Owens adjusts the focus, and the picture clears. It’s a pair of bare buttocks, close-up, which disappear only to replaced by another set. Their radio receiver crackles. “Launch control, this is sentry post one. Can you confirm reports of excessive lunar activity?”
“The Air Police are really assholes,” Owens says.
“God forgives them,” Billy says, and Owens grits his teeth and goes back to his magazine, wondering if the captain would let them put a tanning bed in the Launch Equipment Room.
-16-
A Trout in the Milk
Captain Pete Pukowlski slows his Humvee at a bend in the road just a mile from the missile squadron’s sentry post. The river, which tumbles over rocks farther upstream, flows gently alongside the road here. “I’m afraid you’re going to find my squadron pretty boring,” the captain says to Dr. Susan Burns.
“Boring?”
He turns to face her. “Yeah, compared to the fruitcakes you see back in D.C., my men are boringly normal, run-of-the-mill guys.”
“Look out!” she screams.
He wheels back, sees a figure darting across the road, then slams on the brakes. The Humvee swerves and screeches to a stop, barely missing a man who dives into a ditch at the side of the road. “Shit buckets!” Pukowlski shouts. “What damn fool…!”
They get out of the Humvee and approach the ditch. Pulling himself up the embankment is a man wearing only dog tags and boxer shorts. A knife is strapped to his leg. He is sopping wet, muddy, and his skin is streaked orange.
“Jericho!” Pukowlski thunders. “What the hell!”
Jack Jericho snaps a crisp salute, mud dripping from his hand. “Sir.” He turns toward Dr. Burns. “Ma’am.”
“Sergeant, you’re out of uniform,” Pukowlski says, not knowing what else to say. Getting angrier, turning red.
“But on time, sir.”
“And you look like a goddamn Apache.”
“Insect repellent, sir.”
Susan Burns suppresses a smile. “Captain, I assume this ‘boringly normal run-of-the-mill-guy’ does not turn the key.”
“Jericho a missileer? Hardly. When he’s not AWOL, he mops up the sump.”
Jericho clears his throat. “Begging the captain’s pardon, I maintain the launch eject gas generators, sir.”
“You pathetic excuse for an airman,” Pukowlski fumes. “Sergeant, you just earned yourself a job so deep in the hole you can apply for Chinese citizenship!”
“So this sergeant’s duties are underground?” Susan asks, the shadow of a thought crossing her face.
Pukowlski is puzzled. “Yeah, why? Can you think of a way we can leave him there when we implode the silo?”
“I think I’ve found my first guinea pig.”
“Jericho ain’t crazy, doc. Lazy and stupid maybe, but not crazy.”
“Thank you, sir,” Jericho says.
Susan Burns studies him. “I think there’s more to Sergeant Jack Jericho than meets the eye.” She looks him up and down, and at that moment, the tail of a fish emerges from his boxers. “Sergeant, is that a trout in your shorts, or are you just happy to see me?”
Jericho is too embarrassed to answer.
Pukowlski is apoplectic. “Dammit, Jericho! You were under strict orders to complete your perimeter duties and return immediately to the base, not go fishing.”
“Fishing, sir?”
“Yeah, fishing. You expect me to believe that rainbow just jumped into your shorts.”
“No, sir. But fish have been known to leap into my boat just to save time.”
Dr. Burns clears her throat and says, almost apologetically. “I’m afraid I have to agree with the captain’s conclusion that you’ve been fishing, sergeant. Even Henry David Thoreau would find the evidence compelling.”
“Who?” Pukowlski demands.
“A writer fellow,” Jericho helps out. “He said that sometimes circumstantial evidence is very strong, ‘as when you find a trout in the milk.’”
Dr. Burns arches her eyebrows and gives a little smile. “You’re a man of surprises, Sergeant Jericho.”
“The Maine Woods is my favorite book,” Jericho explains, “other than the Launch Generator Maintenance Manual, of course.”
“What the hell does milk have to do with this?” Pukowlski growls. “If you’re thinking about getting the cook to try a new recipe, forget it. That trout is history, and so are you. Drop the fish, sergeant.”
“Respectfully, sir—”
“Now! That’s an order.”
“But if—”
“No if’s, and’s, or but’s! Now! Cut it loose.”
Jericho takes his knife and slices the drawstring of his boxers. Three trout drop to the ground along with the boxer shorts. Dr. Burns’s eyes flick to Jack’s groin.
“Well, sergeant,” she says, smiling, “I’m happy to see you, too.”
-17-
Tunnel Rat
Cool and damp deep inside the mountain, a steady fifty-eight degrees. Beneath the silo floor, the launch generator beats its steady thumpa-thumpa. The missile hangs in its cables, waiting. Always waiting.
The gantry, a metal work cage, sits halfway up the silo wall, just below the level of a mesh grating. The grating hangs open, and inside, an exhaust tube runs upward at a slight angle from the silo to the dry river bed one hundred feet above. Acidic residue from tests of the launch generator coats the inside of the exhaust tube. Spiders spin webs across its three foot diameter, and field mice scamper along its length, claws scratching against the metal.
Jack Jericho crawls upward, scouring the tube with a soapy brush. It is a task as useful as scrubbing the inside of a car’s tailpipe… three days before junking the car.
“Hey, tunnel rat!” The voice echoes through the tube from the silo. A touch of Georgia. Reynolds’ voice. “Gotta borrow your elevator. Have a nice crawl.”
Shit. Jericho hears the electrical whir of the gantry riding its rails down toward the silo floor. Reynolds enjoying it, getting even with him for the knife trick, he knows. Now, Jericho either has to squirm all the way to the top and pry off the screen on the exhaust pipe in the river bed, or go back into the silo and leap onto the ladder that runs up the wall. It’s only four feet from the exhaust tube opening to the ladder, but if you miss, it’s eighty feet straight down.
Jericho keeps scrubbing, knowing that when the tube bends and he loses the light from the silo, the sweats will begin. Not that he won’t be able to see. He’s wearing the Air Force’s version of a miner’s helmet. But when he flicks the lamp on, when the shadows begin dancing up the wall, when the distant sound of the launch generator becomes the rumble of the pumps in the mine, the visions will start.
Jonah may have been stuck in the gut of the whale, he thinks, but I’m jammed up its rectum.
Jericho hauls himself around the first bend in the tube and reaches up to turn on the helmet lamp. As he does, an exposed bolt catches his sleeve. His arm is bent at an awkward angle above his head, and for a moment, he is stuck. He tries to wriggle backward, but the curvature of the tube stops him. Sweat streams down his face. From somewhere above him, he hears the pinging of groundwater dripping into the tube.
He squeezes his eyes shut, trying to shut it out, but he cannot. He tries reciting Thoreau. “‘Talk of mysteries. Think of our life in nature — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks, the solid earth!’”
But the earth is not solid here. It spins around him. He is dizzy, nauseous. The pinging grows louder, becomes the roar of rushing water, and now there’s no stopping the ghostly shapes that form in the darkness. The roar of the water becomes deafening, and a thousand noises mingle, then echo from inside the cavern. The crashing timbers, the crackling wires and the screams. Always, the screams.