Ballistic

by Paul Levine

  * * *

  In stunned silence, the brass watches the Big Board flash with the words, “LAUNCH SEQUENCE IN PROGRESS.” The computerized voice is calm as ever, a housewife reciting her grocery list. “Generators activated. Launch in ninety seconds. Confidence is high.”

  “Lionel, if you have any bright ideas, you might pass them on just now,” General Corrigan says.

  In his wheelchair, the professor stares vacantly at the board. He gives no sign of having heard the general but begins speaking softly. “I was there, Hugh.”

  “What? Where?”

  “I was there at Eniwetok in ‘52 when we detonated the first hydrogen fusion bomb. I was there with the Teapot Committee and I was there when we needed to reduce the weight of the payloads just to get the birds to fly. I was there when the Army still thought missiles were fancy artillery shells and couldn’t imagine why we needed an ICBM program. I did it, you know. I did it all for thirty-eight years.”

  “And now it’s come to this,” the general says.

  “It’s not the way I planned it,” Lionel Morton says. “You know, back in the fifties and sixties, I always hoped we’d use the missiles. Hell, I prayed that we’d use them when we had clear nuclear superiority. I know that sounds…” He pauses. “Inhumane.”

  “Insane is more like it, Lionel.”

  “I didn’t want an all-out war. No attacks on their cities. Preventive deterrence. A limited strike on the Russian missile fields plus simultaneous hits on their bomber bases. Then a demand for total unilateral nuclear disarmament or we’d finish them off.”

  “We’d have to,” Corrigan says, “because they’d have come at us with everything they had left.”

  “We could debate that all day, Hugh, but you’re missing my point.”

  “Which is?”

  “Now that’s it happening, I can see that I was wrong. I can see it all now. God forgive me, I was wrong.”

  * * *

  In the waterlogged sump, the pumps are throbbing. Generators drive heated gases through thick, insulated tubes into the missile canister. Rising water in the silo roils like a stormy sea.

  On the missile’s nose cone, both Jericho and David – tangled in the rope – can hear the driving force of the pumps. It seems to vitalize David, and he unleashes a series of punches. Jericho fights back, but the endless night has taken its toll.

  David gets a grip on the rope and pulls, spinning Jericho hard into the nose cone. Then he yanks the rope the other direction, and it gets stuck in the clip attached to Jericho’s tool belt. “Jack be nimble!” David cries out, yanking again on the rope, bending the clip, then breaking it. The rope spins free of the tool belt. “Jack be quick!” One more tug, the rope comes loose from Jericho’s waist. He tries to grab the end but misses and plummets toward the water. “Jack fell off the candlestick!” David shouts triumphantly.

  The surging water is fifteen feet deep, lapping at the rocket burners, suspended off the silo floor. In the confined space of the silo, the water sloshes against the walls like breaking waves on a pier.

  Jericho hits the surface and goes under. He touches bottom, bounces back up to the surface, takes a breath, and is swept under again by the tug of a whirlpool. Like an underwater tornado, the water swirls downward into an open drain. Jericho tries to swim against the surge, but it’s useless. He is sucked into the drain and driven by the force of the water into the flooded sump.

  He kicks and paddles but mostly is just propelled by the force of the water, deeper into the channel. The walls seem to press in on him. His shoulder strikes a duct, and he bounces into a web of piping where he becomes stuck. He struggles in the dark, cold water, but cannot free himself.

  Underwater.

  Lungs ready to burst.

  A miner in a flooded shaft.

  Crushed by a timber.

  Waiting to die.

  Jack Jericho has become his father.

  -57-

  The Morning Star

  The second explosion rocks the underground cavern and sets loose a choking cloud of dust. The powerful Semtex jars the blast door, and a burly N.C.O. pries it open with a crowbar. The lieutenant leads six Green Berets into the launch control capsule. The first two inside roughly yank James and Rachel from their flight chairs.

  “It’s too late!” Susan Burns cries out. “The launch is activated. When the gases reach full pressure, the missile will go.”

  “How do we abort?” the lieutenant demands.

  James looks up from his position on the floor. “You don’t. Once the key is turned, it’s too late.” James gives him a sickly smile and sings out, “Sor-ry.”

  The lieutenant kicks him in the ribs with a hard-toed combat boot. The computer’s voice says, “Launch in sixty seconds.”

  The lieutenant looks up at a security monitor. A camera halfway up the silo wall is panning from the floor where the gases beat the gushing water into a seething foam. The camera pivots skyward, up the length of the missile. There at the top, a man is tangled in a rope. He seems to struggle, and at first the lieutenant thinks the man is trying to get free so he can leap from the nose cone to the gantry. But then it becomes clear.

  The man is tying the rope tighter. He wraps it around his legs and loops it over the nose of the missile, pulling it taut, then knotting it.

  “Who the fuck is that?” the lieutenant asks.

  With tears in her eyes, Rachel answers, “The Messiah.”

  “Yeah? Well, he looks like hood ornament to me.”

  * * *

  A torrent of water that began its journey in Chugwater Dam, then spilled down the mountain and cascaded into the silo, now surges through the drainage sump. Compressed into the channel, it picks up speed, tearing at ductwork, breaking Jericho out of the web of piping, and carrying him farther away from the silo. There is nowhere to go but where the water will take him. The channel reaches an incline where the water slows and becomes more shallow. Out of breath and barely conscious, Jericho reaches up, grabs an overhanging pipe and pulls his head above the water.

  He drinks in a series of short breaths and hangs there, gasping.

  And thinking.

  He can let the slowing water carry him farther into the sump, away from the silo. Which is what he should do. Get out of harm’s way before the missile blows.

  He tried to stop it. There’s nothing more he can do.

  He thought he was going to die, but now he knows, he can survive this. No one could blame him for running now.

  No one.

  Except himself. He’s run before. He was frightened then. Afraid to die. If heroism is acting courageously in the face of fear, what he is about to do isn’t heroic at all. He is a man without fear, something he has not been for a long time. Unafraid to die, he is nonetheless a man with a purpose for living. And that, too, is something he has not been for a long time.

  Jericho turns back toward the silo, fighting the current, which tears at him and tumbles him backward into the water. He gets up and struggles on, desperately pulling ahead on pipes and conduits. The water deepens as he gets closer to the silo, filling the channel, and his head bangs against the ceiling. He has no choice but to go under. He takes a breath and exhales, sucks in another breath, and dives under, kicking hard, swimming against the current, pulling himself along on scaffolding and floor-mounted equipment. He blows out some dead air, feels the ache in his lungs, kicks harder, and keeps going. He swims up through the open drain and into the silo where he bobs to the surface and takes in a long breath.

  The water is twenty feet deep now, extending ten feet up the suspended missile, which bobs in its cables. The steaming gases continue to fill the canister. The propulsion launch can only be seconds away, he knows. He kicks out of a swirling whirlpool, swims alongside the missile, reaches up and grabs the umbilical cord that hangs from the fourth stage. He pulls on the umbilical and steadies himself, then hangs there, half in the water, half out. Does he even have time to climb up the cord to get to the comp
uter box? If he makes it, how will he get the box open?

  He sees David above him, lashed to the nose cone. Jericho looks at his own hands. He holds the umbilical, the spinal cord of the missile, where even now, final digital instructions are being fed to the MGCS from the launch control capsule’s computer. On the gantry, he couldn’t reach it. On the floor of the silo, same thing. But now, lifted by the water, here it is. If only there is enough time.

  Jericho grabs the saw-toothed survival knife from the sheath on his leg and begins frantically cutting through the thick rubber casing to a mass of colorful wires underneath.

  * * *

  In the STRATCOM War Room, no one speaks as the computerized voice calmly announces, “Propulsion steady. Pressure three hundred pounds per square inch. Launch in fifteen seconds. Systems go. Confidence is high. Ten seconds, nine, eight, seven…”

  * * *

  Jericho saws away at the umbilical, cutting deeper through the web of wires, down to the last, thin filaments, which he severs just as…

  Whoosh! The rocket erupts skyward, bursting from the water and out of the silo with incredible speed.

  The roiling water propels Jericho to the bottom, sweeps him into the vortex of an underwater maelstrom. He smashes against the silo floor, spins a dizzying circle under water and is driven to the surface, then hard into the steel ladder on the silo wall, where he desperately clings to a rung as the water surges over him.

  * * *

  From the perimeter of Base Camp Alpha, Colonel Henry Zwick watches through binoculars, and what a sight. Against the first light of dawn, the sleek black missile soars above the waterfall pouring into the silo. “Mother of mercy,” he whispers to himself.

  Trailed by a blast of steam, the missile seems to hang in the air for a moment.

  Motionless, as if deciding on its own, whether to fly or…

  The missile pitches over and drops back to earth, splashing down into the river that once again flows through the missile base and onward into the valley. The missile picks up speed in the current, bouncing down a series of rapids in the shallow water, now tinted red by the rising sun.

  * * *

  The Big Board shows a computer simulation of the PK lifting off, and then, the impotent missile simply drops back to earth. A technician in a headset stands at his console, “No first stage ignition! No flame! The bird is down! The bird is down!”

  A second of quiet relief. Then jubilation. The officers slap each other on the back as if their genius resulted in the triumph. General Corrigan walks around, thanking his staff. Nervous laughter. Locker room congratulations. “We had’em all the way.” The celebration is still going when the technician sits back down at his console. Watching the monitor, he hits a few keys. His brow is furrowed. “General,” he calls out. “You’d better have a look at this.”

  * * *

  Dazed and bleeding, Jack Jericho climbs the steel ladder toward the lip of the silo. He can see the contrails in the sky above him, but he knows it is merely a steam trail. He would have heard the rockets explode to life if there had been ignition. He would have seen the burst of orange flame from the first stage of the rocket, would have been scorched by its heat.

  He knows the missile is down, and reason tells him, it is dead. The warheads would not have armed until the missile was on its ballistic descent. Reason tells him that David is dead, too. But a feeling of utter dread tells him something else. Other than the nightmares that peered into his own past, Jack Jericho never had a vision. Now, he does not so much see as feel. He feels the malefic presence of David Morton and can nearly sense his derisive laughter. A wave of fear sweeps over Jericho. For he knows, without knowing how, that David is alive.

  * * *

  The missile spins lazily in the water. As it completes a revolution, David becomes visible, still lashed to the nose cone. Blood flows from his mouth and ears. His arms are spread wide, his feet are together – a watery crucifixion. He appears dead, but slowly his eyes open and his lips move. The missile bounces off a shallow rock, then lodges between two boulders.

  He sees the vision again, the flow of grayish white. Sees it more clearly than before. It is not a banner blowing in the wind, as he had thought. It is a great river, moving slowly at first, still and shallow, then surging forward, faster and rougher, until it plunges over a great waterfall.

  “The bomb leadeth me beside the still waters,” he recites. “It restoreth my soul.”

  * * *

  General Corrigan stands behind the technician at the console. Professor Morton motors over and wedges the wheelchair between two officers at the general’s side. The female mechanical voice intones, “Air burst programmed at five thousand feet. Detonation in seven minutes.”

  “What the hell’s going on!” the general demands.

  The technician bangs his keyboard in frustration. “The computer thinks the missile’s in flight, and it’s armed the warheads.”

  “That’s impossible!” Professor Morton yells. “I designed the accelerometers myself. They’re interfaced with the Environmental Sensing Devices. Unless they detect that the missile has left the earth’s atmosphere, then re-entered, there can be no detonation. I designed it to prevent us from blowing up Denver or Salt Lake City.”

  “You might have designed it that way, professor,” the technician says, “but there must have been a defect. The missile thinks it’s on ballistic descent to the target. The fusing system already sent a test signal to the firing system, which relayed the signal to the firing circuits. The MIRV’s are armed. When they think they’re at five thousand feet, they’re going to detonate, all ten of them.”

  Professor Morton looks at the general, seeking support. “Hugh, I’m telling you, it’s not possible.”

  “Air burst in six minutes,” the computer’s voice says, blandly.

  General Corrigan clasps the professor by the shoulder. It is a gesture both of long friendship and sadness. “You always said that the machines worked, Lionel. Only the men were defective. Have you forgotten who made the machines?”

  * * *

  Jack Jericho is nearly swept off the ladder by the waterfall that gushes over him. Climbing the last few rungs through the downpour, he does not see the man standing on the lip of the silo, bracing himself on a stanchion.

  Jericho pulls himself over the last rung and finds himself staring straight into the savage face of Gabriel. The commando, who should have died a dozen deaths, is badly injured. Blood oozes from several wounds. Two bandoliers of shells criss-cross his chest. Under a torn shirt, a dented forty millimeter grenadier vest is visible. It took the brunt of the kill shots to the sternum and over the heart. Gabriel aims a bulky M-60 machine gun at Jericho’s midsection. “Prepare to meet your Maker, son of Satan.”

  Jericho is oddly calm, though he knows the massive gun will cut him in two. “My father’s name was William, and he was the best man I ever knew.”

  “Then join him in hell!”

  Blam! Shot between the eyes, Gabriel topples sideways into the silo, disappearing in the foam and mist of the waterfall.

  Standing eighty yards away on the river bank, Captain Kyle Clancy lowers his scoped M-16.

  “Stay there!” he yells at Jericho. “We’ll come get you.”

  “No time!” Jericho yells back. “Gotta go!”

  Go where, Clancy wonders. The sergeant looks like one of those victims of a Midwestern flood, stranded in the middle of a river that shouldn’t be there at all. Now what the hell is he up to?

  Jericho dives into the swift-flowing current. The captain stares incredulously. “Oh, shit!” The current takes Jericho closer to the shore, and Clancy tosses a rope to him. It falls short, but it wouldn’t matter anyway because Jericho makes no attempt to grab it. Clancy watches Jericho body surf down the rapids, slamming into rocks, bouncing off fallen trees. Clancy winces with each jolt.

  * * *

  Jericho can see the missile lodged between two boulders. In the distance, he hears the ro
ar of tumbling water. He kicks and paddles, doing the West Virginia version of the Australian crawl, something learned long ago in water-filled limestone quarries. Just as he grabs the trailing umbilical cord, the missile works itself free of the boulders and continues down river. As the missile picks up speed, Jericho crawls up the cord, hand-over-hand.

  Once aboard, he works his way up toward the nose cone where David lies sprawled on his back, entangled in the ropes. His face is a deathly gray, his eyes closed. Blood is caked in his ears, his nose, and in the corners of his eyes. His face a battered mess. Suddenly, in a rasping voice that reminds Jericho of a rattlesnake, David says, “Sergeant Jericho, my favorite janitor.”

  Scrambling on all fours up the rubberized fuselage, Jericho approaches him.

  “I knew you would come, sergeant. I saw it. But why did you come?”

  “To make sure you were dead. To kill you, if you weren’t.”

  David’s hacking gurgle of a laugh brings a pink bubble of blood to his lips. “Can you hear the heart of the beast, Jericho?”

  The missile rotates slowly in the water, and Jericho has to grab the ropes to hang on. The roar of rushing water grows louder. “What are you talking about?”

  “The bomb lives!” David proclaims. “Hear its Word.”

  Stunned, Jericho slides over to the computer box and puts an ear to the cold metal. He hears the unmistakable clickety-click of the computer.

  “As the sound picks up tempo, we approach detonation, Jericho. Surely you know that. I would say we have less than three minutes. But have no fear. You can live forever at the foot of my throne.”

  “Your throne will be a pyre in hell,” Jericho says, taking the knife from the sheath on his leg. He begins working on the one remaining bolt in the computer box but can’t get enough purchase and the knife slips off.