Ballistic

-29- MAD

Professor Lionel Morton, seventy-one years old, wild mane of white hair flowing past his shoulders, sits on the lecture stage in a high-tech wheelchair equipped with a computer and monitor. In front of him, at desks on tiered rows, are fifty of the best and brightest of Stanford University’s students. Behind the professor, the blackboard is filled with lengthy equations and diagrams of every missile in the U.S. arsenal from the old Atlas and Titans to the newest Minutemen III’s and Peacekeepers, called in Air Force parlance, damage limitation weapons.

A plastic scale model of a rocket sits on a miniature launch pad on the stage. Holding a remote control device that resembles a garage door opener, Professor Morton throws back his head and in a voice that is part Olivier, part Brando, calls out dramatically, “I shot an arrow into the air… ”

He pushes a button on the remote, and whoosh… The rocket blasts off.

“It fell to earth I know not where.”

The rocket arcs above the students’ heads, sailing up the tiers where it lands in the top row, squarely in the center of a cardboard bullseye.

“Horse feathers! Henry Wadsworth Longfellow didn’t know a damn thing about ballistics.”

The students titter and exchange looks. They have witnessed Professor Morton’s antics before. Part entertainer, part academician, he plays many roles. He knows the students call him Dr. Strangelove and doesn’t discourage it.

“Why, we could hit Lenin’s tomb or Quadafi’s condominium with a nuclear warhead any time we like,” the professor says with a touch of pride. “Pyongyang, Tehran, Baghdad, Beijing, Moscow… downtown Newark. We can nuke them all.”

Nervous laughter from the students. They can never tell when the professor is joking.

“Of course, it wasn’t always that way. On a cold March morning in 1926 on a farm in Massachusetts, Dr. Robert Goddard fired the world’s first liquid-fuel rocket. It was ten feet long and traveled 61 yards before crashing into the snow. And that, I assure you, was an event as significant as Kitty Hawk.”

Professor Morton pauses, wondering if he should explain the Kitty Hawk reference to these young knowledge seekers, then figures if he has to, it isn’t worth the trouble. “In the following years, Goddard fired hundreds of rockets, always making improvements, gyroscopes for stabilization, movable exhaust vanes for steering, multi-stages to decrease weight and increase distance.”

A hand goes up, and Professor Morton nods in the direction of an earnest young Asian woman in enormous round eyeglasses. “Professor, weren’t rockets used in battle long before the 1920’s? I mean what about the national anthem, ‘in the rockets’ red glare?’”

“Quite right,” he says. “There were rockets at Fort Sumter. Hell, the British used Congreve rockets in the War of 1812, but they were little more than self-propelled artillery shells, and they couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. We’re talking about something else here, the ability to launch a rocket with a substantial payload, and using the principles of ballistics, telemetry and inertial guidance, squarely hit a target. Now, after Dr. Goddard’s experiments in the 1930’s, you would think that the American government would pour money into rocketry research, wouldn’t you?”

The students nod in unison.

“But you would be wrong!” the professor thunders. “Goddard’s work was virtually ignored here. Not so in Germany, however, where the Nazis built a rocket station at Peenemunde on the Baltic Sea. By September 1944, Hitler was raining V-2’s down on London. At the end of the war, Walter Dornberger, Wernher von Braun and 600 other German scientists came to the United States, and a damn good thing, because the Russians had their own advanced rocket program, even without the Germans they shanghaied.”

Professor Morton pauses a moment and surveys his class. Some of the faculty complain about today’s X-generation. To Morton, every class was the same. Ten per cent are brilliant and motivated; eighty per cent fall into the bulbous blob at the middle of the bell curve; and ten per cent who gained admission through family connections, computer error or downright bribery should be used for painful medical experiments. “The German scientists who came to the U.S. took the V-2 and modified and improved it into the MX-774, the forerunner of the Atlas and Titan missile systems that kept the Russians at bay before any of you scholars were born.”

“But the Cold War is over,” pipes up a studious young man in the front row. “What you’re talking about is ancient history.”

The professor smiles, admiring the lad’s gumption, if not his perspicacity. To the students, ancient history is anything that occurred prior to MTV. “Yes, they say the Cold War is over. They say Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD, is obsolete. Hell, they say I’m obsolete. But they are idiots!”

The students roll their eyes and drop their pens. No use taking notes. It won’t be on any tests. Besides, they’ve heard it before, a great soaring riff of a diatribe against the National Security Council, various presidential administrations, both Republican and Democratic, the C.I.A., the D.I.A., the Pentagon, Congress, and just about everyone else in Washington except the men’s room attendant in the V.I.P. lounge at Dulles Airport.

Lionel Morton is at the juncture of tenure and academic freedom, an intersection where the driver has the unbridled right to preach, to rant, to defame and defile. It is, in fact, wondrous therapy for the professor, though it does little to teach theoretical physics to his students.

“If we let down our defenses, if we downsize and streamline and depend on Special Forces and quick-strike commando operations, we’ll be a second-rate power. We must not only maintain our nuclear weaponry, we must constantly improve and refine it if we are to remain the greatest power the world has ever known.”

“But nuclear weapons are just for defense,” says a young woman in the back. “Without the threat of an attack from the Russians, why do we need—”

“Do you know why the Soviet Union crumbled?” the professor interrupts.

“‘Cause they wanted Big Macs and Levis,” says a long-haired guy in the first row.

Professor Morton hits a button, and the wheelchair buzzes closer to the front of the stage. “Because we bankrupted them with defense spending. They had to keep up with the Joneses… and the Reagans. Now, ask yourselves this. If the American nuclear arsenal was merely for defense, why would the Russians have to keep up? Why build the SS-17’s, 18’s, 19’s, 24’s and 25’s? Why build a 25-megaton warhead, bigger than anything we’ve got, a digger that could penetrate Cheyenne Mountain and vaporize NORAD headquarters and obliterate any of our underground bunkers including ACC Command Post outside Omaha or the National Military Command Center underneath the Pentagon?”

No one answers at first, but a guy in the first row fiddles with his gold earring and seems to think about it, then says, “‘Cause the Russians didn’t trust us.”

“Right! Because the Russians were afraid of preemptive deterrence.”

Blank looks from the back rows.

“A first strike!” Professor Morton roars. “It was our first-strike potential that shriveled the commies’ testicles, and don’t ever forget it. From the last days on World War II right up through Reagan’s second term, the bastards were afraid we’d hit ‘em first. And they were right! The blockade of Berlin, the Cuban missile crisis, the Arab-Israeli wars of ‘67 and ‘73… hell, we came damn close a bunch of times.” He pauses, maybe for effect, maybe to consider whether to say it at all. “And there were some of us who thought we made a mistake not doing it as soon as possible and as hard as possible.”

No one is laughing. No one is moving. Few students even take a breath.

Professor Morton dabs his forehead with a handkerchief. He has worked up a sweat. “So ladies and gentlemen, never forget that we need that might, that ability to slick ‘em with submarine launched missiles and glick ‘em with land based missiles, the ability to make the rubble bounce with a clean fusion bomb, the ability to take out specific targets with a cookie cutter. Take away the missiles and you’re castrating America.”

The young woman in eyeglasses raises her hand. “You’re not opposed to the START treaty, are you Professor? I mean, we have enough nuclear weapons now to—”

“To prevent World War III.”

“But the threat’s over,” the earring guy jumps in. “I mean, the Russians are broly.”

Professor Morton wheels the chair around to face the student, who likely will never make Dean’s List, much less become another Oppenheimer. “Ah, the benefits of higher education. That broly bunch of guys at Glavkosmos sold rocket engines to India, missiles to China, submarines to Iran, and unless we stop them, ammonium perchlorate to Libya.”

“Ammon… ” the guy stumbles.

“Rocket fuel! And another thing, uranium fuel rods are disappearing from Russian nuclear plants like trinkets shoplifted from Woolworth’s. China is supplying reactors to every rogue country in the world. Even Algeria has a hot cell to make plutonium. The North Koreans have made enough nuclear material at Yongbyon to build five bombs and have a missile, the Rodong-1, that can hit Japan. The Ukraine has 1800 warheads. Leonid Kravchuk may be okay, but what about its next leader? So, in short, ladies and gentlemen, the world is a far more dangerous place today than it was—”

A rumble interrupts him.

The lecture hall windows vibrate in their frames.

The walls shake.

Several students dive to the floor. “Earthquake!” one shouts.

“The big one!” another screams.

On the stage, Professor Morton calmly looks out the windows toward the quadrangle. He has heard the sound before, loves the growling roar, the sheer power of the engines.

A moment later, an Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter touches down in the grassy quadrangle. Four Airborne Rangers in battle dress jump from the helicopter. It is an impressive sight, even to the jaded Stanford students, who pause on their way between classes, to watch the rugged men whose faces are smeared with camouflage grease and who carry assault rifles at port arms.

Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Griggs, lean and graying, a triangular patch signifying Delta Force on his shoulder, follows the Rangers out of the chopper and leads them at double time toward the lecture hall. They burst through the door and pour into the hall, tromping down the steps to the stage.

Professor Morton hits a button, and his wheelchair spins ninety degrees to face the lieutenant colonel, a man in his late forties with a squinting eyes and thin, humorless lips. “Let’s go, professor. It’s happening.”

Professor Morton doesn’t even try to suppress a smile. He knows, of course. It’s not End Game. No exchange of ICBM’s across the polar ice cap. It would have been over in minutes, and there would have been no time to summon the man who built the systems, the genius who designed everything from the shape of the launch control capsule to the computer programs with the multiple codes. Designed them to be fail-safe. The system had checks, cross-checks and double cross-checks. It was flawless. But human beings were far from perfect, and this was a paradox that intrigued the professor. While humans passed on the same weaknesses from the days of the Garden of Eden, technology exploded exponentially and approached perfection.

That thought always made him smile. Exploded. For as a physicist, he loved the Big Bang of the creator, which he always imagined with a small “c,” and he loved the little, big bangs he could create.

But human error was always the risk.

Incompetence or mendacity. Or both.

Whatever the crisis, he knew, that somewhere a nuclear weapon had been triggered, and he would walk — or more precisely, roll — right into the middle of it. Create the monster, slay the monster.

Professor Morton turns the wheelchair and faces the students. “Class dismissed. Next week, a quiz on deuterium fusion.” He pauses and lets his eyes twinkle. “If there is a next week.”

-30- The Hot Breath of Lucifer

Jack Jericho slogs through the sump, stops, looks warily behind. Nothing but the throb of machinery. He is under the tunnel now, headed toward the Launch Equipment Room.

These fruitcakes have the launch control capsule, he now figures. Nobody ever calls him “sir,” not even the ticket taker at the Laramie Cineplex. And certainly not Lieutenant Owens. Jericho is a non-com, and Owens knows it. He was sending a message, and Jericho hoped it hadn’t gotten the missileer killed.

Okay, so the terrorists took over the capsule. Which means they’ve breached the perimeter and captured Security Command. And God knows what else.

But the bird didn’t fly. Jericho didn’t stop it, he knows. Hell, he nearly been turned into a fried mountaineer, working on the keyboard.

He had a weapon now. And they were on his territory. No, check that. Outdoors, in the woods, along the banks of a stream, that would be his territory. Here, in the tunnel that resembled a mine shaft, even though he knew every twist and turn, it was not his territory. It was his purgatory.

In the launch control capsule, Rachel watches over Susan and Owens while James works feverishly at the computer keyboard, his lank, pale hair drooping into his eyes. Brother David leans over his shoulder watching, growing angrier with every “Access Denied” message on the monitor.

“You’re supposed to be the expert,” David says, brusquely.

“Hey, it wasn’t my job to get the codes, Brother Davy.”

David kicks the railing that runs along the console. A petulant child. “Your blatant incompetence forestalls my destiny!”

James stops what he is doing and turns toward David, whose face is flushed. “You wanna cut the Messiah crap? This ain’t like breaking into a switching station at Pacific Bell to make some long distance calls. It ain’t changing grades at M.I.T.”

“Who do you think you’re talking to?” David demands.

“Back off, Davy. I know you. Hell, I’m the only one who knows you.”

David angrily turns away from the console and faces Susan, who is staring at him. “What is it? Do you have something to say, Ms. Shrink? Do you have something to add to this fiasco?”

“I could help you.”

“Really? Do you know how to acquire the Secondary Launch Code?”

“No, but with the proper therapy, we could exorcize your demons without a nuclear holocaust.”

He glares at her. “You know nothing of my demons. You know nothing of me.”

“But if I did, I could help you.”

David considers telling her the story just to see her reaction. “I shot my father, doctor? What do you make of that?”

What an oedipal delight, a smorgasbord of delicacies for a psychiatrist. How they loved him at the hospital when he wasn’t tormenting them. He spent eighteen months there, and it wasn’t bad, not when you live inside your head. He used his free time — of which there was plenty — to read and to change and then to change again.

He had always been aware of his powers. He saw colors emanating from other persons and came to know that these were called auras. While still a child, he invented a parlor game he called, “I see.” Wearing a black cape and a makeshift turban from a bathroom towel, he would squeeze his eyes shut, work up visions, and reveal all manner of data, some mundane and some astounding. He could conjure up the names of long-deceased relatives and he could tell a stranger whether his ailment was an ulcer or a boil. He didn’t know how he saw these things; sometimes the visions came, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes he was right, sometimes wrong.

Family and friends often asked for predictions, but those were more difficult. David worked hard at making his prophesies come true, but nothing seemed to work, until he discovered a simple solution. Only predict those things over which you have control. If he told a neighborhood pal that his cat would soon die, and a few days later, the cat was found strangled, then David was a prophet, albeit a self-fulfilling one.

Years later, as a young man sitting in the sun in a white wicker chair on the sweeping lawn of the mental hospital, David studied a wide spectrum of metaphysical sciences. At various times, he dabbled in theosophy, I Ching, Mesmerism, kabalism, voodoo, santeria, and even a brief fling with Satanism. He re-read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde until the binding tore apart. The bookshelf in his tiny room was crammed with classic mystical literature including Marion Crawford’s Zoraster, H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, and Florence Marryat’s Daughter of the Tropics.

Always possessed of self-awareness, David knew he was on a quest for his own identity. He read Ammonius, Buddha, Pythagoras, Confucius, Orpheus, Socrates and Jesus. He invented and re-invented himself a dozen times. First believing in a divine wisdom and moral ideals, he adhered to the motto, “There is no religion higher than truth.” Later he came to believe that he could define the truth.

He became fascinated with the early apocalypticists. He studied the teachings of Novatian and Donatus from the third and fourth centuries who prophesied the coming Armageddon. That took him to the millennialists, the Anabaptists, Waldensians, Albigenses, and Moravian Brethren. He listened to Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists, and he consumed the Bible, focusing on the apocalyptic writings of Daniel, Ezekiel and finally, the Book of Revelations.

All the while, David practiced his psychic gifts. After he was released from the hospital, he lived in a commune in Idaho populated by a motley collection of New Age dropouts, time-warped hippies and lethargic lost souls. The others gravitated to him, drawn by his piercing eyes and uncanny mental abilities. He learned the art of hypnotism and sleight-of-hand and became a compelling speaker and performer. To earn money for food and books, he ventured into town and set up a tent, amazing the locals with his mind-reading demonstrations at ten bucks a pop.

When he had honed his gifts and perfected his performance, when he determined who he was, or at least who he wanted to be, David had but two choices: he could become a carnival act or he could start a religion.

No, David thinks now. He won’t tell the psychiatrist his story. Not yet, anyway. But there is something within him, the showman, that cannot resist the center stage. It is the quality that makes him a seductive preacher. But even he knows it is built on the sin of pride. He turns to Doctor Susan Burns and says, “Do you believe that both God and Satan is within each of us?”

“Is that what you believe?”

“It is the Word. There is a constant struggle, the Lord our God against the fallen angel. Evil is such a powerful force.”

Next to Susan, Rachel stirs from her chair. “David, don’t. This isn’t the time or—”

“I can lead the flock because I know sin,” he goes on. “If I open the Seven Seals, it is because I was chosen to do so. If I am the Messiah, I am a sinful one. Even now, Lucifer’s voice rings louder than pealing church bells.”

“David!” Rachel knows what is happening, even if Susan does not. “This is between us, David. It is not to be spoken of.”

“Still, I fear I feel his hot, sulfurous breath on my neck.”

“David, please,” Rachel implores him.

He closes his eyes and lets his voice rise and fall, the words like pounding waves breaking on the shore. “And I saw a mighty angel proclaiming in a loud voice, ‘Who is worthy to break the seals and open the scroll? See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals.’”

“Ain’t gonna open nothing,” James says, “unless we get that code. I figure two hours before Special Forces gets here with a hard-on for the Root of David.”

“But even as I follow my destiny,” David goes on, ignoring his old friend, “even as I prepare to be martyred as the Lamb of Christ, Satan pulls at me.”

David hits a button on the console and the blast door pops open with a pflop of its seals. He leans down behind Susan, opens her handcuffs, then roughly pulls her to her feet. As he drags her toward the open door, Rachel’s voice takes on a scolding tone, “David, we have a higher purpose.”

“Indeed, we do,” he replies, “but all work and no play makes David an even naughtier boy.”

Captain Pete Pukowlski knows his rights. Which is just what he is telling this muscle-bound son-of-a-bitch who dispenses words as if they were silver dollars.

“I am intimately familiar with the provisions of the Geneva Convention as it pertains to prisoners of war,” the captain says.

Gabriel says nothing, just gives Pukowlski a little shove as the group moves through the underground tunnel toward the missile silo.

“And under said provisions, I demand confinement in quarters commensurate with my rank.”

Gabriel separates him from the ambassadors and shoves him through the door to a storage room. Using his shotgun to nudge Pukowlski along, they move to the rear of the room and stop in front of a steel vault with a wheeled door. “Open it,” Gabriel commands.

“That’s against the regs unless we’re wearing—”

“Open it!” Gabriel pokes the shotgun barrel into the captain’s rib cage.

The captain does as he is ordered.

“Inside! Now!”

Before he can protest, Pukowlski is shoved in the back and stumbles into the vault. Gabriel slams the steel door shut and turns the wheel, locking the door. Talking to himself, for the sound cannot penetrate to the other side. “Much more appropriate.” Then he walks away, flicking off the lights. Even in the dark, the sign on the steel door is illuminated by a fluorescent orange border. Glowing ominously, it reads, “Danger — Radioactive Waste.”

-31- Nuclear Family

Brother David leads Dr. Susan Burns down the tunnel toward the silo, passing several commando sentries whose posture straightens as they pass. David nods to them but says nothing. His mind is elsewhere. He pushes open the door to the sleeping quarters/galley and shoves Susan inside. Shadowy, with a bare concrete floor and jammed with half-a-dozen bunks, the room is illuminated by a single yellow bulb. David does not turn on the overhead lights in the Spartan room.

“Now, doctor,” he says, “before you get rid of my demons… ” He pulls out two pairs of handcuffs, and fastens each of her wrists to an overhead pipe, arms spread wide. “I’m going to show you heaven.”

He kneels down and removes her shoes. She is on tip-toes now, spread-eagle, exposed and vulnerable. David stands and places his face close to hers. She can feel his breath, warm and moist, coming faster now as he loosens her long, dark hair from a clip, then unties the bow-tie on her silk blouse.

“I thought you were a man of God,” she says, struggling for control.

He unfastens the top button on her blouse. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

“I didn’t think you were a common rapist.”

Another button. “Oh, but I was never common. Surely you are capable of a more sophisticated diagnosis.”

“You’re what the medical literature would call a middle-class psychopath.”

“How bourgeois. I always imagined myself a bohemian.” He grabs Susan by the chin and twists her head, forcing her to look him in the eyes. “Come now. Tell me my symptoms. What’s bugging poor little Davy?”

Susan masks her fear, knowing part of his pleasure derives from her terror. She tries to control her breathing, aware that her face is flushed. Her arms are already growing heavy, and she feels the damp cold from the floor against her bare feet. “I’m sure you’ve heard it before.”

“I have, but not from someone so lovely, so delicious.” With fingers spread, he rakes both hands through her hair, which falls freely over her shoulders. “All the others just poked and prodded, tested and analyzed. There’s never been anyone so perfectly suited to be the vessel of my wisdom, the repository of my seed.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Oh, but you won’t.”

Susan fights to stay calm, wanting to draw him out, make him continue talking. She needs to probe his personality, find his weaknesses and attack them. At the same time, she knows that David is using his own psychological warfare against her, alternating doses of charm and terror. His flaw, she believes, is his ego, his overwhelming belief that his charisma will draw people to him, make them do his bidding. This leads her to a startling conclusion. David believes he can convert her, make her one of his followers and even more, make her worship him.

Susan Burns is well aware of the Stockholm syndrome, the intense relationship whereby a hostage forms an artificial emotional attachment to a terrorist, a dependence born of the lust for survival. He has traumatized her and weakened her. She is tired, alone and frightened. But she vows to fight.

“Tell me about your therapy,” she says.

“Are you familiar with the Mach test, doctor?”

“It’s named for Machiavelli and tests a person’s willingness to manipulate, to dehumanize, to treat others as objects. At the high end, there is total lack of concern with conventional morality. Lying, cheating and deceit are considered the norm.”

“And how do you think I scored?”

“A twenty.”

“No, twenty-one.”

“That’s impossible. Twenty is the highest, or lowest, depending how you look at it.”

“I got a bonus,” he says, proudly, “for killing the psychiatrist’s hamsters.”

“You’re trying to shock me,” she says. “Why not just tell me about it?”

“The shrink was one of your sixties peaceniks who still drove a VW bus and listened to Joan Baez. Had a kitchenette in his office, used to make godawful fruit and veggie drinks. One day, I dropped the little fellow — the hamster, not the shrink — into the blender. Put some lumps in his smoothie.”

Still fighting the pain in her arms, Susan struggles not to show her revulsion.

David smiles to himself and unfastens another button of her blouse. “So, doctor, any more thoughts on little Davy? And don’t sugar coat it. If you lie to me, I’ll cause you pain.”

She takes a breath and says, “Primary narcissism with delusional episodes and bouts of sadistic sexual paraphilia.”

“Mmm. You’re getting warmer. And so am I.” Suddenly, he rips the blouse open, popping the remaining buttons. Susan gasps with fear, then strains for control, even as her breasts heave under her bra.

David watches her intently, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “My mother wore white brassieres with little pink bows, just like you. Now there’s grist for your mill, eh doctor?”

Susan is silent, afraid to venture more opinions. It is a struggle for control, she knows. She must wrest it away without enraging him.

“Come now, doctor,” he says. Playful now. “Don’t you want to know how a boy like me got to be a boy like me? Wouldn’t you like to venture an expert medical opinion?”

“I would suspect that you had a successful, distant, authoritarian father and a frivolous, indulgent, highly seductive mother. Your parents were self-centered, and rather than being affectionate, merely indulged you. Instead of experiencing feelings, you became charming and manipulative and simply pretended to feel for others in order to obtain what you wished. It is possible that your parents, particularly your father, had criminal impulses which he never acted on, but which he unconsciously projected onto you, hoping you would actualize them, giving him the vicarious pleasure without the risk. In short, your nuclear family was sick, and they made you sick.”

“Nuclear family,” he muses. “An apt phrase, given our circumstances, don’t you think? Still, you can do better than that. Be more specific. Your generalities may apply to bottom-feeding serial killers like Bundy and Dahmer, but I consider myself rather special.”

Susan feels the muscles in her calves beginning to cramp and her arms are growing numb. “From an early age, you engaged in fetishistic masturbatory fantasies. You daydreamed about killing, probably on a massive scale. You—

“You’re getting off the track. My family, doctor. Tell me about my family, and do entertain me. If you’re boring, I shall have to entertain myself, and you wouldn’t like that, I assure you.”

“As I said, your father was likely powerful and remote. He either pushed you—”

“Ah, more clichés.”

“Or ignored you. The cliché would be that he never played ball with you.”

“He played chess with me, taught me the game when I was four, my beloved father did. If I made a move he considered inferior… ”

Wham. David slams his open palm into the overhead pipe. Startled, Susan instinctively raises her legs. The movement causes her to swing to and fro on the pipe. Her arms throb.

“He’d box my ears,” David says.

Her voice quaking, a hot pain searing her shoulders, she says softly, “Your father didn’t know how to express—”

“Shut up! It’s my forty-five minutes, doctor. One day, when I was eight, we were playing chess, just like always. I tried a new maneuver, something he hadn’t seen before, and it appeared that my queen was vulnerable… ” Wham. David hits the pipe again, and Susan winces. “He hits me, screams at me for being stupid, but I don’t cry. I just keep playing. Five moves later, checkmate. I win!”

“And he never hit you again.”

“Wrong! He hit me harder. He just never played with me again.”

Susan senses the opportunity and goes for it. “Don’t you see? Surely, you do. You have the intelligence. You know precisely what shaped you. Armed with that knowledge, you can change. You can—”

“Doctor, doctor. What is the primary reason why therapy is almost always useless for true psychopaths?”

She considers lying, figures he would know, then simply speaks the truth. “Motivation. They don’t want to change. They enjoy their aberrational behavior.

“Quite so,” he says, as he unhooks her bra, and lets it fall to the floor.

The unmarked C-21A, a Lear jet in the military configuration, descends from twenty thousand feet over the flat Nebraska countryside. Professor Lionel Morton sits with his head pressed against the window, staring at the horizon. Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Griggs has silently studied the professor for the past ninety minutes. He knows that Lionel Morton was the boy genius of the missile program in the fifties and sixties. Now, he is considered an oddball, a dinosaur. Brilliant and combative, he’s been fired and rehired by the Air Force a dozen times.

“Without the S.L.C., they can’t launch the missile, can they?” Griggs asks. He has a well-trimmed mustache and his pale hair has gone gray at the temples.

“Correct. The professor still stares out the window.

“So there’s no problem, is there? Special Forces can take back the silo in what, fifteen or twenty minutes. Hell, they would have done it already if we didn’t have the bad luck to have half-a-dozen foreign ambassadors down the hole.”

“Bad luck or clever planning?”

That makes the colonel think. “You mean the bastards knew about the U.N. delegation?”

“It was in the newspapers,” the professor says, dismissing the notion of luck, good or bad. “It is consistent with a well-planned operation.”

“Not so well-planned that they had the slick.”

The jet begins its descent though a thin layer of clouds over Offutt Air Force Base just outside Omaha. Professor Morton turns to face the lieutenant colonel. “But they seemed to have everything else, didn’t they? What makes you think they can’t get the secondary code?”

“Well, how will they get it? The President’s not going to give it to them. You don’t mean to say they have access to it down in the hole.”

Professor Morton closes his eyes and listens to the sound of the landing gear lower into place. “I mean we’re going to find out just how clever they are.”

“Damn.” Griggs uses the knuckle of an index finger to scratch at his mustache. “Then we’d getter get ready to shoot down the missile.”

“With what?” The professor seems oddly pleased by the suggestion even as he rejects it. “Tomahawks, Cruise, Sparrows? Lousy range, and none of them can do more than Mach 4. That bird flies at Mach 20, more than fifteen thousand miles an hour at burnout when it goes ballistic.”

“We don’t wait ‘til it hits apogee, professor. We surround the silo with batteries of Patriots, kill the bird on liftoff.”

“You think my missile is some rustbucket Scud from Baghdad?” He lets out a little laugh. The weapon’s superiority is a source of pride and amusement. He lets his voice slip into its lecture mode. “The Air Force is just dandy at launching missiles, not at shooting them down. On liftoff you’d have no time to acquire the target. You’d either fire too soon or too late, or at the right time at the wrong angle. You might as well try shooting a lightning bolt with a pistol.”

This quiets Griggs, and as the Lear’s wheels touch down with a screech of rubber on pavement, he clicks open his seatbelt, as if that will hurry them on the way to STRATCOM. He stands before the small jet comes to a stop on the tarmac where a helicopter is waiting. Two Airborne Rangers help the professor off the plane and into a waiting military van. There is no time to lose.

Susan hangs painfully from the overhead pipe, her breasts exposed. Brother David stands in front of her, his head cocked as if listening to a distant voice. His eyes are unfocused.

“Father and I always competed for mother’s attention,” he says softly.

A tear tracks slowly down Susan’s cheek.

“Quite a wit, my father. Nicknamed me Oedipus.” He waits for a response, doesn’t get one, and continues. “Just for the record, doctor, I didn’t really have an affair with my mother, then kill my father. But not for lack of trying.”

David rests his head between Susan’s breasts, and her shoulders tremble. “Did you know I had an appointment to West Point? Daddy arranged it. He was chummy with the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and just about everyone at the Pentagon whose name started with ‘General.’ Loved the military, though he never served, of course. What hopes he had for me.”

“Do you feel you failed him?” Susan asks, the numbness paralyzing her.

David nuzzles her breasts with his chin. “I’m sure he would think so. But he could hardly be the one to cast stones.” He takes a nipple in his mouth, and sucks at it.

“What does that mean?” Susan asks, squeezing her eyes shut.

David releases her nipple and seems to appraise it. “I came home after plebe year at the Point and found my mother with three broken ribs.” David reaches behind her and unzips her skirt and pulls it down over her hips. “And a black eye she pathetically tried to cover with makeup.”

David drops to the floor on his knees, lifts up her feet, one at a time, gathers up the skirt and tosses it aside. Still on his knees, he presses his cheek into her abdomen and continues to talk. “He’d beaten her before, of course. For as long as I can remember. Accused her of adultery, of burning the lamb chops, of spending too much money. Such an angry man. And she always made excuses for him. As if it were her fault. But it wasn’t.”

David’s arms are wrapped around her, squeezing her buttocks. “I always thought I should have done something when I was younger. I could have stopped him, but I didn’t.”

“But this time you did,” she says.

“I found my father’s gun. Bang! Bang! Then I found religion.”

Susan begins to sob. David stands and studies her.

“Your nipples are erect, Dr. Burns. But alas, I am not.”

He turns and walks from the room, leaving her suspended from the pipe, half naked and in tears. Without looking back, he says, “Pray tell, what would Freud say?”

-32- Coward!

Jack Jericho splashes through the drainage sump, stopping to look up through the grates above his head. He knows he is directly under the tunnel leading from the launch control capsule to the silo, knows too that no one should be in the tunnel, but is not surprised to see the outline of two men through the shadowy grate.

“Are you ready, Ezekiel?” a voice asks.

“Always, Brother David. But will you open the seven seals?”

“In due time.”

“The men believe in you, Brother David.”

“Let them believe in the Word. It will lead them.”

Weirdos of God, Jericho thinks. He moves directly under the grate, kicking a spray of water against some tubing. The conversation above him stops, and he freezes, a ray of light from the tunnel filtering through the grate and across his face. He imagines the two men peering down through the grate, spotting him. Brother David and Ezekiel. Even as he wonders what they look like, his heart pounds in his chest, so loud it seems, they must hear it, too. His imagination conjures up the sound of a rifle bolt clicking into place, the sight of a muzzle poking through an opening of the grate, even the sound of the gunshot that will end his life. But then, the conversation starts again.

“If you will forgive my sinful pride, Brother David, it would be a great honor to perform any tasks that would further the cause of righteousness.”

“There is one thing,” the other voice says. “I am teaching a lesson to a heathen. Give her another few minutes. Then take these keys, and… ”

Using their voices as cover, Jericho carefully moves through the water down the tunnel, turning under what he knows is the galley-sleeping quarters. He looks up through the grate. Darkness. He takes a deep breath. He has two choices. He can stay in the sump, dashing around corners like a rat in a maze, or he can work his way up to the silo and the launch control capsule. He doesn’t know what he’ll do when he gets there, but he knows he’s not doing anyone any good where he is.

Jericho removes the saw-toothed survival knife from a leg sheath and pries open the grate above his head. Then he pulls himself into the room, pauses a moment to let his eyes get accustomed to the dim light. He hears the unmistakable sound of strained breathing, senses the mixture of pain and fear, and as he turns and sees her in the yellowy light, his first thought is of a an animal caught in a trap.

Susan Burns sees the figure pulling itself out of the grate. The man turns toward her, an apparition appearing through a blazing fire of pain. Her body stiffens. She begins to cry out, but Jericho covers her mouth with his hand.

“It’s me, doctor, Sergeant Jericho,” he whispers in her ear.

It takes a moment, but she recognizes him and calms. He releases his grip then lifts her at the waist to relieve the pressure on her arms.

“Thank God,” she says, her head falling onto his shoulder. Please get me out of here. He was going to… ”

Jericho reaches up toward the overhead pipe, finds the handcuffs and curses. He was hoping she was bound with rope. The saw-toothed knife is in his hand. Wrapped cylindrical handle, a removable cap for storing matches, compass and fishing line. It can saw down trees, clean a fish, or gut a man. But it cannot open handcuffs.

Jericho digs at the lock with the tip of the knife, knowing it is useless. He is face-to-face with Susan, her legs wrapped around his hips instinctively, seeking shelter and protection. Her bare breasts are pressed against his chest, and he can hear her sobbing.

“I can’t get it open,” he says. “But there’s a monkey wrench around here somewhere. Give me a minute. I’ll separate the pipe at the t-joint, and get you out of here.”

“Don’t leave me,” she pleads, tightening the scissors hold of her legs, letting all her weight fold into him. He puts his arms around her, tastes a salty tear that runs from her face to his.

Footsteps echo from the tunnel, interrupting them.

“The pipe, Jericho. Break it! Do what you have to. Please, hurry.”

He releases her, looks for a wrench, but doesn’t find it.

The footsteps grow louder.

He leaps up, grabs the pipe and swings on it like a gymnast on the horizontal bar. He tries to pull the pipe down, but it holds firm, doesn’t even bend.

The door opens, a beam of light shooting across the floor past the cots and toward them in the rear of the sleeping quarters. Jericho turns his head toward the grate in the floor.

“Don’t you dare leave me,” Susan whispers, frantically.

Anguished, Jericho moves toward the grate. “There’s nothing I can do.” He swings his legs into the opening to the sump. “We’re outnumbered and we’re trapped. I don’t even have a gun. I’ll get us both killed.”

“Don’t go!”

“I’ll come back for you.”

“Jack!”

The sound of his name on her lips chills him.

“I promise. I’ll be back.”

“Damn you! You coward!”

The word cuts through him, and he drops into the sump as much to avoid her hateful glare as to escape. Pulling the grate back into place over his head, he sinks into the water, defeated and ashamed.

“I’ll come back for you.”

His father looks up from beneath the fallen beam, the pain etched into his face. He says nothing. Water pours into the shaft, and from overhead comes the angry growl of the earth. Rock moves against rock, timbers snap in two. The growl becomes a deafening roar. Jack Jericho reaches down and grasps his father’s hand. His father latches onto Jericho’s sleeve, holds him there for a moment, then lets go. Still, the older man doesn’t say a word, doesn’t protest as Jericho backs down the tunnel, toward the shouts of the crew boss.

“I’ll come back for you,” he says again, watching his father wince with pain. Jericho turns and scrambles toward the emergency egress ladder. He does not look back.

Ezekiel works his way to the rear of the sleeping quarters, sees Susan suspended from the pipe, and stops. He studies her, notes her exposed breasts, then looks her in the eyes. “Man is weak. Even the Messiah in human form knows sin.”

He reaches for her, and she shrinks back, turning her head away. But Ezekiel merely pulls her torn blouse closed, trying to cover her breasts. Then he reaches up and unlocks her handcuffs. She falls to the floor and rubs her wrists, trying to work the blood back into her hands.

She puts her bra back on and tries to tuck in the blouse, but without the buttons, it’s useless. Ezekiel moves to a metal shelving unit and pulls down a missileer’s blue jumpsuit, which he tosses to her. “Put this on. Rachel sees you like that, there’ll be hell to pay.”

-33- Death Waits in the Dark

The OH-58D Kiowa helicopter swings out of the shadows of Chugwater Mountain and descends from a position over the reservoir, following the path of the aqueduct down to the missile base on the plateau below. In Vietnam, the Kiowa led air cavalry assaults and located targets for attack helicopters. Today, the modified version is still a small, maneuverable chopper without much firepower, except when it’s equipped with Hellfire and Stinger missiles. This one is in the scout mode with no armaments. Instead, it carries three men in its cramped compartment, an Army pilot and two passengers in full battle dress.

Colonel Henry Zwick, with twenty-five years experience in Armored Cavalry, slips on a helmet as they pass near the open missile silo, chunks of the blown concrete cap scattered in pieces on the ground. The colonel has salt and pepper hair and a jet black handlebar mustache that is more Salvador Dali than West Point.

Captain Kyle Clancy sits next to him, his camouflage pants bloused neatly into his combat boots. A jagged scar runs from the corner of his left eye down across the cheekbone and disappears under his pugnacious chin. The patch on his sleeve reads, “Death Waits in the Dark,” the slogan of the Night Stalkers, the Army’s cutthroat Special Forces unit.

The chopper dips lower and the two officers can see the bodies of airmen in front of the barracks, the shattered front gate, and the dead air policemen on the ground.

“What an unholy mess,” Colonel Zwick says, shaking his head.

Captain Clancy makes a sound that reminds the colonel of a horse snorting. “Typical Air Force goat fuck,” the captain says. “They couldn’t defend an assault by a troop of Eagle scouts.”

“Easy, Kyle. We’re all on the same side.”

“Shit, colonel, you know I’m right. The flyboys are trained monkeys. They’re fine at pulling the trigger on some smart bomb at twenty thousand feet, just like playing a video game in an arcade. Put a bayonet at their throats, they piss their pants.”

Overhead, a shadow crosses in front of the sun as a dozen CH-47 Chinook helicopters edge past the mountain and descend. The huge, two-rotor choppers carry troops toward a makeshift base camp just above the missile base on an elevated plateau. On the ground, tents are going up, men are digging in, and trees fall in the path of M1A2 Abrams battle tanks and M2/3 Bradley fighting vehicles with cannons, grenade and missile launchers.

Captain Clancy doesn’t even try to suppress a sneer as he gestures toward the base camp. “No disrespect intended, colonel, but we don’t need all that armor. And we don’t need Rangers or Green Berets, either. Hell, my men could—”

“You’ll have your chance, Kyle. But first, let’s get an idea of what we’re up against.”

The Army pilot turns around and asks, “Another pass?”

Colonel Zwick points toward the ground. “Take it lower and see if we can get a rise out of them.”

Captain Clancy smiles, stretching the scar at the corner of his mouth. The colonel might look like a pussy, but he’s earned his eagle and arrows. Plus an oak leaf cluster and a couple of silver stars. After West Point, Zwick was commissioned a second lieutenant with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Vietnam and later Cambodia. It was the old Army, using outdated tactics of static warfare where the premium was on superior firepower alone. The Armored Cav had forgotten lessons first learned in the Bronze Age by Kazakh warriors who harnessed horses to chariots, all the better to hurl spears at their enemies.

In the recriminations that followed the Vietnam War, the Army changed. A mobile, fluid fighting force was created, and Colonel Zwick was in the forefront. After tours in Germany and studies at the Armed Forces Staff College and the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, Colonel Henry Zwick was part of the most successful cavalry operation in history: Operation Saber of Desert Storm. The new Army was high-tech. Soldiers carried cellular phones and Global Positioning Receivers that gave their precise location by satellite. Weaponry had reached new dimensions from smart bombs to long-rod penetrators, officially known as high-velocity, armor-piercing, fin-stabilized, discarding-sabot projectiles. In layman’s terms, it’s a 120 mm. shell made of tungsten or depleted-uranium alloys, and it exits the muzzle of a tank’s smoothbore gun at an astonishing Mach 4. It was used to pierce the armor of Iraqi tanks at a distance of more than three miles.

Reconnaissance was handled by remote-controlled aircraft and the sophisticated Fox recon vehicles that sense chemical warfare devices. Zwick’s tank corps was equipped with the M1A2 Abrams, “Whispering Death,” the world’s best main battle tank manned by the world’s best tank crews. Multiple-launch rocket systems and self-propelled 155 mm. howitzers added firepower.

Amazingly, the technology all worked.

Colonel Zwick commanded a unit of the 2nd Armored Cavalry that engaged Iraq’s Tawakalna Division in the Battle of 73 Easting, annihilating the enemy. In one hundred hours of fighting, the Armored Cav routed three Republican Guard divisions, destroyed the Iraqi’s 10th and 12th Armored Divisions and the 17th Infantry Division. They destroyed 4,000 Iraqi combat vehicles and took 24,000 prisoners. Only 42 American soldiers were killed and 192 wounded.

So how difficult could it be, Colonel Zwick wondered, to take back a missile silo from a bunch of half-baked terrorists? Not hard at all. Unless the bastards could pull the trigger on the missile. That changed the equation.

The Kiowa descends, hovering a moment over the security building where the blown doors are clearly visible. The sound of gunshots is drowned out by the chopper’s engine, but tiny puffs of smoke come from nearby trees, commandos firing at them. Neither the colonel nor the captain flinches, and the pilot takes evasive action, the chopper banking then cutting a figure-8 above the missile base.

With a look of disdain, Captain Clancy watches the commandos take aim from positions in the trees and behind makeshift bunkers. “Dumb bastards are hiding, can’t tell a recon mission from an assault.” Unlike the colonel, Captain Clancy didn’t have the benefit of higher education, unless you count El Salvador, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, and Haiti. Years ago, he was a grunt who couldn’t stay out of trouble in Basic Training at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Though he regularly led his unit in the rugged physical tests and otherwise showed respect for his superiors, Clancy was an improviser on duty and a brawler off duty. The former troubled commanders who prefer followers, not independent thinkers. The latter caused concern in the New Army.

Clancy busted up bars, never backing down from an insult or a fight. Once in a tavern, he tore off a woman’s red dress and wore it as an ascot. His defense to the M.P.’s was simple. In the war games, his unit was green. Red was the enemy. The woman turned out to be a lieutenant’s wife, and Clancy was either going to end up in the stockade or on a bus home until a J.A.G. lawyer suggested the Special Forces. It was the perfect place for someone who could think on his feet and react with controlled fury when the coach called his number.

During the invasion of Panama, dressed in black and wearing night vision goggles, Clancy leapt out of a hovering MH-6 Little Bird helicopter onto the roof of the Càrcel Modelo prison. As Delta Force snipers picked off guards in front of the prison, Clancy blew open a steel door with plastique explosives, then with three other commandos, raced down the stairs. He shot three guards with a laser-scoped MP-5 Heckler & Koch machine gun, then used more explosives to blow open the cell of a CIA operative who would surely have been killed in retaliation for the invasion. Clancy led the operative up to the roof and the waiting chopper, which was shot down as it lifted off. A U.S. armored personnel carrier evacuated Clancy, the other commandos and the operative with no loss of American life. Just another day in the Special Forces.

Clancy loved all the action, but Desert Storm was his favorite. On G-minus-2, two days before the start of the ground war, he led a recon team across the border into Iraq. His job was to find a route through the mine fields and tank traps and also draw enemy fire so Colonel Zwick’s 2nd Armored Cavalry could locate Iraqi positions. Clancy had the perfect temperament to be a human trip wire. He enjoyed being shot at nearly as much as he enjoyed shooting back.

On the Saudi-Iraq border, hundreds of thousands of Coalition troops were gathered: the British Desert Rats, French Foreign Legionnaires, the Arab Task Force, and of course, the might of the U.S. Army, the 82nd and 101st Airborne, the 1st and 24th Infantry, the 1st and 2nd Cavalry, the 1st and 3rd Armored Division. But across the border, inside Iraq, scuttling through mine fields and over trenches, were the Night Stalkers, some on foot, some in Light Armored Vehicles (LAV’s), daring the enemy to shoot, then firing back with their 25-millimeter Bushmaster chain guns.

On G-minus-1, Clancy and his men did the job too well. Brazenly hurdling flaming tank traps, the Night Stalkers apparently convinced the Iraqis that the main invasion was underway. The Iraqis responded with heavy artillery, 122 mm. rockets, tanks and FROG missiles. Which, of course, was what Clancy wanted all along, because it gave him a chance to stand and fight instead of just “flashing our petticoats and running home to Mama,” which was what he called decoy missions.

Clancy stood atop his unarmored HUMVEE, firing TOW missiles at the Iraqis T-62 tanks, taking out three with direct hits, while his men pinpointed artillery positions and picked off Iraqi infantry with machine gun fire.

Now, as the Kiowa dips to five hundred feet, Clancy can imagine the crackle of small-arms fire from the ground, though he cannot hear it. He and the colonel peer down and see commandos running haphazardly from the security building, firing rifles at them. A lone bullet pings off a landing skid.

“Amateurs,” Clancy says. “We’ll go through them like a knife through an eyeball.”

“I think the expression is, ‘a knife through butter,’” the colonel says.

The captain smiles, and the scar at the corner of his mouth stretches and whitens. “Not where I come from, colonel.”

-34- Run Jericho, Run

Jack Jericho carefully slides the grate from its grooves and pulls himself out of the sump and onto the floor of the missile silo. He is directly below the suspended Peacekeeper missile. As he gets to his feet, he is shocked to find himself ten feet behind a man in a dark suit. The man, whose long hair is tied back in a ponytail, is staring straight up into the burners of the rocket. Jericho drops into a stalking crouch, takes a step and comes down on the outside ball of his foot, rolls to the inside ball, then lowers his heel. He’s practiced in the woods, so that the stalking crouch could bring him close enough to a deer to hear its breathing. Now, deliberate as a heron stalking a frog, he approaches the man from behind.

There is a sense that is part sight and part sound, and yet it does not depend on the eyes or ears. A warning reflex, an electrical synapse more finely tuned in prehistoric man where the rustle of leaves or the breaking of a twig could mean danger or death. Sensing movement he can neither see nor hear, the man whirls around. Jericho leaps out of his crouch and grabs him by his ponytail, yanking his head back, and sliding the saw-toothed knife under his neck. “Who are you!” Jericho demands.

Startled, Brother David peers over his shoulder at Jericho, but it only takes a moment to regain his composure. “Bitte tue mir nichts!”

“What! What the hell are you saying?”

David trembles. His look is pure terror. He is a good enough actor to fool Jericho, who releases the pressure on David’s ponytail, then gets a look at his profile. There is something familiar about the man. “Who are you?”

No answer, just the same terrified look.

“Where are you from?”

“Deutschland.”

“Oh.” Jericho spots the dried blood on the man’s shirt and suit coat. “Jeez, are you hurt?” He lets go and sheaths his knife. “You’re with the U.N., aren’t you? I think I must have seen you yesterday in the silo.”

David nods at him.

“Have you been shot?”

“Nein. One of the others,” David says, affecting a German accent. “The Englishmen. He died in my arms.”

“Oh, God. You get separated from the group?”

“Ya.”

“Look, all hell’s broken loose, but I guess you know that. We’ve got to do something or more people will be killed. Maybe a lot more people.”

David fixes him with a look of wordless astonishment.

“You guys should have shut this place down yesterday,” Jericho says.

“Ya, gestern.”

“You better stick with me.” Thinking this guy isn’t going to be much help, Jericho just wants to get him out of the silo. He speaks slowly, hoping the man understands. “I’ll get us out of here, and we can call in the Marines.”

“Ya, waffen,” David says, smiling obligingly.

They walk to the gantry and get on, David trailing slightly behind. Jericho pulls a lever, and the gantry begins to ascend the silo wall against the backdrop of the black PK missile. “Their leader’s some kind of religious psycho. Had a woman psychiatrist strung up like a gutted deer. We’ve got to get her out of here and bring in some help, pronto.”

“This woman,” David says, slowly, as if trying out the words for the first time. “Is she your geliebte, your sweetheart?”

“Fat chance. A woman like that. What would she see in me?”

Jericho pulls back the lever, and the gantry stops one hundred feet above the silo floor. He points toward the wall where a screen covers an exhaust tube. “We’ll get out through that tube. It runs up to a river bed.”

“We will be wet,” David says deliberately.

“No. We’d be under water now if the river was still there. The water’s dammed at a reservoir on top the mountain. Just a little trickle in an aqueduct now, and the river bed’s as dry as Army pot roast.”

David does not appear to understand.

“C’mon,” Jericho urges him. “You’re not afraid of tight spaces, are you?”

“Nein.”

“Good, ‘cause I am.”

Jericho removes two screws from the top of the screen and pulls it open. Suddenly, a voice crackles, and David reaches into his suit pocket for a walkie-talkie. “Angel, this is Eden,” a man’s voice says through the static. “Do you read me?”

“What the hell is that?” Jericho asks.

David smiles placidly, pivots and hooks a sucker punch into his gut. Jericho doubles over, gasping for breath, and David smashes the walkie-talkie across his skull. A blaze of fireworks ignites Jericho’s eyes, and he struggles not to black out. David locks his hands together and brings them down hard on the back of Jericho’s neck, knocking him to the floor of the gantry. Jericho gets to one knee, but David kicks him in the chest, knocking him back down.

“A patient,” David says.

The world spinning around him, Jericho isn’t sure what he heard. “What?”

“Your lady friend, the shrink. You asked what she would see in you. She’d see you as a patient, Sergeant Jericho, a pathetic loser, a wanderer who has lost his way and who turns to secular healing for answers that will not come.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’ve read your file, sergeant.”

Jericho is on all fours, trying to clear the cobwebs from his brain. He looks up at David, and now it comes to him. “I remember. You’re the preacher on the horse. You kept the sun at your back so I never made out your face.”

“You are blind, Jericho. Even with the sun at your back, you would not see.”

“And you’re going to show me the light, right preacher?”

“Oh, but I shall. Jericho, you carry the name of a city ten thousand years old. Are you a believer?”

“Not in politicians or preachers.”

David kicks him again, this time in the ribs. He’s flat on the floor of the gantry now, gasping as David kicks him again, pushing him toward the ledge. Then a downward swing with the walkie-talkie smashes an ankle hard on the bone, and Jericho yelps and tries to scramble to his knees but the movement takes him closer to the ledge.

“You’ve got to be saved, sergeant.”

Another kick digs into Jericho’s abdomen, and a moment later, the acrid taste of bile fills his mouth. He tries to get to his knees, but his hand slips over the ledge. He looks down, dizzily. The silo floor swirls around him.

“You can die saved or die damned,” David says. “It makes no difference to me.”

“Is there a third choice?” Jericho asks, spitting blood.

“You’re a heathen and a fool!” David prods Jericho with a foot, and one leg slides off the ledge. Jericho tries to grab at the smooth metal flooring, but he can’t get a grip. With a final, vicious kick, David sends Jericho over the ledge.

Plunging into space.

The smooth black missile just feet away, seeming to launch as he plummets.

Reaching out, windmilling his arms, grabbing for something, anything.

Just above the polished steel floor, his arm hooks the thick umbilical cord that runs from the silo wall to the warhead.

The impact pops his shoulder out of its joint, but Jericho still holds on, swinging on the cord, first away from the PK then back where he bashes into the missile canister. He cries out in pain, then falls ten feet to the floor, where he lies in a heap.

On the gantry, David peers over the ledge and looks at the motionless body one hundred feet below. He pulls hits a button on the dented walkie-talkie, and says, “Gabriel, would you be kind enough to join me in the silo? I’d like you to scrape up the janitor.”

David rides the gantry down to the silo floor. He gets off, walks a few paces beneath the missile, and finds…

Nothing.

Jericho is gone.

From the tunnel comes the clack of combat boots on concrete. Gabriel and four young commandos rush from the tunnel into the silo. David kneels at the spot where Jericho fell from the umbilical cord. Drops of blood lead to the grate, which lies outside its track. “Bring him to me!” David shouts.

Gabriel climbs through the opening, followed by three of the commandos. David grabs the fourth commando and points at the dangling screen over exhaust tube high on the silo wall. “Get up there and fix that. And stay there. Keep a lookout until Gabriel reports that he has captured the heathen.”

The commando mumbles his acquiescence, hops onto the gantry, and rides up the wall. As the gantry slows to a stop at the exhaust tube opening, the commando fails to notice a drop of blood on the floor.

Suddenly, Jericho swings down from the roof of the gantry and crashes into the commando. They both fall to the floor, then scramble to their feet. With one arm dangling uselessly, Jericho takes a swipe with his knife, but the commando knocks it away with his Uzi, then levels to fire. Jericho barrels into him like a middle linebacker on a blitz. The Uzi flies out of the man’s hands and slides to the ledge of the gantry. Both men dive for it, wrestling at the edge, Jericho howling in pain when he lands on his shoulder.

On the floor of the silo, David watches the struggle above him on the gantry, then angrily punches a button on the walkie-talkie. “Gabriel! Get back here.”

David watches angrily from the silo floor. This janitor was proving to be more trouble than he had expected.

On the gantry ledge, Jericho’s head is over the edge, the commando trying to shove him off. Jericho rolls over, pinning the commando beneath him. The commando kicks at Jericho, toppling him backwards into the silo wall, which is studded with hoses and gauges. The commando dives for the Uzi.

Jericho spins the wheel of a valve just below a sign emblazoned, “Warning: LOX.” He grabs a hose and aims it at the commando. A blast of liquid oxygen shoots out and hits the man commando squarely in the face, blinding him and searing him with a freezing pain. He staggers backwards, squeezing the trigger of the Uzi, firing wildly, the shots pinging off the silo wall. He pirouettes, claws at his eyes, takes a step backward, then another, then a final one. But his foot doesn’t come down. He has stepped off the ledge, seems to hang there a moment, then plummets toward the floor, screaming, falling, falling… and landing with a thunk at David’s feet, the Uzi skittering a few feet away.

Jericho makes his way to the edge, looks down at David, and for a long moment, the two men just glare at each other. “I’ll be back!” Jericho shouts. “I’m coming back for the woman, but I’m coming back for you, too.”

“No you won’t! It’s not in your nature. Run, Jericho, Run. It’s what you’re good at.”

There is nothing Jericho can say. He backs away from the ledge, painfully pops his dislocated shoulder back into place and retrieves his knife from the gantry floor. He moves back to the silo wall, climbs into the exhaust tube, and disappears from view.

He wriggles slowly through the tube, climbing toward the surface. If the commandos cannot find the tube’s outlet pipe which is obscured in the old river bed by underbrush, safety waits above.

But safety can be a hell all its own.

So Jericho is not thinking about escape.

He is already planning how he will join the battle.

-35- Ask the Missile

Base Camp Alpha is a scene of controlled chaos at the foot of Chugwater Mountain eleven hundred meters from the blown front gate of the 318th Missile Squadron. The sights, sounds and smells are pure military as Quonset huts are erected, tents are pitched, and men and materiél pour in.

Loaded with equipment, olive green deuce-and-a-half trucks pull up the gravel road. Moving slower in the procession, massive trucks called HEMETTS carry tons of ammunition and building supplies. CH-47 Chinook helicopters off-load troops of the Armored Cavalry, and CH-46 Sea Knight copters lower Light Armored Vehicles on cargo hooks.

Forklifts move pallets loaded with wooden crates and bladders of fuel. Bulldozers clear trees and push topsoil spiked with twisted limbs into makeshift fortifications. A dozen M2/3 Bradley Fighting Vehicles equipped with grenade launchers, TOW missile launchers and 25 mm. cannon take a forward position alongside six M109A6 Paladin self-propelled howitzers. Poking through the pine trees, a 120 mm cannon appears. It is attached to an MA1A2 Abrams main battle tank, a seventy-ton fighting machine that is the most sophisticated piece of rolling armor in the history of warfare. Four of the tanks, encased in armor plate tougher than the eighteen inches of solid steel protecting a battleship’s control tower, crunch through trees and underbrush and take their positions.

MLRS rocket launchers on tracked vehicles pull into place at the perimeter. Called “steel rain” by the Iraqis whose parade they rained on. the rocket launchers fire TGW smart missiles. As the vehicles come to a halt, struts extend, elevating the rocket tubes to fire at an thirty-degree angle over the missile silo. It is a strategy that might be called, “if all else fails… ” for no one believes they can shoot down a Peacekeeper missile.

The PK is cold launched, ejected from the canister by pressure created by a mixture of water and gases in a generator. The missile literally pops up out of the silo when the pressure in the sealed canister reaches three hundred twenty pounds per square inch, and something’s got to give. What gives is the missile, all one hundred ninety thousand pounds of it.

There is that moment, less than one second, when the PK hangs there, one hundred feet above the ground. If a ground-to-air rocket launcher could acquire the target, if the gunners knew precisely the moment the Peacekeeper would be there, maybe it could be shot down. But there is no time. In that next second, the rockets ignite with the roar of an angry god, and in the next sixty seconds, they catapult the missile to eighty-six thousand feet.

The first stage peels off, and the second stage fires up, again burning brightly for just a minute, but carrying the missile to a height of three hundred seventy-thousand feet. The third stage is not much longer lived, giving its all in less than ninety seconds, but by this time, the missile is in space traveling at an incredible fifteen thousand miles an hour. It has gone ballistic.

Everywhere at Base Camp Alpha, there are the sounds of chugging diesel engines and spinning rotors, the shouts of men hard at work building and digging. The fragrance of the trees and rich brown earth is mixed now with the pungent smell of diesel fuel and wet canvas and lubricated metal.

By nightfall, there will be enough firepower here to overthrow a healthy number of third-world countries. Whether it is sufficient to take over a missile silo without killing half-a-dozen foreign ambassadors or causing what the Atomic Energy Commission would blithely refer to as a nuclear incident is another matter.

Half a mile above Base Camp Alpha, on an old logging road whose ruts are now overgrown with sunflowers and bright red Indian paintbrush, a lone rider in buckskins sits astride a golden Palomino. Motionless, Kenosha watches as the elaborate war machine is assembled. Then, with a tug of the reins, man and horse turn and make their way higher up the slope, through strands of white birch trees, across a plateau of sagebrush, then higher still through a stand of fir trees. Kenosha works the horse farther away until he can no longer see or hear the grinding engines below him, until he is swallowed by the ancient forest itself.

In the launch control capsule, James works doggedly at the computer as Rachel watches over his shoulder. Brother David enters the capsule from the tunnel, and Rachel glares at him.

“How was your proselytizing? Did you convert her?” Rachel’s tone is sarcastic, and she shoots an angry look at Susan Burns, who is handcuffed and sitting on the floor against the rear wall of the capsule. The psychiatrist wears a blue flightsuit, her hair flowing over her shoulders.

“The woman is not important,” David says, “but something else is. We seem to have a stray airman who refuses to either die or see the light.”

Susan looks toward him, and then away, trying not to reveal her interest. Still, David catches the look in her eyes. “Yes, doctor, I refer to your favorite patient, the cowardly coal miner from Shitkicker, West Virginia.” He turns toward Rachel. “Have Matthew’s men above ground scour the river bed. He’ll be there presently.”

“Armed?” Rachel asks.

“Only with a knife. Matthew will dispose of him.” He looks back to Susan who gives no reaction. “Other than the vexatious sergeant, everything is under control. The ambassadors are confined in the equipment room, and the loud-mouthed sergeant has his own quarters.” He walks down the rail toward the launch commander’s console. “James, how goes it?”

“Damn slow.”

“What can I do to help you?”

James lets out a mirthless laugh. “Bring me the President.”

“Why, looking for an appointment to the cabinet? Secretary of geekdom, maybe.”

“No. I want to ask him the Secondary Launch Code.”

“I doubt he’d tell you.”

James laughs but there is little humor in it. “Yeah, but he told the missile, didn’t he?”

“What do you mean?”

“The PK’s computer has been programmed to recognize the slick, so in a sense, the President told the missile the code.”

“Right.” The shadow of an idea crosses David’s face. “Forget the President. You’ve got it. The missile will tell you.”

David turns and bolts out through the blast door, leaving James and Rachel to exchange puzzled looks.

Jack Jericho has worked his way up to the final turn in the exhaust tube. Around the bend, he can see light coming through the screen where the outlet pipe empties into the dry river bed. He wriggles ahead and brings a knee up toward his chest.

And gets stuck.

His knee is lodged against his sternum, his combat boot propped against the side of the tube. His head and back are pressed against the opposite side, so that he cannot move.

He tries wriggling backward. No dice.

He tries wriggling forward. Nothing.

He tries working his knee free from his chest but cannot. He fears getting a cramp in his calf and begins to massage it. Sweat drips from his forehead and plops off the metal tube.

Then he hears a voice and freezes. At first, he can’t make out the words. Then, louder, “Over here!”

The voice comes from the river bed. Jericho doesn’t know if he’s been discovered, but there it is again, even louder. “Jeptha, over here!”

Jericho squeezes his eyes shut and hears another voice. His father’s.

“Over here, Jack! Help me, son.”

In the collapsed mine shaft, Jericho squirms on his stomach through a nightmarish web of fallen timbers. Water pours through a crevice over his head, dousing him.

His father’s voice is desperate, pleading. “Jack! Where are you?”

Jericho opens his eyes and wipes the sweat away by brushing his face against his shoulder. He sucks in a deep breath, exhales, and lets his body go limp, willing himself into a state of relaxation. Closing his eyes again, he fights off the visions and lets his mind see the exhaust tube expanding while his own body shrinks. He continues to exhale until he has no breath left.

Suddenly, his foot slides free, and he straightens his leg, then crawls a few feet to the screen.

He looks outside. The exhaust tube ends in a clump of underbrush. Jericho can see the shapes of two men moving slowly across the dry river bed, poking at the brush with their rifles. They are doubtless looking for the exhaust tube’s outlet pipe. If he kicks out the screen and jumps into the river bed, they will see him. If he stays put and they find the tube, he’ll be trapped. Courage is so often the choice between equally unappealing risks. He cannot decide, which is a decision in itself. Jack Jericho stays right where he is.

The gantry moves up the silo wall, then stops level with the fourth stage of the Peacekeeper. David hits a button, and the work cage extends horizontally until it is just inches from the missile. Wearing thin white gloves and a headset, David carefully loosens the first of four bolts from a metal plate in the deployment module, just below the titanium shroud of the nose cone.

In the launch control capsule, James watches David on a TV monitor. Rachel sits in the second launch chair. Behind them, Gabriel keeps watch over Susan Burns and Lieutenant Owens.

James speaks into a microphone. “Once you break the seal, you’ve only got ten seconds before auto-lockdown.”

His feet planted firmly on the gantry, David removes the second bolt from the metal plate. “Be still, Brother James. We’ve been over this.”

“Godspeed, David.”

“Precisely.”

David knows they are watching. Enjoys it. He is the center of their universe, and indeed, the center of everyone’s universe at this moment. If he fails and the system shuts down, they will be locked out of the command data buffers and the launch control computers. If he succeeds, they will have broken the system, will have the Secondary Launch Code, and nothing can stop him.

If he can freeze the lockdown, he will extract the computer containing the Multiple Guidance Control System. The computer is the brains of the missile. It arms the warheads, measures inertial flight distances and performs a host of other functions. For David’s purpose, the most important is that it reads the S.L.C. to determine whether to accept a launch command. To recognize the code, David reasoned, the computer must know the code. If it does, James can work his wizardry and find the damn thing. Once they have the code, they will enter it on the console and the re-installed MGCS will happily confirm the S.L.C. is correct.

David removes the third bolt and gently places it on the floor of the work cage. He crouches down and opens what looks like a laptop computer, punches a few keys, then stands up again, holding a multi-pinned plug attached to the computer by a ten-foot cord. He holds the plug between his teeth, then uses both hands to remove the last bolt from the metal plate. He slides off the plate and looks inside the computer box. An LCD display on an interior gauge flashes the countdown as David searches for the female receptacle.

10-9-8… He jams the plug into a hole, but it doesn’t fit...7–6… Another try, and the plug catches, but the clock keeps clicking away...5–4… David drops down to his laptop again, punches in a dizzying combination of letters and numbers… 3-2-1… The LCD display freezes at 1. He’s done it.

David exhales a deep sigh, then reaches into the deployment module and pulls out the computer.

Watching on the monitor in the launch control capsule, James excitedly pounds out a drum role on the console. “Awright! That man has the touch!

“He will never fail us,” Rachel says. “He is truly the chosen one.”

Behind them, Susan Burns feels a chill. Who will stop this maniac? Not Jack Jericho. Not Captain Pukowlski. Special Forces? The only means of access is to rappel down the silo wall or the elevator shaft. The men would be sitting ducks for the well armed commandos.

Halting the greatest tragedy in the history of civilization, Susan Burns thinks, will be entirely up to her.

In the river bed, one of the commandos pushes away the pungent leaves of a sagebrush plant. Hidden behind the plant is the U-shaped outlet pipe of the exhaust tube. “Jeptha! Over here.”

In the exhaust tube, Jericho is startled by the commando’s voice. So close. He removes the knife from the sheath on his leg. If one of the commandos ventures inside, Jericho will gut him. Then be shot to ribbons by the other, he knows.

Now, two voices from outside. “Use your bayonet to pry off the screen.”

Jericho can hear the scraping of the bayonet blade against the metal of the screen. He inches backward just enough to be in the shadows of the bend in the tube. If they come into the outlet pipe, he’ll have to crawl back down toward the silo. The screen clatters to the ground, and the men’s voices are louder. Jericho knows they are poking their heads into the outlet pipe.

“Dark as Hades down there.”

“You’re smaller, Jeptha. You crawl inside, and I’ll stand watch here.”

“Stand watch? For what?”

“For other infidels.”

“Isn’t that just like you, handing off the dirty work?”

“What’s the matter. You afraid of some spiders?”

To Jericho, it seems, there is no clean line of command beneath Brother David. For a moment, he wonders if maybe the military has the right idea about discipline and command control. These bozos wouldn’t know Reveille from Rachmaninoff. Suddenly, there is a sound behind Jericho, farther down the tube.

Trapped.

He freezes and listens.

A squeak, then a scraping sound, then another squeak, only louder.

“Jeptha, did you hear that? In heaven’s name, what—”

“Rats! Satan’s own pets. I’m not going in there.”

Jericho stiffens but as the sound gets closer, he recognizes it. A moment later, Ike the ferret is nuzzling his leg. “Here boy,” he whispers, grabbing the animal and placing him in the deep pocket of his fatigues.

Above him, the two commandos continue to argue. “Brother David ordered us to find the infidel. He won’t care if rats or elephants are in that—”

A noise overhead interrupts them. The two commandos look up to see

a Kiowa reconnaissance helicopter dipping low over the base. Two video cameras are attached to the chopper’s skids. “Brother David promised extra rations for the man who shoots it down!” one yells.

They both whoop and run off through the river bed, firing wildly in the air, fruitlessly chasing the copter as it banks and runs through a series of well-practiced evasive maneuvers.

Jericho crawls the short distance to the opening, tumbles from the outlet pipe onto the ground, then scuttles across the river bed toward a stand of pine trees. His shoulder is swollen and throbs at the joint. He is grimy and sweaty and nearing exhaustion. He is just yards away from cover when he stops short.

Must be dreaming.

Hallucinating.

First the mine shaft. Then this.

In front of him, above him actually, as he is on all fours, is a girl of about ten. She wears a yellow sun dress with blue polka dots. Her blonde hair is in pigtails. She waves a small plastic wand over Jericho’s head, leaving a trail of bubbles that float in the soft breeze.

“Do you love the Lord?” the girl asks.

“What?”

“Do you love the Lord and accept the Word?”

Jericho is speechless.

“‘Cause if you don’t,” the little girl tells him, dipping the wand into a blue plastic bottle, “you’ll get boils, your teeth will rot, and vultures will eat your liver.”

“Is that all?”

“No, then you’ll croak, and the fires of hell will melt your eyeballs.”

As the bubbles float above him, Jericho turns over and flops onto his back, breathing hard. “Just now,” he says, “that would be an improvement.”

-36- Threatening the General

The Big Board at STRATCOM shows live video of the 318th Missile Squadron, taken as the Kiowa recon helicopter sweeps over the base. General Corrigan, Colonel Farris, F.B.I. Agent Hurtgen and a circle of military aides watch as the commandos race helter-skelter below the chopper, blasting away with automatic weapons.

“Small arms fire only,” Colonel Farris sniffs. “No organization, no interlocking fire patterns.”

“We lost a nuclear missile to the military equivalent of a drive-by shooting,” F.B.I. Agent Hurtgen says.

“They were good enough to take over the base, weren’t they?” the general asks. No one answers the question, which was addressed mostly to himself anyway. “Their training was fine for what they had to do.”

“But they planned to launch the missile before we could respond,” Agent Hurtgen says. “Now we can respond, and they likely didn’t train for that.”

“Right,” the general agrees.

“But either way, they’d still have to defend themselves,” Colonel Farris says, puzzled. “They’d have to fight their way out whether they launched or not.”

“Not if they never intended to get out of the hole,” General Corrigan says. The assemblage seems to think it over. Kamikaze warriors of God. Not much difference between them and fundamentalist Shiites in the Middle East, except these guys aren’t fooling around with car bombs or plastiques.

On the Big Board, a live aerial shot shows a commando standing in the open on the gravel road that runs from the front gate to the security building. The Air Force officers cannot make out Matthew’s face, wouldn’t know him if they could. But there is something about this one. He stands motionless, his feet spread to shoulder width, as he raises a tube to his shoulder.

“Shit!” Colonel Farris blurts out. “He’s got a Stinger.”

There is a puff of smoke and an animated blur of yellow. The video from the chopper is up-linked to a satellite, then down-linked to a ground station, where it is fed through underground lines to Offut Air Force Base. Fast motion, such as a race horse or a heat-seeking Stinger missile appears as a streaking blur of color.

The ground tilts away at a sudden angle as the chopper banks in an evasive maneuver, but a second later, there is an explosion of orange flame and the Big Board goes blank.

For a long moment, none of the officers says a word. Finally, the general speaks. “We’ll need to assess enemy numbers and weaponry before there’s an assault.” He turns to Colonel Farris. “Has Intelligence analyzed the satellite photos?”

The colonel nods to an aide who hits a button on his console, and the Big Board flashes with a black-and-white still shot of the missile base shot from a low-orbiting satellite. Enemy commandos have been electronically enhanced and numbered. “Fifty to sixty men above ground. We don’t know what they’ve got in the hole.”

The Big Board flashes to a second shot, a close-up of the open missile silo. The shiny titanium shroud of the PK missile can be seen, but the rest is in shadows.

“Any demands yet?” the general asks.

“Nothing. And no word on the ambassadors.”

“They could be dead.”

The colonel shrugs. “Would make our decisions easier, wouldn’t it?”

General Corrigan gives the colonel a sharp look as a satellite photo of Base Camp Alpha flashes onto the Big Board. “When one of your staff takes early retirement and sells his story to television, you’ll probably be sorry you said that.”

Colonel Farris flinches. He now regrets loosening his tie, treating the general with excessive familiarity. General Corrigan still has his fresh, crisply laundered look, his silver hair neatly in place. The general wasn’t finished chastising Farris, but an aide interrupts and hands him a red telephone. “It’s Morning Star, sir. He’s asked for you by name.”

General Corrigan’s glance shoots the aide a question.

“Voice analysis confirms Morning Star is a white male,” the aide says, “probable age mid-thirties, most likely raised west of the Mississippi.”

“That narrows it down,” Agent Hurtgen says derisively, as the general takes the phone.

“General Corrigan here. Who is this?”

“Hello Hugh,” the voice says. “Congratulations on getting that second star. Lord knows, you deserve it.”

“Who the hell is this?”

“I understand Cliff has an appointment to the Academy. You must be so proud. And how is Edna?”

General Corrigan stands looking into the phone as if trying to divine the identity of the caller. Colonel Farris whispers to an aide. “I’ll bet the bastard even knows about the barmaid in Stuttgart.”

Finally, the general says, “What is it you want?”

“Salvation for all eternity.”

Eternity is not on General Hugh Corrigan’s mind just now. Making it to retirement without presiding over a nuclear holocaust is a higher priority. “What do you want from me?” he asks.

In the launch control capsule at the 318th Missile Squadron, David sits in the commander’s red-cushioned flight chair, his feet propped up on the console. Speaking into the headset, he says, “A word of caution. Don’t do anything foolish, Hugh. I imagine Delta is on its way from Bragg, and a contingent of SEAL’s from San Diego, maybe the black hat Red Cell team, too. Then There’s the F.B.I. Hostage Response Unit, Army Night Stalkers, Green Berets, the 82nd Airborne, and probably the A.T.F. just for good measure. I’ll bet some bright boy in D.C. wants to send in the flame throwers. I have women and children here, Hugh, just like Waco. You want another Texas barbecue?”

“Is that what you are?” the general asks, “another David Koresh?”

“You insult me, Hugh, comparing me to that low-rent charlatan who founded a religion in order to have sex with little girls. A bit tawdry, don’t you think? Do you know his real name was Vernon Howell? Now, doesn’t that have Texas trailer park written all over it?”

“What’s your real name, Morning Star?”

“In due time,” David says. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out without any help from me. In the meantime, I’d caution against using the same tactics the F.B.I. used in Waco. This time, you’ll fry a delegation of U.N. ambassadors.”

“How do I know they’re still alive?”

David’s tone is teasing. “If you like, I’ll send out one’s ear. It’ll still be warm. Let’s see, who should we start with? There’s a rather fussy Englishman who is getting on all our nerves. But in the spirit of the European Community, perhaps the French and German ambassadors should join him. Or, how about the Israeli? How fitting, given our circumstances. He’s already told me that his country’s response to our little plan will be most enlightening.”

“What does that mean?”

“Oh, I’m sure the President knows and you’ll be told in due time if you’re in that loop, Hugh.”

“Look, why not just let the ambassadors go and we’ll talk about resolving this?”

“Actually, I’m reluctant to do that. It could be dangerous. Your boys tend to fire first and ask questions later, don’t they? I always thought the term ‘friendly fire’ was an even juicier oxymoron than ‘military intelligence.’”

“Look, you… ”

“Morning Star, Hugh. But let’s not kid each other. Sure, you’d like to have the ambassadors safe and sound, but if I offered to return your big, beautiful missile in return for their blood, you’d take the deal in an instant.”

The general doesn’t respond. For a moment, there’s the fleeting hope that maybe the terrorists are after the ambassadors, but no, they had tried to launch. “Morning Star, I don’t know what you’re getting at. I can’t help you if you don’t tell—”

“Hugh, you’ve got it all wrong. I’m helping you. I’m giving you advice that will save your career, maybe even get you that third star, make Edna so proud, to say nothing of all the bar girls in western Europe.”

Behind Corrigan, Colonel Farris winks at an aide.

“I’m listening,” the general says.

“Hugh, you have all these killing machines at your disposal, and soon you’ll be under enormous pressure to do something, anything. Am I right?”

“Go on. What’s your point?”

David’s tone changes, his voice taking on a steely edge. “My point, old man, is simply this. If a Ranger, Seal or Boy Scout sets foot in this silo, I’ll start sacrificing U.N. ambassadors. Your so-called Allies will be pissed. And then… ” He lets his voice go up an octave in a child’s sing-song, “I’ll launch your pretty back birdie.”

“You’re bluffing,” Corrigan shoots back. “If you had the S.L.C., you’d have launched already.”

“When you’ve got only one wad to shoot, you don’t want to fire prematurely, do you? Let’s wait for dawn. Don’t you just love the sight of an ICBM lifting off into the rising sun?”

“You still haven’t convinced me you can do it.”

“But you’re not sure, and you can’t take the chance. Besides, Hugh, even without the code, you know I could create a hell of a nuke flash right in the hole.”

“I don’t know that at all. You’d have to arm the warheads. You’d have to detonate. It’s not as simple as you may—”

“Would I come all this way and not know how to do a little fission-fusion-fission? Oh, can’t you just envision two deuterium atoms colliding and fusing into Helium-3?” Suddenly, David laughs and begins singing, “Oh, the lithium’s connected to the deuterium, and the deuterium’s connected to the tritium, and the tritium’s connected to the plutonium, and the plutonium’s connected to the uranium, and the uranium’s connected to… me!”

At STRATCOM, there is worried mumbling and the exchange of astonished looks. “That fellow’s toothpick don’t go all the way through the olive,” Colonel Farris says.

“What a big bang,” David says, “all ten warheads detonating at once in the same location. You’d lose all your ground forces, which serves them right.” He laughs and lets his voice fill with sarcasm. “They’re making so much noise digging in, my men can hardly read their Bibles. And the Sierra Club will be all over your back what with all the dead fish and deer in these bucolic parts.”

“You’ll be killed, too,” the general says flatly.

“No, I will live forever, and even my ashes will have a half-life of 700 million years. What a way to achieve immortality, eh Hugh?”

General Corrigan stares at the Big Board. The map of the world has replaced the satellite shots of the missile base. A dotted line tracks across the continents from Wyoming to Israel. In a corner of the map, the target coordinates appear in a black-lined box: NORTH LATITUDE 32 DEGREES, 28 MINUTES, 15 SECONDS; EAST LONGITUDE 35 DEGREES, 1 MINUTE, 13 SECONDS.

“Why Jerusalem?” the general asks.

“Oh, come now, Hugh. Where should we hit? The boring old Kartaly Missile Field, or Khabarovsk, or the Kremlin. That wouldn’t take any imagination, would it? Russia pales in comparison to the ancient walled city, to Assyria and Babylon, to Mesopotamia where the Tigris meets the Euphrates, and our cup runneth over with prophets and infidels alike.”

At STRATCOM, the officers exchanged puzzled looks. “The fuck is this maniac talking about?” Agent Hurtgen whispers.

“Do you want to kill millions of innocent people?” the general asks.

“You’re ignoring the concept of original sin,” David says.

“You know goddam well what I mean!” The strain is showing on Corrigan’s face and in his voice.

“I wouldn’t be so self-righteous, if I were you, Hugh. I know how you got your second star. Your 379th Bomb Wing baked a hundred thousand Iraqi boys in their bunkers. Scared kids, conscripts from the countryside. Now you tell me, what is the moral difference between dropping ten thousand bombs from the belly of your B-52’s and launching one missile from its silo? Aren’t the deaths just as real?”

“We were at war!” Corrigan thunders.

“Aren’t we always,” David says, not making it a question. “Good-bye, Hugh.”

“Wait! You still haven’t answered my question. Why Jerusalem?”

“It’s really quite simple,” David says. “I must destroy Jerusalem in order to save it.”

-37- Until the Bitter End

Jack Jericho breathes in deeply, inhaling the fragrance of the pines, sensing the moistness of the earth in the shade of the great trees. The little girl in pigtails sits next to him. They are playing tic-tac-toe by drawing in the dirt with sticks.

It is mid-afternoon. In the silo and the sump below, there is never a sense of time or weather. There is only the blandness of re-circulated air, the synthetic smells of fuels and polymers and metals. Here it is cool as the sun slants through the pine needles to their hiding place beneath the umbrella of trees.

“What’s your name, honey?” Jericho asks.

“Elizabeth, but you can call me Betsy.” She reaches down and pets Ike, the ferret, who arches his back, enjoying the attention.

Within minutes, Jericho learns that Betsy’s mother was a member of the Holy Church of Revelations. She had been a Seventh Day Adventist in San Diego but left the church, telling Betsy its teachings had been watered down. The end is coming, and it will be glorious, her mother repeatedly told her. About a year ago, the woman left her husband, a non-believer, and drove with Betsy from southern California to Wyoming.

Now, Jericho scratches an “X” in the wrong place, letting Betsy win the game. She laughs, runs her hand over the dirt, erasing the game, then draws the lines for a new round. Ike grows bored and wanders off, sniffing at fallen pine cones. “Mommy is one of Brother David’s favorites, though not as favorite as Rachel. Mommy cooks. Do you like rice?”

“Not particularly.”

Betsy wrinkles her nose. “Me neither. We eat a lot of rice. Do you think there’s rice in heaven?”

“Why do you ask?”

“‘Cause that’s where we’re going, silly.”

Jericho considers his reply before saying, “Of course you are, but not for a long time.”

“No, we’re going soon. We’ll be lifted through the clouds and poof, we’re there. I just hope we don’t have to eat rice or bean sprouts there.”

“In heaven, there’s pizza and cheeseburgers and cherry Cokes,” Jericho says. “But no rice and no bean sprouts.”

That makes her smile. “I haven’t had a cheeseburger since we left California.”

“Does Rachel cook, too?”

“No, Rachel is David’s Mary Magdalene.”

“Who tells you that?”

Betsy uses the twig to scratch at a mosquito bite on her ankle. “Mommy says Rachel was a coke whore.”

Ike stops his sniffing and looks at Jericho. From his expression, he seems to be listening.

“She sold her flesh,” Betsy says innocently. “David saved her, just like he saved all of us, but Rachel needed it more. Now, she’s David’s best friend. Mommy says she believes even more than David.”

“Believes what?”

“In the Word. The Word will save us.”

“Betsy, listen to me. It takes more than the Bible to save people. Unless we get some help, a lot of very nice people are going to get hurt. Will you help me?”

She seems to think about it as the breeze rattles the tree limbs. A soft shower of pine needles floats over them. “But Brother David will protect us. He loves all the people.”

“Maybe he doesn’t love himself, and that makes him confused.”

Her forehead is wrinkled in thought, but she remains quiet. Ike slinks back and rubs against Jericho’s boot. Jericho picks up the animal and places him in a pocket on his fatigue pants.

“Sometimes, something happens to a man,” Jericho says, “something in his past that affects him forever. Makes him somebody he didn’t think he was and doesn’t want to be. Ruins him, really.”

Betsy’s appraising look is so knowing and mature that Jericho is chilled. “Who are you?” she asks.

“Your friend. Your secret friend. You shouldn’t tell anyone about me.”

She stands and brushes dirt from her knees. “I can’t have any secrets from Brother David, and you’re saying bad things about him. Whenever anybody says anything bad about him, we have to tell Brother David right away, even if it’s our friend or our very own mother.”

“No, no, I was talking about myself,” Jericho says, believing it to be at least partially true.

“You say Brother David is confused, but you’re wrong. Brother David has seen the light.” Agitated now, backing away from Jericho. “Brother David gives us the Word. Only bad people will get hurt. Brother David said so.” She is near tears. “And you’re a big old liar, and besides that, you smell stinky.”

Jericho reaches out to take her arm, but she backs away, turns and runs down the embankment and into the dry river bed. She will tell the commandos about him, he knows. Jericho crouches low and, staying in the shadows, heads toward the barracks on the east side of the missile base.

He weaves through the pine trees, then crawls through the underbrush, listening and watching. He sees commandos working in pairs, fanning out from the river bed over the missile grounds. They could be on routine patrol, but he assumes they are searching for him. Search and destroy.

Jericho has the ability to stalk game without breaking a twig underfoot or snapping a tree branch. Camping out in the mountains of West Virginia, he has made flour from the bark of a spruce tree and brewed tea from its green needles. He has made arrows from a fire-killed sapling and boiled tamarack pine shoots to eat as vegetables. But those skills will do him little good here. This is survival of a different kind. Here, the enemy is man. Another difference, too. Others depend on him, now. Susan Burns, for one. Maybe the whole damn world. For a man who ran away the first time he was needed, it is a frightening proposition. He will have to go back into the hole, into the man-made hell he hates so much.

Jericho comes upon the shredded barracks. There is no sign of life. Bodies of airmen lie where they fell. He circles the barracks, then slithers on his stomach to a rear wall. He hoists himself up and tumbles through a blown-out window, landing squarely on the back of a dead airman, through-and-through wounds puncturing his chest. The barracks is a shambles, the aftermath of a massacre. Nine bodies are strewn on and between bunks. All show multiple gunshot wounds. The walls are peppered with bullet holes, and the barracks have been ransacked. Jericho makes his way to the weapons locker. If he can lay his hands on an M-16…

The locker door has been jimmied.

Empty.

Jericho makes his way to the sleeping compartment at the end of the barracks — the security officer’s quarters. The room has been tossed. Jericho picks up the phone. Dead. He opens a desk drawer, roots around inside and finds a cellular phone and a palm-sized Newton Messagepad Wireless Fax. He puts both devices in his pockets.

Back in the interior of the barracks, he uses his knife to pry open several footlockers, rifling their contents like a burglar. Through the broken windows, he can hear the shouts of the commandos but cannot make out their words. At the locker marked “Sayers,” he pulls out three long bungee cords and stuffs them into a rucksack. He moves to the locker marked “Jericho.” The lock has been broken, and the contents are scattered on the floor, but nothing appears to be missing. What would be? He finds a telescoping fishing rod which has rolled halfway under his bunk and puts it in his rucksack. As he closes the lid on the locker, an old black and white photo slips out and skids across the floor.

He picks it up and looks into the faces of three smiling men, their faces stained with dirt, helmets on their heads at jaunty angles. Two of the men — his father and brother — are ghosts, and the third man, Jack himself, has often wished he were dead. In the background is a long, dark bar in a dingy saloon. He stares at the photo for a long moment, remembers the salute they always gave each other after work on Fridays. This day, he knows, was special. That morning, the Appalachian Anthracite Company had opened two new shafts. There would be work through the winter and spring. He looks at his father’s wide grin, the eyes red dots from the flash and a little glazed from the beer. He looks at his brother, two years older, Jack had idolized him as a child.

Mike Jericho never asked for much, never needed much. Married a girl he had dated since seventh grade and only wanted to live in the mountains, raise a lot of kids and a little hell. Jericho looks at his own picture, barely recognizing himself. Not because he was younger then, but that he was so much more innocent. He looks at his own guileless smile, knows he will never recapture that moment. He remembers the words they spoke just before the photo was taken. Always the same, their arms intertwined, their glasses raised.

“All for one,” Jack Jericho said.

“And one for all,” his brother replied.

Then they both looked at their father who unfailingly said, “Until the bitter end, my boys.”

-38- A Man Who Loves the Bomb

An unmarked van with bulletproof glass, armor-plated doors, and run-flat tires approaches the sentry post at STRATCOM headquarters, Offut Air Force Base, Omaha, Nebraska. A helmeted sentry checks the papers of the driver, makes a quick call on his phone, and waves the van through. Two minutes later, the van speeds past an imposing windowless concrete building and squeals to a stop in front of a titanium blast door cut into a hill. The side door of the van opens, and a motorized ledge lowers Professor Lionel Morton in his wheelchair to the ground.

Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Griggs leads a procession of four Army Rangers, their pants bloused neatly into their combat boots, and the professor, who aims his wheelchair for the open blast door. As he motors into the bunker, Morton smiles at the STRATCOM insignia cut into the wall: an iron fist gripping three lightning bolts, wrapped by an olive branch.

He stops the whirring wheelchair for a moment, sighs, and says, “Home sweet home.” Then with his military escort, Professor Morton proceeds into the bunker, and the huge door closes behind him with a pneumatic whoosh and a metallic clang.

A four-door green Chrysler with black wall tires and tinted windows pulls up to a two-story house on a leafy street in Palo Alto, California. Four men in dark suits get out and walk briskly to the front door. Across the street, an elderly man waters his lawn and looks suspiciously at the strangers.

Once on the porch, one of the men rings the doorbell.

No answer.

Another opens the mailbox and pulls out a wad of third-class mail. The first man stops ringing the bell and tapes to the door a document with an impressive blue cover and the signature of a federal judge. The other two men hit the door with sledge hammers, shattering it. Across the street, the fellow with the hose is suddenly watering his own feet.

“My name is deputy United States Marshal Brian Healey, and I am serving an emergency search warrant on these premises,” the first man shouts as he enters the house. No one answers, and the four men pile inside.

They will painstakingly go over the entire house, but they start in the cluttered study of the owner: Professor Lionel Morton. They pull down photographs from the walls, looking for compartments hidden underneath. While the others search the desk and file cabinets, deputy Marshal Healey takes inventory. He is about forty with close-cropped gray hair and a gut that is just starting to bulge over the 34-inch waistband he has proudly worn since his sophomore year at San Jose State. Healey studies the photos starting with a grainy black-and-white shot of a mustachioed man in an overcoat and galoshes standing in the snow with a rocket that looks like an oversized Roman candle. Underneath, a caption, “Dr. Robert Goddard, March 16, 1926.”

Nearby, a framed shot of the “Enola Gay” crew taken on the island of Tinian on August 2, 1945, just days before they took off for their rendezvous with history. Then, a group shot of the Manhattan Project scientists, a photo of a young Lionel Morton standing beneath the rockets of a first generation Thor missile, and finally, a series of mushroom cloud explosions captioned “Bikini Island 1956” and Eniwetok 1952.”

On a credenza, a scale model of an MX-774 experimental missile sits on a plaque with a brass plate inscribed, “White Sands Proving Grounds, 1948.” Other models, like children’s toys, are lined up alongside: an Atlas Missile with a plaque reading “Cape Canaveral, 1958,” and a Titan II with the notation, “McConnell Air Force Base, Kansas, 1962.”

Like a room frozen in time. other black-and-white photos memorialize a slice of history. Healey picks up a signed photo of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara standing next to an Atlas missile. He reads the inscription aloud, “To Lionel. You made it happen. Bob.”

Healey is mesmerized by the nuclear weapons memorabilia. “What kind of man would create a shrine to nuclear weaponry?” he wonders aloud.

“A man who loves the bomb,” another marshal replies.

“Or worships it,” a third marshal says.

They empty the desk drawers and search the filing cabinets, but do not find what they are looking for. Healey approaches a large globe of the earth, propped on a floor stand. He spins the globe, letting his finger drag across the continents. He finger feels an imperfection in the globe, and he uses his other hand to stop the spinning. He slips his fingers into a groove at the equator and swings the northern hemisphere open like a lid. He pulls out a metal briefcase from inside and opens the latch. Inside is a foam indentation, the perfect size for a computer disk. Only there is no disk. The case is empty.

A courier in civilian clothes dashes across the catwalk in the amphitheater above the STRATCOM War Room. He clatters down the ladder to the main floor and hands a sealed envelope to F.B.I. Agent Hurtgen. General Corrigan, Colonel Farris and their aides turn away from the Big Board and watch as Hurtgen unties the cord and breaks the seal.

“What are you looking at?” he says, moving back a step.

“What the hell is that?” Colonel Farris demands, sneaking a peek at the “Top Secret” seal on the envelope.

“Behavioral Science Unit report. Level Six clearance required. What’s your security rating?”

“Security rating!” General Corrigan booms. “Do you know where you are? Are you out of your mind, you, you… ” The pressure is getting to the general, and all he can say, his voice trailing off, is, “you civilian.”

Chagrined, Agent Hurtgen opens the envelope and pulls out the King James version of the New Testament.

“Top secret,” Colonel Farris says, sneering.

“Might as well be,” Hurtgen says. “It’s not like anybody inside the Beltway’s ever read it.”

Agent Hurtgen opens the Bible where it has been book-marked and reads aloud from a yellowed passage, “‘The first earth had passed away, and the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, came down from Heaven.’”

General Corrigan’s look asks for an explanation.

“Revelations,” Hurtgen says. He unfolds a report on F.B.I. stationery, spends a moment reading it, another moment milking the situation for its drama, then says, “Paraphrasing now. To get a new Jerusalem, a place where all believers live forever, first you gotta blow up the old one.”

“Says who?” the general demands.

“Peter.”

“Peter who?” Colonel Farris asks.

“The Bible guy,” Hurtgen says, thumbing to another marked page. “Peter, chapter three, verse ten. ‘The Lord will come as a thief in the night, and the heavens will open with a great noise and fervent heat, and the earth shall be burned up.’”

“The Morning Star,” General Corrigan says, grimly.

“Jesus Christ,” Colonel Farris mumbles under his breath.

“Exactly,” Hurtgen says, closing the book.

The courier whispers something in Hurtgen’s ear and on the Big Board, the map of the world is replaced by a photo showing the aftermath of the New York porn shop bombing. Again, Hurtgen consults his memo and says, “They call themselves the Holy Church of Revelations. They’re led by a fellow who calls himself Brother David, a charismatic fanatic. The Behavioral Science Unit’s working on a psych profile.”

The Big Board blinks with what looks like a high school yearbook photo of a younger, short-haired David. It blinks again, and a slightly older David is carrying a sign at a protest rally: “Abortion is Murder.”

“He’s an only child, a loner as a kid,” Hurtgen continues. “Grew up on different military bases, even had an appointment to West Point.”

That draws a murmur from the brass. The Big Board blinks again. Another protest rally. This time David carries a hand-painted sign: “No More Nukes.”

“But he got bounced out after his plebe year,” Hurtgen says.

“It’s no damn wonder, if he was one of those anti-war kooks.”

“No, he could have weathered that flack,” Hurtgen says. “But his father made some calls that got him tossed.”

There is a buzzing behind the group as Professor Lionel Morton zips into the semi-circle of officers in his wheelchair.

“I don’t understand,” General Corrigan says. “You saying his father didn’t try to keep him in the Academy?”

“Just the opposite,” Hurtgen says. “He called—”

“The President!” Professor Morton thunders, and heads turn his way. “The Secretary of the Army, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the heads of the C.I.A., the D.I.A., the Secret Service, and Jesus H. Christ himself if I had his 800 number, because David Morton is a goddam lunatic who should have been locked up years ago.”