Sixty Seconds to Midnight

1659 Zulu
49 minutes south of Arrow Creek, Montana

It's cold. So cold that if feels like your breath might freeze inside your lungs instead of on the way out. You've been assigned to the B-02 missile site. The grounds are unremarkable: plains and scrub, with a few small facilities near the missile silo. The barracks is large enough for about ten soldiers, with a fence surrounding both it and the silo. Two guards man a checkpoint on the north side of the fence.

You're not on the site itself, though. They aren't supposed to know you're here. Technically, no one's really supposed to know it's a missile base at all. If you look up its coordinates on a map, the site is part of the Arrow Creek K-12 School District. But you know better. Apparently, so does someone else. Your agency received an anonymous tip that someone would attempt to sabotage the ICBM housed in the base’s missile silo tonight.

The night air is chilly enough that you find yourself wiping the fog from the lenses of your binoculars periodically. You should’ve requisitioned a heavier coat, but last minute and all that. The moon is full, granting good visibility across the field, and your radio is tuned to the base’s frequency. It’ll be tough for anyone to slip by you, and if they do, you’ll hear about it. You hope they try it soon. The tip of your nose is numb.

Getting really cold for Gene, We need to get out of this cold or nothing is going to matter. Lets start closing in some. Perhaps we can get a wind break.

Lorraine had always hated missions in the cold. That fact about her had not changed.

She'd always hated them because in the cold, the shortest of missions always felt that little bit longer. The nip of frost at your skin, the chilling sensation that felt like it might never go away. Frankly, everything just felt a little more dead in colder climates. Yes, silence was paramount, that had never refused to be a touchstone of the espionage experience, but that didn't make it any more pleasant.

Wasn't helping that she'd never worked with these guys before. They'd had to have been competent to get this far, but that didn't mean Lorraine was going to trust any of them further than she could throw them. They'd have to earn that trust. Just as she'd have to earn theirs. Give and take, that was the thing.

Wasn't much else to do except muse and take watch with her binoculars, so that was what she did. Watched, and waited.

Suddenly, Deacon spots a group of eight figures all in black, and armed with what look to be submachine guns, approaching the missile base from the side. They must have used some land feature - probably a culvert or a gulley - to get this close.

Two of the intruders move toward the guard post, while two more move toward the missile silo. The remaining four creep towards the barracks.

It will be a matter of moments before they're at their targets.