***
A small, fenced-in gate guarded the entrance to a tunnel in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Nestled just outside the city of Colorado Springs, the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station that surrounded the mountains was the epicenter of the intricate air and space defense for North America. NORAD had the capability to detect threats and help mobilize a response anywhere in the country.
Deep underneath the thousands of pounds of granite and rocks lay bunkers capable of withstanding nuclear attacks. Those operation rooms were reserved for times of nuclear crisis, but since the water shortage that had begun more than a decade ago, the rooms deep within the mountains now housed most of the base’s staff.
Display screens highlighting Gallo’s forces across the Southwest were etched on multiple surfaces around the main control room. United States Air Force officers sat behind their stations, coding and decrypting messages to units stationed along the borders of Oklahoma and Texas.
Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Mink’s eyes hadn’t left the screens in front of him. He maneuvered the thin wire microphone jutting across the side of his jaw from his ear and sipped from a mug of coffee. Steam rose from the cup, fogging his glasses.
A cadet entered with a sealed envelope, saluted, and then handed Mink the document. Mink set his coffee down, and the tearing of the envelope caused the heads in the room to turn.
“Calm down, everyone. We don’t know what the orders will be,” Mink said.
But even he felt his heart rate accelerate as he flipped the papers open. He scanned the document. The only sounds coming from the room were the beeps from the surrounding computers. Mink folded the orders up, tucked them under his arm, and adjusted the microphone in front of his mouth.
“We are go for operation Sum Zero,” Mink ordered.
The quiet in the room was replaced with the buzz of communications with American military units around the Southwest. The display screens at the front of the room lit up with movement. Planes scrambled in Colorado. Army regiments deployed from Texas. And the Pacific Fleet guarding the Alaskan fisheries was called back to San Diego.
Mink knew what the orders meant. Congress had made its declaration of war. The ink had barely dried, and now it was time to put that piece of legislation into action. Every word and letter on the declaration was pointed with the spears of soldiers, the bombs from planes, and the artillery of tanks.
But Mink also knew the damage it would wreak on the civilians still living in the Southwest. The air strikes wouldn’t just destroy the enemy in Phoenix and Albuquerque; they would hit the former American citizens still holding on to whatever hope they had left.
When the bombs dropped, those hopes and prayers would shatter. But Mink had his orders. There wasn’t any emotion in his actions or the actions of his soldiers. The only reactions were the fluid efficiencies of the coordination with which the orders were carried out.
Lieutenant Colonel Mink picked his coffee back up and watched the squares and triangles on the display screens move closer to their targets. The United States had officially entered the war.