Ballistic

by Paul Levine

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

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

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

  “That’s because of his claustrophobia.”

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

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

  “The hell do you know?”

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

  “Bet you picked up some real dirt.”

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

  “You prick! You read my file.”

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

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

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

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

  “Ain’t that just like the Air Force?”

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

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

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

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

  “Say, that looks like…”

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

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

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

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

  -15-

  The Missileer from Mars

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

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

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

  David looks to Rachel, who nods her agreement.

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

  “Thankfully not,” she says.

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

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

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

  “Special Forces, too,” she says.

  He shoots her a disbelieving look.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Jeez,” the captain says.

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

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

  Dr. Burns shakes her head. “Sorry.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Have you?”

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

  “What is your opinion about dismantling the silos?”

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

  “Sort of a double whammy for you today.”

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

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

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

  “You asking that in your professional capacity?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I think I have a rough idea.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Where?”

  She turns back, but no one is there.

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  -16-

  A Trout in the Milk

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

  “Boring?”

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

  “Look out!” she screams.

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

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

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

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

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

  “But on time, sir.”

  “And you look like a goddamn Apache.”

  “Insect repellent, sir.”

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