off. “Here in the Nightstalkers we are so used to ascribing incidents to mistake or oversight or scientific malfeasance, we rarely consider that often there are those who scheme and plot and act. Sometimes in ways counter to what we believe is in our country’s and mankind’s welfare.”
    Pitr frowned. He glanced over at the machines helping to keep Ms. Jones alive, scanning their various lights and indicators. He’d been doing this for so many years that anything amiss would have screamed out at him. All was within normal parameters. Pitr spoke with less of a Russian accent than Ms. Jones, but that was because he left Area 51 and interacted with other Americans. Ms. Jones had not left the Ranch in eight years. Pitr was a former Russian helicopter pilot whose life Ms. Jones had saved by stopping him from overflying Chernobyl, telling him it was a one-way mission even while she risked her life to save the man who’d started the chain reaction of that disaster back in 1986. Pitr was a tall, rugged-looking man with graying hair. He had perfect teeth that he revealed often when he smiled.
    That was why Ms. Jones knew he could never replace her: the smile. The person who ran the Nightstalkers rarely had anything to smile about. He was good at his job as her assistant, but the mantle of leadership was not something she could drape around his shoulders.
    That a former Soviet nuclear engineer was in charge of the Nightstalkers and had a former Soviet helicopter pilot as her aide was as improbable as an actor who had played the Gipper in
Knute Rockne, All American
becoming the fortieth president of the United States.
    Probably less so.
    “You suspect a plot?” Pitr asked, intrigued. Ms. Jones was not given to idle speculation.
    “This weapon was listed as destroyed,” Ms. Jones said. “That’s not a simple oversight of forgetting it in the silo. Someone also deliberately wiped out any trace of it by recording it as having been dismantled. One event is an oversight. Two is a plan.”
    “If it is a plan,” Pitr said, “it is a very old plan.”
    “When I heard the year, 1962, I knew right away what the code name was,” Ms. Jones said. “Operation Ortsac is in the Nuclear Protocol binder. What is
not
in the binder is what
didn’t
happen. General LeMay was the chief of staff of the air force at the time. He advocated preemptive nuclear warfare from the moment he had any voice in the matter. Even after the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved, he pressed for an invasion of Cuba anyway. His deepest desire was to take advantage of the missile gap.
    “While publicly the military and CIA were claiming our former country was far ahead in terms of nuclear warheads, the truth was the opposite. If the United States had initiated a first strike in the fifties or sixties, the result would have been devastating to Russia. Indeed, Pitr, I would have to say if the generals in our