t’s five days before the year 2000. Businesses and government agencies are scrambling to negate the impact as computer systems, unable to cope with the date change, begin
shutting down and delivering erroneous results.The story begins aboard TCA Flight 257 on its final approach to Dulles International Airport. Senator Michael Lloyd, traveling with his family, is on his way to
meet with the President to urge a Wall Street trading moratorium until after the New Year. He has highly classified information about a terrorist threat to use the millennium computer bug to cripple the world’s
economy. But something goes terribly wrong with the flight – the plane loses power and crashes, killing all but seven.
Among the survivors is Senator Lloyd’s wife, Nora, who pleads on her husband’s behalf to
take immediate action. Instead of shutting down Wall Street as the senator intended, the President orders all private, commercial and military aircraft grounded until 48 hours after the clocks change on January 1,
2000.
In Atlanta, CODE: ALPHA’s Dr. Julie Martinelli is unexpectedly and suddenly drafted by a special branch of the U.S. Military. She and several of her colleagues are whisked to Cheyenne Mountain Air Station,
the military’s high-tech NORAD bunker buried deep inside the Colorado Rockies.
There Julie learns that on Christmas Eve at midnight – exactly one week before the clocks will strike midnight for the last time this
century – America’s top secret Strategic Defense satellite surveillance network, code-named Eclipse, shut itself down. No one knows why. Now the US is blind and deaf to a number of growing international
threats. Julie is forced into a hastily assembled project team to find a solution.
Meanwhile, microprocessor designer and entrepreneur Alexander Skile and his small army of doomsday militants are plotting to use
the window created by the Millennium Bug to commit the ultimate crime. The Eclipse shutdown is merely a diversion – the real target is something far more ominous – and lucrative. If Skile’s plan succeeds,
the world’s financial systems will be left in ruins. And, worse, an unintentional shutdown of the US arsenal of nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors would release a catastrophe of global proportions.
Against
orders for grounding all military aircraft, a Special Forces unit, led by Colonel Joseph Marshall and his Gunnery Sergeant J.C. Williams, “borrow” a RAH-66 Comanche gunship and begin following a gruesome trail to
Skile’s “fortress” Rocky Mountain chateau.
Meanwhile, inside Cheyenne Mountain, Skile’s confederates shut down the military center and seal it behind two 25-ton blast doors encased in concrete collars. Julie is
cut off from surface and becomes trapped in the maze of 15 steel buildings with unknown saboteurs. One by one, the team is systematically “executed,” their deaths made to look like suicides. Panic grips
surviving members as they try to discover who – or what – is sabotaging the system as time, oxygen, and trust all run furiously out.
As time runs out, the President orders Marshall to find and stop Skile before he can
execute his plan. With the seconds ticking away, Marshall and the others follow Skile to Chicago for a desperate battle to save the country – and the world – from...
