Ballistic

by Paul Levine

  “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 vi
olin 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.