-24-
Show Me a Hero
Deep in the sump, the three commandos follow the right-hand turn of the channel. The commando on point takes a step and snaps a piece of twine. A dead rat, its tail tied to an overhead pipe, swings down and smacks him in the face. He screams and squeezes off a wild burst of gunfire.
Farther down the channel, Jericho hears the shots behind him and picks up the pace. He comes to drainage pool where water pours into the sump from an overhead pipe and in the darkness, he slips and falls in the deeper water. Cold and grimy, the water pours down his back. The drainage pipe roars like a waterfall in his ears, and the channel becomes a flooded mine shaft. He squeezes his eyes shut, opens them again, and finds himself thinking of Susan Burns. “Do you think you’re the only one who has suffered a loss?”
He blinks the water out of his eyes, forces himself back to reality, and reaches out for a handhold. He ends up grabbing an old string mop propped in the crotch of some piping. Carrying the mop like a rifle, he keeps moving.
The three commandos splash through the channel, pointing flashlights and rifles into the darkness. One raises his hand, and the other two stop. They listen to the sound of the launch generator and the pouring of water from the drainage pipe. Another few steps, and there he is!
A figure in the dark in a military t-shirt.
The commandos open fire, tearing the man apart, sending him tumbling into the water, his guts oozing out.
But it isn’t a man.
It’s a mop with a string head and a t-shirt stuffed with pink fiberglass insulation.
“He has more faces than the devil himself,” the lead commando says, kicking at the fallen mop.
A grate opens in the floor of the missile silo, and Jericho, bare-chested and sopping wet, crawls out of the sump. He looks up. The suspended missile hangs just above his head.
Moments later, the three commandos come up through the grate into the missile silo. One heads to the gantry and rides it up the length of the missile. The second heads into the tunnel toward the launch control capsule. The youngest commando, Daniel, stands under the rocket burners. He examines the wet footprints that seem to circle beneath the missile but don’t lead away from it. He stares up into the darkness of the rocket burners themselves.
Then he looks down as a drop of water plops onto the polished steel floor. Then another. He lifts his rifle, when…
Jack Jericho dives from inside the cross-tubing of the rocket burners and crashes on top of Daniel, who drops his rifle. Jericho topples off him, landing hard. Daniel dives for the rifle, but Jericho kicks it away. The commando spins a roundhouse kick into Jericho’s chest, knocking him down, then lifts a booted foot and drives it toward Jericho’s head. Jericho grabs him by the ankle, flips him over, then scrambles to his feet and bounds for the rifle.
The commando leaps onto Jericho, who reaches back and slugs him with an elbow, knocking him off. Jericho dives for the rifle, but comes up short. Daniel tackles him, and they sprawl onto the concrete, rolling over each other. The commando is heavier, but Jericho is quicker and stronger. Like the high school wrestler he once was, Jericho slips behind the man, uses leverage to flip him over and ends up pinning him down by sitting on his chest. Jericho pulls his knife from its sheath and holds it to the commando’s jugular.
In the launch control capsule, David sits at the console, watching a monitor that shows an overhead shot of the missile in the silo. He hits a button, and the monitor switches to a shot of the silo floor where Jack Jericho draws a knife at Daniel’s neck.
“Looks like we missed one of the soldiers,” he says calmly
Owens, his hands cuffed behind him, shouts, “All right!” Then he looks closer at the monitor, and his shoulders slump. “Oh shit, that’s not a soldier. Not even an airman. That’s Jericho, the janitor.”
Turning to Gabriel, David says, “Would you please dispose of this fellow, whoever he might be?”
Gabriel nods and heads out the blast door at double time with three commandos.
David shoots a look at the monitor and then at Dr. Burns. He grabs a stack of personnel files piled up in front of her. Opening the first one, he says, “Oh, how I do love a bureaucracy.” He thumbs through the folders, opening each one to look at the passport-sized photos of the airmen. “Ah, here’s our janitor. Sergeant Jack Jericho, E-5, Sinkhole, West Virginia. My oh my, I do believe we’ve met before.”
He turns to Dr. Burns. “Tell me about this Sergeant Jericho, doctor.”
“My conversations with the airmen are privileged.”
Which sets David to laughing. “I love the medical bureaucracy almost as much as the military bureaucracy.” He drills her with a threatening glare and grabs her jaw, his thumb and index finger digging into her cheek, forcing her to open her mouth. “Now, doctor, tell me. Is Sergeant Jack Jericho, this Eagle Scout from the Appalachians, the kind of man to act heroically on behalf of duty and country?”
David lets go, revealing red splotches on her cheeks where his fingers dug in. “No,” she says, her eyes moist. “Not based on past experiences.”
“Good,” David says. “Very good. Wasn’t it Fitzgerald who wrote, ‘show me a hero, and I’ll show you a tragedy.’”
Breathing hard, Jericho presses the knife into the young commando’s neck until a pinprick of blood appears. “Who the hell are you guys?”
“I am called Daniel. We are Warriors of God,” he says tentatively, his eyes darting around the missile silo, looking for his buddies.
“You don’t sound too convinced.”
“Brother David is the Lamb of Christ,” the commando says, as if he memorized the words for such an occasion. “He will usher in the Apocalypse.”
From the tunnel comes the sound of combat boots on concrete as Gabriel’s commandos enter the silo.
“We follow the Word of God,” the young commando says.
“You forget about, ‘Thou shalt not kill?’”
Jericho heads toward the open grate as the footsteps pound closer. He climbs into the sump, realizing as he does that he’s panicked. He could have grabbed the commando’s rifle. Hearing voices above, it’s too late to go back.
Gabriel and his commandos troop into the silo to find the young commando standing in a daze under the missile. “Where is the heathen?” Gabriel demands.
Daniel’s eyes flick to the grate over the sump. Gabriel glares at him suspiciously and motions his men toward the opening.
-25-
Rocky Mountain RAD
In the launch control capsule, Brother James sits in the deputy’s flight chair, David in the commander’s. Two armed commandos stand watch over Owens, who is hunched on the floor, his hands cuffed behind him. Dr. Susan Burns sits nearby, Rachel watching her.
James breathes on the lenses of his rimless glasses, then wipes them on his shirt. He flicks on the console-mounted teletype, brushes a lock of pale hair from his eyes and rubs the back of his fist against his acne-scarred face.
David clasps his shoulder. “Make some beautiful music, maestro.”
James pounds out a message on the teletype keyboard: “Behold, I bring you the Morning Star.” He hits a code and transmits the message, then turns to David and says, “Confusion to the enemy.”
“And glory to God,” David adds.
“Whatever you say, Davy.”
David shoots him an exasperated look, and James laughs. Susan watches the two men interact, noting that James does give David the reverence that the other commandos do.