by Paul Levine
BALLISTIC
PAUL LEVINE
Contents
BOOK ONE – The Prophet, the Sergeant, and the Shrink
Missile Silo
BOOK TWO – In the Hole
Underground Facility
BOOK THREE – Soldiers of the Apocalypse
Missile Base
BOOK FOUR – The Professor and the Prodigal Son
Launch Control
BOOK FIVE – Worst Case Scenario
BOOK SIX – Fire and Water
BOOK SEVEN – End Game
Author’s Afterword
About the Author
BOOK ONE
The Prophet, the Sergeant, and the Shrink
-1-
Are You Ready for the Apocalypse?
Times Square, New York City–September 1994
The young man who calls himself Zachariah blinks against the neon of a megawatt Manhattan night. Cocks his head and hears dueling symphonies in his brain. A thunderstorm of Wagner on the port side, a cannonade of Tchaikovsky to starboard. Schizophrenia in stereo.
Zachariah steps off the curb and pulls up the collar of his trench coat. Rain pelts him. Cleanses him, he thinks, as clueless tourists and scummy gutter rats surge by on both sides. Yokels and locals. Sinners all.
Hookers in halter tops, goosebumpy in the wet chill. Gangbangers in leather, pimp-rolling, toe-walking, trash-talking skull crackers. Corn-fed, name-tagged conventioneers, heehawing across the big city, checking out the bars, Singapore slinging watery drinks at nine bucks a throw.
Lifting his face to the rain, eyeglasses steaming, he splashes through a puddle. Stops at a kiosk filled with filthy magazines. The devil’s own diaries. Creamy breasts and pouty lips. Who will save them?
Splashing through a puddle, wagging his finger at Bernie behind the counter, telling him, “All the animals come out at night.”
Bernie looks at the young man through rheumy eyes. “You’re telling me.”
Zachariah sweeps his arm across a panorama of lustful sinners. “Some day a real rain will come and wash this scum off the street.”
“How many times you seen Taxi Driver? ‘Cause I gotta tell you, Zack, it’s making you even weirder, if that’s possible.”
A radiant light amps Zachariah’s mind, a divine glow inspired by the Truth and heavenly doses of mescaline. He reaches into his trench coat and hands Bernie a pamphlet. On the cover, a drawing of an ornate temple exploding, pillars shooting into the air like flaming spears. Zachariah levels his gaze. “Pilgrim, are you ready for the Apocalypse?”
“Hell yes.” Bernie tosses the pamphlet aside. “But to tell the truth, I thought it already happened.”
* * *
Outside the store, the neon flashes “Adult XXX.” Inside, the pot-bellied clerk with the retro sideburns hacks up a wad of phlegm, cursing the weather and his own clogged sinuses. He empties an ashtray, counting the butts, and curses himself for his three-pack a night-shift habit. He switches channels on his seven-inch black-and-white, then looks up to see a clean-cut young man stroll into the shop, trench coat spotted with rain. Wiping raindrops from his wire-rim glasses with his tie, another accountant or salesman copping a cheap thrill.
The clerk glances at the bland, nothing face. Always check them out, watch for a thug with an attitude and a Saturday night special. Trench Coat tries to flip through “Salt and Pepper Studs,” but it’s stapled shut. Peeper doesn’t even know the rules. He loops around a free-standing display of dildos and cockstraps and approaches the counter.
“If you’re looking for the video booths, they’re in the back,” the clerk says.
“My visions need no video,” Zachariah answers.
“So whadaya want, buddy?”
“Salvation for all eternity.”
The clerk shrugs. “Eternity’s expensive. We charge a quarter a minute for video. Fifty cents for live peeps. Ten bucks for the live sex theater.”
“Sodom and Gomorrah are upon us, and you, sir, are the gatekeeper of hell.”
Ah, one of those. The clerk hacks again, then spits into the trash can. For minimum wage and no health plan, why put up with this shit? “Hey, buddy, if you wanna buy…buy. If you wanna look…look. If you wanna preach, haul your ass out to the street corner.”
Zachariah pulls two quarters from a pocket. “I shall buy. But, as it is written in Revelations, ‘I know where you live. It is the place where Satan has his throne.’”
“You got that right, fella. I live in the Bronx.”
* * *
A whorish red sign with a flashing arrow points to “Live Peeps.” Hallucinating now, Zachariah feels as if his feet are slogging through a wet slime, the vomit of hell. He enters a dark booth the size of a toilet stall. Latching the door, his senses hypertuned, he inhales the tang of disinfectant barely masking the ocean saltiness of semen. Through tinny speakers, he hears the Red Hot Chili Peppers urging, “Give it away now!”
He slips the quarters into a slot. A shutter slides up and light streams through a window from the miniature interior stage where a bored stripper bumps and grinds, her backside facing a booth directly across from him. She chews her gum and pastes on a smile of slutty sincerity, smacking the other guy’s window with her mushy ass. Naked except for her red spiked heels, she dances across the stage toward Zachariah.
Come to me, Jezebel. The angels screech her name in his ear.
He steeples his fingers under his chin, studying her. A scar, fibrous and purple, jags across her belly. She is pale under the glare of the lights. Her hair is dyed a coppery red, top and bottom. Shaved into a design down below, what is it? A cross! Blasphemous bitch. She will pay. They will all pay.
She wiggles and pouts. Then, boom! The music stops, and so does she. Stands there a moment, hip shot, then points to the tray in the window, waiting for her tip. He folds a pamphlet over twice and places it in the tray.
On the other side of the glass, she picks up the pamphlet and unfolds it, her eyes going hard as she read aloud in a Southern twang. “‘Are you ready for the Aypo-ca-lipsee?’ You think I can pay the rent with this shit?”
She looks up, ready to shame a couple of bucks out of him, but he is gone.
Zachariah climbs the stairs to the second floor. Two middle-aged men pass him on their way down, averting their eyes. Confront your sins, heathens!
He hands a ten-dollar bill to a burly Hispanic man with a ponytail and the tattoo of a snake wending across his knuckles, then enters the small theater. Four geezers are spread out, one to a row, hands disappearing into their laps, watching the stage where a naked punk is slipping it to a skinny woman on a soiled mattress.
The woman’s bare, dirty feet are wrapped around the punk’s pimply back as he listlessly pumps away. Neither makes a sound, though the mattress is wheezing, and one of the scuzzbags up front is breathing so hard, he might go into cardiac arrest.
Zachariah heads down several steps and hops onto the stage. The heavy breather in the front row huffs out a “Hey!” The couple untangles, the punk’s pecker hanging forlornly at half-mast. “It ain’t amateur night! Get outta here.”
Zachariah turns to the audience of disgruntled whackers and lets his voice slip into the sing-song of his beloved Brother David. “Babylon, mother of prostitutes, abomination of the earth, hear the Word!”
“Aw, shut up!”
“Chingate!”
“What a meshuggeneh!”
Forgiving the fools who know not what they do. “Behold a pale horse!”
The door bursts open and Snake Knuckles hauls ass toward him.
“And his rider’s name was Death!” Zachariah unbuttons his suit coat and extends his arms. Jesus on the Cross. A battery pack hangs from his belt, and packets of Semtex are taped to his waist.
Snake Knuckles leaps onto the stage but Zachariah sidesteps and calls out, “And Hell followed him!”
He pushes a switch on the battery pack…
* * *
At his kiosk, Bernie sees the orange flash before he hears the thunderclap. An explosion that spews glass and plaster across the street, barely missing him. Pedestrians duck and run as the shrapnel rains down, and where there had been a tawdry little porn shop, now there is a gaping crater of flame. A hot wind sucks piles of magazines from Bernie’s counter, tumbling them down the street, plastering them against windshields, and inhaling them into the inferno.
And still no one has answered the question, “Are you ready for the Apocalypse?”
-2-
In the Belly of the Beast
Chugwater Mountain, Wyoming
Deep inside the missile silo, Sergeant Jack Jericho dangles at the end of a rope and pulley, a harness buckled around his waist. Above him, the sky is crystalline blue. He is a shade under six feet, broad of shoulders and shaggy of hair that has not been regulation length since basic training. He has slate-gray eyes and a nose that has been broken twice, once by a slag bucket that slipped its winch in the coal mine and once by a fist that found its mark.
Jericho pulls in rope, hand-over-hand. Closes his eyes and imagines himself scaling a lodgepole pine in a shaded forest. Climbing up the hard, scaly bark, grabbing a sturdy limb overhead. Catching the crisp scent of the high timberland. White aspens, Douglas firs, and a thicket of snowberry and juniper. Bluebells, too, sprouting out of the rocky soil of an upland clearing.
Mind over matter, it works for a moment. What had the doc called it? Creative visualization. “The mind’s eye can see whatever the brain wishes.”
Yeah, and a lot the brain doesn’t wish. Try not thinking of a brick wall. Or of a mine shaft filling with water, men screaming to the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
Jericho opens his eyes, reaches up and grasps the handle of the exhaust tube cover. He catches a whiff of the oily slickness of metal and hears the thumpa of the generators far below him in the sump. Damn. Tries to bring back the forest, tries to summon the sound of rippling water in a rocky stream. Thumpa-thumpa. Like the heartbeat of a leviathan.
He looks up. The bluest of skies is still there, visible only because the six-foot thick concrete cap is open. He looks down toward the drainage sump and the polished steel floor of the silo.
Jericho uses his legs to kick away from the silo wall, and the rope spins out of the pulley, giving him slack. He propels himself several yards, extends a soapy brush to a grimy spot on the wall, then begins scrubbing. Sweating now, though it’s a consistent fifty-eight degrees inside Chugwater Mountain. Sweating not from the heat, but the confinement, the sense that the encircling wall is closing in.
In the belly of the beast.
He breathes heavily, wiping his forehead on the sleeve of his shirt just above the three stripes. Again, he unwillingly conjures up the mine. The creak of the timbers, the explosion, the rushing water and the darkness. Then the screams, and finally the silence. The doc knew all about the dreams. Had his own from Vietnam. He was a clinical psychologist, on retainer for the union. Wore a ring in his ear, tied his hair in a ponytail. Some of the older miners called him a pansy, until they got close enough look him in the eyes. Glacial ice. Jericho didn’t want to know what those eyes had seen. He visited the doc in his office, a trailer at a job site, and asked a question.
“Will the dreams go away?”
“Scars fade but never vanish. Create your own dreams, sing your own songs.”
“I can’t go back in the ground. I need to get out of here, go somewhere far away.”
“There is nowhere far away.”
The doc had been right. Sleep came hard. Jericho bedded down with a bottle and a dreamscape of ghosts. Joined the Air Force, re-upped, and re-upped again. Now, two thousand miles from the West Virginia coal mines, he finds simple joys in the outdoors. An eagle soaring over the vast prairie, the haunting lunar landscape of a rocky basin, the startling quickness of a deer bounding through the grasslands.
Jericho finishes scrubbing the acidic residue near the exhaust tube and spins around in his harness. His job is to clean up after a test firing of the LEGG, the launch eject gas generator. Unlike other intercontinental ballistic missiles, the one with the Orwellian name of “Peacekeeper” is cold launched, propelled out of the silo by a burst of compressed gas. The solid fuel of the first stage ignites only after the missile is in the air.
Jericho drops his soapy brush into a pail built into his harness. He bristles when other airmen call him the base janitor, but even Jericho figures he is little more than the clown who follows the elephants with broom and pan. He looks up again at the brilliant sky, imagines himself in waders standing in the shallow water of a cool stream, whipping a fly toward a whirling pool where the big trout lurk. For a moment, he is out of the silo, out of the mine.
He kicks off the wall again, a little too hard, and…clang! He bangs into the nose cone of the missile that is suspended from cables, the Longitudinal Support Assembly in Air Force jargon. The cables are attached to the walls of the hardened silo, and in the event of an enemy’s nuclear strike above ground, the missile will sway, then steady itself, and be ready for launching. In theory. As with so much in the missile program, no one knows what really will happen in the event of thermonuclear war.
Seventy-one feet tall, a little less than eight feet in diameter, the Peacekeeper, or PK, is topped by a nose cone containing ten nuclear warheads. Each warhead is seventeen times more powerful than the bomb that leveled Hiroshima and ushered in the nuclear age. At this precise moment, the seat of Jack Jericho’s olive green coveralls are polishing the nose cone. With a layer of dark rubber covering the missile’s four stages, the PK is sleek, breathtaking and black as death.
Jericho winces as the metallic echo reverberates through the silo.
“Yo, Jack! You turn this place into Chernobyl, the captain’s gonna be steamed.”
Jericho looks up to see Sayers, a senior airman standing at the edge of the elevated gantry one hundred feet above the floor of the silo. Sayers wears camouflage green and loam battle dress and polished combat boots. Compared to Jericho, he looks like an ad for GQ, a muscular African-American all spit and polished. “Captain’s already steamed,” Jericho says.
“No shit, look where he put you. Hey, if I had your detail, you know what I’d do?”
“What?”
“Kill myself,” Sayers laughs.
Then he jumps.
Jericho watches a perfect swan dive off the gantry, Sayers sailing into space, his body arcing down the side of the missile toward the steel floor below. Lower, lower, a millisecond from crushing his skull, then…BOING! A bungee cord catches and springs him back up toward the gantry. He bounces twice on the cord, swinging between the missile and the wall.
“You’re next, my man,” Sayers cackles.
Jericho continues scrubbing the wall. “Only if you put a gun to my head.”
“C’mon Jack. You need some excitement in your life.”
-3-
Freudian Flim-Flam
Washington, D.C.
Warren Cabot, the Secretary of the Air Force, spears a slice of rare tenderloin and turns to Christopher Harrington, the California congressman with the telegenic smile and a constituency of Orange County right wingers. Outside the windows, a light rain is falling, peppering the calm waters of the Potomac. A shell glides by, worked by six women wearing Georgetown University t-shirts.
“I’m not admitting weakness, Chris,” the Air Force Secretary says. “I’m recognizing the realities of the new world order. We’re dismantling more than half our missiles under START II. Blowing up the silos and filling them with concrete.”
“I didn’t vote for the damn treaty,” the Congressman says, as if to clear the record.
“Fine, but it’s a done deal, Chris. Question now, what’s the effect on the readine
ss of the remaining missile crews? That’s why Dr. Burns is with us.”
Secretary Cabot gestures with a fork full of filet mignon in the direction of Dr. Susan Burns, who gives her business smile and nods, then slices her poached salmon. At thirty-four, having earned a Ph.D. in psychology with a thesis on soldiers’ response to stress in warfare and an M.D. in general psychiatry, she will let the two stags bloody each other for a while. She wears her long, dark hair up, and today she omitted the makeup and dressed in the most conservative of her blue suits. Still, she had turned the heads of the brass – their medals clinking, ribbons rustling – when she entered the Joint Chiefs Dining room.
The Congressman gives Dr. Burns a grudging nod and motions toward the uniformed steward for a second Scotch on the rocks. “I just don’t believe in sticking pins and needles in our boys to find out if they’ve ever seen their mommies naked.”
“Boys and girls,” Dr. Burns adds with a pleasant smile. “Women command launch capsules, too.”
“Not if I had anything to say about it,” the Congressman fires back. “No offense, Dr. Burns, but I don’t put much faith in all that Freudian flim-flam.”
Dr. Burns stays quiet, admiring the American eagle on the fine china, arrows in one claw, boughs of peace in the other. No use further antagonizing the man who holds the purse strings on her project to test all soldiers with access to nuclear weapons.
“For the love of mercy, Chris,” the Secretary says, “why are you such a Neanderthal?”
“Once a Marine, always a Marine.”
