And still no one has answered the question, “Are you ready for the Apocalypse?”
-2-
In the Belly of the Beast
Deep inside the missile silo, Sergeant Jack Jericho dangles at the end of a rope and pulley, a harness buckled around his waist. Above him, the sky is crystalline blue. He is a shade under six feet, broad of shoulders and shaggy of hair that has not been regulation length since basic training. He has slate-gray eyes and a nose that has been broken twice, once by a slag bucket that slipped its winch in the coal mine and once by a fist that found its mark.
Jericho pulls in rope, hand-over-hand. Closes his eyes and imagines himself scaling a lodgepole pine in a shaded forest. Climbing up the hard, scaly bark, grabbing a sturdy limb overhead. Catching the crisp scent of the high timberland. White aspens, Douglas firs, and a thicket of snowberry and juniper. Bluebells, too, sprouting out of the rocky soil of an upland clearing.
Mind over matter, it works for a moment. What had the doc called it? Creative visualization. “The mind’s eye can see whatever the brain wishes.”
Yeah, and a lot the brain doesn’t wish. Try not thinking of a brick wall. Or of a mine shaft filling with water, men screaming to the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
Jericho opens his eyes, reaches up and grasps the handle of the exhaust tube cover. He catches a whiff of the oily slickness of metal and hears the thumpa of the generators far below him in the sump. Damn. Tries to bring back the forest, tries to summon the sound of rippling water in a rocky stream. Thumpa-thumpa. Like the heartbeat of a leviathan.
He looks up. The bluest of skies is still there, visible only because the six-foot thick concrete cap is open. He looks down toward the drainage sump and the polished steel floor of the silo.
Jericho uses his legs to kick away from the silo wall, and the rope spins out of the pulley, giving him slack. He propels himself several yards, extends a soapy brush to a grimy spot on the wall, then begins scrubbing. Sweating now, though it’s a consistent fifty-eight degrees inside Chugwater Mountain. Sweating not from the heat, but the confinement, the sense that the encircling wall is closing in.
In the belly of the beast.
He breathes heavily, wiping his forehead on the sleeve of his shirt just above the three stripes. Again, he unwillingly conjures up the mine. The creak of the timbers, the explosion, the rushing water and the darkness. Then the screams, and finally the silence. The doc knew all about the dreams. Had his own from Vietnam. He was a clinical psychologist, on retainer for the union. Wore a ring in his ear, tied his hair in a ponytail. Some of the older miners called him a pansy, until they got close enough look him in the eyes. Glacial ice. Jericho didn’t want to know what those eyes had seen. He visited the doc in his office, a trailer at a job site, and asked a question.
“Will the dreams go away?”
“Scars fade but never vanish. Create your own dreams, sing your own songs.”
“I can’t go back in the ground. I need to get out of here, go somewhere far away.”
“There is nowhere far away.”
The doc had been right. Sleep came hard. Jericho bedded down with a bottle and a dreamscape of ghosts. Joined the Air Force, re-upped, and re-upped again. Now, two thousand miles from the West Virginia coal mines, he finds simple joys in the outdoors. An eagle soaring over the vast prairie, the haunting lunar landscape of a rocky basin, the startling quickness of a deer bounding through the grasslands.
Jericho finishes scrubbing the acidic residue near the exhaust tube and spins around in his harness. His job is to clean up after a test firing of the LEGG, the launch eject gas generator. Unlike other intercontinental ballistic missiles, the one with the Orwellian name of “Peacekeeper” is cold launched, propelled out of the silo by a burst of compressed gas. The solid fuel of the first stage ignites only after the missile is in the air.
Jericho drops his soapy brush into a pail built into his harness. He bristles when other airmen call him the base janitor, but even Jericho figures he is little more than the clown who follows the elephants with broom and pan. He looks up again at the brilliant sky, imagines himself in waders standing in the shallow water of a cool stream, whipping a fly toward a whirling pool where the big trout lurk. For a moment, he is out of the silo, out of the mine.
He kicks off the wall again, a little too hard, and… clang! He bangs into the nose cone of the missile that is suspended from cables, the Longitudinal Support Assembly in Air Force jargon. The cables are attached to the walls of the hardened silo, and in the event of an enemy’s nuclear strike above ground, the missile will sway, then steady itself, and be ready for launching. In theory. As with so much in the missile program, no one knows what really will happen in the event of thermonuclear war.
Seventy-one feet tall, a little less than eight feet in diameter, the Peacekeeper, or PK, is topped by a nose cone containing ten nuclear warheads. Each warhead is seventeen times more powerful than the bomb that leveled Hiroshima and ushered in the nuclear age. At this precise moment, the seat of Jack Jericho’s olive green coveralls are polishing the nose cone. With a layer of dark rubber covering the missile’s four stages, the PK is sleek, breathtaking and black as death.
Jericho winces as the metallic echo reverberates through the silo.
“Yo, Jack! You turn this place into Chernobyl, the captain’s gonna be steamed.”
Jericho looks up to see Sayers, a senior airman standing at the edge of the elevated gantry one hundred feet above the floor of the silo. Sayers wears camouflage green and loam battle dress and polished combat boots. Compared to Jericho, he looks like an ad for GQ, a muscular African-American all spit and polished. “Captain’s already steamed,” Jericho says.
“No shit, look where he put you. Hey, if I had your detail, you know what I’d do?”
“What?”
“Kill myself,” Sayers laughs.
Then he jumps.
Jericho watches a perfect swan dive off the gantry, Sayers sailing into space, his body arcing down the side of the missile toward the steel floor below. Lower, lower, a millisecond from crushing his skull, then… BOING! A bungee cord catches and springs him back up toward the gantry. He bounces twice on the cord, swinging between the missile and the wall.
“You’re next, my man,” Sayers cackles.
Jericho continues scrubbing the wall. “Only if you put a gun to my head.”
“C’mon Jack. You need some excitement in your life.”
-3-
Freudian Flim-Flam
Warren Cabot, the Secretary of the Air Force, spears a slice of rare tenderloin and turns to Christopher Harrington, the California congressman with the telegenic smile and a constituency of Orange County right wingers. Outside the windows, a light rain is falling, peppering the calm waters of the Potomac. A shell glides by, worked by six women wearing Georgetown University t-shirts.
“I’m not admitting weakness, Chris,” the Air Force Secretary says. “I’m recognizing the realities of the new world order. We’re dismantling more than half our missiles under START II. Blowing up the silos and filling them with concrete.”