by Paul Levine
“Must have missed that sermon.”
“You should join my congregation. Are you a believer?”
“Unless I was drunk as a skunk, I went to church every Sunday, up ‘til the time we lost our preacher ‘cause he was caught diddling one of the choir boys. I guess you could say my beliefs have been tested.”
“Do you know the Day of Reckoning beckons?”
“Funny, that’s what the preacher said when he was sober. When he was drunk, he said, ‘the day of Beckoning reckons.’”
“You are lost and wicked.” David yanks the reins to one side and roughly digs his heels into the horse’s ribs. The animal splashes across the river and bolts toward the woods, and in a moment, horse and rider are gone.
“I ain’t wicked,” Jack Jericho says to himself, blinking against the glare of the sun. “I’m just like most everyone else.”
BOOK TWO
In the Hole
-13-
The Valley of the Shadow of Death
The second lieutenant approaches the steel door of the Security Building, his combat boots crunching along a gravel path. He wears a blue flightsuit with zippered pockets and a black scarf, signifying the Black Pirates of the 318th Missile Squadron. Pinned to his chest is a medal depicting a missile blasting toward four stars. A missileer’s heaven. A sleeve patch shows a metallic fist gripping three lightning bolts, all sheathed by an olive branch. The iron fist in the velvet glove.
His nametag reads “Riordan, W.” He has pale blond hair and wears wire-rimmed glasses. He slides a coded card through a slot in the steel door, and a red light blinks above a recessed combination mike/speaker. “Lieutenant William Riordan, reporting,” he says crisply.
“No shit,” comes a scratchy voice through the speaker. “Hey, Billy, you’re damn near late. That ain’t like you. And Owens was early. That ain’t like him.”
“I have three minutes, sir.”
“Don’t ‘sir’ me, Billy Riordan. Call me Valoppi or just plain ‘V.’ Call me any damn thing you want. I’m a second louie, just like you, and if I hadn’t taken that ROTC money, I’d be wearing a pin-striped suit and pulling down forty k a year in a major accounting firm.”
“It’s against regulations for Owens to proceed into the hole without me,” Billy says. “It’s a no lone zone.”
“Yeah, so what? In another week, Billy boy, there’ll be no more regs, no more Technical Orders, no more missile, no more nothing.”
The latch buzzes, and Billy opens the door and enters the security bridge, an enclosed tunnel which runs through the building and beyond it to the silo elevator housing. Twenty paces along the metal bridge, Billy comes to a grated steel door with an electronic lock that can be opened only from Security Command inside the building.
Billy looks through the bulletproof window into Security Command, the nerve center of the building. A sign under the window reads, “Controlled Area. It is unlawful to enter this area without permission of the installation commander. Use of deadly force is authorized. Section 21, Internal Security Act of 1950.”
Billy slides an ID card through a tray, and Lieutenant Valoppi pushes it back without looking at it. He is a handsome, dark-haired 22-year-old with an open collar and loosened tie on his Class A blue uniform. “Billy, you don’t have to show me your ID. You don’t have to give me a voiceprint, fingerprint, or urine sample. You don’t have to thank me, kiss me, or blow me. Just get the hell down the hole.”
“It’s in the T.O. I show you my ID. You visually confirm, and if there’s a question as to either my identity or authorization to proceed, you secondarily confirm by asking me the password of the day.”
“Look, Billy, I haven’t had my morning coffee, but I’ve seen your pathetic face every day for the last fourteen months, except when you’re on leave and disappear to God knows where, so I don’t have to visually confirm, secondarily confirm or otherwise confirm. Besides, you don’t know the password.”
“I must disagree, Lieutenant Valoppi. This is my duty shift, and I have lawful access to the password, which I memorized yesterday.” Billy takes back his ID card and carefully places it into a sleeve pocket which he zippers shut.
Valoppi shakes his head, tired of dealing with the little dweeb, but bored enough to want to have some fun. Behind him, two airmen at desks have stopped shuffling their papers to listen. “Oh yeah? All right, Riordan, if that’s really your name, I challenge! What’s the password of the day?”
“Sky King,” Billy answers.
“Wrong. Is your name Ivan? Are you some filthy Russian spy.”
“Nah,” says one of the airmen behind Valoppi. “The Russians are our pals.”
“Okay, smart guy, then who the hell’s the enemy?” Valoppi asks.
“How should I know?” the airman says. “I only work here.”
Billy is tapping on the window. “The password is Sky King. I’m never mistaken about—”
“Wrong!” Valoppi shouts, “because I just changed it. From now on, until they close this sucker down, the password is ‘bite me.’”
Annoyed, Billy stands silently at the window, waiting.
“Say it, Riordan.”
Still no response.
“You’re going to be late. Captain Puke won’t let you lead chapel services on Sunday, Billy boy.”
Billy shoots a nervous glance at his watch.
Valoppi smirks at him. “C’mon, say it.”
“Bite me,” Billy whispers.
“Can’t hear you,” Valoppi sings out.
“Bite me!”
Laughing, Valoppi hits a button, and the electronic latch opens on the steel door.
Billy pushes through the door and chugs at double time across the security bridge toward the elevator housing, an enclosed steel hood that shields the entrance to the elevator. Once there, he quickly punches the day code into the Permissive Action Link pad, and a reinforced steel door rumbles open. Billy steps inside, and the door closes.
The elevator is built to withstand earthquakes, direct hits by conventional weapons, and indirect hits by nuclear warheads, so it is a slow but solid ride down through the hard rock of Chugwater Mountain. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” Billy recites, looking into the lens of the TV camera overhead. “He causes me to lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He guides me in the path of righteousness for His name’s sake.”
The elevator comes to a smooth stop, the door opens, and Billy heads across the underground catwalk, his boots clacking across the steel steps. A sign warns, “No Lone Zone.”
Along the catwalk to the capsule, another sign is posted: “Safety first. There is no substitute for safety.” He can see the light from the launch control capsule fifty yards away. The blast door, required under Technical Order A-17 to be closed at all times, is open. As usual. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”
Billy wordlessly enters the launch control capsule and nods to his crewmate, Owens, who stands drinking coffee behind the two missileers about to go off duty. Owens’ sandy hair is cut close on the sides, but he’s let it grow on top. A cowlick in front gives him a Huckleberry Finn look. He yawns and watches the two missileers make entries in their log books. Sanders, the crew commander, is nicknamed Curly. He is a black 1st lieutenant with a shaved head. His teammate, Lauretta, is a female missileer, a 2nd lieutenant just overweight enough to be considered voluptuous by the men in the hole. Both are strapped into B-52 flight chairs, which are attached by rollers to a metal railing.
Lauretta, the deputy, sits directly in front of a series of olive green communications racks seven feet high. If the United States were under attack, she would have received the Emergency Action Message from the President or the National Command Authority by any of a variety of communications gear, some high tech, some still with a utilitarian, pre-computer age feel. Messages are received in code.
The decoding manual, the Sealed Authentication System in Air Force lingo, is located in a simple red metal box above her head. Sanders has a matching box and manual. Each box is secured with a combination padlock that would cost less than ten dollars at the local hardware store. The missile crew is unarmed, the .38 caliber revolvers of yesteryear having been mothballed. Contrary to popular myth, the guns were not intended to force a recalcitrant crewmate to turn the key. Rather, in the unlikely event that security was breached in the launch control capsule, they were to be used against trespassers, protesters or terrorists.
But it never happened.
Not once since the beginning of the ICBM program.
So now, the basic security at launch facilities is intended to protect airmen and equipment from deep penetrating enemy warheads, not from homegrown terrorists, though at this point, no one really believes that either danger is real.
The missile crews of the 1970’s and 1980’s had another explanation for the sidearms, one never found in the four hundred page launch manual called the T.O., or Technical Order. In the event of thermonuclear war, each U.S. launch facility would be targeted by one or more Russian ICBM’s. The launch control capsules are steel cylinders fifty feet long and twenty feet wide, their interior ceilings curved like old-fashioned lunch diners. They are buried deep in the rock and attached to the roof of underground caverns by four hydraulic jacks intended to act as shock absorbers. In the event of anything but a direct hit from a Russian SS-18, the capsule and the PK missile should still be operational for a counter-strike if one has not already been launched.
In theory.
As with nearly all evidence related to nuclear war, everything is theory, conjecture and supposition. The crew members could be injured or trapped inside a damaged capsule. A deep penetration ICBM would surely destroy the elevator shaft and seal the emergency Personnel Access Hatch, turning its insulation of sand into fused glass. The missileers who survived a direct hit would be trapped in their capsule. The sidearms, the missile crews concluded long ago, were to be used on themselves.
Now, Billy Riordan, the deputy on the next twenty-four hour duty, stands behind Lauretta. In front of her, the vintage 1965 teletype clacks out a message that will need to be decoded. It is surely one of an endless stream of tests. That is life in the hole, interminable preparation and repetition of routine procedures. Nothing, it seems, is ever real.
Lauretta tears off the teletype message and lays it to one side. It’s not an EAM, so there’s no possibility that the country will be at war in fifteen minutes. If it had been, she would be opening the padlock, grabbing the SAS manual, and decoding the message. Then, if it turned out to be a launch command, she would enter the six-digit Enable Code and the four-digit Preparatory Launch Command. In addition to the one PK just down the tunnel, they control another nine located in separate silos several miles away.
To launch, they would each take a key from the red boxes. After entering the Enable Code and the Prepatory Launch Command on their consoles, they would remove a plastic strip covering two keyholes, one in each console approximately twelve feet apart.
No Lone Zone. Even Shaq doesn’t have the wingspan to launch by himself.
They must turn, hold and release their keys simultaneously, or the launch command will not be accepted by the computer in the fourth stage of the PK. There is another safeguard, too, against a mistaken or renegade launch. Another capsule must enter the identical codes, a second “launch vote,” making the procedure double fail-safed.
“Hey, Owens,” Lauretta says. “They don’t pay overtime, so you can figure this one out.” She makes a paper airplane out of the teletype message and sails it to him. He catches it but makes no effort to unfold or read it.
“You sure you want me to? It’s probably a love letter from that major at Malmstrom.”
Lauretta ignores him and runs a quick check on the other communications gear, AFSAT, the link to the Air Force satellite system, SLFCS, the survivable low frequency system with underground wiring intended to withstand a nuclear blast, and SACDIN, a more modern digital network run by computer. There’s also the telephone with direct links to NORAD in Cheyenne Mountain, STRATCOM at Offut Air Force Base in Omaha, the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon, and the Alternate Command Center buried inside Raven Rock Mountain in Maryland, just in case the Pentagon has been obliterated by an enemy attack. The phone itself is something of a relic, a black, rotary dial model the likes of which are not seen on TV commercials extolling the virtues of AT&T versus MCI.
The launch facilities are like that. While the Minuteman III’s have computers and fancy monitors with on-screen commands, the Peacekeeper capsules still have the old lighted boards descended from the Titan project in the sixties. The irony is that the PK is the newer missile with greater range, accuracy and punch. In front of Sanders in the commander’s chair is a console festooned with multi-colored lights. Each light is emblazoned with its own descriptive term, the jargon, too, reaching back to the beginning of the missile program. “Strategic Alert,” “Standby,” “Missile Shutdown,” “Fault,” “LF Down,” “LF No Go,” “Enabled,” “Launch Command,” “Launch Inhibit,” “Launch in Progress,” “Missile Away,”
Beams sweep endlessly across Doppler radar screens, and security monitors attached to the capsule’s ceiling show live shots of the base above them as well as the PK missile three hundred yards down a tunnel from where they now sit.
Owens, who would have been a decent running back at Oklahoma if he hadn’t torn up a knee, leans on the back of Sanders’ chair. “Get your rocks off today Curly?”
“Day ain’t over yet,” Sanders says.
Owens watches the digital clock on the console change from 0759 to 0800. “Now it is.”
Sanders and Lauretta unbuckle their harnesses, and Owens finishes his coffee. “Ain’t fair, Curly. How come I’m stuck with Bible Billy while you get Miss Intercontinental Ballistic Boobs?”
Lauretta kicks her flight chair down the railing and bangs into Owens’ leg. “Hey!” he cries out.
Lauretta jabs a finger into his chest. “Because spending twenty-four hours with you, Owens, would be cruel and unusual punishment.”
“Okay, okay,” Owens says, raising his hands in surrender. “Jeez, a guy can’t even joke around anymore. Right Billy?”
“Not in the hole,” Billy answers. “‘Missileers shall maintain a constant state of readiness. Space Command frowns upon non-service related activities such as playing cards, personal conversation, and horseplay.’”
“Not to mention farting when the vent fan’s down,” Owens adds.
Sanders and Lauretta remove their combination locks from the red boxes, then Owens and Billy fasten on their own. “See you guys,” Owens says. “And be careful, it’s hell up there.” In a moment, Sanders and Lauretta are gone, heading across the catwalk toward the elevator.
Billy and Owens buckle themselves into the flight seats, and Billy hits a button. With a pneumatic whoosh, the blast door begins to close. The door weighs eight tons and is solid steel, four feet thick. Five steel pins, the size of fireplace logs, are recessed into the door and extend into ports in the wall to seal off the capsule. A separate latch on the door locks the pins into place. Until recently, the door opened and closed with a hand air pump, it taking nearly a full minute to operate. In recent renovations, a button on the deputy’s console operates the pump, but it still takes nearly thirty seconds for the pins to insert or retract and the giant door to move.
“I knew you were going to do that,” Owens says.
“What?”
“Seal the blast door.”
“It’s in the T.O. You’re supposed—”
“I know what’s in the regs, Billy. But if we ever got an order to launch, or if incoming were headed this way, don’t you think we’d have time to punch that button and close the damn door?”
“That’s not the point. We’re trained to do exactly as we’re taught. If we foul u
p the little things, then the—”
“My point is, I hate feeling like a sardine in here.”
“I’m sorry, but I feel strongly about this.”
“That’s what I love about you, Billy,” Owens says. “You are so damn predictable.”
-14-
The Race
Stripped to his boxer shorts, Jack Jericho swats at a mosquito that has targeted his neck as ground zero. “Skeeters biting better than the trout,” he says to himself. Behind him, Devil’s Tower radiates a prism of colors from the morning sun.
Bending over the stream, Jericho fills his helmet with water, then props it upside down between two rocks in the blazing fire. He cuts long, thin slices of tannic tree bark with his survival knife and drops them into the helmet. As the concoction boils, he cuts sturdy four-foot long branches from a pine tree, then lashes them together with twine. Along the embankment, he finds a half-buried Styrofoam cooler, its bottom punched out.
“Tourists,” he says derisively.
He takes the cooler and ties it to the cross-section of branches, then carefully lifts his helmet from the rocks and cools it in the stream. Finally, he dips his fingers into the helmet and streaks the orange liquid across his face and body.
Digging into his rucksack, Jericho grabs the jug of moonshine and works out the cork with his thumb. He puts the jug to his lips but it’s dry. Staring in disbelief at the empty jug, he sighs, “Was it good for you, too?”
* * *
Ten miles downstream from Jack’s campsite, Sayers and Reynolds stand on a bridge, urinating into the tumbling water fifteen feet below.
“Ow, that river’s cold,” Reynolds says with a laugh.
“Yep, and deep, too,” Sayers boasts.
They zip up and lean on the bridge railing, looking upstream. Reynolds lights a cigarette. Sayers pops the top on a beer and slaps at a mosquito on his neck, squashing it in a tiny pool of blood.