Jericho digs at the lock with the tip of the knife, knowing it is useless. He is face-to-face with Susan, her legs wrapped around his hips instinctively, seeking shelter and protection. Her bare breasts are pressed against his chest, and he can hear her sobbing.
“I can’t get it open,” he says. “But there’s a monkey wrench around here somewhere. Give me a minute. I’ll separate the pipe at the t-joint, and get you out of here.”
“Don’t leave me,” she pleads, tightening the scissors hold of her legs, letting all her weight fold into him. He puts his arms around her, tastes a salty tear that runs from her face to his.
Footsteps echo from the tunnel, interrupting them.
“The pipe, Jericho. Break it! Do what you have to. Please, hurry.”
He releases her, looks for a wrench, but doesn’t find it.
The footsteps grow louder.
He leaps up, grabs the pipe and swings on it like a gymnast on the horizontal bar. He tries to pull the pipe down, but it holds firm, doesn’t even bend.
The door opens, a beam of light shooting across the floor past the cots and toward them in the rear of the sleeping quarters. Jericho turns his head toward the grate in the floor.
“Don’t you dare leave me,” Susan whispers, frantically.
Anguished, Jericho moves toward the grate. “There’s nothing I can do.” He swings his legs into the opening to the sump. “We’re outnumbered and we’re trapped. I don’t even have a gun. I’ll get us both killed.”
“Don’t go!”
“I’ll come back for you.”
“Jack!”
The sound of his name on her lips chills him.
“I promise. I’ll be back.”
“Damn you! You coward!”
The word cuts through him, and he drops into the sump as much to avoid her hateful glare as to escape. Pulling the grate back into place over his head, he sinks into the water, defeated and ashamed.
“I’ll come back for you.”
His father looks up from beneath the fallen beam, the pain etched into his face. He says nothing. Water pours into the shaft, and from overhead comes the angry growl of the earth. Rock moves against rock, timbers snap in two. The growl becomes a deafening roar. Jack Jericho reaches down and grasps his father’s hand. His father latches onto Jericho’s sleeve, holds him there for a moment, then lets go. Still, the older man doesn’t say a word, doesn’t protest as Jericho backs down the tunnel, toward the shouts of the crew boss.
“I’ll come back for you,” he says again, watching his father wince with pain. Jericho turns and scrambles toward the emergency egress ladder. He does not look back.
Ezekiel works his way to the rear of the sleeping quarters, sees Susan suspended from the pipe, and stops. He studies her, notes her exposed breasts, then looks her in the eyes. “Man is weak. Even the Messiah in human form knows sin.”
He reaches for her, and she shrinks back, turning her head away. But Ezekiel merely pulls her torn blouse closed, trying to cover her breasts. Then he reaches up and unlocks her handcuffs. She falls to the floor and rubs her wrists, trying to work the blood back into her hands.
She puts her bra back on and tries to tuck in the blouse, but without the buttons, it’s useless. Ezekiel moves to a metal shelving unit and pulls down a missileer’s blue jumpsuit, which he tosses to her. “Put this on. Rachel sees you like that, there’ll be hell to pay.”
-33-
Death Waits in the Dark
The OH-58D Kiowa helicopter swings out of the shadows of Chugwater Mountain and descends from a position over the reservoir, following the path of the aqueduct down to the missile base on the plateau below. In Vietnam, the Kiowa led air cavalry assaults and located targets for attack helicopters. Today, the modified version is still a small, maneuverable chopper without much firepower, except when it’s equipped with Hellfire and Stinger missiles. This one is in the scout mode with no armaments. Instead, it carries three men in its cramped compartment, an Army pilot and two passengers in full battle dress.
Colonel Henry Zwick, with twenty-five years experience in Armored Cavalry, slips on a helmet as they pass near the open missile silo, chunks of the blown concrete cap scattered in pieces on the ground. The colonel has salt and pepper hair and a jet black handlebar mustache that is more Salvador Dali than West Point.
Captain Kyle Clancy sits next to him, his camouflage pants bloused neatly into his combat boots. A jagged scar runs from the corner of his left eye down across the cheekbone and disappears under his pugnacious chin. The patch on his sleeve reads, “Death Waits in the Dark,” the slogan of the Night Stalkers, the Army’s cutthroat Special Forces unit.
The chopper dips lower and the two officers can see the bodies of airmen in front of the barracks, the shattered front gate, and the dead air policemen on the ground.
“What an unholy mess,” Colonel Zwick says, shaking his head.
Captain Clancy makes a sound that reminds the colonel of a horse snorting. “Typical Air Force goat fuck,” the captain says. “They couldn’t defend an assault by a troop of Eagle scouts.”
“Easy, Kyle. We’re all on the same side.”
“Shit, colonel, you know I’m right. The flyboys are trained monkeys. They’re fine at pulling the trigger on some smart bomb at twenty thousand feet, just like playing a video game in an arcade. Put a bayonet at their throats, they piss their pants.”
Overhead, a shadow crosses in front of the sun as a dozen CH-47 Chinook helicopters edge past the mountain and descend. The huge, two-rotor choppers carry troops toward a makeshift base camp just above the missile base on an elevated plateau. On the ground, tents are going up, men are digging in, and trees fall in the path of M1A2 Abrams battle tanks and M2/3 Bradley fighting vehicles with cannons, grenade and missile launchers.
Captain Clancy doesn’t even try to suppress a sneer as he gestures toward the base camp. “No disrespect intended, colonel, but we don’t need all that armor. And we don’t need Rangers or Green Berets, either. Hell, my men could—”
“You’ll have your chance, Kyle. But first, let’s get an idea of what we’re up against.”
The Army pilot turns around and asks, “Another pass?”
Colonel Zwick points toward the ground. “Take it lower and see if we can get a rise out of them.”
Captain Clancy smiles, stretching the scar at the corner of his mouth. The colonel might look like a pussy, but he’s earned his eagle and arrows. Plus an oak leaf cluster and a couple of silver stars. After West Point, Zwick was commissioned a second lieutenant with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Vietnam and later Cambodia. It was the old Army, using outdated tactics of static warfare where the premium was on superior firepower alone. The Armored Cav had forgotten lessons first learned in the Bronze Age by Kazakh warriors who harnessed horses to chariots, all the better to hurl spears at their enemies.
In the recriminations that followed the Vietnam War, the Army changed. A mobile, fluid fighting force was created, and Colonel Zwick was in the forefront. After tours in Germany and studies at the Armed Forces Staff College and the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, Colonel Henry Zwick was part of the most successful cavalry operation in history: Operation Saber of Desert Storm. The new Army was high-tech. Soldiers carried cellular phones and Global Positioning Receivers that gave their precise location by satellite. Weaponry had reached new dimensions from smart bombs to long-rod penetrators, officially known as high-velocity, armor-piercing, fin-stabilized, discarding-sabot projectiles. In layman’s terms, it’s a 120 mm. shell made of tungsten or depleted-uranium alloys, and it exits the muzzle of a tank’s smoothbore gun at an astonishing Mach 4. It was used to pierce the armor of Iraqi tanks at a distance of more than three miles.