Ballistic

-13- The Valley of the Shadow of Death

The second lieutenant approaches the steel door of the Security Building, his combat boots crunching along a gravel path. He wears a blue flightsuit with zippered pockets and a black scarf, signifying the Black Pirates of the 318th Missile Squadron. Pinned to his chest is a medal depicting a missile blasting toward four stars. A missileer’s heaven. A sleeve patch shows a metallic fist gripping three lightning bolts, all sheathed by an olive branch. The iron fist in the velvet glove.

His nametag reads “Riordan, W.” He has pale blond hair and wears wire-rimmed glasses. He slides a coded card through a slot in the steel door, and a red light blinks above a recessed combination mike/speaker. “Lieutenant William Riordan, reporting,” he says crisply.

“No shit,” comes a scratchy voice through the speaker. “Hey, Billy, you’re damn near late. That ain’t like you. And Owens was early. That ain’t like him.”

“I have three minutes, sir.”

“Don’t ‘sir’ me, Billy Riordan. Call me Valoppi or just plain ‘V.’ Call me any damn thing you want. I’m a second louie, just like you, and if I hadn’t taken that ROTC money, I’d be wearing a pin-striped suit and pulling down forty k a year in a major accounting firm.”

“It’s against regulations for Owens to proceed into the hole without me,” Billy says. “It’s a no lone zone.”

“Yeah, so what? In another week, Billy boy, there’ll be no more regs, no more Technical Orders, no more missile, no more nothing.”

The latch buzzes, and Billy opens the door and enters the security bridge, an enclosed tunnel which runs through the building and beyond it to the silo elevator housing. Twenty paces along the metal bridge, Billy comes to a grated steel door with an electronic lock that can be opened only from Security Command inside the building.

Billy looks through the bulletproof window into Security Command, the nerve center of the building. A sign under the window reads, “Controlled Area. It is unlawful to enter this area without permission of the installation commander. Use of deadly force is authorized. Section 21, Internal Security Act of 1950.”

Billy slides an ID card through a tray, and Lieutenant Valoppi pushes it back without looking at it. He is a handsome, dark-haired 22-year-old with an open collar and loosened tie on his Class A blue uniform. “Billy, you don’t have to show me your ID. You don’t have to give me a voiceprint, fingerprint, or urine sample. You don’t have to thank me, kiss me, or blow me. Just get the hell down the hole.”

“It’s in the T.O. I show you my ID. You visually confirm, and if there’s a question as to either my identity or authorization to proceed, you secondarily confirm by asking me the password of the day.”

“Look, Billy, I haven’t had my morning coffee, but I’ve seen your pathetic face every day for the last fourteen months, except when you’re on leave and disappear to God knows where, so I don’t have to visually confirm, secondarily confirm or otherwise confirm. Besides, you don’t know the password.”

“I must disagree, Lieutenant Valoppi. This is my duty shift, and I have lawful access to the password, which I memorized yesterday.” Billy takes back his ID card and carefully places it into a sleeve pocket which he zippers shut.

Valoppi shakes his head, tired of dealing with the little dweeb, but bored enough to want to have some fun. Behind him, two airmen at desks have stopped shuffling their papers to listen. “Oh yeah? All right, Riordan, if that’s really your name, I challenge! What’s the password of the day?”

“Sky King,” Billy answers.

“Wrong. Is your name Ivan? Are you some filthy Russian spy.”

“Nah,” says one of the airmen behind Valoppi. “The Russians are our pals.”

“Okay, smart guy, then who the hell’s the enemy?” Valoppi asks.

“How should I know?” the airman says. “I only work here.”

Billy is tapping on the window. “The password is Sky King. I’m never mistaken about—”

“Wrong!” Valoppi shouts, “because I just changed it. From now on, until they close this sucker down, the password is ‘bite me.’”

Annoyed, Billy stands silently at the window, waiting.

“Say it, Riordan.”

Still no response.

“You’re going to be late. Captain Puke won’t let you lead chapel services on Sunday, Billy boy.”

Billy shoots a nervous glance at his watch.

Valoppi smirks at him. “C’mon, say it.”

“Bite me,” Billy whispers.

“Can’t hear you,” Valoppi sings out.

“Bite me!”

Laughing, Valoppi hits a button, and the electronic latch opens on the steel door.

Billy pushes through the door and chugs at double time across the security bridge toward the elevator housing, an enclosed steel hood that shields the entrance to the elevator. Once there, he quickly punches the day code into the Permissive Action Link pad, and a reinforced steel door rumbles open. Billy steps inside, and the door closes.

The elevator is built to withstand earthquakes, direct hits by conventional weapons, and indirect hits by nuclear warheads, so it is a slow but solid ride down through the hard rock of Chugwater Mountain. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” Billy recites, looking into the lens of the TV camera overhead. “He causes me to lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He guides me in the path of righteousness for His name’s sake.”

The elevator comes to a smooth stop, the door opens, and Billy heads across the underground catwalk, his boots clacking across the steel steps. A sign warns, “No Lone Zone.”

Along the catwalk to the capsule, another sign is posted: “Safety first. There is no substitute for safety.” He can see the light from the launch control capsule fifty yards away. The blast door, required under Technical Order A-17 to be closed at all times, is open. As usual. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”

Billy wordlessly enters the launch control capsule and nods to his crewmate, Owens, who stands drinking coffee behind the two missileers about to go off duty. Owens’ sandy hair is cut close on the sides, but he’s let it grow on top. A cowlick in front gives him a Huckleberry Finn look. He yawns and watches the two missileers make entries in their log books. Sanders, the crew commander, is nicknamed Curly. He is a black 1st lieutenant with a shaved head. His teammate, Lauretta, is a female missileer, a 2nd lieutenant just overweight enough to be considered voluptuous by the men in the hole. Both are strapped into B-52 flight chairs, which are attached by rollers to a metal railing.

Lauretta, the deputy, sits directly in front of a series of olive green communications racks seven feet high. If the United States were under attack, she would have received the Emergency Action Message from the President or the National Command Authority by any of a variety of communications gear, some high tech, some still with a utilitarian, pre-computer age feel. Messages are received in code. The decoding manual, the Sealed Authentication System in Air Force lingo, is located in a simple red metal box above her head. Sanders has a matching box and manual. Each box is secured with a combination padlock that would cost less than ten dollars at the local hardware store. The missile crew is unarmed, the .38 caliber revolvers of yesteryear having been mothballed. Contrary to popular myth, the guns were not intended to force a recalcitrant crewmate to turn the key. Rather, in the unlikely event that security was breached in the launch control capsule, they were to be used against trespassers, protesters or terrorists.

But it never happened.

Not once since the beginning of the ICBM program.

So now, the basic security at launch facilities is intended to protect airmen and equipment from deep penetrating enemy warheads, not from homegrown terrorists, though at this point, no one really believes that either danger is real.

The missile crews of the 1970’s and 1980’s had another explanation for the sidearms, one never found in the four hundred page launch manual called the T.O., or Technical Order. In the event of thermonuclear war, each U.S. launch facility would be targeted by one or more Russian ICBM’s. The launch control capsules are steel cylinders fifty feet long and twenty feet wide, their interior ceilings curved like old-fashioned lunch diners. They are buried deep in the rock and attached to the roof of underground caverns by four hydraulic jacks intended to act as shock absorbers. In the event of anything but a direct hit from a Russian SS-18, the capsule and the PK missile should still be operational for a counter-strike if one has not already been launched.

In theory.

As with nearly all evidence related to nuclear war, everything is theory, conjecture and supposition. The crew members could be injured or trapped inside a damaged capsule. A deep penetration ICBM would surely destroy the elevator shaft and seal the emergency Personnel Access Hatch, turning its insulation of sand into fused glass. The missileers who survived a direct hit would be trapped in their capsule. The sidearms, the missile crews concluded long ago, were to be used on themselves.

Now, Billy Riordan, the deputy on the next twenty-four hour duty, stands behind Lauretta. In front of her, the vintage 1965 teletype clacks out a message that will need to be decoded. It is surely one of an endless stream of tests. That is life in the hole, interminable preparation and repetition of routine procedures. Nothing, it seems, is ever real.

Lauretta tears off the teletype message and lays it to one side. It’s not an EAM, so there’s no possibility that the country will be at war in fifteen minutes. If it had been, she would be opening the padlock, grabbing the SAS manual, and decoding the message. Then, if it turned out to be a launch command, she would enter the six-digit Enable Code and the four-digit Preparatory Launch Command. In addition to the one PK just down the tunnel, they control another nine located in separate silos several miles away.

To launch, they would each take a key from the red boxes. After entering the Enable Code and the Prepatory Launch Command on their consoles, they would remove a plastic strip covering two keyholes, one in each console approximately twelve feet apart.

No Lone Zone. Even Shaq doesn’t have the wingspan to launch by himself.

They must turn, hold and release their keys simultaneously, or the launch command will not be accepted by the computer in the fourth stage of the PK. There is another safeguard, too, against a mistaken or renegade launch. Another capsule must enter the identical codes, a second “launch vote,” making the procedure double fail-safed.

“Hey, Owens,” Lauretta says. “They don’t pay overtime, so you can figure this one out.” She makes a paper airplane out of the teletype message and sails it to him. He catches it but makes no effort to unfold or read it.

“You sure you want me to? It’s probably a love letter from that major at Malmstrom.”

Lauretta ignores him and runs a quick check on the other communications gear, AFSAT, the link to the Air Force satellite system, SLFCS, the survivable low frequency system with underground wiring intended to withstand a nuclear blast, and SACDIN, a more modern digital network run by computer. There’s also the telephone with direct links to NORAD in Cheyenne Mountain, STRATCOM at Offut Air Force Base in Omaha, the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon, and the Alternate Command Center buried inside Raven Rock Mountain in Maryland, just in case the Pentagon has been obliterated by an enemy attack. The phone itself is something of a relic, a black, rotary dial model the likes of which are not seen on TV commercials extolling the virtues of AT&T versus MCI.

The launch facilities are like that. While the Minuteman III’s have computers and fancy monitors with on-screen commands, the Peacekeeper capsules still have the old lighted boards descended from the Titan project in the sixties. The irony is that the PK is the newer missile with greater range, accuracy and punch. In front of Sanders in the commander’s chair is a console festooned with multi-colored lights. Each light is emblazoned with its own descriptive term, the jargon, too, reaching back to the beginning of the missile program. “Strategic Alert,” “Standby,” “Missile Shutdown,” “Fault,” “LF Down,” “LF No Go,” “Enabled,” “Launch Command,” “Launch Inhibit,” “Launch in Progress,” “Missile Away,”

Beams sweep endlessly across Doppler radar screens, and security monitors attached to the capsule’s ceiling show live shots of the base above them as well as the PK missile three hundred yards down a tunnel from where they now sit.

Owens, who would have been a decent running back at Oklahoma if he hadn’t torn up a knee, leans on the back of Sanders’ chair. “Get your rocks off today Curly?”

“Day ain’t over yet,” Sanders says.

Owens watches the digital clock on the console change from 0759 to 0800. “Now it is.”

Sanders and Lauretta unbuckle their harnesses, and Owens finishes his coffee. “Ain’t fair, Curly. How come I’m stuck with Bible Billy while you get Miss Intercontinental Ballistic Boobs?”

Lauretta kicks her flight chair down the railing and bangs into Owens’ leg. “Hey!” he cries out.

Lauretta jabs a finger into his chest. “Because spending twenty-four hours with you, Owens, would be cruel and unusual punishment.”

“Okay, okay,” Owens says, raising his hands in surrender. “Jeez, a guy can’t even joke around anymore. Right Billy?”

“Not in the hole,” Billy answers. “‘Missileers shall maintain a constant state of readiness. Space Command frowns upon non-service related activities such as playing cards, personal conversation, and horseplay.’”

“Not to mention farting when the vent fan’s down,” Owens adds.

Sanders and Lauretta remove their combination locks from the red boxes, then Owens and Billy fasten on their own. “See you guys,” Owens says. “And be careful, it’s hell up there.” In a moment, Sanders and Lauretta are gone, heading across the catwalk toward the elevator.

Billy and Owens buckle themselves into the flight seats, and Billy hits a button. With a pneumatic whoosh, the blast door begins to close. The door weighs eight tons and is solid steel, four feet thick. Five steel pins, the size of fireplace logs, are recessed into the door and extend into ports in the wall to seal off the capsule. A separate latch on the door locks the pins into place. Until recently, the door opened and closed with a hand air pump, it taking nearly a full minute to operate. In recent renovations, a button on the deputy’s console operates the pump, but it still takes nearly thirty seconds for the pins to insert or retract and the giant door to move.

“I knew you were going to do that,” Owens says.

“What?”

“Seal the blast door.”

“It’s in the T.O. You’re supposed—”

“I know what’s in the regs, Billy. But if we ever got an order to launch, or if incoming were headed this way, don’t you think we’d have time to punch that button and close the damn door?”

“That’s not the point. We’re trained to do exactly as we’re taught. If we foul up the little things, then the—”

“My point is, I hate feeling like a sardine in here.”

“I’m sorry, but I feel strongly about this.”

“That’s what I love about you, Billy,” Owens says. “You are so damn predictable.”

-14- The Race

Stripped to his boxer shorts, Jack Jericho swats at a mosquito that has targeted his neck as ground zero. “Skeeters biting better than the trout,” he says to himself. Behind him, Devil’s Tower radiates a prism of colors from the morning sun.

Bending over the stream, Jericho fills his helmet with water, then props it upside down between two rocks in the blazing fire. He cuts long, thin slices of tannic tree bark with his survival knife and drops them into the helmet. As the concoction boils, he cuts sturdy four-foot long branches from a pine tree, then lashes them together with twine. Along the embankment, he finds a half-buried Styrofoam cooler, its bottom punched out.

“Tourists,” he says derisively.

He takes the cooler and ties it to the cross-section of branches, then carefully lifts his helmet from the rocks and cools it in the stream. Finally, he dips his fingers into the helmet and streaks the orange liquid across his face and body.

Digging into his rucksack, Jericho grabs the jug of moonshine and works out the cork with his thumb. He puts the jug to his lips but it’s dry. Staring in disbelief at the empty jug, he sighs, “Was it good for you, too?”

Ten miles downstream from Jack’s campsite, Sayers and Reynolds stand on a bridge, urinating into the tumbling water fifteen feet below.

“Ow, that river’s cold,” Reynolds says with a laugh.

“Yep, and deep, too,” Sayers boasts.

They zip up and lean on the bridge railing, looking upstream. Reynolds lights a cigarette. Sayers pops the top on a beer and slaps at a mosquito on his neck, squashing it in a tiny pool of blood.

“The sarge’ll never make it,” Reynolds says, exhaling a puff. “Never.”

Sayers looks at his watch and takes a pull on the beer. “I feel sorry for the him. Puke’ll have his ass.”

“It’s his own damn fault. His job’s to maintain the machinery in the sump, but you can’t hardly get him down there.”

“That’s because of his claustrophobia.”

Reynolds tosses his cigarette into the stream. “His what?”

“You heard me. He’s been treated for claustrophobia and depression.”

“The hell do you know?”

“When I pulled two weeks of clerical duty,” Sayers goes on, “Puke had me photocopy all the personnel and medical files in the 318th. Made better reading than the Perimeter Fence Maintenance Manual.”

“Bet you picked up some real dirt.”

“Sure did,” Sayers says. “Say, did that penicillin knock out the clap you picked up on a three-day leave to Laramie?”

“You prick! You read my file.”

Sayers drains his beer. “Don’t worry. I ain’t gonna sell it to Oprah.”

“I don’t get it. Why’d the captain have you—”

“Space Command’s sending out a shrink who’s gonna separate the men from the bedwetters. ‘Course they already know Jericho goes into a panic in tight spaces.”

“So they assign him to the sump,” Reynolds says in wonderment.

“Ain’t that just like the Air Force?”

Reynolds tosses his cigarette butt into the river. “What do you think they’ll do with him?”

“Probably make him an astronaut.” Sayers looks at his watch again. “C’mon, let’s get back and collect our money from the sarge.”

Just as they start to leave, something catches Sayers’ eye. Upstream, a raft made of tree branches and an old Styrofoam cooler bounces over a dizzying set of rapids. A man hangs on as the raft disappears in a gully and washes out the other side.

“Look at that fool,” Sayers says, shaking his head. The raft bounces off a rock, spins in a whirlpool, and heads toward them. “Who the hell would ride this river on that—”

“Say, that looks like… ”

“It can’t be,” Sayers says, but at the same time knowing it is. Who else would it be?

The wild water carries the raft closer. It’s rocking and rolling over the rapids.

“The bastard!” Sayers yells, tossing his beer can at Jack who passes under the bridge, waving and laughing.

As the two airmen race for their Jeep, the raft sideswipes a boulder and capsizes. Jericho is tossed into the drink but hangs onto the raft, his legs trailing behind him as he is carried down river.

-15- The Missileer from Mars

Brother David walks along a path of wood chips past the firing range, Rachel is at his side, a husky commando named Gabriel trails behind, carrying a Mossberg 500 shotgun. On the range, Matthew supervises as the commandos, spread out in prone and kneeling positions, fire at pop-up targets of enemy soldiers, the shells pinging from direct hits. Nearby, other commandos use rope ladders to scale a ten-foot high wooden fence, then drop to the other side and dance through an obstacle course of old tires. In a shaded area near a strand of birch trees, another group practices hand-to-hand combat and bayonet fighting.

As they approach a gravel driveway, Brother David stops next to a ten-ton truck where a man in a face shield is welding a snowplow to the front bumper. At the rear, other commandos load boxes of ammunition and weapons into the bed of the truck, then fasten a tarpaulin over the load.

“We are ready, Brother David,” Gabriel says.

David looks to Rachel, who nods her agreement.

“Then, let it be Judgment Day,” David proclaims.

The speedy OH-58 Kiowa helicopter settles down inside a circle of rocks on a ridge near Chugwater dam. Captain Pete Pukowlski sits at the wheel of a Humvee, watching as a young woman duck out the door, a shapely leg visible as her skirt hikes up. Dr. Susan Burns hurries toward him, her dark hair blowing in the rotors’ backwash. If she’s a shrink, the captain mutters to himself, give me some therapy.

The helicopter is airborne again by the time Dr. Burns settles into the passenger seat of the Humvee and gives Pukowlski a firm handshake and a businesslike smile. He introduces himself, then says, “There’s something I want you to see before we go back to the base.”

He drives along a gravel path down the backside of the mountain into the next valley. Overhead, a lone eagle soars in the clear blue sky. They pass the dry river bed where once a stream flowed, before the dam was built to accommodate the missile base. They drive past fenced fields with grazing cattle and a pond with a whirling hot spring. From somewhere on a wooded rise, an elk bugles, challenging other bulls to fight.

“Not much like D.C. out here, eh Doctor?” he says as he slows the Humvee to negotiate a turn.

“Thankfully not,” she says.

“Not to pry or anything, but your regular patients, would they include anybody I might have seen on television?”

“Maybe. I’ve treated lobbyists, TV reporters, congressmen.”

“Congressmen,” the captain repeats. “Doesn’t seem to have done much good, does it?”

“Special Forces, too,” she says.

He shoots her a disbelieving look.

“I developed the battery of psychological tests for Delta Force. They take the best soldiers from the Rangers and the Green Berets, and I test them at Ft. Bragg. We try to weed out the lone wolves, the borderline personalities. We separate the men who can be trained as killers from those who just yearn to kill.”

“Jeez, Special Ops.” Impressed now. Pukowlski would have loved to have been an Air Force commando, but he washed out of training with the 20th Special Operations Squadron in Florida. The Cowboys, they call themselves, after the Bon Jovi song, “Dead or Alive.” Guys in nifty flightsuits and red scarves who can fly attack helicopters blindfolded. Shit, Pukowlski thinks, not my fault I get airsick, remembering throwing up on an instructor’s boots in a Pave Low chopper.

“The ones who get through the preliminary testing go to Camp Dawson in West Virginia,” she continues. “I observe them in the field and construct psychological profiles. The Army tests their physical capabilities with grueling field maneuvers. I test their mental capabilities with carefully chosen questions.”

The Humvee is nearly halfway down the mountain now and the road straightens out a bit. “Yeah, like what?” Still thinking he should have been a commando. Remembering, too, that loud noises make him incontinent.

“Let’s say you’re behind enemy lines and an eight-year-old girl picking tulips spots you, compromising your mission. Are you willing to cut her throat?”

“Jeez,” the captain says.

“Nobody said it would be easy,” Susan Burns says. “Or try this one. A foreign national will give you intelligence that will save the lives of your entire platoon, but only if you perform fellatio on him. Will you do it?”

The captain thinks a moment. “Would he settle for a handjob?”

Dr. Burns shakes her head. “Sorry.”

“What are the right answers?” the captain asks.

“There aren’t any. Just as in life, the questions pose unsolvable dilemmas.”

“You can say that again.” Pukowlski pulls the Humvee to a stop on a plateau just above a worksite. They sit quietly a moment before he says, “It’s quite a day for the 318th.” Below them is an open missile silo surrounded by workers and heavy equipment. Two camouflaged deuce-and-a-half trucks pull away from a missile silo loaded with dismantled machinery — pumps and electronics gear peeking out from under the tarpaulins. A HEMMT ten-ton tactical truck with a hoist lifts a launch generator from the open silo and drops it into a flatbed truck. “You should have been here yesterday, doc. We pulled out the warheads, then sent them off to Texas to dilute the uranium and plutonium. To me, it was like a funeral.”

“I didn’t realize the dismantling was this far along,” she says.

“Dismantling’s not the right word. We’re blowing the damn things up.”

“That’s required under START II, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, all fifty PK silos will be history. Plus about 300 Minutemen II’s, and a helluva lot more. ‘Course nobody asked my opinion of the whole disarmament deal. Not that they asked me in ‘91 when they took all ICBMs off alert or when they reprogrammed the Command Data Buffers so the missiles are no longer targeted. And not that they asked me when they folded up SAC in ‘92, and don’t you think General Curtis LeMay was turning over in his grave when they pulled that one?”

“I’m sure you’re right. ‘Bombs Away’ LeMay wouldn’t have approved.”

The captain’s eyes narrow into slits. “That’s what you east coast, left-wing intellectuals might have called him, but in the Air Force, he was known as ‘Old Iron Pants,’ and if you don’t know why, you’ve never flown a bombing mission.”

“Have you?”

“What’s that got to do with it?” the captain asks, sharply. He turns his attention back to the silo, and after a moment, says, “Yeah, the bureaucrats changed everything. Closed down SAC, moved the missile program into Air Combat Command, and when that didn’t work, they shoved it into Space Command with the satellite folks. Didn’t ask my opinion of that, either. Hell’s bells, does anyone know what’s going on?”

“What is your opinion about dismantling the silos?”

“Same as my opinion about having to babysit a lady shrink. Both are about as welcome as a carbuncle on my butt.”

“Sort of a double whammy for you today.”

“Triple. A delegation of Nu-clear Non-pro-lif-er-ationists from the U-nited Nations are here, and they’re so tickled they’re wetting their pants.” He shoots a look at her. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s nothing personal. I just wish the Congressional committee that sent you out here would get tested, too.”

A thirty-two wheel flatbed truck called a transport erector pulls across an intersecting road, headed down valley. Lashed to the truck, like Gulliver in the land of Lilliputians, is an impotent LGM-118A Peacekeeper missile. Pukowlski gestures toward a Humvee on the ridge just below them where five men in suits watch the truck leave. “There the U.N. boys now. I would have asked them to join us, but I’d hate ‘em to see a grown man cry.”

Susan Burns studies Pukowlski, who appears truly anguished. “If it’s so painful, why insist on being here? Why punish yourself?”

“You asking that in your professional capacity?”

“Would the answer be different if I were?” she asks.

“Nah, I just wanted to lie down on a couch, that’s all. ‘Course if I raise hell about destroying the Peacekeepers, you’ll write me up for being a warmongering psycho.”

“We’re still deploying Minutemen III’s and Polaris missiles, and we’ll still have thirty-five hundred nuclear warheads even after START II is fully implemented, so what’s the problem?”

He doesn’t answer, but instead points toward the silo where workers in hard hats are stringing cable around the perimeter of the open hole. “I hate to see anything destroyed, much less anything this beautiful. We’re talking about man’s greatest achievement, the ability to launch a hundred ninety-five thousand pound vehicle straight out of the ground and send a tin can filled with ten independently targetable warheads halfway around the world at eight times the speed of sound and then hit a bullseye on the Kremlin.”

“And that’s our greatest achievement?” Dr. Burns asks, astonished.

“Do you have any idea the technology that’s gone into this? The autonetics, the aerodynamics, the ballistics, the nuclear weaponry?

“I think I have a rough idea.”

He raises his voice. “Then what is there to compare with it? Run-proof panty hose?”

Susan Burns bristles. “That is completely uncalled for, captain, and makes me doubt your ability to fairly command a unit of both men and women.”

“I’m sorry, Doctor. It’s hard to teach an old dog like me. I remember the first time I saw one of these big cocks — pardon me again, Doc — shooting out of the ground at Vandenberg in a night launch. Jesus, it was like God himself pulled the trigger and lit up the sky. So, I’m serious when I say, what is there to compare with our nuclear technology?”

“Many things. The discovery of antibiotics, the U.S. Constitution, Mozart’s Requiem Mass — anything but this.” She motions toward the hole where the men have finished laying the cable.

“This,” Pukowlski says, “has kept us strong and free.”

“We’re losing focus here, captain. It’s not the technology that I deal with. I’m concerned about the combat readiness of the men and women who will work in the remaining missile squadrons. What’s their attitude now that the Cold War is over? Are they alert? Are they disciplined?”

They watch as the men in hard hats head away from the silo at double time. The last of the trucks has pulled onto the road. A siren wails from a Quonset hut several hundred yards away. Then… KA-BOOM! The sound echoes off the ridges as the silo implodes. Concrete crumbles, and steel rods break. A cloud of dust drifts skyward.

Susan is distracted by something on a distant ridge. Squinting into the sun, she strains to make it out. “Who’s that?” she asks, turning to the captain.

“Where?”

She turns back, but no one is there.

“I could have sworn I saw a man wearing buckskins on a horse, right up there,” she says, pointing.

The captain barks out a laugh. “Little Big Horn’s due north of here just over the Montana line, and a lot of folks report seeing old General Custer wandering around, looking for his men. ‘Course, most of those folks have spent their afternoons on a stool at the Old Wrangler Tavern. So if you’re seeing cowboys or Indians on horses, doctor, I’m gonna have to write you up.”

Below them, there is activity once again. Like grave diggers covering a coffin, bulldozers begin pushing mounds of earth into the hole.

Captain Pukowlski starts up the Humvee and pulls away. “Those questions of yours aren’t hard to answer. I can’t speak for the whole missile group, but my squadron’s bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and combat ready twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year. In the 318th, we do it by the book, doctor. I guaran-goddamn-tee it.”

Deep in the hole, Airmen Owens and Riordan have their heads buried in blue loose-leaf binders emblazoned with the Air Force insignia and the words, “Technical Order.” Owens turns a page and unfolds a color photograph. It’s Miss September, nude from her red toenails to her cascading blond hair.

“Tawny’s favorite book is ‘Bridges of Madison County,’” he says. “Ain’t read it myself, but it’s okay with me. I do great with intellectual girls.” He resumes reading. “Uh-oh. She likes men who work outdoors, have great tans, and drive convertibles. That leaves us out, Billy.”

Billy Riordan turns a page in his thumb-worn Bible, tucked inside his binder. “Fallen!” Billy nearly shouts. “Fallen is Babylon the Great, which made all the nations drink the maddening wine of her adulteries.”

“Good, Billy. That’s very good,” Owens says, not even disguising his contempt. “You are the fucking missileer from Mars. Now, I’m gonna read the Playboy Advisor to see what brand of condoms are the silkiest and slipperiest, and you’re gonna shut the fuck up or you’re gonna have to be reborn again, ‘cause Billy, I swear, I’m gonna kill you!”

They both return to their studies, every few minutes looking up at the bank of video monitors. One shows the missile in its silo, steam rising from the idling launch generator; another displays the perimeter of the above-ground facility. A third monitor, aimed at the sentry post, suddenly goes a hazy white, and they both stare at it, uncomprehending.

Owens adjusts the focus, and the picture clears. It’s a pair of bare buttocks, close-up, which disappear only to replaced by another set. Their radio receiver crackles. “Launch control, this is sentry post one. Can you confirm reports of excessive lunar activity?”

“The Air Police are really assholes,” Owens says.

“God forgives them,” Billy says, and Owens grits his teeth and goes back to his magazine, wondering if the captain would let them put a tanning bed in the Launch Equipment Room.

-16- A Trout in the Milk

Captain Pete Pukowlski slows his Humvee at a bend in the road just a mile from the missile squadron’s sentry post. The river, which tumbles over rocks farther upstream, flows gently alongside the road here. “I’m afraid you’re going to find my squadron pretty boring,” the captain says to Dr. Susan Burns.

“Boring?”

He turns to face her. “Yeah, compared to the fruitcakes you see back in D.C., my men are boringly normal, run-of-the-mill guys.”

“Look out!” she screams.

He wheels back, sees a figure darting across the road, then slams on the brakes. The Humvee swerves and screeches to a stop, barely missing a man who dives into a ditch at the side of the road. “Shit buckets!” Pukowlski shouts. “What damn fool…!”

They get out of the Humvee and approach the ditch. Pulling himself up the embankment is a man wearing only dog tags and boxer shorts. A knife is strapped to his leg. He is sopping wet, muddy, and his skin is streaked orange.

“Jericho!” Pukowlski thunders. “What the hell!”

Jack Jericho snaps a crisp salute, mud dripping from his hand. “Sir.” He turns toward Dr. Burns. “Ma’am.”

“Sergeant, you’re out of uniform,” Pukowlski says, not knowing what else to say. Getting angrier, turning red.

“But on time, sir.”

“And you look like a goddamn Apache.”

“Insect repellent, sir.”

Susan Burns suppresses a smile. “Captain, I assume this ‘boringly normal run-of-the-mill-guy’ does not turn the key.”

“Jericho a missileer? Hardly. When he’s not AWOL, he mops up the sump.”

Jericho clears his throat. “Begging the captain’s pardon, I maintain the launch eject gas generators, sir.”

“You pathetic excuse for an airman,” Pukowlski fumes. “Sergeant, you just earned yourself a job so deep in the hole you can apply for Chinese citizenship!”

“So this sergeant’s duties are underground?” Susan asks, the shadow of a thought crossing her face.

Pukowlski is puzzled. “Yeah, why? Can you think of a way we can leave him there when we implode the silo?”

“I think I’ve found my first guinea pig.”

“Jericho ain’t crazy, doc. Lazy and stupid maybe, but not crazy.”

“Thank you, sir,” Jericho says.

Susan Burns studies him. “I think there’s more to Sergeant Jack Jericho than meets the eye.” She looks him up and down, and at that moment, the tail of a fish emerges from his boxers. “Sergeant, is that a trout in your shorts, or are you just happy to see me?”

Jericho is too embarrassed to answer.

Pukowlski is apoplectic. “Dammit, Jericho! You were under strict orders to complete your perimeter duties and return immediately to the base, not go fishing.”

“Fishing, sir?”

“Yeah, fishing. You expect me to believe that rainbow just jumped into your shorts.”

“No, sir. But fish have been known to leap into my boat just to save time.”

Dr. Burns clears her throat and says, almost apologetically. “I’m afraid I have to agree with the captain’s conclusion that you’ve been fishing, sergeant. Even Henry David Thoreau would find the evidence compelling.”

“Who?” Pukowlski demands.

“A writer fellow,” Jericho helps out. “He said that sometimes circumstantial evidence is very strong, ‘as when you find a trout in the milk.’”

Dr. Burns arches her eyebrows and gives a little smile. “You’re a man of surprises, Sergeant Jericho.”

“The Maine Woods is my favorite book,” Jericho explains, “other than the Launch Generator Maintenance Manual, of course.”

“What the hell does milk have to do with this?” Pukowlski growls. “If you’re thinking about getting the cook to try a new recipe, forget it. That trout is history, and so are you. Drop the fish, sergeant.”

“Respectfully, sir—”

“Now! That’s an order.”

“But if—”

“No if’s, and’s, or but’s! Now! Cut it loose.”

Jericho takes his knife and slices the drawstring of his boxers. Three trout drop to the ground along with the boxer shorts. Dr. Burns’s eyes flick to Jack’s groin.

“Well, sergeant,” she says, smiling, “I’m happy to see you, too.”

-17- Tunnel Rat

Cool and damp deep inside the mountain, a steady fifty-eight degrees. Beneath the silo floor, the launch generator beats its steady thumpa-thumpa. The missile hangs in its cables, waiting. Always waiting.

The gantry, a metal work cage, sits halfway up the silo wall, just below the level of a mesh grating. The grating hangs open, and inside, an exhaust tube runs upward at a slight angle from the silo to the dry river bed one hundred feet above. Acidic residue from tests of the launch generator coats the inside of the exhaust tube. Spiders spin webs across its three foot diameter, and field mice scamper along its length, claws scratching against the metal.

Jack Jericho crawls upward, scouring the tube with a soapy brush. It is a task as useful as scrubbing the inside of a car’s tailpipe… three days before junking the car.

“Hey, tunnel rat!” The voice echoes through the tube from the silo. A touch of Georgia. Reynolds’ voice. “Gotta borrow your elevator. Have a nice crawl.”

Shit. Jericho hears the electrical whir of the gantry riding its rails down toward the silo floor. Reynolds enjoying it, getting even with him for the knife trick, he knows. Now, Jericho either has to squirm all the way to the top and pry off the screen on the exhaust pipe in the river bed, or go back into the silo and leap onto the ladder that runs up the wall. It’s only four feet from the exhaust tube opening to the ladder, but if you miss, it’s eighty feet straight down.

Jericho keeps scrubbing, knowing that when the tube bends and he loses the light from the silo, the sweats will begin. Not that he won’t be able to see. He’s wearing the Air Force’s version of a miner’s helmet. But when he flicks the lamp on, when the shadows begin dancing up the wall, when the distant sound of the launch generator becomes the rumble of the pumps in the mine, the visions will start.

Jonah may have been stuck in the gut of the whale, he thinks, but I’m jammed up its rectum.

Jericho hauls himself around the first bend in the tube and reaches up to turn on the helmet lamp. As he does, an exposed bolt catches his sleeve. His arm is bent at an awkward angle above his head, and for a moment, he is stuck. He tries to wriggle backward, but the curvature of the tube stops him. Sweat streams down his face. From somewhere above him, he hears the pinging of groundwater dripping into the tube.

He squeezes his eyes shut, trying to shut it out, but he cannot. He tries reciting Thoreau. “‘Talk of mysteries. Think of our life in nature — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks, the solid earth!’”

But the earth is not solid here. It spins around him. He is dizzy, nauseous. The pinging grows louder, becomes the roar of rushing water, and now there’s no stopping the ghostly shapes that form in the darkness. The roar of the water becomes deafening, and a thousand noises mingle, then echo from inside the cavern. The crashing timbers, the crackling wires and the screams. Always, the screams.

Feeling the water rising around him, the visions come, too. He sees men crushed under tons of rock and wood, hears the life squeezed out of them. Their bodies become skeletons, crawling toward him, bones clacking, grasping for him, reaching, reaching…

To drown it out, to hide from the hideous din, to run from the blood-soaked bony hands, he bellows into the darkness, the wail of a wounded animal. Time and again, he shrieks at the night, at his own fear and shame.

-18- Rye Whiskey I Cry

“Would you describe yourself as a leader or a follower?” Dr. Susan Burns asks, looking up from a notepad.

Jack Jericho stretches his neck. Sitting in straight-backed chairs always seemed unnatural. “Don’t your fancy books have any other choices?”

“Like what?”

“Like loner. I just want to be left the hell alone.”

“Would you rather be rich or famous?” she asks.

“Neither one interests me. But if I was rich, I’d buy an Orvis graphite fishing rod.”

“Feared or respected?”

“I just want to go through life without hurting anybody else. Isn’t that enough?”

“I don’t know,” Dr. Burns says, “is it?”

Jericho scowls and doesn’t answer.

“Perhaps we can place these questions in the context of your life.

Tell me what you remember about the mountains,” Dr. Burns gently orders.

“The flowers in the spring. Mountain laurel, azaleas, a bunch of others, I’m not sure of their names. And the birds, hoot owls and whippoorwills, and quail in the pine forests. When they whistle, it sounds like they’re calling out, ‘Bob White.’ You can hunt them in season, but I never did. I laid out seed in the back yard and made friends with a couple of them every year. They were darn near tame.”

The sounds around them are not the calls of birds in the forest but the constant thumpa-thumpa of the launch generator below them in the sump. They are sitting in metal chairs in the Launch Equipment Room, halfway down the tunnel that runs from the launch control capsule to the missile silo. Around them are metal shelves stacked with huge batteries, cables, electrical gear and spare parts. A bare 75-watt bulb illuminates the room, casting shadows across the floor.

Jericho has cleaned up. He’s in the utility uniform of olive coveralls, three stripes on his sleeve, no medals on his chest. Dr. Susan Burns, in her blue business suit, looks at him with the practiced demeanor of detached professionalism. “What first comes to mind when you think of home?”

“Home baked bread slathered with molasses.”

“How did you and your friends spend your time?”

He pulls a package of Zig-Zag cigarette papers from his pocket. “When we weren’t reading Dostoevski, you mean?”

“Sergeant, this is serious.”

Jericho slips into a down-home Appalachian accent. “Hell, doc, us hillbillies kept busy shuckin’ corn, raisin’ barns, and duelin’ banjos. Once we got the cable, everythin’ changed. Movin’ pitchers all the way from New York City.”

“Your use of self-deprecating humor to change the subject is an obvious ploy,” Dr. Burns says, drumming her pencil on a note pad.

“Is it, doctor? Or is it a manifestation of primary anxiety, a response of the ego to increases in instinctual tension?”

Her drumming stops in mid-beat. She opens Jericho’s personnel file and thumbs through it. “You had three years of college.”

“Guilty as charged. All that book learnin’ and look where it got me.”

“Why’d you drop out? Your grades were exemplary.” She looks up from the file and shoots him a quizzical look. “You majored in English, and… ” She smiles at him. “You minored in psychology.”

Jericho doesn’t answer, just tamps some tobacco into a cigarette paper. She resumes reading, then says, “After your junior year at W.V.U., you took a summer job in the coal mines. Your father was a miner, wasn’t he?”

Jericho licks the paper closed and slips the cigarette into the corner of his mouth but doesn’t light it. “My daddy used to take seventy five pounds of corn meal and mix it with three hundred pounds of sugar, a little yeast, some bran and about three hundred gallons of water. In four days, voila, or as we say in the mountains, ‘Holy shit.’ Fifty gallons of mountain dew, or if you prefer, whiskey.”

“Your father was a bootlegger.”

“No, Al Capone was a bootlegger. My daddy was a moonshiner who didn’t give up his day job. ‘Course, in the mines, it’s always night, isn’t it?”

“Tell me about your father.”

“What’s to tell?”

“Were you embarrassed by his illegal activities?”

Jericho laughs. “No, was Richard Nixon’s family? Look, there’s nothing wrong with moonshining. The government lets you bake bread and sell it to your neighbors, but not cook up some rye whiskey. Mountain folk are independent and don’t necessarily listen to the government, which never did much for them anyway. My daddy’s daddy made corn liquor and drove it to his customers down valley. I don’t know what he enjoyed more, sipping the whiskey or driving like a bat out of hell, avoiding the revenuers.”

“So you admired your grandfather?”

“He was his own man, didn’t take orders from anyone.”

“And you do?”

“I take orders from everyone from an E-6 to the President. Hell, I even take orders from a lady shrink.”

“Did your grandfather work in the mines, too?”

“He was a farmer, forty acres of rocks and sandy topsoil. In the winter, he made whiskey. You know why they call them moonshiners?”

“Why?”

“‘They work at night so the revenuers can’t see the smoke from the stills.” Jericho breaks into a song:

Susan Burns looks at him sternly.

“What’d you expect?” he asks. “John Denver?”

“Your father,” Dr. Burns says.

“What about him?”

“When I asked about him, you changed the subject to your grandfather, then to the etymology of moonshining, and finally to a mountain song.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Oh, but you do. You purposely avoid talking about your father.”

“If I did talk, would it bring him back?”

“No. But it might bring you back.”

Jericho shakes his head. “I’ve done this before.”

“Do it again. Tell me about your father.”

“My daddy drove a ‘60 Dodge with the heaviest springs you ever saw. Forty cases in the car, and it wouldn’t sink an inch. No one ever caught him either.”

“What are you leaving out?”

He avoids her gaze. “Leaving out?”

“The day job,” she says, sternly. “Tell me about the mine.”

His eyes harden. “You’ve read my file. You know all about it.”

“If you don’t cooperate, I’m required to report you to the captain.”

“The captain can kiss me where the sun don’t shine.”

“Very colorful. You play the role convincingly.”

The unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth wags at her. “It’s not a role. It’s who I am.”

Her voice is harsh and reproachful. “It’s who you were. But you left the mountains ten years ago. You’ve been stationed on six different bases around the world. You read books, which believe me, sets you apart. Yet you cling to your earlier identity.”

“Can any of us escape our identities?”

“Do you want to?”

He smiles ruefully. “I forgot. You shrinks don’t answer questions. You just scoop ‘em up and toss ‘em back like a quick-fingered shortstop.” He sighs and says, “What do you want to know?”

“Your feelings after the accident in the mine.”

He looks into the darkness. The thumpa of the generators is not unlike the pumps in the mine. He closes his eyes and feels the cold, black water filling the shaft, knee-deep now. He reaches out, trying to catch onto a wet, rocky wall, but his hand slips off. A powerful shearing sound from above, the earth ripping itself apart. He has lost his helmet and covers his head with his hands. Rocks pelt him, and a roar thunders from above. A falling beam glances off him, slashing his shoulder and back. Even now, he winces with pain and opens his eyes to see Dr. Susan Burns looking at him with compassion. He has seen the look before and hates it. Hates his own weakness that attracts the sympathy of others.

“My feelings,” he says, bitterly, “were real simple. My father and brother were dead, and I wanted to be.”

“Why do you blame yourself? Could you have saved them?”

“I could have tried. Instead, I ran.”

“According to the reports, you followed procedure. You went to the emergency shaft and the evacuation route.”

“Right, I followed orders,” he says sarcastically.

“You did what you were supposed to do.”

“I did what I was told to do.” He lets it hang there, remembering. He can hear the gantry inside the silo running up its track. Beneath them, the mixture of a dozen mechanical and hydraulic sounds. “For a long time, I thought about killing myself, but the closest I got was nearly drinking myself to death.”

Neither speaks for a long moment until she says, “Is that why your wife left you?”

Jericho’s laugh is little more than a rasp. “Cleaning up my puke at three in the morning sorely tested her patience.”

“I understand your running from your past, but why do you hide your intelligence?”

“Why do you hide your sexuality?” he shoots back.

For a moment, they both listen to the pumps and the thumping generator below them. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks.

“Somewhere, someplace, someone told you that your good looks were a hindrance in your profession. So you don’t wear makeup. Your blue suit with its Little Bo Peep white silk blouse and bow is right out of a Dress for Success guide in some woman’s magazine that probably also gives advice for orgasms in five minutes or less without the nuisance of a companion. You’re not married or engaged, at least, you’re not wearing any rings. In fact, you’re not wearing any jewelry, unless we count that sports watch that’s waterproof to forty feet. I figure you use the built-in stopwatch to get your twenty-five minutes on the treadmill at a trendy gym in Georgetown where the TV’s are tuned to C-Span instead of ESPN.”

“Actually, I use it to time those five-minute orgasms.”

Jericho laughs. “But you do have a sense of humor, Dr. Burns, and that makes up for a lot.”

She turns away, her cheeks coloring. “I can’t believe I said that, Sergeant. Forgive me. It was very unprofessional of me.”

Now, Jericho studies her. After a moment, he smiles broadly. “No, it wasn’t. It was very professional. Nicely done, but the shy blush was a little over the top. It was your effort to break through to me, to show you’re human. Or maybe it’s even more complicated. Maybe, you’re encouraging some transference. Maybe you want me to relate to you as if you’re my long lost wife.”

“Sergeant Jack Jericho,” she says, a touch wistfully, “you are a man full of surprises, and you are so much smarter than you look.”

“Thanks, doc,” Jericho replies, slouching in his chair and flicking the unlit cigarette through a grating into the black water of the sump. “And you’re purtier than a trussed-up hog on Christmas Eve.”

She exhales a sigh and closes his file, then clicks her pen closed and slides it into a pouch in her notebook. “All right, Jericho. Let’s make a deal. You stop playing hayseed and I’ll stop playing doctor.”

“Then what do we do?”

“We talk. Has it ever occurred to you that you may not be the only one to have suffered a loss?”

He gauges the seriousness of her look and says, “I’m listening.”

“I’ll tell you a story about a father who was a psychiatrist and also taught at the university, a mother who was active in the P.T.A., and a nine-year-old tomboy with freckles who could skip rope blindfolded and hit a baseball farther than any of the boys.”

“The American ideal,” he says, tentatively.

“So what question should you ask, Jericho?”

“What are you leaving out, Dr. Burns?”

“Did I mention that my mother slept with every man who smiled at her, and there were a lot of big sloppy grins in my hometown? Did I mention that my father drank, and that the former probably contributed to the latter?”

“I’m sorry,” Jericho says, embarrassed. “If you don’t want to tell me this—”

“Of course I do! That’s the point, Jericho.”

He looks into her dark eyes. “All right, tell me about your loss.”

She looks away and cocks her head, as if listening to a far off voice. “My father committed suicide, hung himself in the foyer of our home. He slung one of mother’s belts over an exposed beam. It was a red leather belt that she wore with a matching skirt. Why do you suppose he didn’t go down to Home Depot and buy a stout rope?”

He thinks about it a moment. “Because your mother wore the red leather outfit when she stepped out and your father knew it. He wanted her to suffer.”

“You missed your calling, sergeant. You have a natural talent for discerning psychological symbolism. Now tell me, why did my father hang himself in the foyer of his own home? Why not park the car on some deserted road and run a hose from the tail pipe? Why not dive off a bridge?”

“Same reason. He wanted your mother to find him. He wanted her to wake at night and see him hanging there.”

“Then what a pity that she didn’t find him.”

“Who did?” Jericho asks, but even as the words come out, he knows. He grasps both of Susan’s hands between his own. “Oh dear God, I’m sorry.”

She looks away and does not see the tear tracking down Jericho’s cheek. “My mother had an appointment at the beauty parlor and then should have gone home to put the roast in the oven. Does anyone cook roasts anymore, Jericho? Anyway, I guess she didn’t want to waste that new permanent, because she headed straight to a Holiday Inn just off U.S. 1 where they had a back elevator and the assistant principal of the elementary school — my school — could get a room cheap for a couple of hours. This was a man who would pat me on the head and say I’d be even prettier than my mother.”

“If this is too painful for you, why not just—”

“Shut up, Jericho! This is healthy. You really ought to try it.” She runs a hand through her hair and looks at Jericho straight on. “My mother didn’t show up, so I walked home from school. The key was under the mat, just like always, and as I was opening the door, I was thinking about Oreo cookies and a big glass of cold milk. I opened the door and at that precise instant, the three of us are forever frozen in time. My mother was no more than a mile away, her red-tinted hair spread across a motel pillow. Just inside the door was the lifeless shell that had once been my father, swinging gently in the breeze of the air-conditioning, his face twisted into a mask of pain and horror. And there I was, in the last seconds of my childhood.”

“I am so very sorry,” Jericho says, squeezing her hands.

She looks up at him. “No more milk and cookies, Jericho.”

They are both silent a moment. Then Jericho says, “What can I do to help?”

“Don’t you understand you just did?”

He shakes his head.

“Just listening,” she says, “letting me work it out is therapeutic. And if I can, I’ll help you.”

Jericho gnaws at his lower lip. She waits, letting him summon it up. Finally, he says, “Tell me about the pain. Does it ever go away?”

“No.”

“What do you feel now?”

“Anger at the utter unfairness of it all. A searing, red-hot hatred for father, for mother, for the whole damn world.”

He lets go of her hands, giving them a final pat. “Then you’re in worse shape than I am.”

“What does that mean?” she asks.

“I only hate me,” Jack Jericho says.

-19- The Power and the Glory

Until today, Captain Pete Pukowlski always loved giving The Tour.

In the past, he had escorted Congressmen, VIP’s from aerospace companies, and delegations of our so-called Allies from Western Europe. Hell, he even showed the place to two Russian Air Force generals after the fall of Communism, though only because he was ordered to, and even then, he carried his .45, loaded with the safety off, just in case they tried any sneaky commie tricks. He also refused to answer their questions about the inertial guidance system and the megatonnage of the Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicles — ten Avco Mk 21 RV’s to be exact — that sit atop the big cock of the Peacekeeper.

The third time General Itchykov — or whatever the hell his name was — asked about the missile’s accuracy and throw weight, Pukowlski told him, “We can drop twenty megatons right down the chimney of Boris Yeltstin’s dacha. Does that answer your question, Ivan?”

Not that Ivan was the general’s name, but Pukowlski, who was damn proud the chairman of the joint chiefs was as Polish as kielbasa, would no more call this Rusky “General” than he would paste a “Make Love, Not War” sticker on his Jeep. Anyway, old Ivan didn’t need a translator to figure it out, and he damn sure stopped asking questions.

Today, as always, Pukowlski starts The Tour in the Security Command Center, then moves across the bridge to the elevator housing, then brings them down into the launch control capsule. Owens and Riordan are on-duty in the hole, and he’s advised them to have their shoes shined and their chins shaved. “Spit-and-polish today, men. Let’s not give the bastards an excuse to go after the missiles we still have left.”

Strapped into their flight chairs, Owens and Riordan make a show of studying the gauges on the console in front of them. For once, they’re following orders, and Pukowlski is thankful. He knows it’s stultifyingly boring work. Twenty-four shifts, one missileer allowed to catnap while the other stays on duty. And he knows the whole shebang is almost over. Which makes today bittersweet. Pukowlski stands behind the two missileers, the U.N. Committee members at his side, casting suspicious glances at the old console, the drab green communications racks, the sweeping radar beams, the multi-colored lights. There is a 1960’s feel to the place, Pukowlski knows, and he considers himself a dinosaur, too. Pukowlski shows them the thumbwheels under the yellow metal flaps where the two launch codes are entered and then the slots where the keys are inserted. That’s when the questions come up, and his answers are always the same.

“Of course it’s completely fail safe,” he tells the U.N. delegation, a committee of thousand-dollar suits from England, Japan, Israel, Russia, and Germany. “First, you’ve got to enter the Enable Code. That’s like pulling the hammer back on a gun. Then you need to enter the target info, the Preparatory Launch Command, which is also coded. That’s like pointing the gun. Finally, you’ve got to turn the keys. That’s pulling the trigger. And the same commands must come from a second capsule, guarding against having a couple of lunatics under my command.”

He shoots a look at Owens and Riordan, who are both poker-faced recruiting posters. “There’s also a safety measure that’s so classified, even I don’t know it, and if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.” The delegation chuckles a little. “So, in short, gentlemen,” he continues, looking at the Israeli, who coincidentally is indeed quite short, “there’s no way on earth there could ever be an unauthorized launch.”

The Englishman, a gent in a grey suit, silk polka dot tie with matching pocket handkerchief, watches Billy Riordan, who stares intently at the console, not even appearing to blink. “And these lads with the keys,” the Englishman says, “who are they and how do you assure their competence?”

“The missileers are the elite, the cream of the crop,” Pukowlski says, watching Owens suppress a smile. “They have rigorous training and complete psychological testing prior to be assigned to a launch capsule. We’re constantly alert for any hint of trouble in their personal lives. Drunk driving charge, they’re out of the hole. Divorce, out of the hole. Hell, if they get a prescription for codeine from a dentist, they’re out of the hole for a week.” Pukowlski clears his throat and points to a monitor, which shows the Peacekeeper in the silo. “Now, gentlemen, if you don’t have any further questions, shall we proceed to the highlight of the tour?”

The Englishman nods, gives Billy Riordan one last look, then follows Pukowlski out the blast door. The captain escorts the delegation down the tunnel from the launch control capsule toward the silo. He makes a mental note that Owens and Riordan didn’t close the blast door behind them. A year ago, hell, six weeks ago, he would have written them up. Now? What difference does it make anyway? They pass the Sleeping Quarters/Galley on the right and the Launch Equipment Room on the left, then enter the silo, passing over the grates of the drainage sump. More spacious than the newer underground facilities, this one is the last of the old Titan silos, now converted for the Peacekeeper.

They enter the silo where the PK, a “damage limitation weapon,” in Air Force parlance, is suspended by steel cables from the walls. Heavy propulsion hoses run from generators under the silo to the base of the missile. “Here’s why we’ve got strategic stability in the world,” Pukowlski tells them.

“Strategic stability,” the English ambassador repeats in an accent laced with the House of Lords.

“The absence of overt conflict,” Pukowlski says. “What you might call ‘peace.’”

“Then why don’t you?” the Englishman asks. Pukowlski doesn’t like the snotty tone of voice, and besides, he considers the English a bunch of fairies, so he ignores the question.

They walk in a circle beneath the suspended missile, ducking under a suspended umbilical cord that hangs from near the top of the missile. He pauses to let them look up into the burners. “A four-stage power plant,” he says, “the first three fueled by solid propellant, the fourth hypergolic liquid. This baby is cold-launched from the canister by a launch eject gas generator. Whoosh!” Pukowlski makes a gliding motion with his hand, and for a moment, the crew-cut, husky forty-year-old is a kid again. “When it’s cleared the silo, the computer in the deployment module sends a signal to fire up the rockets, and the first stage ignites. Lordy, what a sight that is. And fast? This baby hits apogee at an altitude of four million feet in fifteen minutes, two thousand miles down range.”

“Who builds this rocket?” the Israeli ambassador asks.

Pukowlski gives him the fish eye. “Why, you want to buy stock or maybe get some preemptive deterrence insurance against the A-rabs?”

“We are at peace with our neighbors,” the Israeli says brusquely.

“Yeah, aren’t we all? Anyway, the first stage was built by Thiokol, second by Aerojet, third by Hercules, and fourth by Rocketdyne. The guidance is by Rockwell, I.M.U. by Northrop, assembly and testing by Martin Marietta and Denver Aerospace. First string, All-American know-how, top to bottom.” He winks at the Japanese ambassador. “You fellows do a helluva job with Toyotas and TV sets, but if you want a four-stage ICBM, there’s only one place to shop.”

“We do not want such a thing,” the Japanese ambassador says. “Our memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still alive.”

“Little Boy and Fat Man,” Pukowlski says, almost wistfully. “Before my time, and obsolete as a buggy whip by today’s technology. You know Little Boy hit Hiroshima with only twenty kilotons, a lousy fifth of a megaton of U-235 in a gun-assembly bomb. Nothing like the fission-fusion-fission thermonuclear warheads today. Can you imagine the damage that ten warheads, each with two megaton lithium deuteride cores, could do?”

“Yes,” says the Japanese ambassador. “I can.”

“‘Course you fellows are our friends now, and we let bygones be bygones. We had our Pearl Harbor, you had your Hiroshima.”

The Japanese ambassador’s look is not as forgiving. “And Nagasaki.”

“Yeah, war is hell.”

There is mumbling in foreign languages that Pukowlski neither understands nor cares to. Leading the visitors toward the gantry, he says, “Let’s take a ride.”

They squeeze aboard, Pukowlski hits a switch, and the gantry runs up the track in the wall of the silo. As they ascend along the shaft of the missile, nearly close enough to touch its dull black surface, Pukowlski launches into his statistical routine. He could be a tour guide telling visitors how many steps there are inside the Statute of Liberty. “The PK is seventy-one feet long and eight feet, seven inches in diameter. Fully loaded with fuel, it weighs one hundred ninety-five thousand pounds. What you’re looking at is a coating of black rubber that covers the Kevlar skin. Up at the top, what looks like a silver bullet, is the titanium shroud covering the nose cone. The shroud ejects when the PK’s still on the way up, just two minutes into flight. ‘Course, it’s already at four hundred thousand feet altitude. From there on out, the MIRV’s are exposed. They’re made of carbon-carbon, about four feet high, kind of look like black ice cream cones coming at you, pointy-end first, but they’re flying at six thousand miles an hour, and instead of filled with strawberry or chocolate, they’ve got the power of God inside.”

“I don’t believe I’ve ever heard nuclear weaponry described as divine,” the Israeli ambassador says.

“You don’t hang out in the right church.” The ambassador is a chubby little guy with curly hair who reminds Pukowlski of a comedian he saw on the cable. What the hell was that guy’s name?

The gantry stops at the level of the nose cone. The captain hits a switch, and the cage extends horizontally toward the missile.

“Now, you’re gonna get an experience only a few human beings have been privileged to partake,” he says with excessive formality. The cage stops just inches from the nose cone. Pukowlski reaches out and touches the tip. Then he strokes it, his hand caressing the shiny, smooth titanium shroud. “Put your hand on the greatest power the world has ever known,” he tells the group. “You can even feel the computer clicking away, and if you close your eyes and use your imagination, you can feel the might of the dragon.”

The ambassadors whisper among themselves, but none reaches out to pet the missile. Embarrassed, Pukowlski clears his throat and hits the switch to retract the gantry to the wall. “You fellows gotta forgive me. When I’m this close to the power and the glory, I get downright poetic.”

Dr. Susan Burns has joined lieutenants Owens and Riordan in the launch control capsule. On a monitor above their heads, Captain Pukowlski is visible on the gantry, stroking the shroud, the ambassadors watching him.

“Puke’s copping a feel again,” Owens says. He has run his flight chair all the way to the far end of the console, and he sits there, alternating his attention between the monitor and the multiple choice questions on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory answer sheet. “‘Would you rather be rich or respected?’” he reads aloud. “Shit, that’s easy, Dr. Burns. If you’re rich, you can buy respect.”

He fills in a blank, then continues reading, moving his lips slightly. “‘Did you ever cheat in school?’ Jeez, who didn’t?”

“Lieutenant Owens,” Dr. Burns says. “Would it be possible for you to complete the test silently?”

“Sure thing. Almost done.” He gives her a smile that even tip-hungry barmaids have found resistible.

While Owens finishes revealing the innermost depths of his skin-deep personality, Susan Burns moves to Billy Riordan. First she attaches a blood-pressure cuff on his right arm. Then she hands him a Rorschach ink blot card.

“Tell me what you see,” she instructs him.

“Chaos,” Billy says without hesitation.

“Of course, but what do you make of it? What images or emotions are evoked by the drawing?”

“You don’t understand, Doctor. What I see really is chaos. Anarchy, carnage, bloodshed, lambs led to the slaughter.”

Susan Burns watches the digital readout on the blood-pressure gauge as the numbers soar higher. She pauses to make a notation on a pad. Just then, a rumble as Owens rolls his chair down the track toward them. He shoots a look over Billy’s shoulder and says, “I’ll tell you what I see, doc.”

“Lieutenant Owens! Let your deputy do—”

“A woman with massive warheads, real first-strike hooters,” he goes on, unperturbed.

“Owens, please!” she pleads with him. “I’m required to test both of you while you’re on duty, but you’re making it impossible.”

“Sorry, but whadaya think? Am I normal?”

“Owens, you’re a certified, card-carrying American male.”

“Thanks, doc,” he says, then rolls down the rail to the other end of the console.

Susan Burns turns back to Billy Riordan and flips to the next ink blot.

“Now, Lieutenant Riordan, what do you see?”

Billy takes his time with this one. Beads of sweat form on his forehead. Susan Burns watches as the blood pressure hits a way-too-high 210 over 135. “What is it, lieutenant? What comes to mind?”

Softly. “The fires of hell.”

“I see.”

“Do you, doctor?” Louder now. “Do you see the pestilence, war, famine, and death?”

“Why don’t you explain it to me?”

“It is written in the Book. It is sung by angels in the heavens.”

“Do you mean that literally, Riordan? Do the angels really sing?”

“Everything in the Book means just what it says. The angels are real, and so are their songs.”

“Are there times you can hear them?”

“Now,” Billy says. “I can hear them now.”