James laughs but there is little humor in it. “Yeah, but he told the missile, didn’t he?”
“What do you mean?”
“The PK’s computer has been programmed to recognize the slick, so in a sense, the President told the missile the code.”
“Right.” The shadow of an idea crosses David’s face. “Forget the President. You’ve got it. The missile will tell you.”
David turns and bolts out through the blast door, leaving James and Rachel to exchange puzzled looks.
Jack Jericho has worked his way up to the final turn in the exhaust tube. Around the bend, he can see light coming through the screen where the outlet pipe empties into the dry river bed. He wriggles ahead and brings a knee up toward his chest.
And gets stuck.
His knee is lodged against his sternum, his combat boot propped against the side of the tube. His head and back are pressed against the opposite side, so that he cannot move.
He tries wriggling backward. No dice.
He tries wriggling forward. Nothing.
He tries working his knee free from his chest but cannot. He fears getting a cramp in his calf and begins to massage it. Sweat drips from his forehead and plops off the metal tube.
Then he hears a voice and freezes. At first, he can’t make out the words. Then, louder, “Over here!”
The voice comes from the river bed. Jericho doesn’t know if he’s been discovered, but there it is again, even louder. “Jeptha, over here!”
Jericho squeezes his eyes shut and hears another voice. His father’s.
“Over here, Jack! Help me, son.”
In the collapsed mine shaft, Jericho squirms on his stomach through a nightmarish web of fallen timbers. Water pours through a crevice over his head, dousing him.
His father’s voice is desperate, pleading. “Jack! Where are you?”
Jericho opens his eyes and wipes the sweat away by brushing his face against his shoulder. He sucks in a deep breath, exhales, and lets his body go limp, willing himself into a state of relaxation. Closing his eyes again, he fights off the visions and lets his mind see the exhaust tube expanding while his own body shrinks. He continues to exhale until he has no breath left.
Suddenly, his foot slides free, and he straightens his leg, then crawls a few feet to the screen.
He looks outside. The exhaust tube ends in a clump of underbrush. Jericho can see the shapes of two men moving slowly across the dry river bed, poking at the brush with their rifles. They are doubtless looking for the exhaust tube’s outlet pipe. If he kicks out the screen and jumps into the river bed, they will see him. If he stays put and they find the tube, he’ll be trapped. Courage is so often the choice between equally unappealing risks. He cannot decide, which is a decision in itself. Jack Jericho stays right where he is.
The gantry moves up the silo wall, then stops level with the fourth stage of the Peacekeeper. David hits a button, and the work cage extends horizontally until it is just inches from the missile. Wearing thin white gloves and a headset, David carefully loosens the first of four bolts from a metal plate in the deployment module, just below the titanium shroud of the nose cone.
In the launch control capsule, James watches David on a TV monitor. Rachel sits in the second launch chair. Behind them, Gabriel keeps watch over Susan Burns and Lieutenant Owens.
James speaks into a microphone. “Once you break the seal, you’ve only got ten seconds before auto-lockdown.”
His feet planted firmly on the gantry, David removes the second bolt from the metal plate. “Be still, Brother James. We’ve been over this.”
“Godspeed, David.”
“Precisely.”
David knows they are watching. Enjoys it. He is the center of their universe, and indeed, the center of everyone’s universe at this moment. If he fails and the system shuts down, they will be locked out of the command data buffers and the launch control computers. If he succeeds, they will have broken the system, will have the Secondary Launch Code, and nothing can stop him.
If he can freeze the lockdown, he will extract the computer containing the Multiple Guidance Control System. The computer is the brains of the missile. It arms the warheads, measures inertial flight distances and performs a host of other functions. For David’s purpose, the most important is that it reads the S.L.C. to determine whether to accept a launch command. To recognize the code, David reasoned, the computer must know the code. If it does, James can work his wizardry and find the damn thing. Once they have the code, they will enter it on the console and the re-installed MGCS will happily confirm the S.L.C. is correct.
David removes the third bolt and gently places it on the floor of the work cage. He crouches down and opens what looks like a laptop computer, punches a few keys, then stands up again, holding a multi-pinned plug attached to the computer by a ten-foot cord. He holds the plug between his teeth, then uses both hands to remove the last bolt from the metal plate. He slides off the plate and looks inside the computer box. An LCD display on an interior gauge flashes the countdown as David searches for the female receptacle.
10-9-8… He jams the plug into a hole, but it doesn’t fit...7–6… Another try, and the plug catches, but the clock keeps clicking away...5–4… David drops down to his laptop again, punches in a dizzying combination of letters and numbers… 3-2-1… The LCD display freezes at 1. He’s done it.
David exhales a deep sigh, then reaches into the deployment module and pulls out the computer.
Watching on the monitor in the launch control capsule, James excitedly pounds out a drum role on the console. “Awright! That man has the touch!
“He will never fail us,” Rachel says. “He is truly the chosen one.”
Behind them, Susan Burns feels a chill. Who will stop this maniac? Not Jack Jericho. Not Captain Pukowlski. Special Forces? The only means of access is to rappel down the silo wall or the elevator shaft. The men would be sitting ducks for the well armed commandos.
Halting the greatest tragedy in the history of civilization, Susan Burns thinks, will be entirely up to her.
In the river bed, one of the commandos pushes away the pungent leaves of a sagebrush plant. Hidden behind the plant is the U-shaped outlet pipe of the exhaust tube. “Jeptha! Over here.”
In the exhaust tube, Jericho is startled by the commando’s voice. So close. He removes the knife from the sheath on his leg. If one of the commandos ventures inside, Jericho will gut him. Then be shot to ribbons by the other, he knows.
Now, two voices from outside. “Use your bayonet to pry off the screen.”
Jericho can hear the scraping of the bayonet blade against the metal of the screen. He inches backward just enough to be in the shadows of the bend in the tube. If they come into the outlet pipe, he’ll have to crawl back down toward the silo. The screen clatters to the ground, and the men’s voices are louder. Jericho knows they are poking their heads into the outlet pipe.
“Dark as Hades down there.”
“You’re smaller, Jeptha. You crawl inside, and I’ll stand watch here.”
“Stand watch? For what?”
“For other infidels.”
“Isn’t that just like you, handing off the dirty work?”
“What’s the matter. You afraid of some spiders?”
To Jericho, it seems, there is no clean line of command beneath Brother David. For a moment, he wonders if maybe the military has the right idea about discipline and command control. These bozos wouldn’t know Reveille from Rachmaninoff. Suddenly, there is a sound behind Jericho, farther down the tube.