Ballistic

by Paul Levine

  “It’s not on the disk.”

  “We know that. Had it been, ten nuclear warheads would already have detonated over Jerusalem.”

  “Can little Davy get the code?” Professor Morton muses, a wry smile on his face. “No, because he refuses to see himself for what he is.”

  General Corrigan shakes his head at the enigmatic statement. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Perhaps in time, you shall know. Meanwhile, let’s consider the benefits of a first strike.”

  “A what?” General Corrigan isn’t sure he heard correctly.

  “The benefits to the United States of America of allowing the PK to fly its coop.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” The general is incredulous.

  “Well, obviously there’d be a wealth of in-field research, material we just couldn’t duplicate in the lab. Temperature and dynamic pressure of the blast, firestorm, base surge, afterwind speeds, hard data we could gather by satellite, but only from a real detonation, not computer models. Plus medical information, statistical analysis of fatalities and casualties such as blindness, radiation poisoning, internal injuries. Psychological studies of survivors, that sort of thing. All invaluable and simply not able to be duplicated in the virtual world.”

  “You’re not serious,” General Corrigan says. “You want to kill hundreds of thousands of people as a lab experiment.”

  “Not for that alone. The political consequences might be even more compelling, so bear with me. For now, call it an academic inquiry. Or contingency planning, Hugh. Isn’t that what you do all the time?”

  “Go on. I’m listening.”

  “Let’s assume that my only child, bless his dastardly heart, acquires the S.L.C. and that you are unable to stop the launch by either technological or strategic means. What happens?”

  “A holocaust. A one-hundred per cent kill ratio for a radius of twelve miles from ground zero of each warhead. Lingering death by radiation poisoning, burns and internal injuries to several hundred thousand others. Complete destruction of the holiest city in the world, home to three religions. The greatest single catastrophe in the history of the world.”

  “Of course, of course,” the professor says, a bit impatiently. “But politically, what are the consequences? Surely, you have discussed this with the National Security Advisor.”

  “I have, and that’s classified. Frankly, Lionel, you’re the last person I would share—”

  “Oh, stow it, Hugh! I can figure it out. The State Department has already alerted the Israelis as to the silo takeover and the reconfiguration of the command data buffer. If the slick is entered into the capsule computer, the damage will be catastrophic, the psychological injury unprecedented in history.” A smile plays at the corner of Morton’s mouth. “Which raises a question. If little Israel is laid waste by ten nuclear warheads, what would Iraq, Iran and Libya do? Maybe Syria, too.”

  “You tell me, Lionel.”

  “They’d finish the job,” Colonel Farris breaks in. “They’d attack. It’d be their one and only chance to defeat a stronger, better organized military power. They’ve waited fifty years, and it’s like all those prayers to Allah will have been answered.”

  “Right!” the professor proclaims. “Colonel, you are not the complete idiot I always took you for.”

  Colonel Farris nods a thank you.

  Nobody says anything for a moment. Then in a low voice, General Corrigan speaks. “It’s a possible scenario that’s been discussed.”

  That brings a laugh from the professor, who hits a button, and moves his wheelchair closer to the general. “Damn right it’s been discussed. That’s what would happen, and everyone in Washington knows it. What those short-sighted, pension-loving, pencil-pushers haven’t thought about is the potential benefit of letting it all happen.”

  No one asks the question, but Professor Lionel Morton answers it anyway. “The benefit, gentleman, is that with one fortuitous stroke, we will have neutralized the world’s hot spot. Between the militant Arab fundamentalists, those pesky Palestinians and the hard-line Israelis, the Middle East is the world’s powder keg. We can just let it blow.”

  “Let it blow?” General Corrigan shakes his head.

  “Boom! Boom!” the professor whoops. “Let the Arabs and Israelis engage in a final, all-out war. A pox on both their houses. They will expend themselves, destroy each other, and end World War III before it begins.”

  The officers exchange looks and mumble to themselves. Finally, Agent Hurtgen says, “What asylum did this maniac escape from?”

  “Ours,” General Corrigan replies.

  -43-

  The Diversion

  The old Volkswagen Beetle chugs past the sign reading, “Rattlesnake Hills Sewage Plant,” grinds its gears and chugs up the mountain road at a clunky fifteen miles an hour. Inside, Jimmy Westoff inhales the tangy aroma of charred meat and sizzling grease. The tiny back seat is loaded with Styrofoam cartons of cheeseburgers, chili and french fries.

  Unbeknownst to Jimmy, eight M-16 rifles are trained on him. Camouflaged in the gully at the side of the road, a squad of Army Rangers watches Jimmy drive by. A lieutenant with a darkened face and a helmet disguised as a mulberry bush speaks into his radio. “Possible enemy vehicle on Access Road One.”

  A scratchy voice comes through his headset. “How many men, what sort of weaponry.”

  Through an infrared night scope, the lieutenant sees the placard attached to the VW’s roof: “Old Wrangler Tavern—We Deliver.” Maybe it’s his imagination, but he thinks he gets a whiff of burgers as the car passes. “One man in a VW Beetle,” he says. “No known weapons.”

  “One man?”

  “Unless it’s one of those clown cars where they just keep piling out.”

  Jimmy stomps on the accelerator, the little car bucks and rounds the last curve, sputtering to a stop in front of the sentry post of the 318th Missile Squadron. Jimmy gets out of the car, feels a tickle in his nose from the dust the VW has kicked up, and sneezes loudly. A kilometer away, at Base Camp Alpha, watching through a telescopic night scope and listening through bionic earpieces, Colonel Henry Zwick says, “Gesundheit.”

  The road had been purposely left open in the hopes that reinforcements the Holy Church of Revelations would arrive. Colonel Zwick wanted to capture several commandos and interrogate them, but so far, the road has been quiet except for the asthmatic Volkswagen.

  The colonel watches Jimmy pull out several grease-stained cartons filled with Styrofoam boxes. “We’re about to see if Napoleon was correct,” Zwick says.

  “About what?” Captain Kyle Clancy asks, raising his own night scope. His face is covered with a thick layer of camouflage grease which seems to overflow the deep scar that runs from his cheekbone to his chin.

  “About an army marching on its stomach. These fellows are into fast food.”

  The captain lets out a little laugh. “Shit, colonel, it can’t be any worse than our M.R.E.’s.”

  His arms loaded, Jimmy Westoff walks up to the guard house. He doesn’t recognize the commando in combat fatigues with no military insignia. “Who ordered forty buffalo burgers, twenty fries, and ten sides of chili?”

  The commando points an M-16 at Jimmy’s head. “Outta here. This is restricted property.”

  “No shit, like I really thought it was a sewage plant. You new or somethin’? And what’s with the uniform?”

  From his view in the underbrush, Jack Jericho can see the sentry post in the flickering headlights of the Volkswagen. He had called the tavern an hour earlier on the cellular phone, and now he waits for his chance. A commando still guards the exhaust tube’s outlet pipe, but with any luck, he’ll be fetching dinner soon.

  At the guard house, the commando is becoming annoyed. “No one told me anything about burgers.”

  “Like what else is new? You wanna call the Pentagon and get authorization, ‘cause I’m telling you, my arms are getting tired, and in a minute, you’re gonna have
chili all over your boots.”

  “Okay, okay. Leave it all here.”

  Jimmy puts the boxes on the ground, goes back to the car and brings over some more. “That’s two hundred twelve fifty, not including tip.”

  The sentry pats his empty pockets. “Do you believe, as it is written in Ecclesiastes, that ‘money answereth all things’?”

  “I believe that if I don’t get paid, Uncle Buck will kicketh my ass from here to Hell’s Half Acre.”

  “Sorry,” the sentry says, inhaling the aroma of the burgers, and dragging one of the boxes inside the guard house. “I’m requisitioning the food in the name of the Lord.” He is salivating. Other commandos begin to drift over to the guard house, eager to eat. Their mission should have been over by now. They should be ascending to heaven. Death they could take; hunger bothered the hell out of them.

  Jericho waits and watches, but the commando near the outlet pipe doesn’t move.

  At the guard house, Jimmy is throwing a tantrum. “You shittin’ me? I drive all the way up here and now you’re jerking my chain.” Jimmy’s voice is cranked up a few notches. “Where’s Dempsey anyway? Sleeping one off.”

  “Dempsey?”

  “The security dude who’s usually here. He never stiffs me.”

  From inside the gate, a broad-shouldered commando carrying a shotgun pushes his way past the others. His harsh voice carries all the way to the underbrush where Jericho watches. “What’s going on here?” Gabriel demands.

  “Supper,” the sentry says, a little unsure.

  “Back to your posts! All of you, now!”

  Jimmy Westoff, with the blissful ignorance of the young, yells at Gabriel. “Hey, cowboy! Whether you want the grub or not, you still gotta pay. C’mon, or I’m gonna complain to the captain how you’re jerking me around out here.”

  Gabriel wheels around, the shotgun pointed at Jimmy Westoff’s Adam’s apple.

  “On the other hand,” Jimmy says, “if you’re a little short, maybe Uncle Buck would take a check.”

  The shotgun drops toward the ground, and a second later, the blam echoes through the trees and across the missile base. Jimmy Westoff’s pant legs are warm and wet. At first he thinks he’s been shot. Then, he realizes he’s peed his pants. The rest of him is covered with cheeseburger shrapnel.

  Reacting to the shotgun blast, the commando near the outlet pipe clicks off the safety on his rifle and heads toward the sentry post. Taking advantage of the diversion, Jericho darts toward the flared end of the pipe.

  At the perimeter of Base Camp Alpha, a sharpshooter with a tripod-mounted Israeli Galil sniper rifle has Gabriel in the cross-hairs of his infrared scope. “I can take him,” he says, keeping his finger on the trigger, his breathing soft and slow. He moves the rifle slightly up and to the right, taking into account wind speed and the gravitational fall of the bullet over eleven hundred meters.

  “I’m sure you can,” Colonel Zwick says. “But we don’t fire a shot until our orders change.”

  “Yes, sir,” he says, releasing the pressure on the trigger, and muttering an inaudible “shit” under his breath.

  At the guard house, the commandos begin to disperse and resume their positions. One comes back to the exhaust tube’s outlet pipe. He does not notice that the screen has been replaced just a tad cockeyed, it being hard to pull into place from inside the pipe.

  Now, in the darkness and gloom of the exhaust tube, Jack Jericho works his way back toward hell. That’s the way he thinks of it. But Jericho knows there are all kinds of purgatory. He’s been doing a slow death in one of his own making. How much worse can this one be?

  * * *

  Sweating heavily, Jack Jericho works his way down the exhaust tube toward the missile silo. He is halfway there, the Uzi slung over one shoulder, the rucksack on the other, when he is startled by a sudden, discordant sound. It takes him a moment to realize that the cellular phone is ringing. He digs it out of a pocket and answers, “Yeah.”

  “Sergeant, you surprise me,” a male voice says with a hint of amusement.

  At first, he thinks it’s Colonel Zwick, calling to give him hell. But it’s Brother David. He knows where I am, Jericho thinks, feeling trapped, a rat in a maze. Scanning equipment picked up his earlier call to the Colonel.

  “Are you there, Sergeant Jack Jericho from Sinkhole, West Virginia? Why haven’t you high-tailed it like some scared rabbit? Flight would be so much more consistent with your profile.”

  “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on,” Jericho fires back. He had wanted to stay quiet and now curses himself for letting the bastard get to him. Over the phone, he hears David’s laughter.

  In the launch control capsule, David hits the speaker button and nods to Rachel, who uses an Uzi to prod Captain Pete Pukowlski toward the microphone. “Someone wants to talk to you,” David says.

  Pukowlski shuffles to the console, his feet shackled by leg irons, his hands cuffed behind him. “Jericho, give yourself up.”

  “Puke, that you?” an astonished Jericho replies. “I thought you were dead.”

  Captain Pukowlski reddens. “You will address me as ‘sir.’ I am still your captain, Jericho.”

  “Not any more. I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.”

  “The fuck are you talking about? That’s insubordination.”

  David pushes Pukowlski away from the microphone. “Actually, it’s ‘Invictus.’ It was intended for me, the sergeant’s way of rejecting determinism. But he is wrong. His fate, like yours and mine, is sealed.”

  “We make our own fate,” Jericho says. “We have free will.”

  “Sergeant, you are so much more interesting than these uniformed eunuchs like Pukowlski, who couldn’t captain the H.M.S. Pinafore. I’d like to know more about you, Jericho.”

  “Go screw yourself.”

  “Did you sit on some mountaintop in the Appalachians reading poetry while your countless cousins picked lice from their scalps?”

  “Let the hostages go and I’ll answer all your questions.”

  “Do you really believe all that whimsical claptrap about free will?”

  “I don’t believe it’s all preordained.”

  “Oh, but it is. An Apocalypse followed by the thousand year reign of the Savior.”

  “With you his right-hand man.”

  “I am the vessel chosen to set in motion the forces that cannot be restrained. I can no more resist my fate than a wave can resist being driven against the shore.”

  “That’s a cop out. We’re all captains of our own destiny.”

  “As I suspected, the son of miners and moonshiners is a poet at heart. Look at your life, Jericho. If you are right, if your fate has not been sealed, look how abysmally you have exercised your free will.”

  “I’m about to change that.”

  “Yes, you are. You’re about to die. Oh, I wish I had time to spar with you. We could go a few rounds of dueling bards. Reason versus belief, rationality versus spirituality. But duty calls.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Simply this, Sergeant. If you don’t surrender at once, I shall have to kill the captain.”

  Jericho continues crawling through the tube. “Promises, promises,” he says into the phone.

  “Jericho!” Pukowlski screams.

  “Ah, perhaps I’ve chosen the wrong hostage,” David says. He moves to the capsule’s back wall and roughly grabs Dr. Susan Burns, yanking her out of the chair. Her hands are cuffed behind her, and she still wears the missileer’s blue jumpsuit. “Sergeant, there’s someone else who wants to say hello.”

  “Jericho, just take care of yourself,” Susan says, her voice breaking. “Don’t worry about me.”

  David pulls the microphone away. “Sorry, sergeant, she’s the next to die.”

  Jericho strains not to lose it, not to show emotion, but he fails. “Hear my word, dirtbag! You hurt that woman, and I’m going to gut you like a barnyard pig. I’m going to skin you and nail your
hide to the barn door, and I’m going to sip rye whiskey while I watch you rot.”

  “How quaint, how country,” David mocks him. “I’d be scared to death if I didn’t know all about Sergeant Jack Jericho, the sniveling coward. You can make all the threats you want, Sergeant. Problem is, it takes balls to go ballistic!”

  “Let’s go at it, just you and me,” Jericho shoots back. “Or are you afraid without your zonked-out warriors?”

  “You dare call me, ‘afraid?’ You, whose life is circumscribed by fear. Like the Sioux warrior who is hung from a line of rawhide strung through his back, I fear no pain. I fear no man. And most of all, I fear not you, Jack Jericho.”

  David cackles spitefully and hangs up. Jericho angrily bangs his fist against the wall of the tube, and even the metallic echo sounds like a scornful laugh.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, Jericho is at the screen separating the exhaust tube from the interior of the missile silo. He peers through it, sees two commandos on the floor of the silo ninety feet below. Carefully, Jericho removes the screen, then swings out of the tube onto the orange steel ladder that is bolted into the silo wall. He slides down the ladder several feet to the gantry and flattens himself against its floor. He is staring directly at the fourth stage of the missile, just below the nose cone, and something is wrong.

  A hole.

  Like a cavity in a tooth.

  The computer box is missing.

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” he says to himself. He remembers the palm-sized Newton Messagepad Fax he lifted from the security officers’ barracks and pulls it out of the rucksack. Hitting the power, he uses the electronic stylus to draw a picture, then punches out a number and hits the SEND button.

  * * *

  Colonel Henry Zwick stands in front of the command tent, admiring the spruce and fir trees silhouetted by a half-moon. It is just after nine p.m. His men and machines are primed, and it’s quiet at Base Camp Alpha. As he puffs on his pipe, the only sound is of the wind through the trees, the chirping of night birds, and the belly-aching of Captain Kyle Clancy, who has been pleading his case for the Night Stalkers.