The Doomsday Bunker Read online

  Look for these heart pounding thrillers by William W. Johnstone, writing with J. A. Johnstone, available whenever books are sold

  BLACK FRIDAY

  TYRANNY

  STAND YOUR GROUND

  SUICIDE MISSION

  THE BLEEDING EDGE

  THE BLOOD OF PATRIOTS

  HOME INVASION

  JACKKNIFE

  REMEMBER THE ALAMO

  INVASION USA

  INVASION USA: BDRDER WAR

  VENGEANCE IS MINE

  PHOENIX RISING

  PHOENIX RISING: FIREBASE FREEDOM

  PHOENIX RISING: DAY OF JUDGMENT

  THE DOOMSDAY BUNKER

  WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE with J. A. Johnstone

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Look for these heart pounding thrillers by William W. Johnstone, writing with J. A. Johnstone, available whenever books are sold

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Epigraph

  BOOK ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  BOOK TWO

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2017 J. A. Johnstone

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  Following the death of William W. Johnstone, the Johnstone family is working with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Mr. Johnstone’s outlines and many unfinished manuscripts to create additional novels in all of his series like The Last Gunfighter, Mountain Man, and Eagles, among others. This novel was inspired by Mr. Johnstone’s superb storytelling.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  PINNACLE BOOKS and the Pinnacle logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-0-7860-3605-9

  First electronic edition: October 2017

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-3606-6

  ISBN-10: 0-7860-3606-0

  America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination, and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.

  —HARRY S. TRUMAN

  Americans never quit.

  —DOUGLAS MACARTHUR

  BOOK ONE

  Chapter 1

  May 24

  “In other news, there are unconfirmed reports that North Korea conducted further missile tests today. The missiles involved in these tests are said to have the potential to reach the continental United States. With the recent increase in North Korea’s nuclear development, these reports have caused grave concern in some circles in Washington, but the President, in a statement today, referred to that concern as ‘fear-mongering’ and said that there is no reason to believe North Korea may be considering aggressive action, despite heightened tensions with South Korea and the U.S.”

  As a commercial came on for the season finale of Singing for Dollars, Patrick Larkin picked up the remote and pushed the mute button.

  “See?” he said to his wife Susan.

  “You’re just fear-mongering,” she said.

  Larkin rolled his eyes.

  “And don’t roll your eyes at me,” Susan added. “You’re talking about a lot of money, Patrick. A hell of a lot of money.”

  He grimaced and said, “Yeah, I know. We’ve got it, but it would sure take a big chunk out of our bank accounts.”

  “It would wipe out a couple of them.”

  Larkin nodded. The remote was in his right hand. He slid his left arm around his wife’s shoulders and pulled her closer against him.

  “You’re not getting ideas, are you?” she asked.

  “Not the kind you’re thinking about,” he said with a sigh.

  He was in his late forties, but the only signs of his age were a few streaks of gray in his thick dark hair and a slight weathering of his features. Also, he wasn’t in quite as good a shape as he had been when he retired from the Marine Corps a few years earlier, but he liked to think he hadn’t lost too much of that conditioning.

  Susan, with her honey-blond hair and classic good looks, didn’t show her age, either. Even after all the years of marriage, it didn’t take much encouragement for him to think about turning off the TV and taking her to bed. Unfortunately, watching the news was as much of an antidote for that as a bucket full of ice water dumped over his head would have been.

  Too late now, he thought as she said, “It’s back on.”

  “West Nile, Zika, and now Hydra. No, we’re not talking about comic book villains. The Centers for Disease Control has confirmed three more cases of the Hydra virus, so named because of the way it reproduces. This brings the number of confirmed cases in the United States to seventeen. The latest victims of the disease have been identified as refugees from the Middle East who were resettled in Houston, Texas.”

  “Good Lord,” Larkin said. “It’s in Texas now, not just Florida and the East Coast.”

  “Shh,” Susan said.

  “These patients are being held in strict quarantine, and Houston’s mayor stated today that the situation is under control and there is no danger of the virus spreading. The patients are listed as being in critical condition, and the prognosis for their recovery is uncertain.”

  “Uncertain, my ass,” Larkin said. “Hydra’s killed everybody else who came down with it. And how can that windbag politician say there’s no danger of it spreading? The doctors and scientists don’t know how it spreads. And now it’s in Texas. You think it’s not coming up I-45 toward us right now?”

  “They’ll get it under control. They did with all the other new viruses, didn’t they?”

  “Well, there hasn’t been another plague that wiped out half the country yet, but give it time.”


  “I swear, Patrick, you sound almost like you wish that would happen.”

  “No,” he said, “I just wish people would wake up to the fact that it could.”

  “Widespread demonstrations prompted by last week’s incident in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, erupted in violence today as police and peaceful protestors clashed. Riots broke out in Des Moines, as well as in other cities in Illinois, Ohio, California, and New York. The Cedar Rapids incident, in which two alleged armed robbers were gunned down by police, is under investigation by the Justice Department, and the officers involved in the shooting have been placed in protective custody after their homes were destroyed by firebombs. No arrests have been made in those bombings.

  “We’ll have news of the latest celebrity breakup right after—Wait. What? Where . . . Breaking news. There has been an explosion in downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee. Reports are coming in of serious destruction and numerous injuries, although there are no confirmed fatalities at this time . . . We’ll try to find out more—”

  “That’s enough,” Larkin said as he pushed the power button on the remote this time.

  “I might have wanted to see that, you know,” Susan said.

  “Why? You know what’s going to happen. All the talking heads will speculate about who’s responsible for that explosion, and they’ll mention everybody except who it turns out to be.”

  “You don’t know who’s responsible.”

  Larkin just gave her a look.

  “Well, you don’t.”

  “Maybe I’ll be proven wrong. The history of the last thirty years says I won’t be, though.” Larkin shook his head. “Let’s face it, you could write the script for the news every night before it comes on. Some dictator on the other side of the world rattles a sword, and our guy waves it off and accuses his political opponents of fear-mongering. So-called peaceful protestors start burning and looting because they can get away with it, while cops trying to do their jobs have to worry not only about being shot but about their families being threatened as well. Some athlete spits on the country that made him a millionaire. We’ve conquered all the diseases except the ones that have mutated to the point that we can’t do anything to control them. And people can’t go about their business without having to wonder if there’s some suicidal nutcase with a bomb standing next to them in a crowd. Isn’t that what we see, night after night?”

  “Maybe, but what good is ranting going to do about it?”

  “Ranting? This is not ranting. I haven’t even come close to working up to a good rant—”

  Susan stood up. “Good night, Patrick.”

  “That’s it? Good night?”

  “Yeah, I think so. I’m tired. I still have a job, you know, and it was a long shift in the ER today.”

  He made a face again and said, “Sorry. I guess I do get a little wound up sometimes.”

  She went behind the sofa, leaned over, and kissed his ear. “You’re passionate about things,” she told him. “I can’t complain too much about that.” She straightened, started to walk toward the bedroom, and then paused to add, “I just hate to see you get so worked up over things you can’t do anything about. Really, Patrick, this is just . . . the new normal.”

  The new normal, he thought as she left the room. He supposed she was right about that.

  God help us all.

  Chapter 2

  Two weeks earlier

  “It’s out in the country west of here,” Adam Threadgill said. “You know, so it would be handy to the Air Force base.” He shrugged. “Back when there was still an Air Force base.”

  “There’s still a base there,” Larkin said. “It’s just a reserve base now.”

  “Yeah. So they don’t have any need for nuclear bombs, do they?”

  “I thought you said this place you’re talking about was where they kept missiles.”

  “They had missiles to protect the bombs.”

  “I get it,” Larkin said, although he wasn’t sure he did. “But now the installation is empty?”

  “Yep,” Adam said. “For now. But not for long, if this guy I’m telling you about has his way.”

  “Okay, run it past me again,” Larkin said as he reached for his glass of iced tea. The plate in front of him was empty except for a couple of tiny smears of barbecue sauce, all that was left of his weekly lunch with his fellow retired Marine.

  The two men were in what looked like a hole-in-the-wall dump of a restaurant, but actually it had some of the best barbecue to be found in Fort Worth. Located near the big aircraft plant, the place was usually packed with guys Larkin could tell were engineers just by looking at them. It was popular with retired military, too, and there were a lot of them in this area.

  “Okay,” Threadgill said. He had let himself go more than Larkin had, but you could still kind of see the tough, squatty noncom he had been. “The Air Force had this secret underground base out in the hills west of town where they stored all the nuclear bombs they’d stockpiled for the B-52s and B-58s that flew out of the regular base. This was in the early Sixties, you know, when the Cold War was at its height. Everybody was afraid the Russians were going to try to bomb the hell out of us at a moment’s notice. Considering there was a stockpile of nuclear weapons here, this whole area was considered a prime target for the Russkies. So they put in Nike Hercules missiles to guard the place. In fact, there were missile bases all around the Dallas/Fort Worth area, but the one I’m talking about was secret. You can’t find out anything about it even on Wikipedia.”

  “Then how do you know about it?”

  “You forget, I grew up around here. My dad worked at General Dynamics, right across the runways from the Air Force base. All the kids whose dads worked at GD knew about the missile base. And it scared the shit out of us thinking that the Russians had painted a big bull’s-eye on the whole area.”

  “So your dads who worked on the flight line knew about it. Wow, that’s some really top-notch military security there.”

  “What can I say?” Threadgill shrugged. “The Russians never bombed us. Maybe they didn’t know about it, after all.”

  “They should have put a few sleeper agents into the elementary schools around here.”

  “Anyway, the empty silos are still there, and so are the bunkers where the warheads were stored, along with all the fire control and administrative areas. It’s almost like an underground mall, but there’s nothing in it. It’s been sitting there like that for all those years, just waiting for somebody to come along and put it to good use.”

  “Like this guy Moultrie you were telling me about.”

  “Yeah. Graham’s got vision.”

  Larkin was pretty sure Threadgill was quoting something Graham Moultrie had said. In his experience, he was a little suspicious of anybody who claimed to have vision. All too often, a businessman who said that was just after a buck. A politician who started spouting about it was after power . . . and a buck. None of it ended well.

  “Moultrie bought the property?”

  “Yeah. From the way he talks, the government was glad to get rid of it. It’s kind of a white elephant. It’s never been sold to a real-estate developer because then they’d have to disclose the fact that nuclear material used to be stored there. Otherwise, if somebody bought the property and covered it with McMansions, they’d be opening themselves up to lawsuits for not revealing that. But in Graham’s case, he knew what had been down there and bought it as is.”

  “Complete with radiation contamination.”

  Threadgill shook his head. “No, the place is clean. He’s had it checked up one way and down the other. It’s perfectly safe.”

  A dubious frown creased Larkin’s forehead. “Yeah, but if he’s trying to sell shares in the place, he’s not going to admit that it might give you radiation poisoning, is he?”

  “He’s going to live there himself, if that day ever comes, God forbid. He wouldn’t move into a place he knew would kill him, would he?”

  “I suppose not
,” Larkin admitted. “It wouldn’t be much of a survival bunker if it was going to kill you.”

  Survival bunker . . . It said something about the state of the world that such a term had even come into being. Of course, back when he was a kid, Larkin had heard people talking about fallout shelters, even though the craze where everybody wanted one in their backyard had passed more than a decade earlier. Even most of those had been nothing more than glorified storm cellars, a place where you could go to hunker down safely until a tornado blew over. You couldn’t wait out a nuclear war in one of them, though.

  A survival bunker was different. He had read up on them, even before Adam Threadgill got interested. Most of them were set up in abandoned military installations like the one Threadgill was talking about, underground bases hardened against not only nuclear blasts but also electromagnetic pulses, chemical and biological warfare, and any other hideous threat the modern world could dish up. They were big enough to hold more than just a family; most could house hundreds of people in relative comfort and were self-sustaining with generators to provide power, plenty of room for stored rations, equipment to supply clean water, and even gardens to grow food hydroponically in case the rations ever ran low. Theoretically, people could live safely under the ground for years no matter what went on above them on the surface.

  What would they find when they came up, though?

  Larkin pushed that thought out of his head. Always a practical man, he said, “What’s it going to cost to buy some space in there?”