With a startled cry of terror, she suddenly tripped and fell headlong to the floor.
As she started to scramble up she saw she’d tripped over a grate into which the stream was draining. Beneath the grate was only darkness. She looked at the onrushing fire, and her eyebrows singed, her face broke into oozing blisters. The air was unbreathable. There was no time to get up and run; the fire was almost upon her.
She gripped the bars of the grate and wrenched upward. One of the grate’s rusted screws snapped, but the second held tight.
The flames were less than forty feet away, and Sister Creep’s hair caught fire.
God help me! she screamed inwardly, and she pulled upward on the grate so hard she felt her shoulders almost rip loose from their sockets.
The second screw snapped.
Sister Creep flung the grate aside, had a second to grab her bag, then lunged headfirst into the hole.
She fell about four feet into a coffin-sized space that held eight inches of water.
The flames passed overhead, sucking the air from her lungs and scorching every inch of her exposed skin. Her clothes burst into flame, and she rolled frantically in the water. For a few seconds there was nothing but the roaring and the agony, and she smelled the odor of hot dogs being boiled in a vendor’s cart.
The wall of fire moved on like a comet, and in its wake returned a whooosh of outside air that carried the thick smell of charred flesh and molten metal.
Down in the hole that fed drainage water to a sewer pipe, Sister Creep’s body hitched and contorted. Three inches of water had risen as mist and evaporated, blunting the full force of the fire. Her burned, tattered body struggled for a breath, and finally gasped and sputtered, the blistered hands tightly gripping her smoldering canvas bag.
And then she lay still.
Eight
The greeter
8:31 A.M. Mountain Daylight Time
Blue Dome Mountain, Idaho
The steady buzzing of the telephone on the table beside his bed brought the man up from a dreamless sleep. Go away, he thought. Leave me alone. But the buzzing continued, and finally he slowly turned over, switched on the lamp and, squinting in the light, picked up the receiver. “Macklin,” he said, his voice slurred and sleepy.
“Uh… Colonel, sir?” It was Sergeant Schorr. “I’ve got some people in orientation waiting to meet you, sir.”
Colonel James “Jimbo” Macklin looked at the little green alarm clock next to the phone and saw he was more than thirty minutes late for the orientation and hand-shaking session. Damn it to Hell! he thought. I set that alarm for 0630 sharp! “All right, Sergeant. Keep them there another fifteen minutes.” He hung up and then checked the back of the alarm clock; he saw that the little lever was still pressed down. Either he’d never set the alarm or he’d turned it off in his sleep. He sat on the edge of the bed, trying to summon the energy to get up, but his body felt sluggish and bloated; years ago, he mused grimly, he’d never needed an alarm clock to wake him: He could’ve been snapped out of sleep by the sound of a footstep in wet grass and he would’ve been as alert as a wolf within seconds.
Passing time, he thought. Long gone.
He willed himself to stand up. Willed himself to walk across the bedroom, its walls decorated with photographs of Phantom and Thunderchief jets in flight, and walked into the small bathroom. He switched on the light and ran water into the sink; it came out rusty. He splashed the water on his face, dried himself with a towel and stood staring bleary-eyed at the stranger in the mirror.
Macklin stood six foot two, and until five or six years ago his body had been lean and hard, his ribs covered with muscle, his shoulders strong and straight, his chest thrust out like Chobham armor on the snout of an M-1 tank. Now the definitions of his body were blurred by loose flesh, and his potbelly resisted the fifty situps he did every morning—that is, when he had time to do them. He detected a stoop in his shoulders, as if he were being bowed by an invisible weight, and the hair on his chest was sprinkled with gray. His biceps, once rock-hard, had deteriorated into flab. He’d once broken the neck of a Libyan soldier in the crook of his arm; now he didn’t feel as if he had the strength to crack a walnut with a sledgehammer.
He plugged in his electric razor and guided it over the stubble on his jaw. His dark brown hair was clipped in a severe crewcut, showing flecks of gray at the temples; beneath a square slab of a forehead, his eyes were frosty blue and sunken in deep hollows of fatigue, like bits of ice floating on muddy water. As he shaved Macklin thought that his face had come to resemble any one of the hundreds of battlefield maps he’d pored over long ago: the jutting cliff of his chin leading to the rugged ravine of his mouth, up to the highlands of his chiseled cheekbones and the craggy ridge of his nose, down again into the swamps of his eyes, then an upward sweep into the brown forests of his thick eyebrows. And all the terrain marks were there, as well: the pockmark craters of the severe acne he’d had as an adolescent, the small trench of a scar zigzagging through his left eyebrow, compliments of a ricocheting bullet in Angola. Across his left shoulder blade was a deeper and longer scar carved by a knife in Iraq, and a reminder of a Viet Cong bullet puckered the skin over the right side of his rib cage. Macklin was forty-four years old, but sometimes he awakened feeling seventy, with shooting pains in his arms and legs from bones that had been broken in battles on distant shores.
He finished shaving and drew aside the shower curtain to run the water, then he stopped, because littering the bottom of the small shower stall were ceiling tiles and bits of rubble. Water was dripping from a series of holes where the shower stall ceiling had given way. As he stared at the leaking water, realizing he was running late and could not take a shower, anger suddenly rose within him like molten iron in a blast furnace; he slammed his fist against the wall once, and then again; the second time, the force of his blow left a network of minute cracks.
He leaned over the sink, waiting for the rage to pass, as it usually did. “Steady,” he told himself. “Discipline and control. Discipline and control.” He repeated it a few more times, like a mantra, drew a long, deep breath and straightened up. Time to go, he thought. They’re waiting for me. He used his stick deodorant under his arms, then went out to the bedroom closet to choose his uniform.
He picked a pair of crisply pressed dark blue trousers, a light blue shirt and his beige poplin flight jacket with leather patches on the elbows and MACKLIN printed across the breast pocket. He reached up to the overhead shelf, where he kept a case containing his Ingram gun and ammo clips, and lovingly took his Air Force colonel’s cap down; he brushed an imaginary bit of lint off the polished brim and put the cap on his head. He checked himself in the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door: buttons polished, check; trousers creased, check; shoes shining, check. He straightened his collar, and then he was ready to go.
His private electric cart was parked outside his quarters on the Command Center Level; he locked his door with one of the many keys he carried on a key chain, then got into the cart and drove along the corridor. Behind him, past his own quarters, was the sealed metal door of the weapons storage room and the emergency food and water supply. Down at the other end of the corridor, past the quarters of other Earth House technicians and employees, was the generator room and the air-filtration system controls. He passed the door of Perimeter Control, which contained the screens of the small portable battlefield surveillance radars set out to guard the entry to Earth House, and the main screen of the skyward-trained radar dish that sat atop Blue Dome Mountain. Within Perimeter Control was also the hydraulic system that sealed the air vents and the lead-lined doorway in the event of a nuclear attack, and the various radar screens were manned around the clock.
Macklin guided the cart up a ramp to the next level and headed for the Town Hall. He passed the open doors of the gymnasium, where an aerobics class was in session. A few morning joggers were running in the corridor, and Macklin nodded at them as he sped past. Then he
was in the wider corridor of Earth House’s Town Square, a junction of hallways with a rock garden at its center. All around were various “shops” with storefronts made to resemble those in a country town. Earth House’s Town Square contained a tanning salon, a theater where videotaped movies were shown, a library, an infirmary staffed by a doctor and two nurses, a game arcade and a cafeteria. Macklin caught the aroma of bacon and eggs as he drove past the cafeteria’s doors and wished he’d had time for breakfast. It was not his way to be late. Discipline and control, he thought. Those were the two things that made a man.
But he was still angry about the collapsed ceiling in his shower stall. Lately, it seemed that the walls and ceiling in several areas of Earth House were cracking and giving way. He’d called the Ausley brothers many times, but they’d told him the structural reports showed settling was to be expected. Settling, my ass! Macklin had said. We’ve got a water drainage problem here! Water’s collecting over the ceilings and leaking through!
“Don’t get yourself in a dither, Colonel,” Donny Ausley had told him from San Antonio. “If you get nervous, them folks are gonna get nervous, right? And there ain’t no sense in gettin’ nervous, ’cause that mountain’s been standing for a few thousand years, and it ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
“It’s not the mountain!” Macklin had said, his fist tightening around the receiver. “It’s the tunnels! My cleanup crews are finding new cracks every day!”
“Settlin’, that’s all. Now listen, Terry and me have pumped ’bout ten million big ones into that place, and we built it to last. If we didn’t have bidness to run, we’d be right there with you. Now, that far underground, you’re gonna have some settlin’ and water leaks. Ain’t no way ’round it. And we’re payin’ you one hundred thousand dollars a year to endorse Earth House and live down there, you bein’ a big war hero and all. So you fix them cracks and keep everybody happy.”
“You listen, Mr. Ausley: If I don’t get a structural engineer to look this place over within a week, I’m leaving. I don’t give a damn about my contract. I’m not going to encourage people to stay down here if it’s not safe!”
“I believe,” Donny Ausley had said, his Texas accent getting a few degrees cooler, “you’d better calm yourself down, Colonel. Now, you don’t want to walk out on a bidness deal. That ain’t good manners. You just ’member how Terry and me found you and brought you along ’fore you start flyin’ off the handle, okay?”
Discipline and control! Macklin had thought, his heart hammering. Discipline and control! And then he’d listened as Donny Ausley had told him he’d send an engineer up from San Antone within two weeks to go over Earth House with a fine-tooth comb. “But meantime, you’re head honcho. You got a problem, you fix it. Right?”
And that had been almost a month ago. The structural engineer had never come.
Colonel Macklin stopped his cart near a pair of double doors. Above the doors was the sign TOWN HALL in ornate, old-timey lettering. Before he went in, he tightened his belt another notch, though the trousers were already squeezed around his midsection; then he drew himself up tall and straight and entered the auditorium.
About a dozen people sat in the red vinyl seats that faced the podium, where Captain Warner was answering questions and pointing out features of Earth House on the wall map displayed behind him. Sergeant Schorr, who stood ready to field the more difficult questions, saw the colonel enter and quickly stepped to the podium’s microphone. “Excuse me, Captain,” he said, interrupting an explanation about the plumbing and water-filtration system. “Folks, I want to introduce you to someone who certainly needs no introduction: Colonel James Barnett Macklin.”
The colonel continued at a crisp pace along the center aisle as the audience applauded. He took his place behind the podium, framed by an American flag and the flag of Earth House, and looked out at the gallery. The applause went on, and a middle-aged man in a camouflage combat jacket rose to his feet, followed by his similarly dressed wife; then all of them were standing and applauding, and Macklin let it continue for another fifteen seconds before he thanked them and asked them to be seated.
Captain “Teddybear” Warner, a husky ex-Green Beret who’d lost his left eye to a grenade in the Sudan and now wore a black patch, took a seat behind the colonel, and Schorr sat beside him. Macklin paused, gathering in his mind what he was going to say; he usually gave the same welcoming speech to all the new arrivals at Earth House, told them how secure the place was and how it would be the last American fortress when the Russians invaded. Afterward, he took their questions, shook their hands and signed a few autographs. That was what the Ausley boys paid him for.
He looked into their eyes. They were used to nice, clean beds, sweet-smelling bathrooms and roast beef on Sunday afternoons. Drones, he thought. They lived to breed and eat and shit, and they thought they knew all about freedom and loyalty and courage—but they didn’t know the first thing about those attributes. He cast his gaze over the faces, saw nothing but softness and weakness; these were people who thought they’d sacrifice their wives and husbands, infant children, homes and all their possessions as the price of keeping the Russian filth off our shores, but they would not, because their spirits were weak and their brains were corrupted by mental junk food. And here they were, like all the others, waiting for him to tell them they were true patriots.
He wanted to open his mouth and tell them to get the hell out of Earth House, that the place was structurally unsound and that they—the weak-willed losers!—ought to go home and cower in their basements. Jesus Christ! he thought. What the hell am I doing here?
Then a mental voice, like the sound of a cracking bullwhip, said, Discipline and control! Shape up, mister!
It was the voice of the Shadow Soldier. Macklin closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them, he was staring into the face of a bony, fragile-looking boy sitting in the second row between his father and mother. A good strong wind would knock that kid to the ground, he decided, but he paused, examining the boy’s pale gray eyes. He thought he recognized something in those eyes—determination, cunning, willpower—that he remembered from pictures of himself at that age, when he was a fat, clumsy slob that his Air Force captain father had kicked in the ass at every opportunity.
Of all of them sitting before me, he thought, that skinny kid might have a chance. The others were dogmeat.
He braced himself and started giving the orientation speech with as much enthusiasm as if he were digging a latrine ditch.
As Colonel Macklin spoke Roland Croninger examined him with intent interest. The colonel was a lot heavier than the photographs in Soldier of Fortune, and he looked sleepy and bored. Roland was disappointed; he’d expected a trim and hungry war hero, not a used car salesman dressed up in military duds. It was hard to believe that this was the same man who had shot down three MiGs over the Thanh Hoa Bridge to save a buddy’s crippled plane and then had ejected from a disintegrating aircraft.
Rip-off, Roland decided. Colonel Macklin was a rip-off, and he was beginning to think Earth House might be a rip-off, as well. That morning he’d awakened to find a dark water stain on his pillow; the ceiling was leaking from a crack two inches wide. There had been no hot water from the shower head, and the cold water was full of grit and rust. His mother had thrown a fit about not being able to get her hair clean, and his father had said he’d mention the problem to Sergeant Schorr.
Roland was fearful of setting up his computer because the air in his bedroom was so damp, and his first impression of Earth House as a neat-o medieval-type fortress was wearing thin. Of course, he’d brought books to read—tomes on Machiavelli and Napoleon and a study of medieval siege warfare—but he’d counted on programming some new dungeons for his King’s Knight game while he was here. King’s Knight was his own creation—128K of an imaginary world shattered into feudal kingdoms at war with one another. Now it looked as if he was going to have to read all the time!
He watched Colonel Macklin. Macklin�
��s eyes were lazy, and his face was fat. He looked like an old bull that had been put out to pasture because he couldn’t get it up anymore. But as Macklin’s eyes met his and held for a couple of seconds before they slid away again, Roland was reminded of a picture he’d seen of Joe Louis when the boxing champion had been a Las Vegas hotel greeter. In that picture, Joe Louis looked flabby and tired, but he had one massive hand clasped around the frail white hand of a tourist, and Joe Louis’ eyes were hard and dark and somewhere far away—maybe back in the ring, remembering the feel of a blow slammed against another man’s midsection almost to the backbone. Roland thought that the same distant stare was in Colonel Macklin’s eyes, and, just as you knew Joe Louis could’ve smashed the bones in that tourist’s hand with one quick squeeze, Roland sensed that the warrior within Colonel Macklin was not yet dead.
As Macklin’s address continued the wall telephone beside the display map buzzed. Sergeant Schorr got up and answered it; he listened for a few seconds, hung the receiver up and started back across the platform toward the colonel. Roland thought that something in Schorr’s face had been altered in the time he was on the telephone; Schorr appeared older now, and his face was slightly flushed. He said, “Excuse me, Colonel,” and he placed his hand over the microphone.
Macklin’s head snapped around, his eyes angry at the interruption.
“Sir,” Schorr said quietly, “Sergeant Lombard says you’re needed in Perimeter Control.”
“What is it?”
“He wouldn’t say, sir. I think… he sounded pretty damned shaken.”
Crap! Macklin thought. Lombard got “shaken” every time the radar picked up a flock of geese or an airliner passing overhead. Once they’d sealed Earth House because Lombard thought a group of hang gliders were enemy paratroopers. Still, Macklin would have to check it out. He motioned for Captain Warner to follow him, and then he told Schorr to dismiss the orientation after they’d gone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Macklin said into the microphone, “I’m going to have to leave you now to take care of a small problem, but I hope to see each of you later this afternoon at the newcomers’ reception. Thank you for your attention.” And then he stalked up the aisle with Captain Warner right behind him.
1987 - Swan Song v4 Page 8