Ballistic

by Paul Levine

  David tosses back his head and laughs. “That’s good. Humor is so unexpected coming from a shrink.”

  “David!” Rachel insists.

  “Fine.” He turns to Billy Riordan and simply says, “The key.”

  Wordlessly, Billy gets up, walks to the red metallic box set into the wall, and enters the combination on the padlock. Back in his flight chair, a woozy Owens stirs. “Billy, don’t do it!”

  But Billy is on a mission. He opens the box, takes the launch key and then hands it to David. “For the eternal glory of God,” Billy says.

  David turns to Owens. “I believe it takes two to tango.”

  “No fucking way,” Owens says. “Look, the keys won’t do you any good. We can’t decipher the Enable Code without an EAM. We can’t enter the PLC, either. Even if you had them, it takes a matching command from another capsule. You can’t do anything without…”

  David silences him with a poisonous look. “Now, I could open that tin box with a rusty screwdriver, but destroying government property is a felony, and we wouldn’t want to violate any laws, would we?”

  Owens doesn’t budge, but Billy goes to the second box and enters the combination, then hands David the second key. “I watched Owens and memorized the combination,” Billy says proudly.

  David cups his hands around Billy’s head, drawing him close, then kissing him squarely on the mouth.

  “What’s with you guys?” Owens says, his voice rising. “Don’t you understand? You can’t fire the missile anyway.”

  “Simpleton!” David shouts at him. “Would I have come this far without having the ability to defeat your pathetic security?”

  “Without the code, the keys won’t do you any good.”

  David nods at Gabriel, who raises his gun.

  “Only the President…” Owens continues, but he shuts up as he watches the gun barrel point at his head.”

  Gabriel shifts his aim slightly, and shoots Billy in the chest.

  Billy’s face is a mixture of disbelief and bewilderment as he slumps to the floor.

  “Oh, shit!” Owens says, slouching back into his chair. “Oh, shit, piss, damn.”

  Startled, Susan puts a hand to her mouth. “Why? Why would you…”

  “His work was done,” David says evenly. Then, with an ironic snigger, “Besides, the boy was quite unstable.”

  -24-

  Show Me a Hero

  Deep in the sump, the three commandos follow the right-hand turn of the channel. The commando on point takes a step and snaps a piece of twine. A dead rat, its tail tied to an overhead pipe, swings down and smacks him in the face. He screams and squeezes off a wild burst of gunfire.

  Farther down the channel, Jericho hears the shots behind him and picks up the pace. He comes to drainage pool where water pours into the sump from an overhead pipe and in the darkness, he slips and falls in the deeper water. Cold and grimy, the water pours down his back. The drainage pipe roars like a waterfall in his ears, and the channel becomes a flooded mine shaft. He squeezes his eyes shut, opens them again, and finds himself thinking of Susan Burns. “Do you think you’re the only one who has suffered a loss?”

  He blinks the water out of his eyes, forces himself back to reality, and reaches out for a handhold. He ends up grabbing an old string mop propped in the crotch of some piping. Carrying the mop like a rifle, he keeps moving.

  The three commandos splash through the channel, pointing flashlights and rifles into the darkness. One raises his hand, and the other two stop. They listen to the sound of the launch generator and the pouring of water from the drainage pipe. Another few steps, and there he is!

  A figure in the dark in a military t-shirt.

  The commandos open fire, tearing the man apart, sending him tumbling into the water, his guts oozing out.

  But it isn’t a man.

  It’s a mop with a string head and a t-shirt stuffed with pink fiberglass insulation.

  “He has more faces than the devil himself,” the lead commando says, kicking at the fallen mop.

  * * *

  A grate opens in the floor of the missile silo, and Jericho, bare-chested and sopping wet, crawls out of the sump. He looks up. The suspended missile hangs just above his head.

  Moments later, the three commandos come up through the grate into the missile silo. One heads to the gantry and rides it up the length of the missile. The second heads into the tunnel toward the launch control capsule. The youngest commando, Daniel, stands under the rocket burners. He examines the wet footprints that seem to circle beneath the missile but don’t lead away from it. He stares up into the darkness of the rocket burners themselves.

  Then he looks down as a drop of water plops onto the polished steel floor. Then another. He lifts his rifle, when…

  Jack Jericho dives from inside the cross-tubing of the rocket burners and crashes on top of Daniel, who drops his rifle. Jericho topples off him, landing hard. Daniel dives for the rifle, but Jericho kicks it away. The commando spins a roundhouse kick into Jericho’s chest, knocking him down, then lifts a booted foot and drives it toward Jericho’s head. Jericho grabs him by the ankle, flips him over, then scrambles to his feet and bounds for the rifle.

  The commando leaps onto Jericho, who reaches back and slugs him with an elbow, knocking him off. Jericho dives for the rifle, but comes up short. Daniel tackles him, and they sprawl onto the concrete, rolling over each other. The commando is heavier, but Jericho is quicker and stronger. Like the high school wrestler he once was, Jericho slips behind the man, uses leverage to flip him over and ends up pinning him down by sitting on his chest. Jericho pulls his knife from its sheath and holds it to the commando’s jugular.

  * * *

  In the launch control capsule, David sits at the console, watching a monitor that shows an overhead shot of the missile in the silo. He hits a button, and the monitor switches to a shot of the silo floor where Jack Jericho draws a knife at Daniel’s neck.

  “Looks like we missed one of the soldiers,” he says calmly

  Owens, his hands cuffed behind him, shouts, “All right!” Then he looks closer at the monitor, and his shoulders slump. “Oh shit, that’s not a soldier. Not even an airman. That’s Jericho, the janitor.”

  Turning to Gabriel, David says, “Would you please dispose of this fellow, whoever he might be?”

  Gabriel nods and heads out the blast door at double time with three commandos.

  David shoots a look at the monitor and then at Dr. Burns. He grabs a stack of personnel files piled up in front of her. Opening the first one, he says, “Oh, how I do love a bureaucracy.” He thumbs through the folders, opening each one to look at the passport-sized photos of the airmen. “Ah, here’s our janitor. Sergeant Jack Jericho, E-5, Sinkhole, West Virginia. My oh my, I do believe we’ve met before.”

  He turns to Dr. Burns. “Tell me about this Sergeant Jericho, doctor.”

  “My conversations with the airmen are privileged.”

  Which sets David to laughing. “I love the medical bureaucracy almost as much as the military bureaucracy.” He drills her with a threatening glare and grabs her jaw, his thumb and index finger digging into her cheek, forcing her to open her mouth. “Now, doctor, tell me. Is Sergeant Jack Jericho, this Eagle Scout from the Appalachians, the kind of man to act heroically on behalf of duty and country?”

  David lets go, revealing red splotches on her cheeks where his fingers dug in. “No,” she says, her eyes moist. “Not based on past experiences.”

  “Good,” David says. “Very good. Wasn’t it Fitzgerald who wrote, ‘show me a hero, and I’ll show you a tragedy.’”

  * * *

  Breathing hard, Jericho presses the knife into the young commando’s neck until a pinprick of blood appears. “Who the hell are you guys?”

  “I am called Daniel. We are Warriors of God,” he says tentatively, his eyes darting around the missile silo, looking for his buddies.

  “You don’t sound too convinced.”


  “Brother David is the Lamb of Christ,” the commando says, as if he memorized the words for such an occasion. “He will usher in the Apocalypse.”

  From the tunnel comes the sound of combat boots on concrete as Gabriel’s commandos enter the silo.

  “We follow the Word of God,” the young commando says.

  “You forget about, ‘Thou shalt not kill?’”

  Jericho heads toward the open grate as the footsteps pound closer. He climbs into the sump, realizing as he does that he’s panicked. He could have grabbed the commando’s rifle. Hearing voices above, it’s too late to go back.

  * * *

  Gabriel and his commandos troop into the silo to find the young commando standing in a daze under the missile. “Where is the heathen?” Gabriel demands.

  Daniel’s eyes flick to the grate over the sump. Gabriel glares at him suspiciously and motions his men toward the opening.

  -25-

  Rocky Mountain RAD

  In the launch control capsule, Brother James sits in the deputy’s flight chair, David in the commander’s. Two armed commandos stand watch over Owens, who is hunched on the floor, his hands cuffed behind him. Dr. Susan Burns sits nearby, Rachel watching her.

  James breathes on the lenses of his rimless glasses, then wipes them on his shirt. He flicks on the console-mounted teletype, brushes a lock of pale hair from his eyes and rubs the back of his fist against his acne-scarred face.

  David clasps his shoulder. “Make some beautiful music, maestro.”

  James pounds out a message on the teletype keyboard: “Behold, I bring you the Morning Star.” He hits a code and transmits the message, then turns to David and says, “Confusion to the enemy.”

  “And glory to God,” David adds.

  “Whatever you say, Davy.”

  David shoots him an exasperated look, and James laughs. Susan watches the two men interact, noting that James does give David the reverence that the other commandos do.

  James slides his flight chair down the rail away from the teletype and toward the computer keyboard. “Okay, Brother David,” he says, hitting the words with just a hint of sarcasm, “let’s work on the codes.” With that, his fingers dance across the keyboard, and six-digit alpha-numeric combinations begin scrolling down the monitor. David watches him work, his eyes never straying from the monitor.

  The two men have known each other since elementary school and later, both were both expelled from a prep school outside Colorado Springs. At the time, David’s father was a consultant to the North American Aerospace Defense Command, commonly called NORAD, headquartered deep inside Cheyenne Mountain.

  The mountain is a hundred million years old, but for the last thirty-five years, has housed a city, a complex of fifteen steel buildings constructed on steel springs to negate the earthquake effect of a nuclear blast. As a child, David accompanied his father to the nerve center of NORAD, the huge room known as the Air Defense Operations Center. David was thrilled to enter the long tunnel under the rock and wait for the huge steel blast doors – encased in concrete collars – to swing open. His father told him how Blast Door One is set flush with the tunnel’s rock and designed to blow inward from a direct nuclear hit, guiding the fireball through the tunnel and out the south side of the mountain. A second blast door just fifty feet away is intended to withstand the blast and protect the 4.5 acre grid of buildings and personnel inside the rock.

  In theory. In the event of near misses.

  But if a massive Russian SS-18 penetrator/warhead package hit the mountain directly above the Op Center, it would be a different story. The hardened penetrator would hit the earth at seventeen thousand miles an hour, melting the granite and digging dig a shaft three hundred feet deep. The warhead would follow, setting off the largest manmade explosion in history. Other penetrators and warheads would follow, and if a cavity were opened inside the blast doors, the intruding warhead would shoot a flame of gases reaching ten thousand degrees down the tunnel and through the Op Center, incinerating everything and everyone inside. The expanding gases, moving in excess of three thousand miles and hour, would create a pressure wave that would blow off the blast doors, from the inside out, and the mountain would spew flames like an ancient volcano.

  David was nine years old when his father told him these things, and for weeks, the boy awoke each night with dreams of nuclear explosions and firestorms sweeping through the mountain and the nearby town. They weren’t nightmares, for David was not frightened by the visions of mushroom clouds and vaporized human beings. Instead, the visions fascinated him just as a bottle filled with fireflies might enchant other youngsters.

  By the time he was eleven, no other child in the world knew as much about the strategic uses of nuclear fission. “The core is surrounded by U-235 and then a layer of U-238,” David told his tow-headed friend James when they worked on a fifth grade science fair project.

  “What if you can’t get any U-235?” James asked.

  “Plutonium will do,” David says, confidently, as if he were substituting margarine for butter. “When the deuterium and tritium undergo fusion, high-energy neutrons cause the U-238 to undergo fusion.”

  Mrs. Scoggins, their teacher, had assumed the project would focus on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Mrs. Scoggins had assumed wrong.

  David and James constructed a scale model illustrating the effects of a Russian missile’s ten megaton air burst over downtown Denver. On the poster board, they headlined the project in red letters, “Rocky Mountain RAD.” Mrs. Scoggins looked at the display, patted her grey bun of hair and wrinkled her forehead.

  “Roentgen Absorbed Dose,” David explained, happily, pointing to a chart on the poster board. “About 450,000 RAD within a mile of ground zero. A measly thousand will kill you, ‘course you’d already be vaporized by the heat, so what’s the big deal?”

  “The big deal,” she repeated, staring at the display, “is that I don’t understand whatever possessed you to do this, this…” She couldn’t finish because she was staring at the rest of the display. Besides statistical data showing atmospheric pressure and whole body doses of gamma rays, there were Ken and Barbie dolls with charred skin and melted eyeglasses, both courtesy of a backyard hibachi, plus some broken false teeth and a shattered pocket watch, its hands crumpled at 8:34.

  “We figured an air burst in morning rush hour for maximum kill ratio,” James explained.

  Mrs. Scoggins blanched, looking at the boys as if they had just strangled her pet cat, but she gave them both A’s, then sent them to the school psychologist for counseling.

  While their classmates played ball or fished, these two sat in David’s bedroom and talked for hours about optimum detonation altitudes, initial radiation yields, and the triggering devices for fission-fusion-fission bombs. James had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, and David had most of the answers.

  “The blast,” James would ask, “do you see it or hear it first?”

  “See it. A bluish-white flash, some ultraviolet, too.”

  “Cool.”

  “The temperature at ground zero is eighteen million degrees.”

  “Fahrenheit or centigrade?” James wanted to know.

  “Fahrenheit. It creates a fireball that generates radiant heat traveling at the speed of light.”

  “A hundred eighty-six thousand miles a second,” James added, knowingly.

  “Then comes the blast. It’s really a pressure wave moving at about eleven hundred feet a second. It hits the ground and bounces up, doubling the pressure into a mach wave. Then you get your negative pressure, and that’s really neat, because it causes a firestorm, flaming winds at six hundred miles an hour.”

  James whistled. “Wow. Small craft should stay in port.”

  “Yeah. The fireball sucks debris into the air and all that vaporized crud forms the mushroom cloud.”

  “Way cool,” James says, working on the idea of it. “You think you could score some U-235 so we could build one.”

  �
��Sure,” David boasted.

  He was right, though he never figured it would take this long.

  -26-

  STRATCOM

  In the War Room at STRATCOM, technicians work at the unhurried pace of men and women used to the routine. In subdued light, a dozen hypnotic beams endlessly circle their radar screens while teletypes clack noisily. On the front wall, the huge screens occasionally flick with the movement of submarines or a satellite photo of a military installation in the Middle East. American and Canadian Air Force personnel roam among the computer consoles, as do some visiting NATO officers. Technicians sit at desks watching computer monitors that are recessed into desks, not visible only to foreign visitors.

  Technical Sergeant Bill Ryder, U.S.A.F. E-6, a skinny thirty-year-old, tears a scroll of paper from a teletype and carries it to Colonel Frank Farris, who sips coffee while he watches the wall screens with little interest. “This just came in from 47-Q, sir.”

  “Good. They finally responding?”

  “Not exactly, sir.”

  The colonel frowns and studies the teletype through his wire-rimmed bifocals. He is fifty-one, has a receding hairline and a soft belly. “What the hell is this ‘Morning Star’ gibberish?”

  “Don’t know, sir. It’s not part of the code.”

  “You raise the base?”

  “Tried, sir. No answer from Security Command, nothing from the capsule, except for the teletype. We thought their power was down until we got the message.”

  “Shit. Have Cryptography take a look at it. When will we have the satellite photos?”

  “Any minute, sir.”

  Just then, the center wall screen on the Big Board blinks, and the map of North America is replaced by a photograph of Chugwater Mountain taken from Eyesat II. The dam and reservoir are visible, then farther down, the slope of the mountain, the dry river bed and a forest of pine and fir trees. A second photo replaces it, a shot of 318th Missile Squadron at the base of the mountain. The screen blinks, the photo is enhanced, and Colonel Farris stares at an overhead view of the blown front gate and the crumpled bodies of airmen outside the barracks and mess hall.