“I said, are you ready?” Patton repeated louder to Stone, as he stepped harder on the gas pedal. “Ready to hear the next step, the next stage on our road to total victory?”
“Yes, General,” Stone said, turning and trying to focus his eyes on the man. “And anxious to know every detail.”
“There’s a meeting going to happen, Stone, a meeting of nearly all the Mafia, biker gangs and warlords for the whole Rocky Mountain and Plains area. A meeting scheduled for two days from now. They have one every year to work out inter-gang problems, pay each other off—take care of their slimy business. If we could take out that entire crew at one stroke, we could take control of an immense area of land—nearly seven states in a matter of weeks, rather than the years it would take with town-by-town fighting between our forces and each little chapter of the bastards out there. No, I’m going to take them all at once, Stone, grab them up in my hands.” He gripped the wheel of the half-track with white-knuckled fists. “And squeeze them until the flesh on their bodies turns to pulp, until they melt before me.”
“Sounds like a great idea,” Stone said, sitting up straight in the leather seat of the half-track, trying to sound as enthusiastic about the flesh-squeezing idea as possible. “Huh… just how are you going to attack, sir?” Stone asked a little hesitantly, not sure how the general would take to his pet project being questioned. “I’ve seen some of their forces; they’re pretty well armed. I would imagine at a convention of that size they would be extremely well protected. I wonder if your Third Army is ready to take on an army nearly as large as itself at this stage in time.”
“Precisely,” Patton said, glancing at Stone, his eyes burning like blue laser rubies again. “My realization exactly. Except for one thing, Stone, my ace in the hole. My way to melt the sons-of-bitches down to ash without losing a single one of my own.”
“You keep saying melt, General,” Stone said curiously. “What do you have in mind—setting the convention site on fire?”
“On fire.” Patton laughed. “Yes, you might say that. A fire that will cleanse with utter purity, will leave a clean slate upon which to build.” He squinted at the weaving road ahead as they hit a sudden deep crack and bounced over it, flying through the air on one side for a second or two and then landing with a thud. “You’ll see soon enough, Stone. See what our ace in the hole is.”
He drove for about an hour and Stone vaguely kept track of where they were going, mentally noting a particular rock formation off to the side, or a group of trees configured a certain way on the semi-mountainous terrain around them. Suddenly they were there—wherever there was—and Patton slowed as he came to what Stone could only make out as a patch of darkness. Lights snapped on in front of them and gruff voices yelled out challenges as Stone heard the safetys of at least two machine guns being switched off. Then whoever was in the darkness saw the general and a flurry of feet came from behind the searchlights as a gate was opened. As they drove on Stone could see they were inside a protected area approximately a hundred feet in diameter and dead ahead of them was a large cone-shaped piece of steel built on top of a concrete square. The shape and design looked strangely familiar. Suddenly his heart skipped a beat. It was a silo. A missile silo.
“Come on, Colonel Stone,” the general said, leading him out of the half-track to what looked like a piece of flat ground next to the silo. But Patton reached down, gripped a hidden handle and pulled a steel door up. He started down inside and Stone followed just behind, resting his feet and hands on a wide rung ladder. He looked down and felt a wave of dizziness sweep over him. They were inside the silo—on a ladder that went straight down what looked like hundreds of feet. And taking up the center of the ten-foot-wide, perfectly round funnel was the biggest goddamned missile Stone had ever seen, poised, ready to fly up into the blackest of nights.
“Isn’t it beautiful,” Patton screamed up to Stone. “I mean, isn’t it just about the most beautiful goddamned thing you’ve ever seen, Colonel Stone?”
“Absolutely,” Stone yelled down, examining the missile closely as he moved down the narrow ladder that ran right alongside it. The thing was thick, a lot wider somehow than he had imagined a missile to be—and long too. It seemed to go on forever as they moved down the ladder. It was a metallic blue, and seamless, perfect every inch that Stone looked. There was a feeling about it. God, was there a feeling about it. Just being next to it—though the weapon was absolutely still and silent—he could feel its tremendous power to destroy, to kill. A shiver ran up and down his spine and he had the strongest urge to get away from the steel rocket, just get away, run as fast as he could. But he held himself in place and kept descending deeper into the bowels of the silo.
“Jesus, she’s a sight, isn’t she,” Patton asked Stone as he dropped to a circular walkway at the very base of the silo. “This particular design of missile, the M-7, has always been my favorite, Colonel. The lines, the thick wide body, the immense double-stage rocket with nearly enough power to send this thing into orbit. I mean, it’s almost more like a Russian rocket, only this one’s got the computerized guidance and avoidance systems that the Russkies never could get together.”
“You’re quite a connoisseur of missiles, I see,” Stone commented dryly as he looked up the inside of the silo. The damned thing looked bigger, if anything, from below. It made him feel small, about as vulnerable as an ant with a combat boot hanging just over its head.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, in my earlier days, before the shit hit the societal fan, I was attached to a missile base, in charge of its security and military operations. I learned all about missiles then. Everything about them, from their maintenance to their firing.” He led Stone around the walkway, reaching out with his hand to touch the missile with his palm. He stroked it like the thigh of a woman, slowly, feeling every sensation, every nuance of the perfect curve of the metal.
“Tell me, Stone, how big do you think she is?”
“I couldn’t hazard a guess,” Stone answered, gulping, not really wanting to know.
“Oh come on, again humor an old man. What do you think?”
“Oh God,” Stone muttered, feeling as if he were in a guess-how-many-jellybeans-are-in-the-jar-win-a-sundae contest. “Two megaton, five megaton… I don’t know,” Stone said. “I haven’t been around too many H-bombs lately.”
“Ten, Stone, ten megatons. And plutonium-enriched, one of the advanced models with equivalent power of the old fifteen meg or better.”
“Can you actually make it… go?” Stone asked, feeling his chest growing tighter by the second, his lips and mouth drying out so they felt like a salt flat on a summer day.
“Go?” Patton laughed. “Colonel, I can pinpoint this missile to within one hundred yards in a 15,000 mile radius. You think this is all for show.” He knocked on a two-inch-thick reinforced steel door and a face peered through the leaded Plexiglas window. Then it opened and they walked in. Again Stone was overwhelmed and fought not to have any of it register on his face—the sheer insane power these men possessed. The room was filled with radar screens and computer printouts, constantly updating weather, oil pressure on hydraulics systems, electrical hookups—every goddamned thing it took to keep an atomic missile alive, and to be able to send its flaming ass into the clouds.
“This is Colonel Stone,” the general said, introducing him to the two technicians who sat on duty, far apart on each end of the nearly eighty-foot-long control center. “And these are Major Rasner and Major Hollings, in charge of the actual launch operations. We’re set up here just like the old days. It takes both men to turn keys simultaneously to arm the missile and send her up. Both men are chained to their seats, so if one goes mad we have a safety. And as you can see—” He swept his hands around the blinking beeping high tech missile control room that made Stone feel more like he was in a spaceship headed for the outer planets than a concrete-reinforced bunker two hundred feet below the desert soil.
“And who decides when and where to a
ctually launch the missile,” Stone asked as he tried to see where the launch controls were. “Assuming,” he coughed, “that one were ever pushed to such an eventuality.”
“Oh, one doesn’t have to be pushed, Colonel Stone.” The general’s laugh was a thin rasp. His tone and volume suddenly dropped lower and he stared at Stone as a madman might stare into the void. “I have already decided to use the weapon. In three days, in fact. And it’s targeted for Glenwood Springs, where the warlords of crime and blood are having their annual who-gets-how-much-of-what’s-left-of-America meeting. Only, you know what’s ironic, Colonel Stone?” the general asked. “There won’t be enough left of them to divvy anything up. Instead there will be a tremendous power vacuum created throughout the central United States, and the NAA will move in—seize the opening and take control in a blitzkrieg of armored vehicles and highly mobile, combat-hardened soldiers.”
“You’re—go—ing to use this bomb?” Stone asked, knowing the target was less than a hundred miles away. The man was mad. He’d take himself out too. He’d take the whole damned state and—perhaps, if the winds were right—a few others with it.
“Goddamned right, I’m going to use this bomb,” Patton half shouted, whirling at Stone. His eyes suddenly looked wild, a storm swirling behind the ice blue.
“Sir, I hate to be negative,” Stone said hesitantly, “but I do feel it’s important for an officer, such as myself, to question certain things, just play devil’s advocate for a moment. You yourself said everyone around you were all fools and yes men. That you needed me just for that quality of questioning. Of adding another perspective.”
“Yes, yes, go ahead,” Patton said impatiently, folding his arms and looking up at the waveform monitor on the far wall—waving lines of luminescent green that wriggled in digital data concerning the electronic health of the missile across a wide tilted screen.
“Sir.” Stone coughed, trying to remember his debating class rules back at college—what the hell were they? Establish need, find flaw, give alternative and correct approach. Find flaw—he sure as hell could do that. “Sir,” Stone said, looking over at Patton, who wouldn’t return his glance but kept staring at the slithering sine waves, his chin and profile posed sideways in a most heroic stance. The man knew how to look like a general, Stone thought. You had to give him that.
“Sir, as I remember my A-bombs—and grant you I’m not the authority that you are—the amount of radiation released from a ten megaton H-bomb only a hundred miles away would have a very powerful effect on all of us here at Fort Bradley, in fact all over Colorado. I mean it’s not just the blast, but the fallout, the radioactivity in the wind, in the grass, in the—”
“Oh, don’t give me all that liberal ecology bullshit,” Patton said, his jaw tightening even farther, as if he could keep the truth out by clenching his cheekbones a little harder. “I’m surprised at you, Colonel Stone, quite surprised.”
“Well, sir, it’s not that I don’t think the scum should be blasted into infinity, but if we nuke them we’re guaranteed to hit ourselves. It’s a proven fact. Why right here… somewhere… there must be a booklet, a chart or something, showing the damage done at different ranges. Is there?” Stone asked, going over to one of the technicians, who opened a drawer without saying a word and handed Stone a thick manual that looked like an Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the H-Bomb But You Were Afraid It Would Kill You kind of text. It was about six inches thick, hard to hold with one hand.
“Page 1,879,” the tech said with a bored tone. Stone leafed to the page and found it. “There, sir,” he said, handing the bible-sized manual to the general, who took it gruffly and then, glaring around angrily at them all, took out a pair of reading glasses from the inside of his coat and looked at the picture—a map with concentric circles leading outwards, showing the damage from a ten megaton missile at ten-mile intervals. At one hundred miles the damage was, to say the least, severe. A windblown storm of radioactive debris would sweep through the area, not to mention the fallout that would occur over the next few days. Estimated: fifty percent fatalities within six months—human and animal. Water supply contaminated; food chain, livestock, fish and crops dangerously contaminated. In short, a mess. As Chernobyl in the Soviet Union had proved years before, a little went a long way when it came to radiation damage—and a plutonium-enriched ten meg went a long, long way.
“Sir,” Stone said, trying to strike while the iron was hot, “perhaps the fact is that it’s not so important to destroy the crime bosses as to remove them from their stations of power. We could use the sheer destructive potential of the weapon as a negotiating point. They surrender to us, or we send them into Hell. Diplomacy, I have always thought,” Stone said slyly, “was the hallmark of great leadership. I think you have an opportunity here to not fire a shot, and win everything. The military history books would look favorably upon such an accomplishment.”
“Yes, I see your point,” the general said, brightening slightly as he began to see the possibilities of such a move. “But how… who—”
“General,” Stone said, stepping a little closer to Patton and talking softer, trying to lure him into the concept as one tried to dance a fly in front of a mountain trout, “if we could give them some kind of proof—the cover of this manual, Maintenance and Firing of the M-7—for example, and convince them they didn’t have a chance. Maybe even bring four or five of their top leaders—under blindfold, of course—to the silo and show them with their own eyes. It is the use of power, General, not the sheer dispensing of it, that marks the great strategist,” Stone said with sincerity, remembering the phrase that had always been a favorite of his father’s.
“I admit, it’s an interesting concept—purely theoretically, of course. But somehow I imagine the carrying out of it would be almost impossible. How would this threat be conveyed? Why would their people even trust us enough to come? They would certainly kill me if they had me in their grasp—you can rest assured of that.” He had taken the bait; Stone moved in for the hooking.
“I’ll go, sir. As you can see, I’m very persuasive. Why, I’ve even got you interested. Plus, some of those sons-of-bitches know me. I’ve had my own run-ins with them several times. They hate me, but they know I’m not a liar. I think I could get them to at least listen. What harm would it do?”
“You’d risk your life, Colonel Stone?” Patton asked skeptically. “You could end up with your hands and feet missing and your balls sewn into your mouth. They’ve done it to some of my intelligence men who were trying to infiltrate their ranks.”
“Well, I’m willing to take the chance, General. They’re my hands, my feet, my everything.”
“Why, Stone, why?” Patton asked, suddenly looking very suspicious as if he smelled a trap, as if Stone was in with the bastards.
“Sir, you said you liked knowing men’s motivations so you could keep a hold over them. Well, mine is greed. I’m not ashamed to admit it. I want more. I want—as you yourself put it—everything. If I carry out this mission, General, I want a mansion, enough expensive art and beautiful women to fill it, enough money to keep it going the rest of my life… and enough weapons to guard it so no son-of-a-bitch can take it away from me. I’ll risk my life—for everything. Bet it all on a single toss of the dice. That’s why I’m willing to take the chance, General, for greed.”
“Greed is the American way, Stone,” Patton replied, his eyes half closed as if he were looking at Stone from out of a pillbox gun slit. “All right, Colonel, you’re on. I’ve always been a gambling man. Your balls against a life of ultra-wealth. But if you don’t come back, I’m sending up the M-7, and let the chips fall where they may.”
CHAPTER
Nineteen
WITHIN TWELVE hours a convoy of NAA vehicles tore across the canyon wastelands toward Glenwood Springs—four armored jeeps with 105mm recoilless rifles in the lead, followed by three tanks. Mountain bandits eyed the force with curious eyes from their hiding places amongst the boul
ders and the scraggly pine-covered hills. But none of them dared attack, not against that. With rifles, pistols, a grenade or two, they wouldn’t have a chance. Stone sat in the lead tank, at the controls. He felt confident enough now to drive one on his own. Besides, if the dim plans that were beginning to formulate in his mind as to just how he was going to sort this whole thing out came to pass, he’d better know how to use one of these. He’d need it. The driver of the Bradley III sat in a metal swivel chair a yard away, looking pissed as hell but unable to say a word since Stone was in charge of the entire mission.
He’d gotten Patton to give him two days—one to get there, and one to convince the crime bosses that they’d better give it up or their asses were grass, smoking atomic grass. Then he would transmit the results on a small battery-powered transmitter that he carried with him. No signal—in exactly forty-eight hours—would mean they had cut him up, and the missile would be launched, no ifs, ands or buts.
Stone knew there were spies and assassins throughout the crew. Patton would trust Stone on such a mission only as far as a bullet could strike his flesh. Stone felt the pressure. He had never been in a tighter spot in his life and beads of sweat kept lining up along his forehead and dripping down his face. He tried to keep his mind on the driving of the tank. He liked the handling of the battle machine; it moved fast, quick to the touch, almost like a good sports car. It was amazing that such a heavy machine could move with such on-a-dime maneuverability. Still, it was hard not to notice all the eyes peering at him from the rest of the tank’s crew, or to forget the terms of the wager—his balls against… No, no, he didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to get a mental picture of that knife coming down and—
“Sir, as long as we’re driving all night,” the captain of the tank, Captain Chambers, spoke up, realizing that since Stone might well soon be one of the most important men in the NAA it might be a good idea to get on his good side. “Perhaps I could demonstrate some of the other features of the Bradley. It can actually do quite a lot, you know.”
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