Ballistic

-47- Overkill

Green sodium vapor lights cast an eerie glow over Base Camp Alpha as the Army prepares for battle. The base is a symphony of competing sounds, the crunch of M60A3 tanks with bulldozer blades and the diesel roar of M1A2 Abrams battle tanks moving to front-line positions. On the flanks, M2/3 Bradley fighting vehicles with cannons and missile launchers pound over the rough terrain. HUMVEES grind their gears, and Armored Personnel Carriers rev their engines. Orders are shouted over loudspeakers. The tracked equipment kicks up clouds of dust that float in the breeze. On the horizon, the half-moon provides a sliver of light on the cloudless night.

Delta Force soldiers darken their faces with camouflage grease. Army Night Stalkers and Navy Seal Team-6 clean their weapons and load their rucksacks with flash-bang grenades, bolt cutters, harnesses, nylon ropes and rappelling gear. The FBI’s Hostage Response unit studies maps and the latest satellite photos. In a compromise that satisfies no one, virtually all the Special Ops Forces will play some role in the assault.

In front of the command tent, Kimberly Crawford, the media’s pool reporter, tags along after Colonel Henry Zwick, whose cold pipe is clamped in his teeth. A short, husky cameraman walks backward in front of them, keeping the colonel in focus. Nearby, a CNN truck festooned with antennae and dishes, up-links the signal to a satellite. “Colonel, colonel,” Kimberly Crawford implores him, jamming a microphone into his face. “Can you verify reports that the missile base has been overrun by Palestinian terrorists?”

“I’m not at liberty to comment on the identity of the enemy,” he says.

“Can you tell us where the missile is targeted?”

“No comment.”

“Has the Army been in contact with the terrorists?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“What about the report that the terrorists have the ability to launch the missile?”

Zwick has held her off as long as he can. Looking straight into the camera, he says, “Absolutely untrue. The launch system is fail-safe.”

“Then what’s all this?” she asks, sweeping an arm over toward a pair of Bradley Fighting Vehicles, with their 25 mm cannon and TOW missile launchers pointed toward the missile base. “Isn’t this overkill?”

Colonel Zwick studies her a moment. Not a day over thirty, a blonde with gold-green eyes, she’s wearing a khaki jumpsuit with epaulets and a sky-blue silk scarf. Some sort of journalists’ war couture, he supposes. The colonel would like to tell her that ‘overkill’ is the best kind of kill there is, that he’d like to outnumber, out-weigh, and out-caliber every enemy he’s supposed to destroy. He wants better training, better food, and warmer boots than the opposition. He wants more iron, more ammo, and a bigger dick than the guy on the other side. But he doesn’t say these things because the media types would probably make him sound like a cross between Ivan the Terrible and General Jack Ripper. Nothing on television ever comes out right. “Precautions. Just precautions,” he says, after a moment.

At that moment, in the launch control capsule, David watches a television set where an attractive young woman chases after a colonel whose jaw muscles are working overtime on a cold pipe. In the corner of the screen is the logo, “CNN LIVE.”

“So, Colonel Zwick,” the woman says, “are you denying that an assault on the missile silo is imminent?”

“That’s correct. It’s unnecessary. There is no risk of the missile being launched, and our primary concern is the safety of the foreign ambassadors as well as the American airmen who are being held hostage. As I said before, these are just precautions. We expect reason to prevail and the incident to end without further violence.”

The message, David knows, is for him. “They must think I’m an idiot,” he says aloud. He punches a button on the console and speaks into a microphone. “Full alert! No one sleeps! And find that maintenance man!”

The world is dark and shadowy.

And spinning. Jack Jericho is the center of a universe that revolves out of control around him.

There is no color except black, which dissolves into an ashen gray. Then, in the corner of his eye, there comes a sick, pale yellowy light. Somewhere in his head, there is a roar. A freight train rumbles over the tracks, toots its horn, and keeps going. Around and around in his skull.

Jack Jericho rubs his aching jaw. Which tells him he is conscious. Then the throbbing pain comes, and he would prefer to be unconscious. He rotates his neck. His head is a bucket of sand, but nothing seems to be broken. He opens his eyes one at a time. It would be easier with tire jacks. A figure stands above him, saying something, but what?

“You have… ” and then the words are swallowed into the black hole.

“What? Who are you?” Jericho hears himself say, the words echoing from a tunnel.

“Don’t you remember me?”

Jericho squints into the yellowy light. The universe slows. The young man is familiar. So is the M-16 pointed at Jericho’s head. “Yeah. Your name is Daniel. Daniel Boone, for all I know. About a million years ago, you tried to shoot me in the L.E.R., but your rifle jammed.”

“The safety was on,” Daniel says. Towheaded, a peach-fuzzy round face, he cannot be more than twenty.

“Then you were poking around in the silo. You figured I was hanging on the struts in the rocket burners, and you were right, so I jumped you.”

“You could have killed me,” Daniel says, “but you did not.”

A jungle animal roars inside Jericho’s skull. “I made a mistake. It won’t happen again.”

“Why didn’t you kill me?”

Jericho thinks about it, at least he tries to think above the metallic clanging in his brain. In the silo, he could have killed this man but did not. Until that moment in his life, he had never intentionally hurt anyone. But in the day and endless night that followed, the world had changed. “I didn’t know what you maniacs were up to, and you looked so young that… ” He just leaves it hanging there.

“No, that is not it. God’s psalms sang in your heart, filling you with compassion and mercy. God protected you and then me. He sent us a message. ‘The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.’”

“I haven’t heard too much about compassion and mercy from your pals, Daniel.”

“I am sorry about that. I thought David had seen the light. But—” A splashing sound down the channel interrupts them. “You have very little time.”

“Time for what? To welcome the Apocalypse?”

“No. To get the hell out of here.” Daniel swings the rifle away and uses his free hand to help Jericho to his feet. The splashes are drawing closer, and a flashlight beam dances down the channel in the distance.

Jericho takes a few wobbly steps down the sump the other way, then looks back over his shoulder. “Why are you doing this? Aren’t you a believer?”

“Oh, I believe, all right. I believe in a forgiving God. I believe in love and goodwill toward our brothers and sisters. I just don’t believe in Brother David.”

Moments later, Jericho stops at the intersection of two channels in the sump. He hears the splashing and occasional clanging behind him as the commando team hunts him down.

He can outrun them.

He can hide from them.

But it won’t do any good. It won’t stop David and his band of crazies.

He tears a strip of cloth from his fatigues and wedges it into a piece of piping directly over the channel. Then he goes down the intersecting channel. Bolted into the wall is an orange steel ladder leading into a vertical metal chute. A sign bolted to the chute reads, “Personnel Evacuation Shaft.”

It will take him all the way to the river bed above the missile silo. He will have to find another way back in, but he’s already thinking about it, and it may just work.

He remembers something Kenosha told him, something about the missile raping the earth. Sooner or later, Kenosha said, the earth would reclaim the land. He pictures Kenosha, hears his words. “In the end, my friend, the earth will prevail.”

“That’s right, you smart old coot,” Jericho says to himself. “But maybe I can give Mother Earth a helping hand.”

Colonel Henry Zwick and Kenosha stand over a table, intently studying reconnaissance photos of the missile facility. “What we’re trying to do,” the colonel says, “is achieve simultaneous entry into as many access corridors as possible with maximum firepower. Our problem is that the only sure way to get down there is the elevator shaft, and it’s—”

“Sir!” Captain Kyle Clancy, his face coated with camouflage grease, interrupts. “With all due respect, sir, strategy and tactics should not be discussed with… ”

For a moment, the colonel thinks Clancy is going to say, “Indians.” For the same moment, the colonel is ready to throttle the younger man. But finally, Clancy says, “civilians.”

“If you don’t shut up, captain,” the colonel fires back, “that’s what you’re going to be. Now, you can listen if you want, but the man I want to hear from is Kenosha. He knows the territory, Kyle, and he’s too modest to tell you, but he earned a Silver Star when you were still in knickers.”

Clancy shoots a look at Kenosha, but doesn’t get a rise out of him.

“Eleventh Armored Cavalry in ‘Nam,” the colonel says.

“The Blackhorse,” Clancy says, beginning to connect the dots. “That was your regiment, wasn’t it, colonel?”

“Damn straight!”

Then simultaneously, Zwick and Kenosha loudly declare, “If you ain’t Cav, you ain’t!”

To Clancy, the cavalry trooper’s slogan sounds strange coming from the pony-tailed man in buckskins, but what the hell. “Okay, I’m outnumbered by the guys who believe in firepower and armor.”

“Mobile firepower,” Kenosha corrects him.

Pointing to a satellite photo on the table, Zwick says, “We need a second access corridor. We have to divide the enemy’s fire and have a second route to the capsule.”

“The open silo,” Kenosha says.

“Right. But it’s farther up the mountain, and the terrain’s too rugged for APC’s. Choppers are too loud for a surprise attack, and infantry will be exposed crossing the river bed.”

Kenosha points to a map showing the mountain and the valley to the north. “There is a natural drainage ditch on the back side of the mountain. It is steep and rocky, but you could climb it without being discovered, then approach the silo from the rear, coming down from the dam.”

The colonel looks from the maps to the photos, then back again. Finally, Clancy says, “How the hell would we get up there without being seen or heard?”

“The old fashioned way,” Kenosha says. Both officers look at him, waiting. “Horses.”

Zwick and Clancy exchange surprised glances. Then Zwick breaks into a grin. “Sure, why not? We are the cavalry.”

“Horses,” Clancy ponders. He pictures himself atop a galloping steed, blasting away with pistols in each hand. “My men can shoot from damn near any position. Standing, prone, kneeling supported, kneeling unsupported, forward slope, bunker windows, sitting on the can taking a dump, if we have to. No damn reason in hell we can’t shoot from horseback.”

The ladder ends at metal shelf just below ground level. A sign on the shelf reads, “Emergency Egress Only.” Jericho reaches over his head and pulls a metal chain, and the shelf folds in two, dumping three feet of sand onto his head. Blast insulation. In the event of a strike by enemy warheads, the sand would be fused into glass and the missile crew — if they survived the hit — would have to chip through it to get out of the hole and discover what was left of their world. Jericho shakes the crud out of his hair and reaches up to open the hatch.

The cool night air hits his face, and he sucks in a long breath. It is nearly three a.m. It’s only been hours, but it seems like days since the nightmare began. He climbs into the dry river bed and looks around. Searchlights sweep across the missile base. He turns away from the silo and heads toward a rocky trail that leads up the mountain.

In launch control capsule, a bell rings, and a message flashes across a monitor: “Security Breach.” David hits a button, and a three-dimensional grid of the missile facility appears on the screen. A blinking red arrow appears over the words, “Personnel Evacuation Shaft.”

David picks up a walkie-talkie and clicks it on. “My brother, he is in the river bed. Bring me his head!”

-48- Sibling Rivalry

At just after 3 a.m., David turns to Susan Burns and says, “I was hoping to convert you.”

“How? With your so-called psychic powers? Do you expect me to swoon because you see my aura?”

“You have been wounded. My flock is made up of the lame.”

“Lame brains,” she says. “Look, nothing is going to bring me to you. Not force. Not the Stockholm Syndrome. I don’t identify with you. I pity you.”

David is silent a moment, and then he says flatly, “I should kill you now and get it over with.”

Susan Burns shrugs. “Would that make you happy?”

“Deliriously.”

“Then do it. I prefer my patients to enjoy life.”

“Or should I tie you to the blast door, spreadeagled and naked, a sacrificial offering for the Special Ops boys? They won’t know whether to shoot you or fuck you.”

“But you can’t do either one, can you?”

“You mock me!” he thunders. “You, the symbol of a profession of frauds and quacks! You, who follows a false science instead of the Word.”

“Show me the light. Shoot me. Kill me now.”

David grabs Rachel’s rifle and swings the barrel toward Susan’s head. Then, just as suddenly, he lets the rifle fall to the floor. He laughs, throws his head back and cackles until tears flow. “You are so clever, Dr. Susan Burns. You think that if I kill you, I’ll be so revolted, so changed in some fundamental way by the utter cruelty of the act that I’ll stop. I’ll surrender, repent, and give them back their missile. Isn’t that it?”

She stays quiet and he goes on, “You’re willing to sacrifice yourself for all mankind. A gesture brimming with Freudian noblesse oblige.”

Still, Susan is silent.

The phone buzzes. “What does old Hugh want now?” David says. Enjoying himself again, occupying center stage. He hits a speaker button and puts a tune to his voice. “Be all that you can be, in the Ar-my.”

“Mr. Morton, we’d like to engage you in a discussion.” General Corrigan’s voice is calm, polite.

“Or a distraction. You’re looking for a few good men, eh Hugh?”

“We know you’re searching for the password. We don’t think you’ll get it, and we prefer to end this without bloodshed. We’re prepared to discuss amnesty.”

“Off we go into the wild blue yon-der,” David sings out, “high-er still, into the sun.” He laughs, then says, “You’re lying Hugh. Besides, only the Lord can offer forgiveness. Your amnesty is a purely secular concept of no interest to me.”

“What is it you want, Mr. Morton? Death and devastation?”

“The few, the proud, the Marines!” David calls out.

“We’re not going to make progress this way.”

“Progress, Hugh? Like the progress my dear Daddy made for you. Semper Fi.”

“Mr. Morton, I know you’re a very intelligent young man, but I’m not sure you comprehend just what those ten nuclear warheads can do.”

“Au contraire. Do you know what the first injury will be to a person standing at ground zero?”

“Injury?” General Corrigan lets out a humorless laugh. “Injury hardly begins to describe—”

“A broken ankle, perhaps a broken leg, and certainly burst eardrums.”

“Are you out of your mind? A person at ground zero will be vaporized.”

“Not at first, not until after thirty seconds or so of quite unimaginable horror. At the moment of the air burst, there is a flash that will blind anyone whose eyes are open. The shock wave from the ionized atoms then causes a pressure wave that will buckle the ground with such force that it will break the bones of anyone standing there, hence our broken ankles. Then an atmospheric blast wave will surge out horizontally and flatten every manmade structure at ground zero, be it the Wailing Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, or the Mosque of Omar. The dynamic pressure of the blast will set loose winds of six hundred miles an hour. Anyone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity will be picked up and swirled about in the firestorm. The radiant heat of the fireball will turn glass, metal and wood into ash, and a person’s internal organs will simply burst into flame. You use the word, ‘vaporized.’ I prefer to think that a person is ultimately reduced to one’s essential elements.”

“What does that mean?”

“It really isn’t ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’ Hugh. More like ashes to nitrogen and hydrogen.”

In the STRATCOM War Room, General Hugh Corrigan stares into space. “If you’re attempting to be utterly repulsive, Mr. Morton, you’re succeeding. If you want to shock us with your inhumanity, fine, we’re shocked.”

“Why, Hugh? It’s your weapon. I’m just using it before you have the chance.”

“It’s not intended to be used,” Corrigan says, angrily. “It’s intended to deter war.”

“How quaint a concept. But if you ask me, it’s use it or lose it. And guess what, Hugh? You lose it, and I use it.”

General Corrigan’s shoulders slump. He is willing to try just about anything, so he signals Dr. Rosen to come to the phone. The balding psychiatrist looks like he slept in his sport coat, and in fact, he’s been cat-napping most of the long night. Behind Dr. Rosen, three nervous middle-aged men in suits — one polyester, two brown plaid — look on.

“Mr. Morton, there’s someone I’d like you to hear from,” the general says.

“Pray tell, who could it be? Not Daddy, again. Hopefully, you’ve locked him up. He’s quite insane, you know. What now, an expert hostage negotiator dyspeptic shrink?”

“David, this is Dr. Stuart Rosen,” the FBI psychiatrist says in an unctuous tone. “Think of me as a master of ceremonies.”

“Or masturbator,” David adds, helpfully.

“David, we have three theological experts here representing a wide spectrum of views on the Book of Revelations.”

In the launch control capsule, David listens listlessly while scanning the security monitors. On the screens, Army searchlights sweep the darkened perimeter of the missile base. Next to him, James still works at the computer, trying out a variety of seven-letter words in the blinking cursors. “Missile” doesn’t work. Neither do “Goddard,” “Nuclear,” “Liberty,” “Kennedy” or a hundred more improbable ones including “Sputnik” and “Hussein.” James tries to imagine the technicians who programmed this sucker. It’s a No Lone Zone with the codes, too. One technician could have the Enable Code, but another would possess the S.L.C. James conjures up a nerdy guy working for defense contractor, a guy who goes to the grocery store himself because he doesn’t have a girlfriend or a wife. “Grocery” doesn’t work. Neither does “forlorn.”

The shrink goes on for a while about what he calls the “panorama” of interpretations of the Book of Revelations. “Our experts believe your view of the prophesied Apocalypse is, shall we say, premature.”

“No doubt, like your ejaculations,” David says.

“David, we need to discuss your current plans,” Dr. Rosen says, ignoring the remark. “Let’s put them in perspective with your overall goals, how you see yourself in the universe, your relation to people around you, what we might call your personal context, your—”

“Hugh!” David interrupts. “Why do you insult me with this thumb-sucking bed-wetter?”

General Hugh Corrigan grimaces and doesn’t respond. Next to him, Colonel Farris whispers, “First thing the fucker’s said all night that makes any sense.”

“Goodbye, doctor,” David says. “Goodbye, Hugh.”

The phone clicks off. Dr. Rosen wrinkles his forehead. “I’m not sure I liked the sound of those ‘goodbye.’ They had an air of finality about them.”

General Corrigan would like to lend an air of finality to the F.B.I. psychiatrist, but an aide signals that he’s wanted on another line. “If it’s the President again, tell him to go to sleep. We’ll wake him if—”

“It’s the Pope,” the aide says.

“What does he want?” Stunned.

“He wants to know if he can help.”

“Sure. Ask if he can rappel two hundred feet down an elevator shaft with automatic weapons pointed up his skirts?”

Taking the telephone, the aide’s tone is formal and respectful. “Your Holiness, the General asks for your prayers.”

Jack Jericho is on all fours, scrambling up the steep trail toward Chugwater Dam. Below him, the lights from the open silo cut into the night sky like signals to heaven. From this height he can see the war machinery in place on the perimeter of Base Camp Alpha. Searchlights from the camp sweep the mountainside, intermittently passing over him.

He thinks of Susan Burns and how he left her and what will happen to her if there is an all-out assault on the capsule. He quickens his pace, hoisting himself on reedy branches that grow out of the parched soil.

The back side of the mountain is lit only by the half moon. Riding easily on a golden palomino, Kenosha leads a company of Night Stalkers up a boulder-strewn drainage ditch. Some of the soldiers appear unsteady on their horses, awkwardly clutching their saddle horns, cursing as their asses bounce in the saddle. A corporal’s horse veers out of the ditch and into the trees. He kicks it in the ribs but doesn’t pull hard enough on the reins, and the horse carries him straight into a tangle of low branches which knock him to the ground.

Kenosha looks at the soldiers and wonders if mules might have been a better idea. For a moment he ponders how his ancestors ever lost their land to the white man. Numbers, he knows. Too many men, too much firepower.

Adrenalized by the impending action, Captain Kyle Clancy slaps his horse’s rump with a cowboy hat and catches up with Kenosha at the point. Clancy has ridden before and he is comfortable in the saddle, holding the reins loosely in one hand, letting the other hand dangle at his side. “Whoopee! On a night like this, there’s only one thing better than a good fuck, and that’s a good fight.”

“What is a good fight, captain?”

“One you win, of course. Cutting off the other guy’s nuts before he cuts off yours.” Captain Clancy notes the pistol in Kenosha’s holster. “Lord, what’s that? The barrel must be a foot long.”

“Exactly. The Colt .45 Peacemaker.”

“Peacemaker,” the captain muses. “Just like the Peacekeeper missile.”

“Only this one was made in 1873, the single action army model. It’s signed and numbered, the third one ever made.”

“How the hell did you ever get it?”

Kenosha whispers something to his palomino, then says, “It was bestowed on a member of my family by General Custer.”

“What?”

“At Little Bighorn. To my great-great grandfather. Of course, the general was dead at the time.”

The captain finally gets it. “Why you sly fox! One of your ancestors was in the greatest Indian battle of all time. You son-of-bitches sure kicked Custer’s ass.”

“It was a disastrous victory,” Kenosha says.

“Whadaya mean?”

“It was the humiliation at Little Bighorn that forced Washington to set about a serious war. It was a success for my people only as Pearl Harbor was a success for the Japanese.”

Clancy chews this over for a while. There is more to this Kenosha than he recognized at first. Vietnam. The Silver Star. His past with the colonel. The Indian is not a bad companion for battle, he decides.

David intently scans the security monitors, but there is no movement. He uses the walkie-talkie to check on his sentries, then turns back to James, who still works at the computer. A rifle slung over a shoulder, Rachel keeps a watch on Susan.

James angrily bangs his fist on the console. “It’s no use. I’ve tried every trick in the book. Without the slick password, we’re locked out.”

“Have you prayed for divine guidance?” David asks.

“Hey, Davy, cut the shit. I remember when we were breaking into mainframes and mail-ordering dildoes for our French teacher.”

“Just deliver me the password, James.” David closes his eyes and attempts to conjure up a vision. Only colors come, a bright, runny red that he takes for blood and that same flowing gray that reminds him of a banner blowing in the wind. The images make no sense to him, and he tries to let them go. Still, the notion of the blood stays with him.”

“They will attack soon,” David says, “and blood will flow like a river that has flooded its banks. Unless you come up with the code, we will die without bringing about the New Jerusalem.”

“But we will live forever,” Rachel says. “It is prophesied. You have seen it yourself.”

“I have seen many things,” David says, enigmatically.

“And you cannot separate the visions, can you?” Susan Burns asks, a note of derision in her voice.

“Be still!” David commands.

But she will not. Susan Burns believes she is going to die at David’s hand. To fight him, to stop him from killing so many others, she probes for the weak spot. “You cannot tell the delusions from the visions, the warped dreams from psychic phenomena.”

“Shut up!”

Rachel stands and moves menacingly in front of Susan. “Don’t listen to her, David.”

“You are plagued by doubts, David Morton,” Susan says, taunting him. “Just as you were as a child. Your father built something, something awesome and powerful, and what have you done? You sneak into your father’s house like a vandal spray painting graffiti in a church. Your greatest fears are about to be realized. You are about to fail in the eyes of your father.”

David roars like a wounded beast and yanks the rifle away from Rachel. “Enough! Damn you, I have had enough of your mockery!” He jams the barrel into Susan’s forehead, pushing her back against the wall. She refuses to close her eyes, and instead, glares back at David whose own eyes blaze with maddened fury. “I will not fail! And you will not live to see my glory!”

“Shoot me!” she yells at him. “It won’t change a thing. You’re still not the half man your father was. You’re not half the man he is. He’s beaten you again.”

“My father has nothing to do with this.”

“He made you. He made the missile. You’re both his children. Your brother is the bomb, David. You said it yourself. Your father always loved the bomb more than he loved you. Sibling rivalry, and you came in second.”

“Psychological claptrap!” He switches the safety off and eases his finger onto the trigger. “Sometimes, doctor, a cigar is only a cigar, and a missile is only a missile.”

“When you were a pacifist, you wanted to destroy the bomb to get even with your father. Now you’re trying to destroy it another way, a way that will destroy him. This has nothing to do with Jerusalem or the Bible or anything else.”

“Don’t listen to her!” Rachel screams.

“It’s even your father’s code that baffles you,” Susan says. “It’s his handiwork that has stymied you again.”

“Wrong! My father retired before they added the code,” David says, lowering the rifle. The shadow of a thought crosses his face, and Susan fears she has made a mistake. Realizing now she gave David information he did not have. She wanted him out of control, wanted him raging, turning the gun on her, and then on himself. Instead, he is pondering something, and Susan’s terror is greater than if the gun were still jammed against her head.

David looks at Lieutenant Owens and says, “Wasn’t the S.L.C. added in the last year?”

“Yeah, less than a year ago.”

“James, what about it?”

“Your Pop may have been retired, Davy, but his fingerprints are all over this program, everything from terminology to digital access routes. They must have called him back in as a consultant. I double-damn guarantee you, this is his baby.”

David has forgotten all about Susan. He rushes to James. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know. It didn’t seem—”

“Hush! Let me think. My father came up with the code. I can do this.” He squeezes his eyes shut. Tries to conjure something up, but there’s interference, something kicking around in his brain, something…

“James! What did you say?”

“Huh? Nothing. I’m letting you think or whatever the hell it is you do.”

“No, a moment ago. What did you say?”

James licks his lips and tries to remember. “I said it didn’t seem relevant who designed—”

“No! Before that. You guarantee me… ”

“‘This is his baby.’ That’s all I said. ‘This is his baby.’ Why? Do you see something, Davy? Do you have a vision?”

David Morton smiles to himself. He has no vision. Psychic phenomena are fine when they come, but the bitchy doctor is right. He cannot separate the wheat from the chaff. But this time, he does not need paranormal powers. He needs only memory and logic, and he is thinking very clearly, indeed.

-49- A Seven-Letter Word

Kenosha and Captain Clancy lead the Night Stalkers up the steep slope, near the top of the mountain. Suddenly, a gunshot from the darkness rings above their heads. Other gunshots, and two soldiers topple from their horses. Clancy tries to find the source of the gunfire, but seeing no flash, and with the sound echoing off the rocks, he cannot. Kenosha points higher on the slope, and Clancy signals his men to take cover. More fire, and one of the horses spooks, throwing its rider. The other soldiers dismount and dive for cover. Kenosha calmly walks his horse out of the ditch and joins the captain behind a boulder.

In Army parlance, the soldiers establish a “hasty fighting position,” then unleash a volley of automatic weapons fire, killing a number of rocks, but no commandos. Return gunfire keeps them pinned down.

Clancy looks through infrared binoculars, scanning the mountainside above them. He sees the flash of gunshots in the darkness. “Only four of them, but the bastards have the high ground. Never expected they’d post sentries on this side of the mountain.”

“It is not the first time the Army has underestimated an enemy’s prowess,” Kenosha says.

Clancy shoots him a look.

“Little Big Horn is not far from here, just over the Montana border.”

“Yeah, well you’re on the other side now, chief, and if you’ve got any bright ideas, let me hear them.”

“As a matter of fact,” Kenosha says, “I do.”

Jack Jericho climbs a jagged cliff above the trail on the front side of Chugwater Mountain, pale moonbeams reflecting off massive boulders over his head. He claws at a crease in the rocks, slips, catches himself and keeps going. He can see the lights of the dam and its control buildings above him. Again, he slips and nearly falls, his boots digging into the cliff, seeking a hold, dislodging loose pebbles, which trickle down the slope. He regains his footing and pauses at the sound of gunfire from the backside of the mountain.

It’s begun, he thinks, and quickens his pace.

Below the cliff, farther down the trail, the pebbles come to rest alongside a combat boot. The man wearing the boots looks down and then up at the cliff, then resumes following his prey.

James sits with his hands poised like a pianist above the keyboard of the computer. “It’s a seven digit password. We’re talking eight billion possible combinations if it’s alphabetical only. If it’s mixed, alpha-numeric, there’d be—”

“No,” David says, “there’s only one.”

“You’re sure, aren’t you?”

“I’m sure it’s one of just a few choices. All I have to do is climb inside my father’s warped brain and find them.”

“Okay,” James says. “Let it rip.”

“I’ll do it,” David says, motioning for the flight chair.

James shrugs and gets up. David sits, takes a breath and hits a key. On the monitor, the letter “M” replaces the first cursor. David fills in the rest of the word, “M-A-T-A-D-O-R.”

“What is it?” James asks.

“The nickname for the XB-61 missile my dear Daddy worked on in the fifties.”

The computer makes a whirring sound. Then a discordant beep, and the screen flashes, “Password Rejected. Enter Secondary Launch Code Password.”

David types, “A-E-R-O-B-E-E.”

““Another missile?” James asks.

“The X-8,” David tells him.

“Who would even remember the name?”

“I think that’s the idea.”

Again, the computer rejects the word. “One more try,” David says, punching in, “P-O-L-A-R-I-S.”

They wait in silence, and after a moment, another rejection message. David sits staring into the monitor, then says, “My father’s baby.”

“That’d be you. But ‘David’ has only five letters.”

“The son-of-a-bitch could have been making a joke. A perverted private joke that only he would get.”

“What are you talking about?”

David quickly taps out, “O-E-D… ”

“No,” James says. “It couldn’t be.”

David smiles, watching his own reflection in the monitor, and hits another key. “We’ll soon find out.”

At that moment, in the STRATCOM War Room, the Big Board shows four letters and three pulsating cursors:

O E D I_ _ _

Colonel Farris wrinkles his forehead and says, “Ed-dy… Oh-dee? Now what’s he doing?”

Professor Lionel Morton motors over in his wheelchair and blurts out a bitter laugh just as a “P” is added to the screen.

“Goddamit! He’s got the password. He’s got the code.”

In the launch control capsule, David Morton’s eyes burn with hate. In the reflection of the monitor, he resembles a younger Lionel Morton. On the screen, ‘OEDIPUS’ stares back at him like a vicious taunt. Five seconds after the “S” appears, the computer’s mechanical voice intones, “Secondary Launch Code Password Confirmed. Re-Enter Enable Code. Launch Sequence in Progress.”

James slaps David on the back. Rachel bursts into tears of joy. Susan slumps against the back wall in anguish.

At STRATCOM, the mechanical voice delivers the same message: “Launch Sequence in Progress.” The uniformed officers are frozen in place. Professor Morton hits a button on the wheelchair and moves past the contingent of brass. “Checkmate, gentlemen.”

-50- Flood Gates

Four commandos with automatic weapons are hunkered down behind boulders, firing straight down the drainage ditch at the dug-in Night Stalkers.

The Night Stalkers load 40 mm. grenades into M203 launchers and let them fly. The launcher has a range of 350 meters and is accurate to about half that distance. The commandos are 150 meters away, but the angle of the slope throws off the targeting. Grenades land twenty feet behind the commandos and rain dirt on them, but they keep shooting.

Other soldiers unleash soaring tracer shots, incandescent threads illuminating the night. Still, they are pinned down by the commandos above them. Captain Clancy speaks to Colonel Zwick on the radio. “Colonel, we need air support. Gimme some Cobra gunships.”

Kenosha grabs the colonel’s arm. “There is another way.”

The gantry moves vertically up the silo wall, stopping at the level of the PK’s fourth stage. Wearing white gloves, David holds the computer box as if it were a newborn babe. He uses an elbow to hit a button, and the gantry extends horizontally to the missile. Slowly, carefully, he fits the box back into its compartment, reattaches several plugs and hits a switch. The computer springs to life. He replaces the metal plate and inserts the four bolts.

For a moment, David just looks at the missile. Then he lays a hand on the titanium shroud, the silvery cap of the nose cone. Finally, he places his cheek against the smooth metal and spreads his arms around it. He stands there, listening to the heartbeat of the beast. At peace.

Looking down the slope, the four commandos of the Holy Church of Revelations see a horse without a rider bolt from the drainage ditch and race into the woods. They do not see the man hanging onto the horse’s neck, his body tucked away on the far side. In a moment, the horse disappears.

Lying prone at the front of the Night Stalkers’s position, a soldier opens up with an M-60 machine gun, spraying 200 rounds per minute up the slope. With their assault rifles, other soldiers lay down a blistering barrage, providing cover, as Kenosha rides out of the woods and up the rocky incline around the right flank. The slope is impossibly steep and covered with a loose, slippery gravel. Kenosha navigates by memory and by the light of the tracer rounds. The horse slips backward in the gravel and raises up its head in fear, and Kenosha whispers soothing endearments.

Higher up the mountain, the four commandos dig deep into their hiding places, burying their heads, bullets ricocheting around them.

In the drainage ditch, Captain Clancy looks at his stopwatch. Four minutes. Kenosha said he could get up there in four minutes. “That old bastard better be in place,” he says to himself, “because we can’t help him now.” He raises his right hand in front of his forehead, palm to the front and swings his hand up and down several times in front of his face. Though it looks like a drunken salute, it is the cease fire signal, and the men obey. In a moment, there is no sound coming from the ditch. “Now!” Clancy orders.

A soldier with an M203 launcher pulls the trigger, and a grenade sails high over the commandos’ position. “Eyes closed! Everybody!” Clancy yells.

Flash-bang! The burst of a million candlepower isotropic grenade ignites the sky.

Then, from the top of the mountain comes a blood-curdling war whoop.

The soldiers hold their fire. Kenosha is behind the commandos. Any gunfire from below would be as likely to hit him as the enemy. He is on his own.

Kenosha rides down the ditch, the blazing light behind him. He attacks the exposed commandos from the rear. They turn and look up, blinded by the bright flash, their eyes spotted with thousands of pinpricks in dazzling colors. What they see reflected off their corneas freezes them.

Indians on horseback!

Screaming at the night in a language they have never heard.

An avalanche of attacking warriors waving long-barreled pistols in the electrified air.

Kenosha holds the palomino’s reins with one hand and aims the heavy revolver with the other. Shooting a target from a moving horse is akin to surfing and playing the violin at the same time. But Kenosha takes down the first commando where he stands. The second tries to hide between two boulders, squeezing into a crevice, but gets stuck. Unable to move, he aims his rifle in the general vicinity of the moon, and Kenosha drops him with two shots to the chest. The third commando flattens to a prone position and gets off a quick burst that sails over the Indian’s head. Kenosha pulls the palomino into a zig-zag gallop, misses with the first shot, then gut shoots the commando with the next. The fourth commando runs from behind the rocks, scurrying over a boulder, trying to get the hell out of Dodge.

Cr-ack. Captain Clancy drops him with a hundred-fifty yard scoped shot to the head.

“Damn good shooting!” he yells up the slope to Kenosha. “We make a damn fine team.”

Jack Jericho climbs over the railing of the observation deck that juts out from the dam control building and overlooks the missile facility far below. He crosses the deck and peers through a window where illuminated gauges and meters glow in the darkened control room. The controls are run by computer and monitored twenty-four hours a day at the central water district headquarters outside Laramie. The building itself is deserted. Jericho tries a door leading from the deck to the control room.

Locked.

He knows he has very little time. A few moments ago, the sky lit up like the Fourth of July. Now, the gunfire from the backside of the mountain has stopped, but he figures it was just a prelude.

A table and three redwood chairs sit on the observation deck. Jericho picks up one of the chairs. Heavier than it looks. He struggles with it and approaches the window.

Kenosha and Captain Clancy ride side-by-side on horseback, approaching the dam control building from the back side of the mountain. The rest of Clancy’s men follow. They are chattering happily, adrenaline pumping. They’ve had a taste of battle. Now they want the main course.

They pull up behind the control building and Clancy speak into his radio. “Jackal reporting. Objective one achieved, sir. Delta team… ” He winks at Kenosha, “plus one tough Indian, ready for kickoff.”

Colonel Zwick says something, but Clancy can’t hear it over a discordant crash, the sound of glass breaking.

“Now what the hell was that?” Clancy says.

It is 4:35 a.m. when Jericho steps through the broken window into the control room. He navigates in the dark through a maze of overhead piping, meters, valves and gauges, listening to the steady hum of machinery. A window on the far side of the room looks out over the dam itself. Sodium-vapor lights illuminate the water far below, an artificial lake created by closing off Chugwater River and diverting it to a trickle that runs down the front of the mountain through the aqueduct.

Jericho finds a switch and flicks on a set of overhead lights. He wanders around, examining the massive control panels, not knowing exactly what he’s looking for, and not knowing if his plan will work. He’s good with machinery, but the names on the panels speak a foreign language: Riprap Sensors; Filtration Governor; Spillway Intake. Then, Sluice Gate.

Which had to be the one. A chrome wheel four feet in diameter is attached to the Sluice Gate panel. Jericho tries to turn it counter-clockwise, opening the gate, but it doesn’t budge. He tries to turn it clockwise. Still, nothing. He braces both feet against a floor panel and gives it everything he’s got, but nothing moves except a disk in his lumbar spine that threatens to explode.

Okay, the wheel is locked.

Which makes sense.

You don’t want some boozed-up technician stumbling into the controls and opening the flood gates.

He looks at the panel and finds rows of numbered green and red lights and switches. Somewhere, there’s a release for the Sluice Gate valve. How much harm can he do, he wonders, by hitting a few switches. Probably less than he’s going to by finding the right switch. Just as he’s about to find out, he there comes a sharp and angry voice: “Infidel!”

Jericho whirls around. He barely notices the shotgun pointed at his chest. Instead he is drawn to the face of the ugliest man he has ever seen. The man’s skin is a mass of raw, festering blisters. Blood mixes with pus on open sores. “Do you know who I am?” The voice slurs from a mouth hidden under swollen, purple lips.

“Your voice is familiar, and you sort of look like Elvis if they just dug him up.”

Ker-click. The man pumps the shotgun. Jericho’s Uzi is slung across a shoulder. It might as well be at Fort Bragg.

“They call me Matthew.”

“Oh,” Jericho says, remembering their encounter in the kitchen. “You’re the guy who can’t stay away from the french fries.”

Matthew’s lips twist like fat worms into a grotesque smile. “I want to see your pain when I shoot you. I want you to die slowly.”

“You don’t have to shoot,” Jericho says, not giving in to the fear. “Just looking at your face ought to do it.”

“I’ll cut your legs off at the knees!” Matthew drops the barrel low, aiming for Jericho’s lower legs.

Jericho leaps up, grabs an overhead pipe and swings his legs as high as he can. The blast caroms off the floor beneath him, and he can feel ricocheting pellets stinging his rump. Matthew pumps again, and Jericho dives from the pipe, shoulder rolls under a counter and out the other side. A second blast shatters a row of gauges and monitors.

Jericho scurries on all fours along the floor. Ka-boom. A third shot pelts him with shards of shattered glass from the light fixtures. Once behind a table, Jericho comes up and fires a short burst from the Uzi, inflicting serious wounds on a bank of computer consoles but nothing else. Though he can’t see Matthew, he hears the shotgun pump, and the next blast blows up an electrical panel, which sizzles with orange sparks. Jericho fires a burst at the opposite wall, then scrambles around the eight-foot high control panel, peers out, and spots Matthew turned the other way. Jericho pulls the trigger, and click.

Empty!

Matthew spins and faces him.

Jericho dives for cover behind a green, ceiling-high control panel. Matthew follows, shotgun held at gut level. He wheels around a corner, but Jericho is not there. He spins three hundred sixty degrees, looking for his game.

“Come out. Show your cowardly face.”

Suddenly, Jericho dives from the top of the control panel, knocking Matthew over. They tumble to the floor, entangled, and the shotgun skitters away. Matthew shoves Jericho off and gets to his feet. Jericho is on one knee when a thunderous kick to the chest sits him down again. He expects Matthew to come at him, but instead, the commando pulls a 9 mm. pistol from under a bloused pantleg and backs up, putting distance between them. He raises the pistol and says, “I have fifteen bullets, and I will use every one of them. You won’t die until the last one enters your brain.”

Jericho’s hand flashes from behind his neck, and a blade glints in the air. The soft pfffut sounds like a melon being sliced in two. The handle of the Jimmy Lile protrudes from Matthew’s throat. He staggers backward and falls into the control panel, bracing himself with a hand that hits a red switch.

Lights flash and a buzzer sounds.

Matthew bounces off the panel and pulls the knife out of his throat. As he does, the blood erupts, a geyser spraying the ceiling. He crumples to the floor, next to the Sluice Gate wheel. Jericho looks at the wheel and the flashing lights. Why not? He gives the wheel a counter-clockwise turn, and it spins free.

Jericho can hear the movement of machinery, can feel the vibrations beneath his feet. Deep inside the steel and concrete wall of the dam, the huge sluice gates open and water surges from the spillway into the aqueducts.

Jericho checks on Matthew. Dead. He returns to the wheel and spins it wide open. A roar can be heard in the control room, and outside, water cascades from the spillway, overflows the narrow aqueduct and pours toward the missile facility far below.

Jericho picks up his knife, wipes off the blood, and walks to the window overlooking the observation deck. He sees a waterfall tumbling down the mountain.

“Freeze!”

Ignoring the suggestion, Jericho dives to the floor and scrambles under a counter. Across the control room, Captain Clancy stands, legs spread, his M-16 at hip level. “Son-of-a-bitch.” He peppers the wall with gunfire, and motions to three of his men to flare out across the room. “Corporal, cover the exit!”

Corporal? Jericho hears the captain. From beneath a desk, he calls out, “Army? If you’re Army, identify yourselves.”

A rapid burst of gunfire tears up equipment on top of the desk. “How’s that for identification, scuzzbag?”

“Hold you fire!” Jericho yells. “I’m Air Force.”

“Whose?”

The question throws Jericho for a moment. “Ours. The U.S. of A.”

“Are you that dickhead who wouldn’t get off the base?”

Jericho briefly considers whether there might be a second dickhead to whom the question might apply. “That’s me.”

“Hands behind head. Come out slowly.”

Jericho does as he’s told. “Jack Jericho, Airman E-5, United States Air Force, 318th Missile Squadron.”

The captain gives a once over to the commando fatigues. “You’re out of uniform, sergeant.”

“Occupational hazard, sir.”

“Lemme see your tags.”

“Threw ‘em out, didn’t match the apparel.”

Clancy appraises him suspiciously. Just then, a lieutenant dashes in from the observation deck. “Captain, quick! We gotta close the valves or something. The whole damn valley is flooding. We’ll never get down the mountain.”

Clancy surveys the room. The dead commando, the blown out control panels. “What the hell’s going on in here?”

Gesturing toward the wheel, Jericho says, “I opened the sluice gates.”

“Why?” The captain doesn’t wait for an answer. He goes over to the wheel and tries to close it, but it won’t budge. “Shit!”

“It’s open all the way,” Jericho says. “The water pressure’s so great, there’s no way to close it manually.”

“Then how—” Clancy interrupts himself. He’s looking at a gauge labeled, “Emergency Sluice Gate Closure.” The switch dangles uselessly on its wires, the glass facing on the gauge shattered by a shotgun blast. Furious, the captain bangs his fist into the control panel, shaking loose more broken glass. He turns toward the window, watching the water pour down the mountain. Then he raises his M-16 toward Jericho’s chest. “Sergeant, give me one good reason I shouldn’t splatter your guts from here to Hanoi.”

Jericho is trying futilely to think of an answer when Kenosha strides into the control room with the bearing of a great warrior. “Because Jack Jericho is a good man,” he says.

-51- Hello Darkness

“Flight switch on,” David says.

“Check,” Rachel responds.

“Launcher on.”

“Check.”

“Enable on.”

“Check.”

“Enter Enable Code, now,” David orders.

“Six,” Rachel says.

“I agree,” David responds.

David’s hand is steady as he turns over a red flap on the console and spins a thumbwheel. He stops at the number, “6.”

“B,” Rachel says.

“I agree.” David flips the second flap and spins its thumbwheel, this time stopping on the letter, “B.” He pauses and listens to an old song that swirls around in his consciousness. The song has a special meaning for him, he always believed. “‘Hello darkness, my old friend,’” he sings aloud. “‘I’ve come to talk with you again.’”

Susan Burns watches as David and Rachel work at the console, re-entering the Enable Code. Going through the familiar protocol, David adds an “8” on the third thumbwheel.

“6-B-8-A-3… ” appears on the monitor.

“Seven,” Rachel says.

“I agree,” David responds, thumbing the wheel to number seven, then hitting the Initiate switch. He leans back in his flight chair as three chimes ring a tune of their own.

Pandemonium in the STRATCOM War Room.

“Kickoff now!” General Corrigan orders. “Kickoff now!”

“Go, go, go!” Colonel Farris yells in the phone to Colonel Zwick at Base Camp Alpha.

Officers and aides dash everywhere. Coded telexes are sent and received from the National Command Center in the Pentagon. It is five a.m. in Wyoming, and seven a.m. in Washington, and the President is already awake when the direct line from the Pentagon rings on his bedroom phone. In a moment, he will be on the phone with the president of Israel. The president cannot believe that a nuclear holocaust is about to happen on his watch. He will plead. He will promise aid. He will even cry. But the Israelis vow to set Operation Masada in motion. Once the PK hits apogee, Israeli planes will take off with their nuclear payloads that are being readied even now.

General Corrigan stands motionless, a rock in the midst of the turbulent sea. Colonel Farris stands behind the general, awaiting further orders, trying to appear calm. Watching from his wheelchair, not even attempting to hide his mocking smile, Professor Lionel Morton gestures toward the Big Board. “You must admit, Hugh, that the PK is a thing of beauty.”

“Lionel, if you don’t wipe that smirk off your face, I’ll have you arrested.”

On the Big Board, there is a schematic diagram of the PK missile and the flashing message: “LF 47-Q LAUNCH ENABLED.” The computer’s female mechanical voice intones, “Enable Code confirmed. Secondary Launch Code confirmed. Confidence is high.”

“I want continuous progress reports on the assault,” the general tells Colonel Farris. He has approved Colonel Zwick’s the two-pronged attack plan: the direct assault to get Special Forces to the elevator shaft and the surprise descent down the mountain to give the Night Stalkers the chance to rappel down the silo walls.

The colonel has the phone to his ear. Putting a hand over the mouthpiece, he says, “Something strange, general. You better take a look.”

A technician punches a button, and the Big Board is filled with an aerial video shot from a helicopter. A spotlight illuminates a raging torrent of water surging down the mountain.

General Corrigan says, “What the hell is that?”

“We thought the bastards had blown the dam, but it seems one of our men opened the sluice gates,” Colonel Farris says.

“One of our men!”

“Well, not exactly, sir. That Air Force E-5, the maintenance man. He’s stranded Delta on top the mountain, and the water’s headed toward the silo.”

The general grinds his teeth. In his younger days, as a fighter pilot, he wore a plastic mouthpiece at night sleep to keep from crushing his molars into dust while he slept. “What the hell was he thinking?”

“Thinking? He’s just a sergeant.”

Professor Morton sits nearby in his wheelchair, listening. He coughs out a laugh and says, “Your erstwhile sergeant thought he could stop my missile with a squirt gun.”

The men and machines of Base Camp Alpha are massed on the perimeter. Wooden ammunition crates have been cracked open and emptied. For the tenth time, men check their weapons, clicking magazines into place again and again. Faces and hands are covered with camouflage grease. Engines rev on the great pieces of mobile armor, fouling the early morning air with diesel fumes.

Standing in the command tent, Colonel Zwick yells into his radio transmitter to Captain Clancy, still stranded atop the mountain. “Jackal, I’m sorry, but you’re on your own. We gotta kickoff without you.”

The battle begins with two gunshots.

Two expert Army marksmen — snipers by any other name — each with a night-scoped spotter and M24 rifle are ensconced in a camouflaged bunker dug into a raised bluff. They are two hundred meters in front of the base camp perimeter, nine hundred meters from the missile base sentry post.

Well within range.

In Desert Storm, each had confirmed kills at the magical thousand yard distance. Superbly conditioned in both body and mind, they can kill without their pulse rates topping fifty-five. Keeping it under the speed limit, they call it. Now, at a signal, they fire simultaneously. It takes nearly three seconds for the cra-ack of the rifles to reach the sentry post. By which point, both commando sentries are dead.

A moment later, four Abrams main battle tanks lurch down the gentle slope from base camp, cross a open field, then the access road, and finally tear through the perimeter fence of the missile base. Bradley Fighting Vehicles are close behind, fanning out toward the security building and the barracks. A mounted machine gun rakes the buildings, and commandos return the fire from dug-in positions.

Soldiers swarm through the woods, tearing apart commandos on the way to the elevator housing. The soldiers are well trained and well equipped. Some carry the new lightweight machine guns called SAWs. Others fire grenades from M-203 launchers attached below the barrels of their M-16 battle rifles. Some of the Special Forces platoons — Green Berets and Rangers — also carry Beretta 9 mm. pistols and combat knives. Their ammunition is virtually limitless. Reinforcements are ready if needed. It is not a question of whether the Army will take back the base, but how long it will take and how many — hostages, soldiers, enemy — will die.

The commandos are outnumbered and outgunned, but they gamely fight back, welcoming their own Armageddon. They are not stupid men. There was always an awareness that it would be easier to attack the sleepy missile base than to defend it. They are prepared to die, and that always makes for good fighting men. But still, they are not prepared for the ferocity of the onslaught. How could they be? Their training — mock battles, target practice and obstacle courses — was a fantasy camp for would-be soldiers. The men facing them now are hardened Special Op soldiers plus the armored cavalry, gritty professionals whose job is simply to make other men die.

It is one thing to lie comfortably in the prone shooting position on a range, adjusting the battlesight aperture on the M-16A2, rotating the windage knob just a tad, taking your time, exhaling, then zeroing in on a stationery target. One that doesn’t shoot back. It is quite another thing to have a horde of trained killers swarming at you from three directions, wanting nothing so much as to kill you and all your friends.

During the day and night of occupation of the missile base, the commandos have buried several dozen US MI 14 anti-personnel mines in the woods. They were stolen from the Denver Armory, surplus munitions dating from the 1950’s. Half don’t explode at all. The others explode harmlessly as the tanks crunch over them. Randomly placed “dragon’s teeth,” concrete blocks intended to break the tank’s tracks, slow the huge death machines, but do not stop them. Once past the obstacles, the tanks open up with their 120 mm. main guns, blasting holes in the fortifications constructed by the commandos. With each shell, dirt and debris splatters the men behind the barricades. As Special Op troops advance on foot, Bradley Fighting Vehicles spray the commando position with machine gun fire and occasional bursts from their Bushmaster 25 mm. cannons.

Still, the commandos fight like men possessed. Which, of course, they are. Possessed by the passion of their leader, possessed by a wishful belief in the Apocalypse, possessed by the desire to be more than the faceless nobodies they always have been.

And it all comes true. Just as Brother David said it would. They stand their ground, battle valiantly. They recklessly toss grenades in close quarters, for if you plan to die anyway, it is best to take the enemy with you. Some are decent shots, at least at close range, and they take down the occasional soldier.

And when the end is near, when they are outnumbered and nearly overrun, some charge forward with bayonets mounted, like ancient Biblical warriors. They die glorious deaths. The Hereafter, they know with all their hearts, will be nothing short of eternal bliss.

-52- Rotate and Hold

Water overflows the spillway and pours down the mountain. Captain Clancy stands on the dam’s observation deck, listening to gunfire from the missile facility below.

Caged.

Crazed.

Missing the fight, the kind of fight he lives for. And would die for.

He stalks back and forth, pounding his fist against the deck’s railing. Knowing his mood, Clancy’s men give him distance. Oblivious, Jack Jericho works his survival knife into the latch of a storage locker at one end of the deck. Clancy stomps toward him.

“You stupid son-of-a-bitch! You horse’s ass worthless scum-sucking, shit-eating son-of-a-bitch.”

Jericho ignores the captain and cracks open the locker.

Which only makes the captain angrier. “Didn’t you know that big cock is cold launched?”

“Yeah, I know. I run the generator that compresses the propulsion gases.”

“Then what did you think? That you could drown the missile?”

Jericho digs a coil of heavy rope and a tool belt out of the shed. He tosses a couple of screwdrivers out of the belt, leaves two wrenches and a gas-powered stud driver in, then fastens the belt around his waist. “I thought I could foul them up, make that lunatic think it was a Biblical flood, Noah or somebody. I don’t know, I just thought I should try to stop them.”

“You stopped us, you pathetic excuse for a soldier, you worthless piece of whale shit.”

“I need a gun.”

“What!”

“Or just some clips for the Uzi.”

“Are you out of the mind? You’re under arrest! You’ll be court-martialed.”

With the rope coiled around his shoulder, Jericho crawls over the deck railing onto the jagged rocks. A few feet away, a vicious torrent of water surges down the mountainside.

Clancy yells over the noise of the rushing water. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“I’ve got an appointment with my psychiatrist.”

“The hell you do!” Clancy menacingly gestures with his M-16. You think you can surf the mountain? If you didn’t drown, you’d find a way to fuck up the rest of the operation. You’re staying put, sergeant.”

Jericho takes a first step on the rocks, then drops to all fours. He reaches out toward a fallen tree trunk as thick as a man’s waist. “Can’t do that, sir.”

“What!”

“I promised.”

“Yeah, well here’s another promise. You take one more step, I’ll shoot you. I’ll blow your kneecaps off.”

“That’s pretty much what he said,” Jericho says.

“Who?”

“His name was Matthew. Everybody wants to kill me. You, him, Brother David, and all of you seem to prefer the most painful method possible. I guess I bring out the worst in people.”

Clancy is livid. He wants to shoot somebody, and if it can’t be the terrorists, it might as well be Jack Jericho, who deserves it just as much. Maybe he is a terrorist. Maybe he’s one of the crazies, and this was just a cover. The Indian could have been wrong about his old fishing buddy. Clancy clicks off the safety on the rifle. “I’m ordering you to stand down, sergeant. Disregard the order at your own peril.”

Jericho has his hands on the tree trunk and is tying the rope around a gnarled branch. “I’ve followed orders before, captain. I’ve done the right thing, and the safe thing, and it didn’t work out. I’m through following orders. I’m doing what I think is right. You do what you have to do.” Jericho leans down over the tree trunk and ties an end of the rope around his waist.

“Halt!” The rifle is at Clancy’s shoulder, and he squeezes his left eye shut. “Last warning. Halt!”

Clancy knows his men are watching him. He’s never backed down from anyone. He also has never shot an American before, not even a worthless airman.

Jericho shoves the heavy trunk toward the rushing water. It catches on a rock.

Clancy has a clear shot at the back of Jericho’s skull. He drops the rifle lower until he can put a bullet through the meaty part of Jericho’s hamstrings. Cripple but not kill.

Jericho braces his legs and pushes against the trunk, clearing the rock.

Clancy tightens his finger on the trigger. Then eases off.

The tree trunk slips over the side of the rocks, and Jericho with it. In a second, they are swallowed by the raging torrent.

Clancy lets the rifle fall to his side. “Go get ‘em, Noah,” he says with resignation.

David and Rachel sit in the flight chairs. James stands behind them, excitedly pacing. Susan, her hands cuffed behind her, nervously watches from her position on the floor.

“Time and target complete,” David says.

“I have good lights,” Rachel responds.

The console printer unleashes a blizzard of paper as the launch commands are confirmed and recorded on printouts.

“Lock your board,” David says.

Rachel hits a switch. “Board locked.”

David pushes down the Enable switch. “Insert your key,” he orders.

Simultaneously, David and Rachel slide their keys into the slots twelve feet apart on the console.

“Key inserted,” Rachel says.

David scans a security monitor showing his men falling back toward the elevator shaft as the Army troops advance. Calmly, he says, “Key turn clockwise… on my mark.”

From behind them, James watches the console as if hypnotized. He does not see Susan roll to her feet, drop into a crouch, then bring her arms underneath her, stepping through her clasped hands. She is still handcuffed, but now, her arms are in front of her chest.

David counts slowly, “Three two, one… ”

Suddenly, Susan dives forward, loops her cuffed hands around Rachel’s neck. Rachel’s right hand reflexively releases the key and claws at Susan’s arms. Susan roughly pulls Rachel sideways out of her chair.

“Rotate and hold,” David says, as if nothing has happened. “James, take over the deputy’s chair and be kind enough to rotate and hold.”

James reaches for the key, but Susan kicks him in the groin, doubling him over. Rachel is on the floor, holding her neck, gasping. The key remains in the slot, unturned.

“Susan, please turn the key,” David says. “And hold on my count.” His voice is confident, the voice of a man whose orders are obeyed without question.

She stops, thunderstruck at his words. “What!”

“End your pain. End your anger. It can all be over. Let us welcome the Apocalypse together.”

James gets to one knee and is ready to tackle Susan. “No!” David commands. “She is one of us. Only now does she realize it. My will has triumphed over her secular pseudo science.”

Susan looks deeply into David’s penetrating stare. She reaches for the key, her hand resting on it without moving. Their eyes are locked on each other for a long moment.

“Rotate key on my command,” he says softly.

She breaks his hypnotic gaze. “Like hell!” She yanks the key from the slot and dashes toward the open blast door. David scowls and hits a red button. The door begins to slowly close. Susan sees it, thinks she can make it.

Rachel gets to her feet, grabs for Susan but misses her. James comes from behind and dives at Susan, taking her down at the ankles, a desperate cornerback tripping up the receiver who has broken free. As she falls, Susan whips her cuffed hands forward. The key sails out the narrowing opening of the door and skitters across the concrete floor of the tunnel, sliding … sliding… sliding until it comes to rest at the edge of a metal grate where it balances for a precious second, then plops into the black water of the sump.

David glares at James. “Get it! Now!”

Her face flushed, Rachel stomps toward David. “And you thought she was under your spell,” she says, bitterly. “Vanity of vanities. Even with you, David, all is vanity.”

-53- Fire in the Hole

The Army troops work their way across the grounds. In minutes, they have taken the security building. No commandos surrender; no one survives.

The troops head across the bridge toward the elevator housing where the himself Ezekiel and four of his comrades have retreated. One-by-one, the commandos fall under the ferocious attack. Propping up a bulky M-60 machine gun, Ezekiel stands with his back to the elevator housing door, spraying lethal 7.62 mm. shells across the bridge. He cuts down half-a-dozen soldiers and pins down the rest.

Driven by the fierce current, a tree trunk rushes down the flooded river bed toward the open missile silo, bouncing over rapids and banging into boulders. The trunk spins in the water, collides with more flotsam, then turns over, exposing a man’s hand.

Then an arm.

Then a head.

Jack Jericho appears lifeless as the heavy tree trunk continues to twirl, helpless against the forces of nature unleashed. Finally, it comes to rest against a wedge of concrete, a six-feet thick chunk of the silo cap which was blown off during the first countdown. Jericho stirs from semi-consciousness, opens his eyes, coughs and sputters, then returns a few jiggers of muddy water to the river. He unties the rope that binds him to the trunk, coils it over a shoulder, climbs over the concrete slab, and splashes into the water. Still wearing the tool belt, he paddles along. Battered and bruised from the ride down the mountain, he half swims, half body surfs in the current. In a few moments, he is at the edge of the open silo. A lip five feet high has kept the first surge of water out, but now, the swelling river laps over the top and pours down the walls.

Slivers of light appear on the horizon as the sun peeks over the mountains to the east. In a moment, the dark water takes on a pink glow. Jericho rigs his rope around a metal stanchion barely visible under the rising water and climbs over the lip and into the silo. As the water cascades over him, he lowers himself into the opening. Looking down, he sees the nose cone of the Peacekeeper directly below him. He remembers dangling from a line, much like this, scrubbing the walls of the silo. He remembers many other things, too, the beauty of a fall day in the mountains, the fallen leaves crunching underfoot, his mother’s sour apple pie, a white-tailed buck drinking from a cool stream. He remembers his father and brother and their endless card games on the front porch. And now, with his butt hanging over the nose cone that contains ten nuclear warheads, he says a brief prayer aloud, “Lord, I’ve always believed in you, though sometimes, it may seem like I forgot. I’ve believed you made the mountains and the rivers and the yellow tulips in the Spring. I know you’ve got a lot to worry about, but if it isn’t too much trouble, I’d surely appreciate it if you didn’t let them launch that missile just now.”

In the launch control capsule, David watches the security monitors. One camera at the elevator housing catches Ezekiel’s heroics, holding off the first of the forces of Satan. David knows he has little time. The troops will be down the elevator shaft in minutes. There are still commandos in the tunnel and outside the capsule. He yells into a mike. “Everyone with a weapon to the elevator shaft!”

His men tromp from the silo through the underground tunnel and take up positions on the catwalk outside the elevator door. The first of the Special Forces will be cut down when they emerge from the elevator. There will be more, though, David knows. Too many. On another security monitor, he sees a waterfall surging into the silo. He hits a button and speaks again into the mike, “Make haste, James.”

In the drainage sump just outside the capsule, James shines a flashlight into the water. He speaks into his headset, “The Bible advises us to ‘run with patience the race before us.’”

“Screw the Bible! Find the key!”

There is nothing David can do. He looks at the key still in his slot, then shoots a look at the deputy’s slot, as if miraculously the other key might appear there. No miracles today. Frustrated and angry, he gets out of the flight chair, turns around and approaches Susan. Rachel watches over her with a rifle. David leans down and grabs Susan’s cheek, pinching her jaw muscles hard. “And you, Dr. Burns, are the biggest fool of all. Bigger even than the sergeant who cares so much for you.”

He releases his grip and she just stares at him defiantly, not saying a word.

“Thou could have shared my throne,” he says to her.

Glaring back. Unafraid. “I wouldn’t even drinketh from the same cup.”

Ezekiel’s —60 jams, just for a moment. Which is long enough.

The troops pour onto the security bridge, firing M-16’s from their hips. Ezekiel is struck more than thirty times in the chest, a cluster of wounds opening a gaping hole the size of a basketball. Another burst of direct hits to the head and neck nearly decapitate him. His body does a macabre dance backward into the elevator door, a red smear left behind as he crumples to the metal floor.

The troops rush across the bridge, and a mustachioed lieutenant wearing a sidearm and carrying a briefcase approaches the keyboard at the elevator housing. He pulls a card from the briefcase, studies it a moment, then enters the PAL code. The heavy door slowly opens, and the lieutenant jams a detonator into a wad of Semtex, tosses it into the empty elevator, hits the down button and steps back. “Fire in the hole!” he yells at his men.

As the soldiers back away from the opening, sporadic gunfire comes from the surrounding woods, the remaining commandos gamely fighting on. The Army, though, now controls the bridge, the security building, the barracks, and the elevator housing.

In the capsule, David watches a monitor as a mechanical voice intones, “Elevator Access Granted.” David yells into a mike: “They’re coming! Send them straight to hell!”

At the foot of the elevator shaft, Gabriel commands half a dozen commandos. They know their friends above ground have been annihilated. They know they will die, too. First, though, they will dispense punishment to the minions of Satan’s army. “Hold your fire until my order!” Gabriel commands, listening to the elevator descend.

The elevator clunks to a stop, and the door slowly opens. Gabriel’s men obey, peering suspiciously into the compartment which appears empty… until Gabriel sees something on the floor. The Semtex.

Oh shit.

Oh holy shit.

The sound of the explosion is magnified by the close quarters, and the reverberations from the rocky cavern produce an ear-shattering, disorienting echo. Blood streams from both of Gabriel’s ears, and a soaring cloud of dust fills his nostrils. His men stagger backward into the twisted railing of the catwalk. Knowing they cannot hear him, Gabriel simply motions for them to get into kneeling position, rifles pointed at the gaping opening of what had been the elevator car.

At the top of the elevator shaft, the soldiers push a prisoner to the lieutenant. The commando, wearing a black hood, stumbles and is held up by a sergeant who is bleeding from a bayonet wound to the shoulder. “He’s the only one who surrendered, sir,” the sergeant says.

“What’s your name, jerkoff?” the lieutenant says, yanking off the black hood.

“Danny Price, but they call me Daniel.” It is the pudgy, peach fuzzy commando who let Jericho escape.

“How would you like to help your Uncle Sam, Danny boy?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Yeah, you can help dead or help alive.” The lieutenant nods, and his men begin stripping off Daniel’s camouflage garb. Quickly, they re-dress him in Army Ranger combat fatigues. “Do you know the Rangers’ creed, Danny boy?”

A nervous shake of the head, no.

“‘Never shall I fail my comrades.’”

“You’re a Ranger now, Danny. And I’m sure you won’t let us down.” They slip him into a metal harness, thread a black rope through the a metal clip and gag him. “Of course, we’re going to let you down.” The lieutenant nods, and two soldiers push Daniel into the shaft. The soldiers let out the rope, and Daniel disappears into the darkness below.

“Let’s see if this baby’s still hot,” the lieutenant says.

The descent takes only thirty seconds, the soldiers not particularly concerned about their bait bouncing off the walls or being cut up as he’s lowered through the blown roof of the elevator. A moment later, Daniel is dangling in the opening of what had been the elevator door.

Gunfire from Gabriel’s men virtually cuts him in two.

At the top of the shaft, the lieutenant grimaces. “Yep, the baby’s still hot.” He speaks into a radio transmitter. “This is Beta. Come in Alpha. We got a problem here.”