No answer, just the same terrified look.
“Where are you from?”
“Deutschland.”
“Oh.” Jericho spots the dried blood on the man’s shirt and suit coat. “Jeez, are you hurt?” He lets go and sheaths his knife. “You’re with the U.N., aren’t you? I think I must have seen you yesterday in the silo.”
David nods at him.
“Have you been shot?”
“Nein. One of the others,” David says, affecting a German accent. “The Englishmen. He died in my arms.”
“Oh, God. You get separated from the group?”
“Ya.”
“Look, all hell’s broken loose, but I guess you know that. We’ve got to do something or more people will be killed. Maybe a lot more people.”
David fixes him with a look of wordless astonishment.
“You guys should have shut this place down yesterday,” Jericho says.
“Ya, gestern.”
“You better stick with me.” Thinking this guy isn’t going to be much help, Jericho just wants to get him out of the silo. He speaks slowly, hoping the man understands. “I’ll get us out of here, and we can call in the Marines.”
“Ya, waffen,” David says, smiling obligingly.
They walk to the gantry and get on, David trailing slightly behind. Jericho pulls a lever, and the gantry begins to ascend the silo wall against the backdrop of the black PK missile. “Their leader’s some kind of religious psycho. Had a woman psychiatrist strung up like a gutted deer. We’ve got to get her out of here and bring in some help, pronto.”
“This woman,” David says, slowly, as if trying out the words for the first time. “Is she your geliebte, your sweetheart?”
“Fat chance. A woman like that. What would she see in me?”
Jericho pulls back the lever, and the gantry stops one hundred feet above the silo floor. He points toward the wall where a screen covers an exhaust tube. “We’ll get out through that tube. It runs up to a river bed.”
“We will be wet,” David says deliberately.
“No. We’d be under water now if the river was still there. The water’s dammed at a reservoir on top the mountain. Just a little trickle in an aqueduct now, and the river bed’s as dry as Army pot roast.”
David does not appear to understand.
“C’mon,” Jericho urges him. “You’re not afraid of tight spaces, are you?”
“Nein.”
“Good, ‘cause I am.”
Jericho removes two screws from the top of the screen and pulls it open. Suddenly, a voice crackles, and David reaches into his suit pocket for a walkie-talkie. “Angel, this is Eden,” a man’s voice says through the static. “Do you read me?”
“What the hell is that?” Jericho asks.
David smiles placidly, pivots and hooks a sucker punch into his gut. Jericho doubles over, gasping for breath, and David smashes the walkie-talkie across his skull. A blaze of fireworks ignites Jericho’s eyes, and he struggles not to black out. David locks his hands together and brings them down hard on the back of Jericho’s neck, knocking him to the floor of the gantry. Jericho gets to one knee, but David kicks him in the chest, knocking him back down.
“A patient,” David says.
The world spinning around him, Jericho isn’t sure what he heard. “What?”
“Your lady friend, the shrink. You asked what she would see in you. She’d see you as a patient, Sergeant Jericho, a pathetic loser, a wanderer who has lost his way and who turns to secular healing for answers that will not come.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’ve read your file, sergeant.”
Jericho is on all fours, trying to clear the cobwebs from his brain. He looks up at David, and now it comes to him. “I remember. You’re the preacher on the horse. You kept the sun at your back so I never made out your face.”
“You are blind, Jericho. Even with the sun at your back, you would not see.”
“And you’re going to show me the light, right preacher?”
“Oh, but I shall. Jericho, you carry the name of a city ten thousand years old. Are you a believer?”
“Not in politicians or preachers.”
David kicks him again, this time in the ribs. He’s flat on the floor of the gantry now, gasping as David kicks him again, pushing him toward the ledge. Then a downward swing with the walkie-talkie smashes an ankle hard on the bone, and Jericho yelps and tries to scramble to his knees but the movement takes him closer to the ledge.
“You’ve got to be saved, sergeant.”
Another kick digs into Jericho’s abdomen, and a moment later, the acrid taste of bile fills his mouth. He tries to get to his knees, but his hand slips over the ledge. He looks down, dizzily. The silo floor swirls around him.
“You can die saved or die damned,” David says. “It makes no difference to me.”
“Is there a third choice?” Jericho asks, spitting blood.
“You’re a heathen and a fool!” David prods Jericho with a foot, and one leg slides off the ledge. Jericho tries to grab at the smooth metal flooring, but he can’t get a grip. With a final, vicious kick, David sends Jericho over the ledge.
Plunging into space.
The smooth black missile just feet away, seeming to launch as he plummets.
Reaching out, windmilling his arms, grabbing for something, anything.
Just above the polished steel floor, his arm hooks the thick umbilical cord that runs from the silo wall to the warhead.
The impact pops his shoulder out of its joint, but Jericho still holds on, swinging on the cord, first away from the PK then back where he bashes into the missile canister. He cries out in pain, then falls ten feet to the floor, where he lies in a heap.
On the gantry, David peers over the ledge and looks at the motionless body one hundred feet below. He pulls hits a button on the dented walkie-talkie, and says, “Gabriel, would you be kind enough to join me in the silo? I’d like you to scrape up the janitor.”
David rides the gantry down to the silo floor. He gets off, walks a few paces beneath the missile, and finds…
Nothing.
Jericho is gone.
From the tunnel comes the clack of combat boots on concrete. Gabriel and four young commandos rush from the tunnel into the silo. David kneels at the spot where Jericho fell from the umbilical cord. Drops of blood lead to the grate, which lies outside its track. “Bring him to me!” David shouts.
Gabriel climbs through the opening, followed by three of the commandos. David grabs the fourth commando and points at the dangling screen over exhaust tube high on the silo wall. “Get up there and fix that. And stay there. Keep a lookout until Gabriel reports that he has captured the heathen.”
The commando mumbles his acquiescence, hops onto the gantry, and rides up the wall. As the gantry slows to a stop at the exhaust tube opening, the commando fails to notice a drop of blood on the floor.
Suddenly, Jericho swings down from the roof of the gantry and crashes into the commando. They both fall to the floor, then scramble to their feet. With one arm dangling uselessly, Jericho takes a swipe with his knife, but the commando knocks it away with his Uzi, then levels to fire. Jericho barrels into him like a middle linebacker on a blitz. The Uzi flies out of the man’s hands and slides to the ledge of the gantry. Both men dive for it, wrestling at the edge, Jericho howling in pain when he lands on his shoulder.
On the floor of the silo, David watches the struggle above him on the gantry, then angrily punches a button on the walkie-talkie. “Gabriel! Get back here.”
David watches angrily from the silo floor. This janitor was proving to be more trouble than he had expected.